A clarification about freedom and limits

I just wanted to take a moment to talk about freedom and limits and what my work and experience has meant in this regard.

My belief is not at all that we should not live within limits for our freedom. To the contrary, I very much believe in limits governing our lives. What I believe is two-fold. First, that limits that revolve around reason, which are gentler, more loving, and more understanding, and which create as much room as possible for self-determined choices are the best limits both because they indicate to those we are responsible for - children, employees, citizens, etc. - that they need limits and creates relationships and engagement that allow us to spell out, over time, what those limits might be, while acknowledging the reality that they will make choices that exercise their own limits or lack of them over their behavior. Second, that the only real sustainable limits that people will exercise over their lives are ones that they self-govern their behavior with, regardless of what others do.

Long term, adults will either figure out the need for limits or they will ignore them. We need to step in only when people are in real danger. Otherwise, what we need people to learn is having limits for their own behavior and self-governing their choices and behavior. Limits that are based more in reason - in love and logic, as Jim Fay would say - which are more loving and understanding of and sensitive to the need for autonomy that children have and the confusion and conflict they experience for themselves and with adults in exericisng that autonomy appropriately, and where better choices are made freely by people from that reason are the only real sustainable means of governing behavior over the course of a lifetime.

As children grow up, this is the only way that they can govern their behavior as adults that is most reliable. They, generally, are the only people who are in their own presence all of the time. Hence the reason why we emphasize that consciences tell us how to behave when noone else is present. People will, inevitably, screw this up. We are all sinners, as many Christians remind us. But they can only sustainably and reliably learn to live within limits for their behavior insofar as they internalize those limits and the need for them, especially the recognition that without them our more hurtful or dangerous behavior can go on without limits and hurt many people in the meantime. The only sustainable path out of this possibility is people, of their free will, learning to set limits for their own behavior. Parents, teachers, religious leaders and peers, family, and others can only limit behavior for us and one another so much. For the most part, either we learn to set limits for ourselves or we spend our lives constantly testing those limits and making mistakes largely out of an immature desire to test limits that is on-going in lieu of our understanding of the need to set limits for ourselves.

Many people live entire lives or long lives testing their various limits and those set by society. It is a clearly immature way to live life, perpetually challenging limits set by responsible adults around them in lieu of learning and discovering why setting those limits was so important and valuable and why it is important to set them for ourselves.

In the meantime, the reality is that until people learn to set those limits for themselves, no amount of external policing by others will set those limits permanently for them. Either those limits will be internalized by reason and understanding - especially the understanding of the need for limits - or people will either spend lives obsessed with challenging limits, or, almost as bad if not worse, they will spend their lives obsessed with having those limits rigidly in place. Either extreme - one generally considered a more liberal extreme and the other generally considered a more conservative extreme - are foolish wastes of life that miss the point of limits and their relationship to freedom and free will, as far as I am concerned, as people obsess about limits rather than using them, freely and effectively, to govern their choices and behavior so that they can live rich, engaged, contributing lives.

The limits which are most based in reason and genuine concern - love and logic - are the most likely to promote this kind of reasonable self-governance where limits are internalized as an understanding of how to govern one's own behavior and choices so that they can live fulfilling and contributing lives, because fear is a sign of an externally imposed limit rather than a more mature internalized limit based on reason and understanding, especially for the need for limits in life.

So a life of freedom is not at all a life of unbridled behavior. Quite the contrary, a life of freedom with responsibility is a life where limits are more reliably and sustainably internalized, where they govern behavior more effectively, rather than externally imposed by fear and force, which often, unintentionally but counterproductively, undermine internalized, self-governing limits.

I do not advocate, at all, a life without limits. Such a life would be foolish and wasted. I advocate freedom as the most sustainable path to a life of self-governing, internalized limits which are more reliable and effective and more ever-present in the long run. And all efforts to impose limits externally, primarily, waste the potential of people who might otherwise learn and need to learn to internalize self-governing limits which are more sustainable, reliable, and effective for the long term. I don't doubt the intentions of the teachers I work I with. I doubt their understanding of the consequences of adopting a policy that is focussed, primarly, around externally imposed limits rather than working to cultivate internalized self-governing limits based on reason and understanding. More effective schools and more effective parents clearly work, primarily, to inculcate the latter form of limits, while falling back on externally imposed limits when they are concerned they have no other alternative. Less effective teachers and parents rely primarily on externally imposed limits, which limits their effectiveness and their capacity to be more effective, self-governing, contributing adults.

Similiarly, more effective leaders, managers and administrators, and others responsible for the efforts and welfare of others will work, as much as possible, to develop a sense of reasonable, understanding, self-governing limits. We generally call the kind of people who exemplify those qualities and virtues professionals (though their understanding of those limits is generally limited, as well), and we develop those professional abilities in liberal universities and schools which give people the freedom to be responsible for their activities so that they can learn to be more responsible, autonomous people and professionals. Often adults don't learn these skills well enough in college, which often leads to all kinds of disgruntlement on their part with what college did not teach them (which is somewhat ironic since this is a skill of independence that adults and young people must learn to internalize on their own, ultimately, though many teachers and responsible people help along the way).

Our failure to learn this lesson about limits leaves us perpetually lamenting the very freedom that offers us the capacity to internalize limits more sustainably, thus perpetually waiting for someone or something to impose limits that they could never reliably impose as well as we could internalize them. It's a very sad, immature fact of many, many peoples' lives. And it is a fact of their lives nonetheless.

I am learning a lot of these lessons just this year, actually, so I share them as I learn them. I have always known I was on the right track on this question. And now I am sure of it because I am internalizing, myself, the need for limits and how not learning to respect them and internatlize them abuses trust and undermines more responsible, proactive behavior. I didn't want to be afraid my whole life, or forever lamenting my incapacity to be responsible for my own behavior, choices, and limits as so many of the adults who mentored me did. I wanted to be responsible for myself genuinely. And it turns out that to do so means to internalize limits based on freedom and conscience and thought and understanding rather than externally enforced by some external force or authority.

The least possible necessary aggression is the most sustainable way to facilitate the free internalization of limits and to externally enforce them only insofar as all other methods have really been exhausted (and not just rationalized because of more aggressive, less reasonable instincts). As much as possible, we want a world of maturity where people limit their own behavior by their own self-governing reason. And even when that ideal is not lived up to, the reality is that the most sustainable, reliable, and effective way for limits to be set and taken seriously is when they are internalized and self-governing reason. And insofar as they are not, people still have their freedom and make their own choices. The question is will we face this, substantially enough, and the reality of the limits of power and externally enforced limits to recognize the need to focus our primary efforts and setting limits in this more internalized, self-governing realm. Liberal societies are not strongest for no reason. They are strongest because they recognize this need to facilitate more self-governing behavior, and the potential that is unleashed when people and a culture learn to limit their own behavior and proceed to engage in contributions that are most reasonable and valuable, rather than relying on the more artificial, less reliable, less effective, less sustainable, and often counterproductive method of imposing limits externally, which often creates rebellion among those who have not or do not know how to set limits for themselves as they persistently fight and engage passive or open conflict with effort to impose limits.

After a entire history of humanity experiencing largely failure with a more externally imposed route and a 200+ year history of more success in more liberal societies, you would think that liberal socieities would embrace the need to internalize reasoning self-governing values, limits, and understandings, at this point. Too little faith in our capacity to do so, I think, very much like the too little faith that representatives of the British Empire expressed in the notion that the people of their North American colonies could be self-governing. They were wrong, and so are we.

With freedom comes responsibility - especially the responsibility to set limits for our freedom and behavior - is a bit of wisdom that has been handed down from generation to generation among liberal societies. And it is this kind of wisdom that allows us the opportunity to live more self-governing lives, and which is the perpetually taken-for-granted basis for the level and quality of self-governance that we practice today.

If we think about, there is no other serious option but to embrace that freedom and the responsibility that comes with it, both because it is the clearly most sustainable route to self-governing behavior and, almost as importantly, because it is the only real alternative, since externally-imposed discipline or limits is limited in its capacity to actually govern behavior for any longer than any brief period of time. For the long term, we need freedom, responsibility, and reason.

Here is to the liberal democratic world embracing the freedom, responsibility, and reason that are the foundations for their values, societies and ways of life.

Love,
Ben