“No one has the right to tell us what we can and cannot do with our own bodies”, her friends bellowed in near perfect unison, the moment she voiced her ambivalence toward the possibility of the illegalization of abortion in the United States, yet another expression of a fast-growing trend of draconian measures being imposed on people by democratically elected governments and supreme courts, and she couldn’t help but wonder if it wasn’t attributable, at least in part, to the people themselves …
… as American author and journalist Frank Herbert once wrote, “seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty”, the very notion of discipline, from time immemorial, vividly absent in both the interpretation and navigation of freedom, a sense of birthright with respect to the latter, inspiring an unbridled and mostly self-defeating pursuit of desire, resulting not only in the moral and spiritual impoverishment of human beings, but also in the diminishing of the very freedoms they so volubly and aggressively champion; it should hardly come as a surprise that in the early 19th century, Soren Kierkegaard, known to be the founder of existential philosophy, wrote that …
“… people demand freedom of speech as compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
Moreover, most human beings are not unequivocal in their desire for freedom, for it is a vast, sparsely populated and hence essentially lonely state in which to be; they appear to covet it only when it is either threatened or denied and enjoy it but momentarily when they find themselves liberated from captivity. At all other times, they seek safety in numbers, anchors to provide sense of orientation and attachments that curtail their autonomy.
Even more incongruous with the spirit of freedom is the fact that people find it difficult to permit it to others who differ from them in any way, shape or form, the double standard of the majority, whose views are dangerously given primacy, in each instance no less than resounding, for if one was to consider, by way of example, the matter of vaccination against covid-19, while the herd droned on about each one having the right to do as they wish with and to their own bodies, they were quick to condemn those that refused to take the vaccine, citing selfishness and irresponsibility as ‘just cause’; in the same vein, should preventive measures against a reckless approach by women to sexual relations, fostering the liberal use of a procedure, which for many has damaging physiological, emotional and moral repercussions (not to mention the fact that it sabotages the very essence of being a woman, i.e. her natural instinct to nurture) unilaterally be deemed repressive? The Law – an incontestably imprecise science that is inextricably linked to the development and protection of civilization – in fact exists to retrench the very right to do as each one wishes, without which the human being might well become an endangered species. As English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes very simply proposed in the 17th century,
“a society without rules and laws to govern our actions would be a dreadful place to live.”
Later on in the 18th century, Swiss born philosopher, writer and political theorist, Jean Jacques Rousseau famously wrote that “man is born free but everywhere he is in chains” … it was the opening sentence of The Social Contract, a treatise in which he attempts to find a solution to the protection of individual freedoms with respect to legitimate political authority and the various applications of law; he went on to surmise, that the moment man made the transition from his natural forest dwelling state into becoming a member of society, the only way to protect individual freedom was to submit free will to the general will and thereby forfeit the same number of rights and impose the same duties on all …
… in many ways, the fundamental tenets of the social contract – not only considered cynical but also potentially harmful at the time of their inception, for they would permit governments to make laws that excessively infringed upon people’s freedom and privacy – are, without our consent, unfolding today, and we the people, she thought to herself, with emphasis on the majority, are indisputably to blame; as Abraham Lincoln once said,
“Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.”