An Infinite Pursuit

These few most advanced searchers have been among those who say: "The more exploration I do, the more I find there is to learn." An InfinitePursuit The reason for this difficulty in understanding liberty is that liberty, like truth, is an object of infinite pursuit, *"Law and order." We have grown up with this idea. We accept "order" as unquestionably good. We accept "law" as the unquestionably good way to achieve this "good." But some discrimination is required. Law can restrain private violence; this is good. Law can also restrain private creativeness; this is not good. Restraint, the characteristic of law, cannot aid private creativeness except as it restrains private violence. Order in creativeness is a matter between our individual selves and our Maker; it is not the concern of would-be makers. Order in creativeness is a problem that falls beyond the proper scope of man-made law. 42 a quest without end, ever. Liberty does not lend itself to objective definition except to say that liberty is the absence of its opposites - restraint or coercion. These, to some degree, can be observed and talked about descriptively.

But there is difficulty even in defining restraint or co ercion. They take many forms and cannot be defined to any person in any of their forms which he does not already recognize. The Negro slave, for instance, if asked to list the restraints exercised over him would have had little to offer.* He could not clearly define and describe a status unknown to him. A relatively free American, after having experienced a fair measure of liberty, and then suddenly put in the same bondage as the Negro slave, would have been better able to differentiate between his new slave status and the freedom he had earlier known. But many present-day Americans, when asked the question "What liberties have you lost?" are stumped for an answer. A creeping slavery progressively removes the contrasting experience that would give the basis for a full answer. They cannot, any more than the slave, discriminate be tween what is and what might have been in the area of the personally unknown. No better testimony of this point is required than the common reaction when anyone raises any question about the long-established public education system. It has become so much a part of the mores, so *Perhaps a better example would be present-day Russians. They have so far lost sight of individual liberty that 99.98 % of registered voters, according to their claims, cast their ballots for Stalin and his group.

And they regard this as freedom! 43 sanctified by years of acceptance and tradition, that any alternative to "education" under the principles of violence is quite beyond comprehension. The Death of Creative Thought Once the reliance on self is removed, once the respon sibility for a portion of our being has been assumed by another - be that other a person, a set of persons, or the police force - we cease to think about or apply our ingenuity to the activities thus transferred. When the agency to which the transfer is made is the state, an agency of coercion, is it any wonder that creative thought diminishes to near non-existence? Creative thought is abandoned by man as a free and thus a creative agent, and assumed by man as an agent of coercion. Coercion, by its nature, is incapable of creativeness. One minus one plus zero equals zero! Understanding liberty requires that we think in these lost areas, in areas where there is no longer incentive for thinking except for the seemingly unrewarding and abstract objective of replacing violence with voluntary action.