“True freedom, the freedom that liberates, is grounded in truth
and ordered to truth and, therefore, to virtue. A free person
is enslaved neither to the sheer will of another nor to his own
appetites and passions. A free person lives uprightly, fulfilling
his obligations to family, community, nation and God. By contrast,
a person given over to his appetites and passions, a person who
scoffs at truth and chooses to live, whether openly or secretly,
in defiance of the moral law is not free. He is simply a different
kind of slave. The counterfeit of freedom consists in the idea of
personal and communal liberation from morality, responsibility and
truth. It is what our nation’s founders expressly distinguished
from liberty and condemned as ‘license.’ The so-called freedom
celebrated today by so many of our opinion-shaping elites in
education, entertainment and the media is simply the license
to do whatever one pleases. This false conception of freedom –
false because disordered, disordered because detached from moral
truth and civic responsibility — shackles those in its grip no
less powerfully than did the chattel slavery of old. Enslavement
to one’s own appetites and passions is no less brutal a form of
bondage for being a slavery of the soul. It is no less tragic,
indeed, it is in certain respects immeasurably more tragic,
for being self-imposed. It is ironic, is it not, that people
who celebrate slavery to appetite and passion call this bondage
‘freedom’?”
–Imprimis