I wasn’t wrong. Dostoevsky intentionally set them up as role-playing the tendencies he noticed in his time and place

Alyosha was the saintly Christian.
Ivan was the bookish atheist/nihilist who sought to undermine Christianity.

It’s good to keep this in mind when confronting the Parable of the Grand Inquisitor. It’s a story which Ivan is telling to his brother Alyosha.

At the end Alyosha, the Christian, kisses his dear atheist brother, Ivan, and Ivan accepts the kiss with humor and delight.

The Grand Inquisitor story forces us into a false binary. People either choose liberty or get bought off with bread or security.

This is an excluded middle fallacy. All western nations are to some extent socialized. We all have experienced times when we required to be looked after. We accept that. Nonetheless we also yearn for liberty and rightly so. It’s not either-or.

It’s trade-offs, as HC68 argues.

The Grand Inquisitor is great literature but not Plato nor Thomas Aquinas.

Most people _absolutely_ want liberty. The problem is that liberty has many definitions. Humans are social, tribal creatures, and so our definitions of freedom and liberty necessary involve interactions with others. One person’s definition of freedom can and often does conflict with another’s.

Which is why cultural diversity and personal liberty are generally contrary indicators. Highly culturally homogenous societies can permit large degrees of personal liberty, because they can more or less agree on what is permissible and what is not. As cultural diversity increases, definitions of liberty diverge, and conflict arises inevitably.

“Your right to throw a punch ends where my nose begins.” That’s a popular libertarian line. To which the counter-response could just as easily be “Your nose’s right to be somewhere stops where the line of my punch begins.” If there is no agreed-upon standard, all claims becomes exercises of power.

(Which is why the post-modernist ‘everything is relative’ viewpoint, once a society internalizes it, leads either to breakdown or tyranny or both.)

Other people will react to your exercise of liberty, and that forces you to make exclusive choices. If you convert to another faith, that’s an exercise of your liberty. But if your family refuses to engage with you afterward, and won’t let you talk to their kids for fear you’ll poison their minds, that’s an exercise of _their_ liberty. You must either content yourself with being cut off from your family, or somehow force them (by law or social pressure or whatever) to engage again, which violates their liberty. If your family truly believes you are harming your children by teaching them your new faith (or no faith), they either have to stand back and permit that…or somehow force you to do it their way.

What people craves is both liberty/freedom…and affirmation, or at least acknowledgement/permission, of their choices by their fellows. Which is not always possible.

The current ‘trans’ hysteria is a classic case-in-point of both theory and practice. The sincere (and tiny) group of people who really wish to be the other sex for non-fetishistic reasons have a problem: it’s mostly already legal for a guy to wear a dress and call himself a girl. It’s legal for a girl to declare herself a guy. But what use is that?

Humans are social/tribal, and what they crave is for _others_ to treat them as the sex they want to be. But that conflicts with other people’s desire to treat them as the sex they are. So, either the “trans” person must have his/her liberty to be the sexy they prefer abridged, or the other person must be compelled to lie to make the trans person happy. To different definitions of liberty, in inherent, irresolvable conflict. But that’s only a particularly clear example, such conflicts arise _whenever_ different cultures and religions and core assumptions are trying to operate within a single society.

So saying ‘everyone wants freedom and liberty’ is true in an absolute sense, but only meaningful in context.

“As much as they want liberty, most people want security, ease, peace of mind, order, meaning, and control over others. Liberty can be inimical to all of those.” — Wendy K Laubach

Liberty can also _require_ those things.

Very few people question why a person with a gun to his head will act against his core beliefs, and do things he would never otherwise do. But the man with the gun can’t _make_ him do that. He can kill him for refusing, but the other guy is still free to refuse to obey…at the price of his life.

Yet very, very few people would condemn the latter for failing to stand by his principles at the cost of his death, because we all know we’d probably do the same. We value our lives more than our principles, most of the time.

Franklin’s famous line: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” is often taken radically out of context in modern debates. Without that context, the quote is idealized nonsense. We trade liberty for security, and security for liberty, day in and day out, forever. _Practical_ politics, and simply living a decent life, is all about managing that tradeoff successfully.

The man who compromises his principles to avoid have his head blown off is making such a tradeoff. The parent who accepts a nasty regime because at least that way their kids are fed is making such a tradeoff.

The person who faces a choice between living under a harsh dictator or in the cross-fire of a civil war between factions, both of whom he detests and who detest him, is making such a tradeoff. Who is right? Depends on the person and the context. The fall of a harsh dictator often brings more freedom and liberty to some groups while bringing fear and restriction to others.

Even the American Revolution reduced the freedom and liberty of many Crown Loyalists (almost a third of the adult population by some estimates). One reason the American Revolution ended well where so many end in tears is that the victors _mostly_ tried to deliberately _not_ grind down the losers (the loyalists) and let them become part of the new state and society.

We trade freedom for security and vice versa, and we trade freedom today for different freedom tomorrow, and so on, all the time.

A more useful quote is from Thomas Sowell: “There are no solutions. There are only tradeoffs.”

Dreamers and idealists look at Principles. Real life is about applications and compromises and tradeoffs.

I related to Jamie’s comment when she posted it, and I appreciate neo turning it into this post and explaining her (neo’s) own perspective. I don’t know that I was ever a “neocon,” (and glad to read that was never the meaning of neo’s moniker) but like Jamie I had some hope the desire for liberty could take root if the U.S. helped eliminate tyrannical rulers keeping revolutionaries in check.

I have a lot I’d like to add, but neo and the commenters have already expounded on the subject here beyond my ability. This post and the tangents raised in the comments should be the basis of a mandatory, one year course for every U.S. citizen Freshman year of High School. Discussing this topic openly, and debating human nature as it relates to this topic, would help build a more thoughtful, realistic citizenry.

It seems people love a lot of things other than liberty which, I think, means taking an active part in the decisions made by the government. That, by its nature is uncomfortable.

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.

Samuel Adams

Hear! Hear! DT.

Most people like “socialism” – under whatever name – because it’s “somebody else’s fault” and “somebody else will take care of me”; call it a return to an ideal childhood. Liberty tells one “it’s my fault” and “nobody’s coming to rescue me”.
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I get a lot of non-religious young people asking sneering questions about Judaism, or spouting leftie victimhood politics. At some point in these conversations I usually deliver this line:

Judaism is religion for grown-ups.

This is true of Western democracy as well… you have to mature to the point of seeing others, wanting to be a giver, having personal honor about keeping your word.

Much of the current cultural dissolution can be traced to infantilization of the populace… this is the thread underlying nostalgic talk about “the Greatest Generation” etc.

It will be very difficult to wean people from this attitude – remember the cradle-to-grave dependency of Obama’s “Life of Julia” campaign? It’s no accident that the Dem base is largely AWFLs who are already isolated and atomized by the breakup of family and community.