Live Free or Die?

The quest for freedom is not universal. Forget about the countries which have only known tyranny: freedom is hardly universally admired or sought in the West!

A lot of people like a simple life. Choice confuses or frightens people. You can witness it with any child: give them a toy, and they’ll play with it. Offer too many choices, and you make an unhappy child. The same thing is true with stocks – people often select investments not on the basis of risk/reward, but instead on volatility. People do not want volatility. They want simple, predictable. “Safe”. Even if that simpler life comes with a reduction in free will. It is a matter of historical fact that most people, most of the time, will line up for it.

It seems that slavery has its virtues after all.

Are you skeptical? If so, it might because the word “slavery” comes with so much freight from the American South, a particularly pernicious, exploitive and dehumanizing way of extracting work through coercion. But try using “Welfare State” or “Nanny State” and things are much more clear. People invariably line up cheerfully for goodies, even if those goodies come with strings attached. And with those strings come all the creeping ways in which we can be deprived of any of a range of freedoms, including economic, speech, social, arms, and religious.

The human instinct for safety, too, has a biblical source. During the Exodus (and many times afterward), the people declare their reluctance with this whole concept of freedom:

And they said to Moshe, Because there were no graves in Egypt, hast thou taken us away to die in the wilderness? why hast thou dealt thus with us, to carry us out of Egypt? Is not this the word that we did tell thee in Egypt, saying, Let us alone, that we may serve Egypt? For it had been better for us to serve Egypt, than that we should die in the wilderness.

Remember that slavery can come in a wide variety of flavors. Slavery is not necessarily the way it was in the American South. Slavery can be like it was in Egypt, where you could still effectively own land, choose whom you wanted to marry, etc. All you had to do was pay off the king. Indeed, throughout much history, the line between “free” and “unfree” is much fuzzier than we tend to think. Neither slavery nor freedom are easily condensed to concrete metrics. Instead, both are about the direction of travel — are we moving toward more (or less) freedom?

A great many people would prefer secure knowledge of the future (as depressing as it might be), to freedom and free choice and responsibility. There was clearly no sentiment of “Live Free or Die!” among the Children of Israel in the Exodus.

It seems America is always asking itself this question: do we want freedom or do we want a nanny state? In both Ancient Egypt and present-day America, a people who have tasted slavery are not necessarily all that excited about freedom.