There is a difference between Liberty and freedom. Words do have meaning. How you interpret those meanings will form the basis of your actions. Are you fighting for your freedom, for Liberty or both? Or are you even fighting yet as we spiral into the descent of civil war?
The French Revolution was fought for Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. Patrick Henry’s famous speech ended with “I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”
It is strange that two Revolutions were fought on the basis of Liberty but most people do not understand this concept. Here is a good treatise from 1965 for you consideration. If you take the time to read it, ask yourself if you feel free under today’s fraudulent government, the actions of the Supreme Court and the effort to destroy the Constitution under the guise of “cancel culture??
David DeGerolamo
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Defining Liberty: An Analysis of Its Three Elements
Abraham Lincoln said the American people were much in want of a good definition of the word liberty. Mr. Brown has accepted that challenge, and to define what liberty is he divides it into three elements and analyzes each. He writes of the goals liberty seeks to achieve, the procedures by which it moves, and the underlying faiths that sustain it.
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In the context of a free society there are three elements in the concept of liberty. One of these is what liberty seeks to accomplish. The second is how to accomplish it procedurally. And the third is its underlying faiths.
I. WHAT LIBERTY SEEKS TO ACCOMPLISH
In terms of what a free society seeks to accomplish, liberty is five freedoms for each individual: (1) freedom to come and go, (2) equality and justice before the law, (3) security of property, (4) freedom of speech, and (5) freedom of conscience. There are many other names for these five individual freedoms—freedom of the press, freedom of expression and opinion, freedom of religion, freedom of association, right of habeas corpus, right of assembly, right of jury trial, etc. But these five individual freedoms are the “blessings of liberty” that constitute the first element of the word.
The active and politically minded members of a free society may use a “more or less” liberal or an absolute “either-or” approach, but these five individual freedoms are what a free society seeks to accomplish.
The intent of a free society is to keep the use of all man-made power within the periphery of these five individual freedoms.
We keep going in circles trying to find the magic definition of Liberty.
Capture the essence: Do not encroach on others or their property; do all you agreed to do.
The authors’ attempt to define Liberty in a political context … procedures, constitutions, majority opinions, etc., is misdirection from the essence.
The author came closest to capturing the essence when he said:
“The advocate of liberty believes that by the use of the individual inner drives of compassion, courage, reason, and intelligence, mankind need not inevitably destroy itself and that the course of mankind can continue. He believes that liberty, if he has it, is in the process of living and never at the end of a rainbow of wishful thinking. He believes that it is complementary of the orderly laws of cause and effect, of probability and of chance, of which man is not completely informed. It is complementary of them because it rests in part upon the faith that each individual is endowed by his Creator with some power of individual choice.”
It has nothing to do with governments or governance.
Well said. The Creator has an established Government. mankind has a pattern of ‘assuming’ and or twisting upon this Government, His lessons, His teachings, His examples.
i believe this is part of our nature (or curse). Overcoming these tendencies has proven difficult.
Liberty and Freedom through all challenges, all circumstances, with morals, and integrity intact is perhaps where Spiritual and physical are combined.
Many still only see and seek the physical. How do you find Freedom and Liberty there, if we are to assume happiness comes along with both?
Many on these sites quote Bonhoeffer. Do they see He was locked up and incarcerated yet He was free? From His point of view He was Free!
Needed to continue quoting the article: “We do not expect either these five individual freedoms or their conflicts with each other to “wither away,” and we know that we could not have them where the state is everything, or where there is no state.”
This is incorrect. The State is the problem and it prevents Liberty. Government and State are not the same. The native tribes of the land this empire occupies had government without a State.
Read Albert Nock’s Our enemy, the State.
Ahhh, yes, Lincoln.
The first fake president and possibly the greatest engineer of America’s destruction until King (Commie) Rat FDR.
As he was ineligible to hold the actual office of The President of The United States of America, due to being a foreign agent (BAR Attorney/Shipping Clerk), he could only occupy the British Territorial office of “President of the United States of America.”
This caused a huge uproar, as people in every state recognized that he was not occupying the actual Presidency of our Country, but instead functioning as the head of one of our subcontractors.
Very shortly, he engineered the unlawful mercenary war on our shores, fought between two of the three “Civil” subcontractors (Territorial and Municipal), also known as the Northern Confederate States and the Southern Confederate States (or “States of States,” business organizations).
Our American subcontractor (The Federal Republic) was shut down, and never revived (since Americans were never told they had to).
Since this unlawful “war” (actually a conflict/”police action” similar to Vietnam/Korea) was never lawfully declared (no declaration of war by two legitimate sovereign countries) and never ended (no peace treaty between two legitimate sovereign countries), it has continued to this day, preying upon Americans (who never had anything to do with this war). They are “conferred” dual “statuses” (“citizenships”) at birth, allowing both “sides” of this war to presume they are enemy combatants.
So quoting anything from Lincoln is tantamount to quoting King George III, or Pol Pot, or Mao, or Stalin, or FDR. Evil is evil.