However, this dichotomy (freedom = good/restriction = bad) has blinded us to a vital nuance with a grave potential to derail and corrupt public life: we’ve overlooked that there are better and worse kinds of freedom and that promoting freedom above all other values may be deeply unhelpful to the long-term and collective interests of the nation. Freedom is not a baseless word, but it is in general simply too vague, ambiguous and emotive a term to guide policy or to be an ideal around which a nation can reasonably cohere. It has grown too easy for corrupt and venal organisations to operate under the banner of ‘freedom’ in order to get away with activities that covertly run sharply counter to the public good. Freedom is evidently not a virtue when it involves the freedom of bankers to offload ruinous financial instruments on an uneducated public, just as censorship – that bogeyman of contemporary politics – is evidently far from a vice when it prevents corporations from pushing alcohol on children or denying affordable housing to the poor.
In the Utopia, the word ‘freedom’ would therefore be used with far greater care than today – and would never come at the top of the list of what any government should aim for. The real aim of government should be the promotion of the public good and the flourishing of the greatest number – never simply the defence of the freedom of more or less anyone to do more or less anything.
In the Utopia, the government would – with great intelligence and democratic accountability – often be interested in restricting freedom. Though we bridle at folk memories of police states, there is a more important and ambitious view of what government is for than merely freedom. Government is the institutionalisation of our long-term and collective interests. And the painful fact is that the pursuit of what matters to us in the long-term and collectively may at times be in sharp conflict with our short term and individual pleasures.
It’s something parents understand very well about their children. They are forever having to say no – not because they are mean but because they know it’s their job to stand up for their child’s and their society’s longer-term needs. It’s because the parent keeps in mind (when the child can’t) that they will feel sick later, that they’ll be exhausted tomorrow, that they can’t simply cause chaos in the playground, that they step in. We have fully accepted this sort of case at the level of families. But we resist the thought that, as adults in society, we stand in equal need of having our own well-being protected against the worst wishes of others as well as against our own more unhelpful and destructive desires.
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