Those with libertarian leanings expressed concern during the pandemic that Americans were too meekly accepting the greatest suppression of rights in our history, that a nation founded on the proposition of individual liberty might be in danger of sacrificing it out of fear and panic.
It was suggested that the experience might even lead us to become habituated to such authoritarianism, however well-intended (as authoritarianism usually claims to be).
Those fears over a "new authoritarian normal" were probably exaggerated, but the wind-down of the pandemic might now be producing a somewhat different, in some ways more subtle and complex threat to liberty in various places, including here in Arkansas.
To fully explain that fear it might be useful to imagine that back in January, during the worst days of the pandemic, we were told that within six months there would be a surplus of extremely effective vaccines available and all anyone had to do was stop by the nearest drug store to get the shot for free.
If asked what the adult vaccination rate would be by midyear under those circumstances, I would have predicted at least 80-90 percent, with great confidence, accompanied by a prayer of gratitude for a seeming miracle.
What I would never have expected was that by the time we approached July barely a third of our state's adults (34 percent) had bothered to receive a vaccine that represented the decisive means of ending our national travail (including the authoritarian lockdowns and cancellation of so much of what had been normal life).
We are thus forced by this inexplicable failure to revisit a seldom-discussed but crucial premise, one upon which a free society always depends--that the people will possess sufficient "virtue" to use their freedoms wisely and can be trusted enough to be left to their own devices and to adequately assess their own interests.
Freedom requires personal responsibility; more specifically, a willingness to accept the consequences of our actions. For only by accepting those consequences can we learn to make good, rather than destructive, decisions under conditions of freedom.
Just as human beings learn to make better decisions from often bitter experience as they develop into responsible adults, collectives of such beings must be given sufficient opportunity (freedom) to make mistakes in order to later avoid them and thus prove their ability to live freely.
The greatest argument for dictatorship throughout history is that the people can't handle freedom, that their irresponsibility requires that they be treated like children and sternly dictated to for their own good (as during the pandemic).
The American experiment was above all else an ambitious effort to interrupt this long-standing historical pattern of authoritarianism and paternalism based on assumptions of incorrigible human ignorance and irresponsibility.
Implicit in the founders' attempted refutation of authoritarian pretext was the belief that the more decisions government makes for us, the more our ability to make responsible decisions for ourselves declines, to the point where the extinction of freedom itself looms. Once we assume that humans can't be trusted to make this or that decision regarding x or y or z, it becomes progressively easier to justify denying them autonomy in other areas, eventually all.
The truly concerning part comes into play when we realize that a decline in personal responsibility, although almost certainly having occurred in tandem with and because of the dramatic expansion of centralized governmental authority in our lives over the course of the past century or so, is one of those trends that is as difficult to measure as it is devastating in its consequences, and most likely to be detected only when it is too late to reverse.
Along these lines, one of my students recently wrote in an essay that government existed primarily to "to take care of us," a formulation that made me shiver and wonder how many other young people in the supposed "land of the free and the home of the brave" had come to think that way.
Arkansas' meager vaccination rate at a time when nearly all those being hospitalized and dying are unvaccinated and vaccines are available for the asking constitutes alarming evidence that we are failing the basic test of freedom and thus providing useful ammunition to those who would restrict it.
Two hundred and forty-five years ago, the consensus was that the bet on freedom boldly placed by the founders was misguided because it was incompatible with both human nature and experience; that history had taught us that human frailty made it impossible for people to live free and responsibly govern themselves.
The current Arkansas vaccination rate probably wouldn't be cited to prove such naysayers wrong.
Stupidity and irresponsibility have been the primary enemies of freedom and thus the steady handmaidens of paternalism and authoritarianism throughout time.
Something of a paradox has therefore always existed for any self-conscious experiment in freedom, including ours, because a free society leaves its citizens free to do the kind of stupid things (in this case to not get vaccinated) that can ultimately imperil freedom.
Ben Franklin's quip about "a republic if you can keep it" appropriately places the burden of preserving freedom on the people themselves.
It was also a roundabout way of saying that free and stupid can go together, but not for long.
Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
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