I’ve been writing toward this question for years now, and I think I’m finally ready to tackle this head-on.
Freedom isn’t an entitlement. It isn’t a right that some authority granted you and that you can sit back and enjoy. Those framings have caused a lot of mischief over the centuries — they let people believe they have freedom while they’re busy denying it to someone else.
The freedom I’m trying to write about is something you do. Every day. To everyone you have any power over.
Freedom is the result of your daily refusal to decide for someone else what they’re allowed to be.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. A parent who lets the adult child make their own choices, even bad ones. An employer who lets the worker have their own politics. A government that resists the temptation to manage what its citizens are allowed to know. There are a hundred versions, in every life. Most of us fail this test more often than we succeed.
The reason this matters for the books I’m writing is that all the great evils in this story are versions of the same failure. The Church decides what ordinary people are allowed to understand. The Garden decides what its petals are allowed to choose, down to their name. The Crown decides what its subjects are allowed to know. The aliens decide that humanity is livestock.
Each of them has reasons, some good, some less so. The reasons are not the point. The point is that someone made the decision for someone else.
Freedom, true freedom, is the result of not making that decision. Even when you’re sure you’d make a better one than they would.
We’ll spend four more Sundays on this. The next one is about why freedom decays even after you win it.