You may have your freedom if you live by their rules
When compliance is the condition of liberty
Forget everything you know about freedom, democracy, and power because the old assumptions are no longer useful. When the Western nations shuttered people behind doors, masks, and fear, the leaders of those countries stripped meaning from those words, gutting them of any previously held beliefs and replacing them with a gross senselessness. This is a modern reformation in the sense that freedom and the power of words and their definitions being endowed to the people are instead snatched up by a few and used as a whip to both punish the less powerful and protect their own eminence.
More than anything else, this statement by Canadian Prime Minister Justine Trudeau encapsulates life in the perpetual crisis state. For the last two years, officials in government, public health, and the corporate media have convinced us that the only way to experience freedom is to take it away.
A warning: however much villains like Harvard Professor and Very Important Person Juliette Kayyem want to make you believe otherwise, the Canadian trucker dissident movement is a reaction to the unyielding oppressiveness, suffocating power of the government over the individual. We see the limitations and consequences of accepting conditioned liberty, in which our freedom is dependent on the charity of our rulers instead of adhering to negative freedom or the absence of oppression. Accept the terms of your existence, or suffer the wrath of the tyrannical state.
In G. K. Chesterton’s 1910 work, What’s Wrong with the World, he denounced the industrialist cabals of the elitists of that time who recognized and exploited the political power that came with wealth, “I am well aware that the word ‘property’ has been defined in our time by the corruption of the great capitalists. One would think, to hear people talk, that the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers were on the side of property. But obviously they are the enemies of property because they are enemies of their own limitations. They do not want their own land; but other people’s.”
If one were to substitute “freedom” for “property” it is not difficult to see the People’s freedom as a threat to their own. One could carry it further by recognizing Chesterton’s robber-barons in today’s political elites, Mark Zuckerberg, or the gatekeepers of information of Twitter and corporate media.
It exposes the fragility of the precipice on which they stand, shoulder to shoulder, ready to cast each other over the edge as martyrs in their vainglorious sanctimony, or to throw into the morass every single person who stands against them and their rules or who dares question their authority. They dole out scraps of sustenance and in return demand groveling loyalty and teary thankfulness.
Living in Minneapolis – ground zero of the molten rage of the George Floyd riots – I witnessed firsthand the dangers of encouraging fear and anarchy to run through a community like fire, engulfing order, morality, and yes freedom. In this sense, the rioters and the BLM abettors are no different than the state. It is not wrong, even, to believe the two are of the same basic cause. The racialism heaved upon us and used as a line separating the anti-racists from the racists, the faithful from the non-believers, the “good” from the “bad”, demanding the use of the right words, associating with the right people, expressing the right thoughts, is indistinguishable from the authoritarian state’s demands. It manifests itself in the current form through COVID, reaction to January 6th, and the institutionalization of woke protocol. Following mask requirements, belief in universal mandates, adhering to the administration’s political views, unquestioned belief in nonsensical policies, using the right words, expressing the right thoughts; it separates the anti-racists from the racists, the faithful from the non-believers, the “good” from the “bad.” Both instances use fear to control, use the threat of chaos to exert power, make the restriction of freedom seem like the only way to be free. Compliance is the condition of “liberty.”
In Sunday’s Atlantic, Rachel Gutman provided the window into mass derangement and self-delusion that tyranny relies upon. “Mask Mandates Are Illogical. So What?” is the headline but the implication is that a compliant, unthinking, uncritical mass who places moral authority in authoritarians will always rationalize the irrational. “[masks] don’t actually change people’s behavior: People who would’ve masked anyway cover up, and people who don’t want to mask wear theirs badly or ignore the rules.”
From Johns Hopkins University epidemiologist David Dowdy, “‘From my perspective, the main benefit [of mandates] is not so much the masking itself, but the message to society that this wave is not yet over,’ ... A mask mandate may not magically swaddle the faces of everyone in its jurisdiction, but it could remind already enthusiastic maskers to avoid large gatherings, or lead non-maskers to give the people around them a little more space.” The trouble with compliance is that it never stops with the compliant. Freedom will be achieved when maximum restrictions are imposed.
One doesn’t have to look to the Ottawa police to understand America’s mandated conformity in the offing. Radical activists in the streets have the protection of the government. Conservative views are problematic to corporate wretches who stake their moral high ground to communist China while they preclude people from participating in society. From crowdfunding, to public doxing and harassment (recall what happened to the Utah EMT who contributed just $10 to Kyle Rittenhouse’s defense fund), to deplatforming, it’s a dangerous slope that only tilts in one direction. [This parasitic ecosystem could garner its own post, so I won’t indulge it here beyond its mention.]
There is a radical shift in attitudes and the willingness to adhere to the edicts of authoritarianism. There is a confusion of words and meanings and actions where force is equated with morality, condescension with righteousness, and power with justice. C.S. Lewis wrote in his 1958 essay Is Progress Possible? “The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good — anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name ‘leaders’ for those who were once ‘rulers’. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, ‘Mind your own business.’ Our whole lives are their business.”
The great deception of the COVID era was convincing people that their natural right to freedom was open to negotiation. Consenting to lockdowns, mandates, and the separation of good from bad citizens based on conformity to or questioning of “The Science” made it possible for boundaries of tyranny to push ever closer to personal liberty. It revealed the fragility of our personal freedom. Accepting the state’s safetyism, acquiescing to woke ideology, rejecting the mob-mentality political narrative was the natural progression, reinforcing the existential purpose of government to protect the powerful instead of the liberty of the individual. Political philosopher Benjamin Constant warned in The Liberty of Ancients Compared to That of Moderns
Individual liberty … is the true modern liberty. Political liberty is its guarantee, consequently political liberty is indispensable. But to ask the peoples of our day to sacrifice, like those of the past, the whole of their individual liberty to political liberty, is the surest means of detaching them from the former and, once this result has been achieved, it would be only too easy to deprive them of the latter.
Every time the state reminds us of our freedom, question their definition of freedom and for whom it belongs. The more they talk of freedom, the more vociferously they snatch your rights away; the more they talk of sacrifices for everyone’s well-being, the more we sacrifice for their well-being; the more they talk about progress, the more they enact autocratic rules. There is no return to normal until there is universal compliance; the riots will stop when there is universal shame for systemic racism; we won’t monitor your bank account if you don’t give to problematic causes; you won’t be fired if you use the correct language; you can have access to the best schools if you adhere to the correct narrative.
You may have your freedom if you live by our rules.
