Walmart and Liberty
I live in a fairly rural area. Unfortunately, this means that unless I want to drive for an hour, I am forced to make a significant amount of my purchases at the most despicable of big box stores, Walmart. As I was walking through those highly esteemed aisles, I saw some employees setting up some event merchandise for the 4th of July.
One of those items was a set of big plastic letters that spelled out “LIBERTY.” I had to stop for a moment, because that might be the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. First, there’s a weird bit of irony in importing a bunch of cheap garbage from China to proclaim how American we are. Second, it’s completely and entirely meaningless.
Find me a single person who doesn’t claim to believe in liberty. Republicans and Democrats will tell you they do. So will your socialists and MAGAs. Hell, even your fascists and Nazis. No, not the (insert ideology I don’t like) are fascists and Nazis. The people who would tell you to your face that they’re a fascist or a Nazi. They still believe in liberty.
The problem is that there is no single, universally accepted definition of liberty and freedom. There are positive liberties, which are your rights to do specific things. My First Amendment right to free speech and my Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms are positive liberties. There are also negative liberties, which are freedoms from something. My Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure or Third Amendment protections against being forced to quarter soldiers in my home are examples of negative freedoms.
The thing is, positive and negative freedoms don’t always play nicely together. My freedom to move my fist ends where your face begins. Something like religious freedom can actually work both ways. Do you mean freedom to express your religion, or freedom from having someone else’s religion imposed on you? Rastafarians didn’t get a free pass to smoke weed because it is their holy herb. Yelling “FIRE!” in a crowded movie theater when there is no fire is not an acceptable use of free speech.
I’m not saying you should agree with what my definitions of liberty are. It’s fairly obvious I’m somewhere on the left of the political spectrum—it should be pretty easy to work out what I think is important. What I’m saying is that paying lip service to the idea of liberty is just as meaningless as corporations slapping rainbow stickers on everything once a year or social media posts asking you to like and share if you care about (issue).
Instead, tell me what you mean by liberty. We probably won’t agree, but at least then, we can have a nuanced, in-depth conversation about the topic. Anyone who says that (My side) believes in liberty and (the other side) hates liberty is misinformed at best and deliberately misleading at worst.
Unfortunately, it is really difficult to fit a nuanced take into a tweet or TikTok post. When you simplify things, you lose depth. The human brain is not designed to handle the absolute flood of information social media gives us. As a result, we have shallower discussions, make assumptions, and hate people who we would probably agree with on 80% of the issues if we removed all the political buzzwords and loaded terms from the conversation.
Featured image from Caique Morais on Unsplash.
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This article was originally published to James' Substack, Sarcastrophe. Consider taking a look at other published works.