Self-Policing Freedom

Nils Lofgren, Taking Memos From the Boss appears in today's Washington Post. It gives several quotes from that ace guitarist in Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, Nils Lofgren. In answer to the question, "There's some controversy surrounding the show here. TicketsNow, the Ticketmaster-owned reseller, sold some tickets to the show that it didn't have, leaving some fans in the lurch. Do you follow that sort of news at all?", Mr. Lofgren says:

Not too much. . . . I read what Bruce commented about it, how wrong it was, and I'm obviously in total agreement. Listen, that's why the whole planet's getting run down, because of greed and freedom gone unchecked. Sadly, there's people that aren't burdened with a conscience. Greed is king. We don't police those people well enough as a society, and that obviously has to change or things are just going to keep getting worse. This is just a microcosm of what's wrong with the planet. Look at Bernie Madoff.

America to me is the greatest country in the world and the greatest experiment in freedom we'll ever have. But our forefathers, I'm sure, expected us to police freedom appropriately. In other words, you shouldn't have freedom to pipe in porn to kids' computers . . . You shouldn't have freedom to murder and pillage and get out on good behavior in seven years. What the hell is that about? That's the great challenge of society, is to police freedom appropriately. It's not happening at the moment.

An important question, policing freedom appropriately. At first, "policing freedom" sounds like an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. This blog maintains that the best way to resolve the tension between freedom and policing is self-policing.

In Rededicating This Blog I talked about words such as self-control, maturity, forbearance, and chastity. Self-policing is a good umbrella term for all of those.

To be an adult is to have the ability, ostensibly, to self-police ... which is why Mr. Lofgren bemoans the "freedom to pipe in porn to kids' computers." Adults have the right to look at porn on their computers. They also have the right to forbear looking at porn. In my earlier post, I gave "an abstaining from the enforcement of a right" as a definition of both forbearance and chastity. It could also be given as a definition of the umbrella term, self-policing.

Self-policing is impossible for the immature. For those with just a little bit of maturity, self-policing is a hit-or-miss proposition. For the truly mature, self-policing is a given.