Since I was a little boy, I was taught that freedom was a quality that made America great, allowing us to say what we want and live life how we want. The merits of freedom were never up for debate, especially since the dark days of American slavery made it clear that any kind of bondage, actual or figurative, is the incarnation of evil itself. Now that I’m older and have been able to witness human beings living with their freedom, I’ve come to the conclusion that complete freedom is not a natural human state, and giving it to individuals is more harmful than not.

I examined this problem by asking myself the following: what do human beings typically do once given absolute personal freedom? I first looked at the behavior of people in America, since culturally they have the most freedoms out of any other world citizen to pursue whatever lifestyle they want.

Most Americans, if you give them freedom and a life without restrictions, will almost certainly dive head-first into a life of absolute degeneracy and vice. They will pursue fleeting pleasures of the body, including alcohol use, drug abuse, and casual sex. They will make colossal mistakes with their education that put them into debt for life. They will seek out fame, attention, and validation instead of developing genuine skill or competency. They will permanently disfigure their bodies with tattoos and ear gauges. They will experiment with homosexuality or an artificially invented gender identity. They will overindulge in food and mindless entertainment. They will not educate themselves unless there is a bag of money at the end of their efforts. They will lie, cheat, and rationalize the hurting of others. The more freedom you give to the average person, the more they will harm not only themselves but others whom they come across.

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Giving a human being freedom simply gives them the ability to choose one of many available and willing slave masters, but even worse than an actual slave who has chains clamped on his wrists, the modern human seeks out chains for both his mind and body. What happens if you give a woman freedom? She enslaves herself to her feelings. She enslaves herself to entertainment, attention from men, alcohol, food, crushing student loans that she can’t possibly pay back, material possessions, and money. What happens when you give a man freedom? He enslaves himself to sex, corporate products, video games, to his own mirror image.

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I’m currently living in a country that has changed greatly over the past twenty years from the days of communist repression when freedoms were limited to now nearly unlimited personal freedom for people to look, act, live, and behave in any way they want. I can see firsthand how this freedom has merely transformed citizens from being enslaved to the government to being enslaved to alcohol, vulgar sexual vices, Hollywood-style entertainment, and corporations selling them shiny products, all while enabling them to adopt lifestyles that will cause long-term harm to themselves and to their society.

Most humans are not capable of wisely using their freedom, and so they must be restrained and managed by rules or by those who know what’s best for that individual more than the individual himself. In the past this restraint took place with those who had a sincere investment in the person’s well-belling, such as the family, the tribe, the village, and the local church, but these restraints are long gone, released in the cultural chaos of the post-Enlightenment world. With a general trend of increasing personal freedom around the planet, the only logical result is a steadfast mental and behavioral decline of humanity. Unless people are limited in the personal decisions they’re able to make, they will continue to hurt themselves and others.