Let’s face it, freedom isn’t easy.  Being responsible for your own decisions means you’re responsible for the consequences, good or bad, of those decisions.  It means that not only can you have a great life because you made good decisions, but also that you can have a horrible life when you make bad decisions.  The freedom to be rich is also the freedom to starve.  The freedom to choose is also the freedom to choose poorly.

Tyranny, on the other hand, makes life simpler for the average person.  How much easier is life when someone else makes the decision and, for the most part, shields you from bad consequences?  That is the seductive nature of tyranny.  Just give in, let someone else make the decision, and they’ll take care of everything.  No need to worry about where the next meal is going to come from when all you have to do is pledge allegiance to Caesar and he will make sure there are bread and circuses.  Why worry about starting a business when you can just espouse your love and admiration of Dear Leader and he’ll make sure that there’s a factory built so you have a good job, an apartment, and a clinic to take your children to?  Why get a job and work so hard, when you can just vote for politicians who will keep those sweet, sweet welfare checks, either personal or corporate, coming and not ask any questions about how you spend the money?  All you have to do is be a reliable voting block for one party or another, and they’ll make sure you don’t have to live with the consequences of your bad choices, even if they have to limit what you can choose in the first place.

In the most seductive and dangerous form of tyranny, you still have the illusion of freedom; the government just gets to define which decisions you still have the freedom to make, and which options you are still allowed to choose.  Sure, you can choose which foods to eat, as long as the government decides that they are ‘pure’ enough for your palate, or if they’re healthy enough for you to imbibe.  You can still make decisions about your child’s education, so long as it’s at a government approved program.  You can feel secure in your home, the government just needs your young people to go fight wars in far-off lands for murky reasons without having to check with you first, and they’ll also need you to submit to new surveillance and searches in order to do get that done for you.  Heck, they’ll even let you decide which websites to view, they’ll just assert a power to monitor what you’re looking at, who you’re communicating with, and what you’re talking about.  Don’t worry about how they’ll use the information, just take a little more soma and enjoy your simple, easy life.

The trade-off, of course, is that you give up a lot in order to have your needs taken care of.  A government that gives you everything not only has the ability to take away everything, but also has the ability to limit what you can do and dictate what you must do.  A government that gives you free food and healthcare will eventually start to dictate what you can and can’t eat, or what you can and can’t get taken care of at the doctor.  A government that funds business picks and chooses which companies survive, as well as the technologies and business methods that are allowed to happen, decides who succeeds and who doesn’t**.  A government that feels it should control information and what is said in the public square will use its power to try to intimidate and silence critics.

And let’s recognize something here:  Few tyrants see themselves as tyrannical, and tyranny rarely happens overnight. I honestly believe that almost every authoritarian has the best interests of the rest of humanity in their hearts when they start restricting the freedoms of others.  They just have a warped perspective on what’s good and right for humanity.  Even if the current leadership isn’t that bad, or heck even if they’re philosopher kings that wouldn’t think of violating our freedom, if you give them powers now with a gentleman’s agreement that they won’t abuse them, even if they abide by that promise, who’s to say that someone in 10, 50, or 100 years from now won’t use them as a tool to carve away freedom?  We have to be careful what power we give good people, because eventually bad people are going to have that power.

This is one of the reasons that I continually remind my kids that no one owes them anything.  Above and beyond the value of being self-sufficient, it teaches them to not get into that dangerous comfort zone where a little help from Uncle Sugar becomes a little more, then a little more, then eventually they find themselves in a cage, gilded or not.*  I’m setting them up for a harder life, but hopefully it’ll be a better one.  Like the ants in the fable, the grasshoppers are going to call them fools for working so hard when the necessities of life are free for the asking.  What I want my kids to know is that these things aren’t really free, (someone has to pay for them, usually the other ants) and that the sweet honey might just be a sticky trap waiting to spring.  If only more people would recognize the danger of tyranny in the siren song of dependency, we might be able to choose to have a freer, better world.

*Yes, I understand that I’m also in that gilded cage.  My responsibility to the next generation is to help them see the cage, give them the tools to make sure the door isn’t shut and locked on them, and maybe dismantle the cage a bit.

**Edited to make this an actual sentence.  I swear, I truly did pass English 101.