There’s more to freedom than just individual liberties
The other day I saw a pickup truck run a stop sign in a mall parking lot, just missing an elderly woman on the pedestrian crossing. When I instinctively shouted, “Stop!” the driver cursed, gave me the bird and sped off. I guessed the driver viewed my protestation as an infringement on his freedom to run a stop sign.
I can’t tell you how many guys like this driver I’ve encountered lately. It struck me how his irresponsible view of freedom as “Don’t constrain me” is fast becoming a dominant theme in American life.
Many people view a life-saving mask mandate amid the COVID-19 pandemic that’s already killed more than 700,000 people in the U.S. as an encroachment on their personal liberty. Their liberty, of course, comes at the expense of those whom they infect. The anti-vaxxers are no different. Even though the vaccine has the potential to end the pandemic, anti-vaxxers insist that taking the vaccine is a personal choice. They apparently don’t care that their refusal to get vaccinated will prolong the pandemic; likely infect others, not to mention themselves; push health care systems and health workers to the breaking point; and contribute to the possible development of new, more virulent variants of the deadly disease.
This hyperindividualistic view of freedom as the absence of restraints ignores the fact that the exercise of liberty is a social act. As the saying goes, your right to swing your fists ends where my nose begins. The decision not to get vaccinated or wear a mask, for instance, conflicts with the well-being of others, just as choosing to run a stop sign at the mall does.
Too often, the news media
reports on clashes, sometimes violent, between self-styled “freedom fighters” and people whose views they oppose — on masks, vaccines, guns, election results, you name it. Rational societies resolve these conflicts through an appeal to a larger communal interest. But fueled by a rightwing media machine unconstrained by facts and demagogic politicians intent on winning elections, these rugged individualists reject the notion of the common good as just another attack on their liberty to do as they please.
Ironically, William Vanderbilt’s 19thcentury dictum of the “public be damned” is no longer the mantra of the captains of industry alone. It’s now becoming the rallying cry of large segments of the public itself.
This Archie Bunker view of “me foist” liberty is fracturing the body politic, making politics more extreme, more divisive and more prone to violence. Even a cursory review of 20th-century European history tells us this stormy climate does not augur well for the United States. There’s much historical evidence to suggest that democracies are unlikely to survive in fractured societies. And our democracy is under attack. The battle over masks and vaccinations is just part of a larger piece. After all, a majority of Republicans still believe the Big Lie that the election was stolen, a lie that almost cost us our democratic institutions on January 6th — and still may.
In the early 1940s philosopher Erich Fromm attempted to understand the rise of Nazism in Germany in his seminal “Escape from Freedom.” He concluded that a changing economy that left many without work or hope contributed to the rise of a rootless kind of individualism, leading many Germans to seek fulfillment by blindly following a “great leader.” Sound familiar? Fromm warned that “if humanity cannot live with the dangers and responsibilities inherent in freedom, it will probably turn to authoritarianism.” It’s time to heed his warning.