When the Pursuit of Liberty Is Liberty's Greatest Enemy

American Thinkier ^ | 6/19/11 | Jeremy Egerer

[Nachum]

It has been said by persons such as Abraham Lincoln that the cause of tyranny can oftentimes be mistaken for and promoted as the cause of liberty. To prevent such a destructive misconception from metastasizing, Americans must concern themselves most seriously with understanding what liberty is -- and also what it is not.

John Stuart Mill, in what is perhaps his most famous and influential work, On Liberty, helped build the foundation for a modern understanding of freedom, one which an overwhelming number of Americans support. In doing so, he argued that for a society to be properly liberated, its citizens must be guaranteed freedom of thought and speech, liberty of tastes and pursuits, and freedom of association. Yet, expressly recognizing in the first chapter of On Liberty that these liberties were too radical without certain restrictions, Mill sought the boundaries within which they should exist. And by setting those particular boundaries, like so many of his followers on both the left and right do today, he unwittingly destroyed the foundation for the liberty he sought in the first place.

[EGPWS]

...a modern understanding of freedom,

Now there's a kicker!

Any relation to a "living breathing" Constitution?

[DesertRhino]

This is incredibly muddled thinking for American Thinker. When Mill said “Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.”
He was no referring to letting Aztecs alone to run their human sacrificial affairs. He was saying Aztecs should be ruled by force, by someone who has their betterment as the end goal. Like it or not, the Spanish were utterly justified in enslaving them.

And far from not defining babarism, Mill’s very statements define it. If you assert a “right”that causes actual harm to another, you are barbaric.
I’m talking actual verifiable undeniable proof that something is harming another. Not the mentality that by exhaling or eating a steak, im affecting the fate of someone else. This guy is very muddled compared to what i normally see in American Thinker.

Worst of all, it looks like he says “Mill was wrong” and doesn’t say why, or offer any example to prove his point, or offer any alternate way to view Liberty.

Thumbs down.

[gunnyg]

certainly lincoln would know that tobe so!

[gunnyg]

certainly lincoln would know that to be so!

[R_Kangel]

.... Basically what the left and even our enemies use against us is to argue that in the free country of America, where owe have protected freedom of speech and expression, an individual has the protected right to deny you of your freedom of speech and expression in order to allow them to have the right of freedom of speech and expression!!! .........SHEESH!!!

Then they lawyer up with an activist legal whiz and make it so! WTF

[Louis Foxwell]

Agreed this needs clarity. It is late and my mind is not as clear as in the AM. I am going to try again tomorrow morning. This is too important to gloss or ignore.

[Louis Foxwell]

This is the central issue of our time. Can a nation, conceived in liberty, protect and sustain that liberty without the beliefs of its founders? Clearly if the ensuing beliefs are superior it can. The beliefs of our current age, however, are profoundly inferior.
We have sacrificed a national commitment to the principles of a God centered creation and replaced them with a muddled set of so called scientific ideas that do not translate into a behavioral code.
The founders gave us as their heritage an ethical system based on ancient Biblical wisdom. We have replaced that philosophy of thought with whatever feels good and whoever screeches the loudest about their right to inflame the passions of the electorate. This is no way to run a country.
Without a set of objective standards we are left with the idiocy of Sheila Lee Jackson and the labyrinthic manipulations of Obama. We are guided by the predominant standard designed by humans to be both murderous and incompetent, Marxist socialism.
The solution is simple. We must return to a God given world view in which man is not the sum of his imagination but is a sinner in the hands of an angry yet curiously loving God.
We are not the last best hope for mankind. We are fools who think ourselves superior to all of creation. A nation on its knees in supplication to the Father of Creation can be a safe harbor for the humble and a living hell for the wicked. Let it be so.