What emotions are evoked by the word ‘freedom’? They’re positive, right? People like to be free, and with good reason–the millennia-long history of human conflict can be defined as a battle between freedom and slavery. But what does “freedom” mean? If you don’t know that, you can’t know what slavery is. So how will you know what’s true–and works for freedom–and what’s false–and works for slavery? If people don’t know what truth is, it becomes possible to hide anything from them. “Freedom” has been redefined–recontextualized, rather–to mean its opposite.

Think about the political context in which you have heard the word ‘freedom’ in the last few decades. Such phrases as “free love,” “freedom of movement,” and “free housing/education” have become staples of leftist political speech. Now they’re calling for “free money,” meaning “universal basic income.” They purposely ignore that such things aren’t free–that they must either be created out of the aether or taxed into existence. “Freedom” from society’s rules put in place to both protect you from harm, and to protect others from damages incurred by your hedonistic self-destruction. People who are against communist or socialist doctrine are painted as being “against freedom,” even though they are only against the “freedom” of self-destruction. “Free speech” is championed by people who seek nothing except censorship of everything they don’t like. Sane people want freedom of expression. When the words “free speech” are uttered, support for those who champion it is garnered, not knowing that what they really want is censorship of everything that questions their ideology. Among themselves, they use phrases such as “repressive tolerance” to describe censorship done “in the name” of freedom of speech.

True freedom comes not from anarchy, but from within a rightful order. Not “righteous,” because I don’t want people ascribing these statements to theocratic imposition. But rather “rightful,” as in “in accordance with natural law.” Society cannot permit the libertarian (I’m using that word very broadly here; it doesn’t quite mean what we think when we normally think about it) conception of “freedom” without collapsing into… well… multicultural subjectivism, emotion, hedonism, debauchery, degeneracy, and decay.

His conception of “freedom of speech” is much like that of a child, incapable of comprehending that true freedom–in the adult sense–comes from the conscious decision to abstain, not to indulge.