Dangerous freedom

This weekend we saw yet another mass shooting. In an outlet mall in Allen, TX, nine people were murdered by what reports say was a shooter with neo-Nazi links.

This, of course, is such of the "new normal" that it goes unremarked, save for a few hours after the incident. 

This tweet, however, caught my eye:

I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery. https://t.co/N10kVj2kaV

— Dean Cain (@RealDeanCain) May 7, 2023

Now, poor man's Superman is an idiot. When he played a vile racist in A Different World, I imagine he didn't have go into the Method. 

Now, "dangerous freedom" is a Thomas Jefferson quote. Which Cain avers over and over again in the incredulous responses to his callousness. So, let's look at the quote in full:

Societies exist under three forms sufficiently distinguishable. 1. Without government, as among our Indians. 2. Under governments wherein the will of every one has a just influence, as is the case in England in a slight degree, and in our states in a great one. 3. Under governments of force: as is the case in all other monarchies and in most of the other republics. To have an idea of the curse of existence under these last, they must be seen. It is a government of wolves over sheep. It is a problem, not clear in my mind, that the 1st. condition is not the best. But I believe it to be inconsistent with any great degree of population. The second state has a great deal of good in it. The mass of mankind under that enjoys a precious degree of liberty and happiness. It has it's evils too: the principal of which is the turbulence to which it is subject. But weigh this against the oppressions of monarchy, and it becomes nothing. Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem. Even this evil is productive of good. It prevents the degeneracy of government, and nourishes a general attention to the public affairs. I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.

In this letter to James Madison, Jefferson was comparing the "dangerous freedom" we have to living either without government, as he claims the Natives did—which was a lie—or to living under autocracy.

But notice what he claims that "dangerous freedom" does: It prevents the degeneracy of government, and nourishes a general attention to the public affairs. "Dangerous freedom" is political. It encourages free citizens to hold their governments to account, not allowing these governments born in freedom to degenerate to autocracy.

Freedom, in Jefferson's context, was "dangerous" to those who wished to exert control over citizens beyond that which was enumerated in the Constitution. Dangerous, in this context, was in no way supposed to mean that you had to live your day-to-day life with the ever-present sense of danger, as in that your life could be taken away from you at any point. The end of this passage explicitly says that this dangerous freedom is political, not physical. He compares the storms of politics with the storms of nature, in that they both bring regeneration. To leap from that to say that daily massacres are the "price of freedom" would, I'm sure, have been a surprise to Jefferson.

People like dime-store Superman are not small-d democrats. They don't believe in democracy. They don't believe in a commonwealth, where the general welfare is promoted. They are anarchists in the most extreme sense of the word, in that they believe they should be free to do whatever they want, including inflicting violence on those whom they deem as lesser than them. Or, I should say, not anarchists, as that has a specific political meaning, wherein communities organize their own affairs with no overarching nation-state. No, they are nihilists, uncaring for anyone other than themselves and perhaps those with whom they agree. Thus they see mass slaughter as an expression of their freedom. It is indistinguishable.

And, I doubt the likes of Cain—what an appropriate name—would change their tunes if someone for whom they cared suffered the consequences of their "freedom". They would just chock it up to "God's will", and a price they simply have to pay. For me this is sociopathy. But what do I know?

Perhaps if Cain had a liberal arts education, he would have read the rest of Jefferson's quote, and noticed the nuance. But education is the enemy to dogma. It's why we see it being suppressed across red states. Just as fundamentalist prelates cherry-pick Scripture, they cherry-pick quotes from the Founders. Anything to score points against the libs.

Perhaps the likes of Cain would like to volunteer to be sacrifices to freedom. Then I might take their irruptions seriously. Until then, they live in safety behind gated communities. Same as it ever was.