Meditation 54: Which is more valuable to society, freedom or safety?

There is no doubt that both safety and freedom are important values. Concerns about safety, after all, have their roots in the fear of pain, dying and death. We fear war, terrorists, criminals, and domestic violence. We fear death from disease, pollution, thirst, cold, and starvation. The list of concerns for safety goes on and on. Freedom matters more when the safety problems have been managed to some extent. What good is freedom if life is so unsafe as to prevent you from living a meaningful life? It is true that you are free to choose to live or to die, and the manner of your life and death, but what kind of freedom is it that forces you to choose between evils just to preserve your life a little longer in constant danger?

Thus, it would seem that safety is more valuable to society, because without it, freedom is irrelevant.  Safety matters most to most people. However, this very fact may be bad for society, and ultimately bad for the individuals who value safety first. A case in point is what is happening in the United States today. Fear is everywhere. Safety is on everyone's lips. We have to make airliners safe, harbors, nuclear reactors, large public events. Then, we have the water, air, and food to protect from contamination. All are to be made safe from determined individuals intent on bringing mayhem and creating fear.

Safety is a tall order. For a start, life is intrinsically unsafe. One is never too young or old to die. Risks come with the territory of living in a mortal body on a very contingent and unpredictable earth. So there are risks, but how much energy and how many freedoms ought free citizens to give up for the sake of safety? To be concerned mainly about safety is to live in fear, and, since it is not >safe' to live at all, we will always live in fear. That is no way to live. Courage is still an important value, and it takes courage to put freedom above safety as a value for society. The reason is that courage accepts that there will always be risks, but accepts them as part of life and does not allow fear to rule.

If we cherish a life in which human beings make the meaningful choices of their lives, tolerated by others as long they are not harming anyone, then we may not be able to make ourselves as safe as we might be in a well regulated and benign police state, when everyone has identity chips implanted in their bodies to monitor and record the activities and locations of all >legitimate' citizens. Yes, it would be harder for suicide bombers and other attackers to carry out their plans, but at the cost of the complete regimentation of a fearful society. Even then, we have seen that it is impossible to stop all attacks succeeding, especially suicide bombings.

And what happens when a police state ceases to be benign? Then we will see the re-emergence of an oppressive regime like those of recent history that somehow seem to be all but forgotten in 'advanced' Western societies. If we used our historical knowledge, we would see that a society that tries to play it safe is asking for trouble. By all means take every reasonable measure to thwart people who want to kill citizens. However, do a cost- benefit, and risk analysis before taking away individual freedoms. On the risks, we ought to be less afraid of terrorist attacks than we are, and more afraid of dying in an automobile accident. What good is it if we strip away civil liberties in the name of safety, only to leave the people fairly 'safe' from terrorist attacks, but under-employed, sick, ignorant, and impoverished by the war on terror itself? We must accept some risks to maintain the kind of open and free society that we publicly extol, but which we might increasingly lose in the name of an illusory standard of safety.