Absolute liberty means absolute liberty, but what if the liberty you seek is death? The moment you carve out exceptions – speech you can’t say, choices you can’t make, exits you can’t take – you’ve left the realm of liberty and entered the gated community of permission.
Give me liberty or give me death.
–Patrick Henry
And here’s the test most self-styled liberty lovers fail: you’re free to skydive without a parachute, but try ending your life peacefully and watch how quickly the freedom brigade calls in the moral SWAT team.
If the right to live doesn’t come with the right to leave, it’s not a right. It’s a sentence.
I’m not his usual audience; I’m already in the choir, but this eight-minute clip by Philosopher Muse is worth your time. It’s a lucid walk through the ethical terrain mapped by Sarah Perry in Every Cradle Is a Grave, and it’s one of the better distillations of antinatalist thought I’ve seen for the general public. Perry’s libertarian starting point is straightforward: if you truly own your life, you must also have the right to give it up.
He threads in the dark-glimmer insights of Emil Cioran’s poetic despair, Thomas Ligotti’s existential horror, David Benatar’s asymmetry, and Peter Wessel Zapffe’s tragic consciousness. Together they point to an uncomfortable truth: autonomy that stops short of death isn’t autonomy at all; it’s a petting zoo of freedoms where the gate is locked.
What we do not own, we are enslaved to. If we cannot choose death, then we do not truly own our lives.
—Sarah Perry
I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. I once had a girlfriend who hated her life but was too afraid of hell to end it. She didn’t “pull through.” She overdosed by accident. Loophole closed, I suppose. That’s what happens when metaphysical prohibitions are allowed to run the operating system.
And here’s where I diverge from the purist libertarians. I don’t believe most people are competent enough to have the liberty they think they deserve. Not because they’re all dribbling idiots, but because they’ve been marinated for generations in a stew of indoctrination. For thousands of years, nobody talked about “liberty” or “freedom” as inalienable rights. Once the notion caught on, it was packaged and sold – complete with an asterisk, endless fine print, and a service desk that’s never open.
We tell ourselves we’re free, but only in the ways that don’t threaten the custodians. You can vote for whoever the party machine serves up, but you can’t opt out of the game. You can live any way you like, as long as it looks enough like everyone else’s life. You can risk death in countless state-approved ways, but the moment you calmly choose it, your autonomy gets revoked.
Sometimes the most loving thing we can do is not to rescue but to listen – not to prevent, but to allow.
So yes, watch the video. Read Perry’s Every Cradle Is a Grave. Then ask yourself whether your liberty is liberty, or just a longer leash.
If liberty means anything, it means the right to live and the right to leave. The former without the latter is just life imprisonment with better marketing.
Philosophics 