 Here's a easy little question for you. Which of the following two people is more free? Person number one, a drug addict, or person number two, an average person who's only not a drug addict because he lives in a society where drugs are illegal and shamed and generally loathed by everyone else, okay? Think about that for a second. Now, most modern people, if they are ideologically consistent, will usually actually say the first person is more free. The drug addict is more free because he lives in a society where, hey man, the government isn't telling me what to do. Society isn't judging me. I'm doing what I want. And you know what? This is what I want, all right? That is the more free person in the modern definition of freedom. But I think everyone has at least some level of cognitive dissonance here because there's a sense in which, well, you know, really there's a sense in which the second person is more free. I mean, he might live in a government that tells him what to do or a society that shames him for what he might do. But I mean, he's not addicted to drugs. I mean, that's good, right? In fact, he does have a better measure of freedom in terms of, you know, he can make, he doesn't have to worry about all the money he's going to spend on drugs or the lifestyle he's going to live because he's not beholden to this extra vice, right? So, I want to talk about this question specifically because nowadays, specifically after the Enlightenment, we have a very hobbled definition of what the word freedom means because a lot of people will say, yeah, well, I guess, you know, technically, number one is more free even though maybe he should think better about his decisions or something like that. I mean, in antiquity, no one would have ever said number one. Everyone would say, number two is the more free person. Now, why is that? Well, you have to understand that in the classical world, there was a very different definition of what the word freedom means. And you can look at, you know, Greek and Roman philosophers talking about this kind of stuff, but actually, strangely enough, or maybe not really strangely enough at all, Christian thought is arguably the consummation of all this because, you know, they were reading, you know, Aristotle and Plato and stuff like that. But when you read, you know, when you look at the Christian tradition, they state this very clearly. I mean, Paul in his letters writes that everyone is really either a slave to Christ or a slave to sin, right? And, you know, if you're a fedora, we can religiously neutralize that we can say, oh, you know, a slave to instead of Christ, a slave to consistent moral behavior and stuff like that versus a slave to sin versus a slave to impulse. Okay. Now, the modern man, of course, doesn't want, I don't want to be anyone's slave, man, I'm an independent, I'm my own master, you know, God's no master. Like that's the tendency of people nowadays. But there's a sense in which you have to acknowledge that Paul's dichotomy is sort of true to an extent. You either are governed by moral principles, you know, you're a slave to Christ, or you're the kind of person who does not rely on consistent moral principles and really just goes by what your appetites lead you to, what your sexual appetites lead you to, what your habits that you've formed over the years lead you to. And it really leads you to be very impulsive. Now, these do two different kinds of slaves, you know, slave to Christ slave to sin, they're not actually equivalent. Okay, these are not equal masters, right? Because slave is, you know, being a slave to sin is a, you know, having a master which is inconsistent, in fact, incoherent, okay, because anyone who follows their impulses is going to be doing thoughtless and inconsistent things, right? So, you know, sexuality is a good example of this where, you know, something might seem very sexually appealing one moment, and then that changes the next moment. Okay, that's something that happens to people all the time. If you're not governed by moral principles, and by reason, you are being governed by your impulses, and you really have no control over anything. Now, the Christian definition of freedom that it was sort of, you can see here in Paul, and later is more overtly stated in St. Augustine, is basically that freedom is freedom from sin. It's a freedom from impulse, a free person is a one who is not beholden to inborn or acquired desires, acquired passions that lead people to do this, that or the other, right? A free person is someone who can sit back and say, okay, what is actually the best thing for me to do? It's not someone who has to worry about, oh, I need, oh, I need my cigarettes, or, you know, I'm going to feel really bad, I need, oh, I have to, you know, coom to porn, otherwise, you know, the, I don't know, the media said I'll get prostate cancer or something like that, you know, they're not these kind of people who are governed by their impulses and trying to rationalize their impulses. They're people who can really sit down and make impartial decisions. That is true freedom. Now, the thing nowadays, the modern world is so screwed, because many people, they don't just have impulses, but our society tells them to follow them. In fact, it tells them that that is their identity. Okay, for a lot of people nowadays, it's hard to even understand the concept that I exist outside of my preferences. Okay, that might seem like a, you know, people are born with an identity, with who they are. But modern man, you know, is sort of implicitly told that you have to identify with your sexual vices. You have to identify with, you know, what, you know, social media sites, you reflexively browse when you get home, or whatever TV show you happen to consume for hours on end, or the music that you always have blaring in your head, right? There, you know, the modern man sort of identifies with these superficial things, right? Ultimately impulses. They think of themselves as being extensions of their impulses. And that is a recipe for absolute personal disaster. Because if anyone ever comes along and say, hey, dude, you know, maybe you need to chill out on this, like maybe, maybe this isn't good for you. They don't take that as criticism. They take that as a personal assault, because they think of themselves as extensions of their sins, you know, extensions of their vices, right? So it's worse than even Stockholm syndrome. It's they people lose touch with themselves because they are governed by these kind of vices, right? Now, in reality, control of your impulses leads to your personal freedom. If you can sit back and say, yeah, well, you know what, I do have, you know, oh, I'm a teenager who has a lot of sexual impulses, but you know what, I'm going to keep myself from, you know, temptation, I'm going to keep myself from the possibility of looking at thoughts on Instagram or like porn or something like that. I'm going to physically separate myself from that. That is actually where you truly become free. You truly gain the ability to sit down and think things through and act in, I guess, a really agentive way. You know, people who are constantly slaves to impulses, they are always being led around. They are always it's very easy, although they might be very unpredictable as individuals, you know, they might be arbitrarily changing. If you look at them as a group, they're actually the easiest to control, I guess, subjects of, you know, a society or, you know, they're very easy people to rule because it's easy to control what they want. You give them something hyper stimulating, or you tell them that, oh, you know, you're political enemies, they don't want you to have fun. That's a very easy way to motivate people who are governed by their impulses, right? And, you know, people who are reactive, especially in politics, frankly, are always the losers, right? Or not even the losers, they're the ones, they're the useful idiots, you know what I mean? They're always the people who are governed by something that they cannot control. And if you're governed by something you can't control, and someone else can control that, you know, someone else can control the extent to which your vices exist or that you can satisfy your vices, that makes you a slave, not just to your sin, but to the people who can control that sin, right? It is really a decentralized way, you know, sin is a decentralized way of controlling people, okay? Now, what is the contrary part to that? I mean, when we look at traditional societies, at some level, they look really, oh, they look so mean because, you know, governments have laws that say that people, you know, can't do this kind of sexual sin, they can't do these drugs and governments, you know, seek out and punish people who are doing this kind of stuff. That seems like a violation of freedom. No, that's not the point. The point of a sane society, the point of traditional morality, the point of a government that actually governs rather than leads people to vices, is that your goal is to actually increase freedom. And you increase freedom by being a countervailing force to people's impulses. They want to do things, they are naturally led, you know, by many, I guess, sinful tendencies, to do things that harm themselves, you know, they are governed by sexual vices, for example. And if you are a countervailing power to that as a dutiful ruler or a dutiful parent, you are doing something that seems like it's violating their freedom, but it's actually increasing their freedom because they would otherwise be slaves to a much more arbitrary master, a master much more arbitrary than moral principles, a master that has, you know, no end, no end to its appetite, right? So that is the true, you know, a truly good government, a truly good society is one that does restrict one's ability to follow vices, because if you don't do that, people can't be free. They will just be automata that are seeking what they want. Okay. And that's that's it. So anyway, that hopefully is an explanation of the differences of the classical view of freedom, which I think is a little more wide than the modern view of freedom. It's not just about what you can legally do or what you can socially do with or without approval. It's really about what maximizes your ability to make rational decisions. And I think the most important thing for people is to separate themselves to firstly, to not identify with their vices to realize that those are different things that they didn't, you know, whether you have a desire that was inborn into you, or one that you've gradually acquired by habit, what, you know, whether that's a sexual thing or, you know, addiction to video games, or I don't know, the consuming product all day. Those are things that you should not identify with. And you should always be clear that those are your masters. Those are the things controlling you. And if you want to be free, you not only have to learn to abandon and leave those things, but you also have to be very amenable when someone tells you that maybe that's a bad idea. So anyway, that's about it.