America: The Individual is the smallest sovereign

The individual is the smallest sovereign.

Why do I say this?

To be American is to stand on the principle that we rise above our inventions—and even above our own liberties—so that new innovations and new liberties may be discovered. This is a simple truth, though rarely seen clearly. We use our liberties interchangeably; we do not bind ourselves to a single one. To rise above a liberty is not to reject it, but to leave it behind when its purpose has been fulfilled, so that another liberty may emerge.

Our very bodies are liberties granted to our souls and our spirit. From them, countless other liberties have unfolded. Look at what has followed.

The strength of independence must be continually fostered, so that both inward and outward discovery may proceed—even through suffering. From that suffering, liberty is found. This is the American Dream: not comfort without cost, but freedom earned through understanding.

This stands as a testament to a deeper truth—that the mind is immovable, independent of reality and non-reality alike. Because the mind itself stands in liberty, we are reflections of liberty, and liberties are undertaken through us.

This is why the individual is the smallest sovereign.

Only at the level of the individual can suffering be discovered at its root. Only there can it be brought forward—into community, into law, into government—so that liberties themselves may be governed. For the self, our very makeup, is itself a liberty. And if the self is a liberty, then self-governance is required.

This is my credence: if the self must be governed, then the liberties created by the self must also be governed. Not by the creator of the liberty alone, but by government—so that society may hold together, and so that the many may share in each liberty that society brings forth.

This is not a surrender of freedom.

It is its preservation.

The automobile is a powerful liberty—but it is a situational one. It works well on the highway. It moves us across distance efficiently. Yet I do not farm with an automobile. When I enter the grocery store, I do not drive it down the aisles. To do so would be absurd. The liberty is not diminished by its limits; it is preserved by them.

Liberty functions best when it is precise.

And here I look to the proliferation of computer systems in the same light. Why is this single liberty—the computer—being drawn into every manifold of experience? Why is it asked to mediate thought, memory, conversation, creation, navigation, judgment, and identity itself? This is not the expansion of liberty; it is the cultivation of dependence.

A liberty meant for everything becomes a substitute for everything.

Rather than placing one instrument into every corner of life like a Swiss Army knife, we should be discovering new, specific, and separate liberties—tools that serve particular purposes and then are set down. Ingenuity once gave us many instruments, each answering a clear human need. Dependence gives us one instrument and asks it to answer all of them.

Innovation should not whisper to us that there is only one way to move, only one way to think, only one way to fly. The automobile did not abolish walking. The airplane did not abolish the horizon. True liberty multiplies paths; it does not collapse them into a single channel.

When a liberty insists it must be everywhere, it is no longer serving the individual. It is training the individual.

And sovereignty cannot survive where dependence is mistaken for progress.