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I think that many people have missed the point of the western conception of freedom and view it as an end in itself. The people who want to scream the N-word don't seem to realise that the ultimate freedom they extol is freedom that requires they build a fortress in which to scream it. It's the freedom to defect while overlooking the implication of being unprotected from being defected against. Suffer what wilt be done would be the whole of the law.
The freedom we have in the west, or at least the concept, is that we have the freedom to choose which compromises we make on our liberties. That is, we can (theoretically, imperfectly) exercise some choice in which personal freedoms to trade away for a greater social gain. It's a quid pro quo.
The trade-off isn't the problem. The failure to deliver (cynically, the failure to honour) the deal is the problem.
This is too abstract for me to really grok. Can you elaborate a bit on who is failing to honor which deal?
Both the state and the public fail in their own ways, and it can be due to legitimate difficulty or cynical dishonourableness.
A simple example is speed limits. We accept a state regulated limit on our freedom to not drive faster than say 70mph so that our journeys are safer than they would be otherwise, and at the second order they're more efficient too (less road closures due to pile-ups). Our freedom was reduced in exchange for those benefits, but we retain the greater freedom to change or remove that limit via the democratic process. Yet some people still choose to defect from something as easy as not speeding.
There's a difference between failure to deliver on the social contract and failure to honour it. Say we gave the police £200 to patrol a motorway and eliminate 100% of speeding. They would inevitably fail to deliver, point out it's not a realistic target and reasonably request an increase to the budget. But if we gave them £200 million and there was no improvement in their performance it would be reasonable to assume that they're not trying.
On the other hand say we offered a homeless person a subsidised house so that they could get back on their feet and become independent. If the house was cold, damp, and next to a factory pumping out toxic smoke they might have understandable grounds to reject the deal and go back to sleeping rough in the posh part of town where the air is sweet and the begging is easy. But if the house was plain and adequate with access to suitable work nearby and it turned out they sold the copper and then turned it into a combination knocking shop and trap house it's hard to justify trading away more social goods of state expenditure and the loss of potential responsible residents to enable further defection.
In short the rights and privileges we experience as freedom come with responsibilities and associated costs. We, as public and the state, are free to renegotiate the costs and benefits rather than suffering them by diktat or anarchy but we are responsible for exercising good faith in upholding the agreements. The N-word screamer wants the freedom to defect at will and neglects to realise his stance implies other people's freedom to blast a combination of spam advertising and malicious slander back at them. The anarchist/libertarian neglects that zeroing out the state monopoly on violence and legitimacy re-opens a competition which leads back to where they began only de facto instead of de jure.
I don't recall agreeing to that, and I'm fairly sure all the other people doing 80 on I-80 didn't agree to it either. There is no dishonor per se in breaking the law, only disobedience. The law is the output of a sausage machine, not a freely-entered agreement between governed and governing.
You and all the other drivers tacitly accepted those conditions when you applied for a licence to drive on the state's roads. You're free to walk at whatever speed you like.
The democratic sausage machine aspires to the freedom to be user serviceable, the other sausage machines don't. It's not like you can get away from the butcher.
Certainly I did not.
Suppose I'm driving without a license? Does that mean I am free of other traffic laws?
I need not ascribe moral authority to the butcher, and I do not.
It's not moral authority, it's regular authority. A tyrannical monarch could write a law that says "all gold belongs to the king" with no reference to morality.
I don't understand what you're driving at, if you'll pardon the phrasing. My starting point was that we're not free in the west/democracy, we're free-er, and that there is no radical freedom where we can do whatever we like under any system or lack of system. That's omnipotence.
I feel this is straying further from my central point but what kind of christmas cracker cereal box licencing body grants licences that don't require abiding by the rules? It doesn't make sense to me. If they don't require abiding by the rules what's the point of a licence? It would be no different to not needing one. The first rule of licence club is "you need a licence". The second rule is "if you don't have one you're not authorised to do it". The third rule is "if you break the rules you lose your licence; refer to rule two".
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And this is precisely why it always seemed to be a pipe dream that only ends in failure. Because if people have missed the entire western conception of freedom on this point, then virtually the 'entire' population missed it long ago, and by a very substantial margin. Any true condition of freedom at play, ultimately requires that its adherents take the good with the bad. Any conception of freedom truly worth the name, can't stand to reason on a one-sided conception of freedom of action and liberty, which also ignores consequence. You have the free will to act as you will as far as your agency goes, and call someone the N-word, but if you demand insularity and protection from the consequences of someone who pulls a gun out and shoots you for it, you aren't a person that wants freedom.
Observing the way people in the west choose to live their life, gives me no logical indication to suggest that what they want is "freedom." Because if freedom entails 'responsibility', most people don't want to have 'anything' to do with it. The freedom Americans want and feel they're entitled to, is the same freedom a selfish 5-year-old believes he's entitled to, to demand and be given what he wants on a whim and have someone else pay the cost for it down the road. I would submit contra your final point, that the trade-off is precisely the problem. Freedom is certainly important. But it is most definitely 'not' an absolute value. Not even concepts like freedom of speech are absolute values. It doesn't give you the right to harass people. Science isn't an absolute value. It ends at the Nazi's human medical experiments. 'Nobody' has an unbridled absolute right to freedom, let alone to do whatever they want, whenever they want. Which is certainly how most Americans conceptualize their right to it.
I concur with your criticisms but would push back against the doomerism of inevitable failure. While many people misunderstand the concept of freedom intellectually most of them get it intuitively and don't count themselves as suffering unjustly for the restrictions against selling their own children into slavery, dumping their rubbish in the road or using racist language. It's not perfect, it will never be perfect, but there's many ways it could be a lot worse. It works best when people act responsibly.
My point is freedom is not all or nothing, it's how much and who decides. The freedom fetishists are engaged in binary thinking: Freedom vs oppression, self vs everyone else. Of course they want freedom for themselves. Their error is missing how oppressive it would be if everyone else was free of restrictions too. Your presumably rhetorical wish of living in a ball-busting autocracy is a mirror image where it's oppression for everyone else with significant cost to your own freedom. You can walk the streets at night but you will be required to report for assigned work in the morning.
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One of those is a word, the other is murder, my 𝓃𝒾𝑔𝑔ℯ𝓇. Nobody advocates for the freedom to murder, people in sane countries do advocate for the freedom to say whatever words you want.
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