Truth and Consequences

The tension at the heart of Liberty

There is a dilemma at the heart of the belief in Liberty. One that causes much difficulty for those of us who would see humanity thrive.

The tension is this: If you believe in Liberty, the right to live as you please within the boundaries of Law and Justice, you cannot absolve people of their own choices, or the consequences of them.

When people choose to be bigoted, or selfish, or willfully stupid, you cannot then say that they bear no responsibility for those choices. You can resist, you can disagree, you can oppose with all your heart, but you cannot make excuses for them. If you say, “Well, that’s how they were raised,” or “You don’t know what they’ve been through,” you are denying their autonomy. You must hold them responsible for the misery their selfishness and stupidity causes. In a way, it is respect for their humanity, but it is also necessary. If we are to improve, to climb higher as a species, we must oppose error, greed and self-righteousness without deciding to “tolerate” what they do to others.

We have reached a time in our history as a species where both disaster and transcendence are within our grasp. Our climate is being systematically poisoned and disordered at a geometrically accelerating rate. The government of the most powerful, richest nation the world has ever seen is being run by authoritarian grifters who celebrate bigotry and are utterly addicted to violence. And we have to face without flinching the fact that those people were put into those positions of power by millions of people who did so out of resentment, fear and overt bigotry.

We can now feed, shelter and educate everyone on the planet. A fraction of the funds spent on slaughter and self-serving could do this. Our technological and logistical ability puts this within our grasp, yet we don’t. Why? Because we are hindered by the greed of the few, and the willful ignorance and fear of the many.

We could decide that we will seize power by whatever means available and force the world to behave as we think it should. But that would turn us into the very thing we purport to despise – authoritarians, rulers, not governors. Every Hell on Earth was once someone’s utopian dream that collapsed, built on the unstable foundation of a people not yet convinced to govern themselves humanely, and the calculus of selfishness and the lust for power. Create a throne for a righteous sovereign, and you ensure, that eventually someone will seize that power for their own sake. It makes no difference if the dream was a classless society, or one of nationalist destiny, historically, the result is always the same. People who want power for its own sake – who need to rule will always find their way to that power. The humane and the thoughtful lose for one simple reason: you cannot beat a junkie to a fix.

If we really wanted to make the world better, we wouldn’t be testing people for drugs, we’d be testing them for the pathological need for power. But we don’t design our systems for selecting wisdom or humanness, we design them for obsessive strivers who tell us what we want to hear. So many of us would rather be entertained and comforted than informed that the voice of reason is drowned out by the screaming of the demagogue and the chanting of the true believer.

So the work falls to the only place it can — to each of us, in the ordinary moments where we choose to speak or stay silent, excuse or refuse to excuse, tolerate or refuse to tolerate.

The only way to address this is to call bigotry, greed and power seeking what they are: anti-human. That which will not hear reason and compassion is opposed to human thriving and Liberty.

We must call bigotry and greed by their names. We must allow people the consequences of their decisions, and hope that we can reassemble something like a better society from the wreckage they cause. But we must not excuse them. We must not “go along to get along.” We must not pretend that bigotry is “understandable” because people suffer from the very decisions they have consistently made. To do so is to comfort at the expense of progress, to permit disasters that are on the horizon that may not be recoverable. Let them know that you do not agree, that you are not resigned to their blinkered views, and that bigotry is not a position or an argument, it is a moral fault.

This is not comfortable. When shame is earned, it must be applied without apology. Evil must be denounced, and sometimes, relationships must be severed. It does not feel good to do so. We want to be tolerant and unfailingly kind. But to do so is to permit Evil a comfort that it does not deserve, and that we cannot afford.