Sacred Freedoms

“FOR it is this – the ‘positive’ conception of liberty: not freedom from, but freedom to – which the adherents of the ‘negative’ notion represent as being, at times, no better than a specious disguise for brutal tyranny.”
Isaiah Berlin 1958   Two Concepts of Liberty

“Hell is other people.” 
-Jean-Paul Sartre 1944  No Exit

Of the two forms of liberty, positive and negative, that Berlin posits, the negative one – that protects against interference from the state and prevents collisions between the aims of individuals – is under increasing attack. Proponents of the positive one – the seemingly sacred right of ”being one’s own master” with the totalizing right to do all that he pleases – have for decades built up the state’s machinery to advance and enforce it. To the point that every individual must now be made free to do anything. If no other individual or legal constraint exists, the state must now make accessible all means of conveyance for everyone’s will to selfmastery.  

It’s this positive liberty – this liberty to – this will to collective power, that, unchecked has become exactly the “specious disguise for brutal tyranny” that Berlin foresaw.

And as Sartre explains about his own famous line,  “..when we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves … we use the knowledge of us which other people already have. We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves.”

Is this not implicit in the concept of “equity” promoted by the ever-metastasizing administrative state? Even Sartre the Stalinist understood this.
 
What is endangered by defining liberty according to the collective of other people? Autonomy. The creative will, itself.