Today I was asked in class to consider the "conflicts of Order and Freedom," and I immediately noticed that the argument was a fallacious one.
The argument of freedom and the rule of law has constantly been framed as a false dichotomy: whomever usually brings the argument to fore begins from the early assumption that both concepts are anathema, and one cannot exist in the presence of another. I find this formulation flawed, as it seeks to present the argument as a false alternative.
Further contributing to the impression of a false alternative is the incorrect labeling of the concepts of “Freedom” and “Order.” Firstly, Freedom is equivocated with “Hedonism” or with “Whim”, and it often seeks to divorce the concept of freedom with the necessary contextual setting.
Firstly, no concept can truly be said to be applicable to human life if its conception is devoid and distanced from the facts of reality. When speaking of ‘freedom’ as the individual understands it, namely “The ability to choose and to act in accordance with one’s choices,” we cannot forget that we exist within the concept of a reality that is firmly established upon cause and effect, that actions have repercussions and that neither the concept nor we exist in a void, devoid of any interrelational values.
There is a distinct difference between make believe and reality, and you will often find that proponents of the false dichotomy often start from the assumption that make-believe is the desirable state when contemplating the issues of freedom (this is a tactic used in order to undermine it): They often paint people *wishing* to perform numerous acts of vandalism, or violation of rights or similar events, and then when repercussions (legal and personal) are presented upon these individuals –the argument somehow follows- it is a proof that freedom and order cannot coexist harmoniously.
What is missing from this reasoning?
A chemist decides to combine an acid with a substance that can accept hydrogen ions, an Acid-Base reaction occurs. The chemist then states that freedom does not exist, because she wanted to perform the combination without causing a reaction, despite her ample chemical knowledge which tells her that this is impossible. What has the chemist done? The answer is simple: An evasion of the facts of reality.
Every person is free to choose the course of action ahead of them. However, these actions do not occur in a vacuum, and they do not occur divorced from the rules of the world in which they are made. Just like the chemist who wished to combine reactive elements without causing a reaction, anyone who believes that freedom means actions without consequences (causes without effects) is practicing a willful denial of reality—and while one can try to escape reality, one cannot escape the consequences of attempting to escape reality.
We are free to invest our money, but we must use our rational minds to gauge the viability of different possible sources of investment as well as the risk each one of them incurs, knowing there is no such thing as a risk-free investment . Even in a stable market the onset of war, undetected natural disasters and similar events can bring about unexpected results. To enter into such an investment and willfully ignore the potential risks, to not prepare for them in case they happen, in the hope that not acknowledging them will prevent them from happening is to ignore how reality works.
This is not an issue of freedom, but an issue of irrational thought. You are also free to be irrational, but you cannot escape the consequences that accompany being irrational.
When we choose to perform an action that we know violates someone’s rights (theft, extortion, kidnapping, murder, etcetera), unless we suffer from an actual mental impediment, we are quite *aware* of the nature of the action, and of the accompanying consequences. We have the *freedom* to choose this particular set of actions, but if we do so then we also have the *responsibility* to accept the accompanying consequences.
It is then that it becomes clear that any debate upon freedom and order which does not hold responsibility as part of the equation is therefore an attempt to create a straw man out of freedom through misrepresentation. To discuss freedom without responsibility is to attempt to contemplate effects without causes.
Finally, to put both terms in their most appropriate definitions, I would like to propose the following definition of “Freedom”:
In a political context, Freedom is the protection of the individual *from* the coercive force of other individuals and from unwarranted coercive force by government itself. This does not include freedom from the laws of nature, or to circumvent cause and effect. “Order”, in this context being the rule of law, exists to safeguard that freedom and the individual rights from which it is derived. In a properly structured framework, therefore, Freedom and Order *cannot* conflict.
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