Should Peace Prevail? Of Course!

When I contributed to the recently published Why Liberty, the assignment was easy. After all, liberty is a condition that men and women everywhere instinctively love and need, even if it isn’t always well-articulated. Liberty speaks to a way of self-government that is human-centered and fundamentally humane. Liberty defines human rights in a way that is supremely just, and liberty, by its very nature, is antithetical to force. Liberty is the natural condition of man, and most Americans share this ideal. Peace, on the other hand, for Americans born in the past 70 years, and for the millions of foreign subjects of the modern American empire, has not been part of their ideals, their ethics or their collective experience.

When we think of the Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his work on individualism, libertarians and logicians alike chuckle at his claim that "Men must be forced to be free." Rousseau likely meant that we tend to be voluntarily enslaved by our governments and kings, and by our cultures and traditions. He was right on one aspect of human nature. We are often reluctant to give up our fantasies of the justness of our rulers, and the righteousness of our traditions.

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