Man wants to be free, naturally. Throughout history we see the yearning of the human person to be free. And in a sort of cyclical way he attains it, and then loses it again. Both the gaining and the losing seem to happen in spite of himself. He gains freedom in spite of his own incompetence, and he loses it in spite of his insatiable desire to keep it. And as he appears to attain more of it, he in fact merely enslaves himself yet again to some lesser master than himself. Even as man desires to be free, he chooses to be a slave. It’s a mutation of his nature. Instead of ruling his passions, his passions rule him. How many people out there really go after money or sex for the goods that they really are? How many people in fact pursue them insatiably because they feel they cannot be happy without them? These goods are less than the man himself, and yet rule the man. The man has relinquished his own power. Augustine once said that man has become “ruled by his lust for rule.” By trying to become masters, we make ourselves as powerless as chattel servants. What is real freedom then? There are in the world three different kinds of men. There are those who stand for nothing, those who stand for the wrong things, and those who stand for the right things. Only one of those types of men is actually free. I won’t waste any time on that second type of man, since I think no one these days really wants to stand for the wrong things. Or if he does, I probably don’t have anything to say that he would find worthwhile. The stronger temptation these days is to be that first man. The first type of man appears to be free to the uncritical eye. He appears to have no foibles, no constraints, no inhibitions, no fears. But the man who stands for nothing has nothing really worth having. In the end, all we really have is what we stand for. Now a man who stands for nothing doesn’t stand for freedom. And if it is true that all we really have is what we stand for, then it follows that a man who does not stand for freedom naturally does not have it. In the same way, a man who stands for nothing also does not have joy, happiness, fulfillment, or peace. Peace. It is sometimes believed that peace is achieved by standing for nothing. A tempting concept. Standing for something often leads to conflict after all, and can there really be peace in the midst of conflict? Would it not be easier to stand for nothing and avoid ruffling any feathers? Isn’t that the true path to peace? But all we really have in the end is what we stand for. Peace is not nothing. If we stand for nothing, we will not have peace. Whoever first appended the words “and quiet” to the word “peace” gave birth to a grievous error indeed. I think a lot of the people in this world who claim to stand for “peace,” if only through faultless misconception, really just want “peace and quiet.” But the movement for it is simply called “peace.” So the people who actually want to stand for something are accused of working against peace, and mongering conflict. And this is not unique to our current time or to military combat. This error spans human history. Peace is difficult to achieve because it requires that a man stand for something. Peace and quiet is easy. A man can do nothing and have peace and quiet – the kind of peace and quiet achieved at the end of the day in Rwanda, or 1944 Auschwitz. And that’s how we become slaves. It starts in the mind, with the intellectual misconception that freedom means the freedom to have everything we want and peace means doing and standing and fighting for nothing to get it. So what is real freedom and what is real peace? Both consist in and are achieved by standing up for something, or someone. By committing and devoting oneself to the right things. It’s an interesting pseudo-conundrum. To be free we must be willing to subordinate ourselves to something greater. We must acknowledge our own smallness before that good to which we devote ourselves, and for which we choose to stand. But that means also that we have to fight in order to have peace. We have to defend the goodness of things, even when we’re accused of being divisive or unnecessarily combative. Freedom and peace are innately attractive to us. The struggle it takes to attain them is less so. But the struggle is where man really finds his life; it is what sets apart a man who stands for something from a man who is afraid to stand for anything. "Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb." --Winston Churchill