Freedom and liberty.(Letters To The Editor)(Letter to the Editor)

Dennis Behreandt's excellent article "Man's Upward Reach" (THE NEW AMERICAN, December 27, 2004 issue) touches on a point needing further clarification: the distinction between freedom and liberty.

Freedom means the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in one's choice or action. The essence of freedom is having a choice.

Freedom embraces every aspect of our being. It applies to our physical, mental, social, and spiritual dimensions because we have the capacity--called free will--to choose what we do and how we behave in all those dimensions of life.

Physical freedom means freedom from the elements and other dangers of the natural world, and from hunger, thirst, and other biological needs. It also means freedom to move about and travel, to associate with others, to change jobs, to live where we want and as we want.

Mental freedom means the absence of fear or coercion in our thinking and our emotions; it also means unfettered access to information, as in freedom of education and freedom of the press.

Social freedom takes the physical and mental freedom of individuals and extends it to members of a community or society, so that the institutions of that community or society are likewise structured to remove physical and mental barriers to exercising choice and self-determination.

Although liberty is often used as a synonym for freedom, strictly speaking it is not. Liberty (from the Latin liber, meaning free rather than slave) is the sociopolitical aspect of freedom. A person may be captive, enslaved, or in prison and thus not enjoy liberty (sociopolitical freedom), but he or she may nevertheless be free. Conversely, a person may have social and political liberty, but nevertheless be captive, enslaved, or imprisoned in his or her own fears or vices and self-destructive desires, and thus not enjoy that liberty and not know happiness.