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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 ππΎππβ―π. 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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