Freedom, Part 2
Origins of my quirky ideas, and conclusions I drew from them
“A person with an experience is not at the mercy of a person with an opinion,” according to a popular saying. Therefore I am starting this week’s post with an explanation of personal experiences that brought me to turning my life upside down.
My Story
After college I went to Israel to study Hebrew and work. When I returned 15 months later, I got a job as a cataloger at Brandeis University’s Goldfarb Library. I spent over an hour each day filing new cards into the catalog, during which time students often asked for help finding material. Two of these were Susan Saxe and Katherine Ann Power. Later that spring they were involved in a bank robbery in which a policeman was killed.[i] The stolen money went to support the anti-war movement. As time went on, the movement became more violent. Buildings were blown up and more innocent people were killed.[ii] Anti-war certainly did not mean anti-violence.
(Photo by Erol Ahmed on Unsplash)
Perhaps because I had known Saxe and Power, I became very conscious of the way the anti-war violence increased over time. Since then I have noticed how boundary-less movements become progressively more violent and dangerous. The dangers can be perpetrated directly by movement participants (the demoralization of the US army and a lack of will to win the war) or tangentially (the rise of the genocidal Pol Pot in Cambodia).
While I was in Israel, R.H. Rimmer’s book The Harrad Experiment,[iii] advocating premarital sexual activity, had become very popular. Between the introduction of the birth control pill in the 1960s, the influence of the Hippie movement, and the devaluation of religion, marriage was decried as unnecessary. In places where religion was unimportant, sexual abstinence became almost impossible if one dated. “Putting out” was expected. “I bought you dinner, you owe me” became a common line. In general, at least in the Boston area, any woman who said No did not get a second date. Many men were no longer dating with marriage in mind; they were out for quick, casual sex. This situation does not appear to have improved over time.
Learning about Backbones
One of my coworkers was an Orthodox Jew, and under her influence I started attending synagogue, even though I had been taught that Orthodoxy was archaic and dysfunctional. I was pretty sure there was a God, but beyond that I was unsure.
In 1972 I moved to Idaho, where I had family. My two best friends there were a Nazarene and a devout Catholic. Besides their deep faith, I admired their confidence and ability to avoid the excesses I had seen in both San Francisco as an undergraduate and in the Boston area. I learned from them that religions can provide standards and boundaries, and that living within these did not mean one was brainwashed, dysfunctional, or following archaic precepts. I moved back to the Boston area in 1979 with the goal of finding that kind of faith and confidence within Judaism.
Back in Boston, the more I learned about Orthodoxy and Jewish Law, the easier it was for me to say No in social situations: not wanting a second drink, not interested in attending certain types of functions, not wanting physical involvement.
Conventional wisdom says that freedom means no boundaries. But I was learning that without boundaries there can be no freedom.
Why Freedom Requires Boundaries
As we have all heard, Lord Acton, a 19th century British politician, said, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Since the 1960s we have seen how this applies to leaders in movements without boundaries. Two examples are Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Hamas. Patrisse Cullors, a BLM founder, appears to have used donations meant to help the black community for herself,[iv] while Hamas leaders have become billionaires on contributions meant to improve the lives of Palestinians living in Gaza.[v] Both movements have activated huge numbers of people and caused untold misery.
Movements have leaders and advocates. According to Forbes, “Leadership is a process of social influence, which maximizes the efforts of others, towards the achievement of a goal.”[vi] McKinsey & Company writes, “Leadership is a set of behaviors used to help people align their collective direction…”[vii]
A strong leader has an infinite number of ways of convincing someone to join his effort. A google search for “persuasion techniques” brings up almost 35 million results with titles such as “4 Modes of Persuasion and How To Use Them,” “12 Persuasion techniques used by successful leaders,” and “Persuasion techniques psychology says are super effective.”
None of the articles on persuasion that I skimmed mentioned threatening students with low or failing grades unless they agree to whatever the professor wants, be it adherence to his philosophy or sexual favors. Nevertheless, this type of persuasion is rampant on college campuses and has been for generations.[viii] I believe it is one way that professors have gained enough strength to lead some of the most destructive American movements of the 21st century.
But true freedom includes the freedom to say No and to have that No respected. One is not truly free if a leader or movement can coerce one into either action or silence by threats. Threats can include, among others, university course failure or withholding of degree, job loss or inability to progress in career, blacklisting from academic or other journals, peer pressure, bullying on social media, and others .
Withstanding pressure, especially when it is applied by an expert in persuasive techniques, is difficult. Philosophical or emotional standards are rarely enough; a strong leader can convince someone by bypassing the type of standard one has and approaching the problem from a different direction. For example, a woman saying No to sex because she “doesn’t want to” might be pressured by any of several other types of arguments such as logical, shame-based, or philosophical—arguments that she might not agree with, but for which she does not have a ready retort.
Religious standards, when firmly adhered to, provide the needed backbone. “My religion forbids it” is as effective as the complete sentence “No!” because there is no good rejoinder.
Stepping away from boundaries is the start of the infamous “slippery slope.” The thing about slippery slopes is that there is no stopping something that starts to slide down them. What is missing is that firm boundary. With firm boundaries, like those provided by Martin Luther King Jr. and by religious laws, people have the choice to live by the boundary or away from it. Even just awareness of a boundary provides people with the opportunity to say, “Enough, no further.” Without knowing abouty a boundary, they are liable to slide right down that slope, ending up in a place they did not foresee and did not want to be.
The “sexual freedom” of the Hippies, where sex was an animal act of pure lust, was part of a slippery slope that has now reached a previously unthinkable place. Whereas once an unwanted full-term, healthy baby would have been given up for adoption, now in many places it can be killed in utero. The absence of boundaries between the sexes means that in some locales, minors who are too young to buy a pack of cigarettes can choose irreversible, experimental sex-change surgeries.
And in a boundary-less culture, there are always opportunists who have mastered the art of persuasion and are looking for power, as well as adherents of ideologies that are anathema to western civilization. These people will take advantage of the void, dragging society deeper and deeper into immorality and lawlessness.
Freedom without boundaries leads directly to chaos. And the western world, at this time, is standing precariously on that edge.
Next week: Traditional Jewish law and freedom
[i] FBI Boston History, 1970, in Field Office Histories, https://www.fbi.gov/history/field-office-histories/boston, accessed December 27, 2023.
[ii] Protests and Backlash. PBS: American Experience. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/two-days-in-october-student-antiwar-protests-and-backlash/ accessed December 27, 2023.
[iii] Rimmer, R.H., The Harrad Experiment, reviewed in Goodreads, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/228376.The_Harrad_Experiment?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=sBsh9dkDTu&rank=1, accessed December 26, 2023.
[iv] Magee, N., BLM founder Patrisse Cullors’ $1.4M home draws criticism, call for investigation. https://news.yahoo.com/blm-official-calls-investigation-founder-114017918.html, April 12, 2021, accessed December 27, 2023.
[v] Vincent, I. and Weinthal, B., Hamas leaders worth staggering $11B revel in luxury—while Gaza’s people suffer. https://nypost.com/2023/11/07/news/hamas-leaders-worth-11bn-live-luxury-lives-in-qatar/, November 7, 2023, accessed December 27, 2023.
[vi] Kruse, K., What is Leadership? Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2013/04/09/what-is-leadership/?sh=710e0e325b90, accessed December 26, 2023.
[vii] What is Leadership? McKinsey & Company, August 17, 2022, https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-explainers/what-is-leadership, accessed December 26, 2023.
[viii] I withdrew failing from a required Humanities class after the teacher spent the 1.5 hour class period eviscerating a paper I’d written in response to the assignment, “Who is the contemporary American hero?” I began by writing that I could only speak for myself, then told about a friend of my mother’s who had lost a job because he stood up for something he believed in. This was the wrong answer, and there was clearly no way for me to pass the class unless I spit back what the teacher had said. Since my hero was a person who stood up for what he believed, capitulation was closed to me.
Another “boom”- there it is people!