An Evil Choice Destroys Freedom

AMERICANS TALK A HELL OF A LOT about freedom and liberty but so little thought goes into what they mean by those words that they have come to mean absolutely nothing most of the time they are mouthed or typed. When an American fascist, a white supremacist or their ilk use those words it's clear that the entire notion of them has reached the absolute nadir of decadent corruption.  The lousy cause of preserving slavery in the United States was dishonestly, immorally and irrationally presented in terms of freedom for the white enslavers even as it insisted on the totalitarian oppression and violent control of Black People.  That was the motive for the corrupt Taney Court in lying that the Constitution as written excluded Black People from those held to have rights and freedom under it in order for that corrupt slave owner and his fellow slave-holding "justices" to maintain the source of their personal wealth.  In doing that they joined a long line of such "justices" including, as I will never stop pointing out, the most august of them all, the corrupt John Marshall.  Courts and police and the culture right up to now considers that men should be free to practice a full range of harms against Women, LGBTQ+ People, the Corrupt (Roberts) Court is all-in on destroying any slight steps, an tendencies that the Congress or others have made to restrict that obscene kind of "freedom" which constitutes the most traditional holders of that kind of freedom, straight,white, males, especially those with wealth.  The most depraved members of that court, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, clearly have that as their goal.  

On the other hand, the scientistic-academic babble about it, often as not, declares that the idea free-will is nonsense because that has become so absolutely wedded to the monism that everything that is real is a result of material causation, the movements of objects and molecules, atoms and subatomic particles under the operation of randomness.  That is even though there has been absolutely no demonstration that their ideological framing of reality is, actually, real.  I have posed the problem for that assertion a number of times that if there is such a thing as free will or, so ironic in the context of the argument, free thought that it couldn't be under that ideologically asserted restriction because it would be something apart from their scheme of material causation and have qualities that physical objects are not known to have.  

So, it's clear that the old notions of freedom and liberty are in deep trouble.  I think one of the greatest defects in how Americans, and so many others around the world, think about freedom is that they consider it both an absurdly abstract entity, having no relation to the fullness of real life, or something so particular that is applies to any desired and ephemeral aspect of what the user wants at any given time.  That is the spoiled brat of a kid concept of freedom and liberty, such as reaches decaying senectitude in Donald Trump and as can be seen in comment treads, tweets, etc. online.  

I think it's essential to rethink, really think for the first time in most cases, exactly what freedom, what liberty means and why, when it is asserted to exist only as the right of a few or a large minority against Black People, Native Americans, Women, LGBTQ+ the industrialist and investor class against workers, etc. AS THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION DID AS THE FRAMERS WROTE IT AND AS IT HAS EXISTED FOR MOST OF ITS EXISTENCE, a situation that certainly isn't unique in so-called democracies and certainly of all of the overt gangster governments in the world today, such "freedom" and the liberties that actually exist under those conditions are held to be a good instead of the very source of evils.

I hold that equality, not "liberty" or even "freedom" is the actual bedrock value of any real democracy as that word denotes something to be sought and desired, the only really legitimate government being such an egalitarian democracy.  All other kinds of government, from "liberal democracy" to the worst regimes in history, under Hitler or Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot or the Kim clique are degrees of government by gangster law.  I hold that the liberal democracy of the United States is one such government that, to the extent it is not equal and equally free it is not legitimate.  Legitimate government exists as a goal to be constantly sought and constantly struggled for and, against the irrational stupidity of the First Amendment, protected from all anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic ideologies, forces, parties and movements.  It is the hugest of stupidities in the U.S. Constitution that it is not laid out as the fundamental principal right of Americans to live securely under an egalitarian democracy and that the government, FOREMOST OF ALL THE COURTS, HAVE AN OBLIGATION TO PROTECT EQUALITY AND DEMOCRACY and that to the extent they do not do that they have forfeited any claim to legitimacy that they may wish to assert.  The Supreme Court, the Corrupt Court, has been the least interested in protecting equality of all the branches, as bad as many presidents and Congresses have been, the Courts are the worst.  Which isn't a surprise because as constituted by the acts organizing the courts, they have been made the most remote from the reality of the actual lives of Americans, staffed by a profession which is best paid when it is working to protect the privileges and corruptly asserted "rights" of the wealthiest and most powerful.  

I have decided to type out and post the entire short essay by Thomas Merton from New Seeds of Contemplation on this topic, not because I am entirely comfortable with everything he says in it - the section that starts "You fool!" is a little too pre-Vatican II for my taste, though it sounds better if you read that "You dope!" and I'm sure there will be lots in it that many will object to on the basis of religion.  But I think it forces the question of exactly what's good about People having the "liberty" to do evil and damaging and harmful things to other People and animals and the land and to the entire biosphere?   It's certainly possible to have legitimate freedoms or "liberty," if you insist that is consistent with the equal good of all on the principle that "freedom and liberty" that harms others is not legitimate freedom.  Though the Framers of the U.S. Constitution knew very well they had no such intentions because they intended to have slaves, to murder Native Americans and steal their land, to hoard political power to their class against the interests of those who were unpropertied and they certainly had no intention of allowing Women to have equality, and so they wrote the Constitution against any possibility of anything like egalitarian democracy.  The fake reverence for that document, including the extremely dangerous and flawed First and Second Amendments is a major impediment to changing it and achieving even the possibility of egalitarian democracy on the basis of legitimate and equal representation in the government.  The matter of cleaning up the courts would require a total reworking of the court organization acts but it might, actually, be easier to do a lot towards cleaning up that cesspool.  Consider this a first strike in that effort.

Let me know if there are any typos, I had to rush this one. I have bolded a few lines that I think are especially worth considering. [Update: what I did to bold the bolded sections worked on one browser but not on another.  I've underlined those.]


What Is Liberty?

The mere ability to choose between good and evil is the lowest limit of freedom, and the only thing that is free about that is the fact that we can still choose good.

To the extent that you are free to choose evil, you are not free.  An evil choice destroys freedom.

We can never choose evil as evil; only as an apparent good.  But when we decide to do something that seems to us to be good when it is not really so, we are doing something that we do not really want to do, and therefore we are not really free.

Perfect spiritual freedom is a total inability to make any evil choice.  When everything you desire is truly good and every choice not only aspires to that good but attains it, then you are free because you do everything that you want, every act of your will ends in perfect fulfillment.

Freedom therefore does not consist in an equal balance between good and evil choices but in the perfect love and acceptance of what is really good and the perfect hatred and rejection of what is evil, so that everything you do is good and makes you happy, and you refuse and deny and ignore every possibility that might lead to unhappiness and self-deception and grief.  Only the man who has rejected all evil so completely that he is unable to desire it at all, is truly free.  

God, in Whom there is absolutely no shadow or possibility of evil or of sin, is infinitely free.  In fact, He is Freedom.

Only the will of God is indefectible.  Every other freedom can fail and defeat itself by a false choice.  All true freedom comes as a supernatural gift of God, as a participation in His own essential Freedom by the Love He infuses into our souls, uniting them with Him first in perfect consent, then in a transforming union of wills. 

I will break in here and point out that every scheme of freedom that human beings come up with will be defective so that any law "granting liberty" is bound to be flawed, especially under the scheming and manipulation of lawyers and judges and, worst of all "justices."   Encoding those humanly imperfect schemes in permanent form are only safe in so far as those can effectively be changed under the influence of honest appraisal and good will.  Good will is absent in American politics to a serious extent.

The other freedom, the so-called freedom of our nature, which is indifference with respect to good and evil choices, is nothing more than a capacity, a potentiality waiting to be fulfilled by the grace, the will and the supernatural love of God.

All good, all perfection, all happiness, are found in the infinitely good and perfect and blessed will of God.  Since true freedom means the ability to desire and choose, always, without error, without defection, what is really good, then freedom can only be found in perfect union and submission to the will of God.  If our will travels with His, it will reach the same end, rest in the same peace, and be filled with the same infinite happiness that is HIs.

Therefore, the simplest definition of freedom is this; it means the ability to do the will of God.  To be able to resist His will is not to be free.  In sin there is no true freedom.

Surrounding sin there is certain goods - in sins of the flesh there are, for instance, pleasure of the flesh.  But it is not these pleasures that are evil.  They are good, and they are willed by God and even when someone takes those pleasures in a way that is not God's will, God still wills that those pleasures should be felt.  But though the pleasures in themselves are good, the direction of the will to them under circumstances that are against the will of God, become evil.  And because that direction of the will is evil it cannot reach the mark which the will intends.  Therefore it defeats itself.  And therefore there is ultimately no happiness in any act of sin.

You fool!  You have really done what you did not want to do!  God has left you with the pleasure, because the pleasure also was His will;  but you have neglected the happiness He wanted to give you along with the pleasure, or perhaps the greater happiness He intended for you without the pleasure and beyond it and above it!  You have eaten the rind and thrown away the orange.  You have kept the paper that was nothing but a wrapping and you have thrown away the case and the ring and the diamond.

And now that the pleasure - which has to end - is finished, you have nothing of the happiness that would have enriched you forever.  If you had taken (or forsaken) the pleasure in the way God willed for the sake of your happiness, you would still possess the pleasure in your happiness, and it would be with you always and follow you everywhere in God's will.  For it is impossible for the sane man to seriously regret an act that was consciously performed in union with God's will.

Liberty, then, is a talent given us by God, an instrument to work with.  It is the tool with which we build our own lives, our own happiness.  Our true liberty is something we must never sacrifice, for if we sacrifice it we renounce God Himself.  Only the false spontaneity of caprice, the pseudo liberty of sin is to be sacrificed.  Our true liberty is something we must never sacrifice, for if we sacrifice it we renounce God Himself.  Only the false spontaneity of caprice, the pseudo liberty of sin is to be sacrificed.  Our true liberty must be defended with life itself for it's the most precious element in our being.  It is our liberty that makes us Persons, constituted in the divine image.  The supernatural society of the Church has, as one of its chief functions, the preservation of our spiritual liberty as sons of God.  How few people realize this!  

As I said, it's pre-Vatican II (1961) the later Merton probably wouldn't have said some of the same things the same way but it's the ideas that are important.