The Myth of Personal Freedom

You know that feeling of not being able to look away from a car crash on the highway? Well, recently I’ve been fighting impulses to be consumed by stories of the “Freedom Convoy” that’s made its way to our nation’s capital. I’ve tried to stay away because I know the kind of division and polarization it’s causing in our country, but it’s getting hard to avoid. 

By now we know that we don’t all agree on COVID-19 restrictions and vaccine mandates. But things came to a head for a group of truckers in Canada after our government imposed mandatory vaccines for cross-border travel - a mandate from which they were exempt until now. This past week a convoy of truckers made their way to Ottawa, gathering support along the way.

At first it seemed like their goal was to stop the vaccine mandate for cross-border truckers, but the convoy quickly morphed to include many more people who have been discontented with the pandemic. And so, as I write this, “Freedom Protests” continue in our capital city and around Canada. Of course there’s a lot more that could be said about all this, but all I want to do here is address the use of the word “freedom.” 

Freedom is a powerfully loaded and cliché word. It’s something we claim to hold as a value in North America, but do we truly know what it means? This word quickly morphs into a political and ideological weapon in certain contexts, romanticizing an idea that doesn’t really exist. What’s more, if it did, I don’t think any of us would actually want it.

A quick search on Merriam-Webster tells us that freedom is defined as “the power to do what you want to do.” At first, this idea seems nice because it fits into our individualistic worldview. We all want autonomy. We don’t like it when other people make decisions for us or restrict our actions, and we like it even less when those people are our political enemies.

But unless you live isolated from every other being on Earth, you never have complete autonomy, and therefore, you’re never completely “free.” We’re all connected in some way, and that means our actions have consequences. Freedom in the sense of doing whatever you want is neither something that’s offered to us nor is it something we can ever truly attain.

If you’re driving a car, for example, you’re free to go where you like, but you must stay on your side of the road. You’re free to go as fast as the speed limit allows, but you can’t go above it. You can make turns, but you need to yield to those who have the right of way. You can park your car, but only in designated zones. Yes, you have the freedom to drive, but not without a seatbelt, license, or insurance.

For a while, we had the freedom to make calls and text while driving, but since 2008, laws across Canada changed that. Is this oppression, discrimination, or tyranny? No. This is how freedom has always worked. Freedom is a constant give and take, because it means different things to different people. In order to live in a society where common values and morals are respected, freedom and responsibility need to be negotiated and experimented with. When one freedom is exercised, it often costs someone something. The challenge is trying to figure out if that cost is worth it.

“We always need to balance freedom with responsibility.”

We always need to balance freedom with responsibility. As a society, we’ve decided that the responsibility to prevent car crashes and save lives is more important than the freedom to text while driving. And so, we continue to have laws that restrict that freedom for those who want to drive. Sure, driving is a trivial example, but the same principles apply to changes we’ve made in terms of same-sex marriage, use of cannabis, and medical assistance in dying.

We’ve seen this dynamic at work in a new way as we’ve moved from wave to wave of the pandemic. Our freedoms of gathering and movement have been in constant flux. Our governments have always had to balance the freedom for people to do what they want with the responsibility to keep people safe and alive. This is no different than the ways we’ve negotiated our freedoms in the past, but the nature of COVID-19 has affected the severity and speed at which these decisions were made.

With what we’ve lived through in the pandemic, I can totally understand why there are people who are opposed to the regulations and mandates that have been put into place. I also think that people should have the right to speak up if they don’t like the way these decisions are being made. But let’s not confuse what’s happening in Ottawa with a fight for our country’s freedom.

If anything, it’s a fight by a very specific group of people who are wanting specific types of freedoms for themselves. What is yet to be worked out is whether the cost to accommodate those freedoms will be worth the price the rest of the country will have to pay. This dance will continue until we can find our rhythm and stop stumbling over each other, or until we stumble so much that someone gets hurt.

Freedom isn’t a black and white concept. It’s a complex and delicate idea that tries to balance our autonomy and responsibility within our cultural and societal context. And when it’s used as a political or ideological buzz-word, it polarizes the situation even more, giving people license to act in unloving ways. When negotiating our personal freedoms, we should always keep in mind that our freedoms likely cost someone something. Humility is a good posture to take in order to ask whether our freedoms are more important than our responsibility to each other.

Without a healthy balance of freedom and responsibility, we’re left with anarchy. I don’t think anybody wants that. Instead, I think what we really want is to be allowed to flourish - to live meaningful lives, to contribute, to be safe and secure, and to know and to be known. And even though freedoms are a part of that, we’re far better off starting with our responsibilities. It’s in understanding our shared responsibilities to ourselves, to one another, and to our world that we can more fully live into the freedoms we enjoy.