By: Daniel McCombs

“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” –Benjamin Franklin

I often overhear people use Franklin’s quote to the point that it’s become kitsch and meaningless. It seems like people only use it for its convenience to argue their point, but don’t actually live up to it once the argument is over. And this is on any side, political, religious, sexual—there is no cultural orientation not guilty of using Franklin’s quote with mindless repetition as a talking point.

But I would go so far as to state that those who prefer safety and security over liberty actually hate life, which would mean that all of America, and even the Western world, hates life, since it very rarely matters what political beliefs you uphold, because freedom is not exerted through public policy. No, rather it is an individual precept that is unique in and of itself to each individual. And to relinquish the individual’s power to some force, be it socially manifested in government or corporations or religious institutions, or in any other institution thereof, then the individual hates all of life.

It may seem antithetical to both hate life and want to protect it through measures that ensure its preservation, but it is possible. If one were to look at the core of life, then they would see that life is inherently dangerous—not extreme-sport dangerous, since that is invariably non-dangerous due to its reliance of regulations and policies. Life’s meaning is derived from the constant struggle of the individual with their surrounding, and to necessarily affirm life one must constantly pursue struggle through self-overcoming the complacency of security.

In a certain sense this manifests through physicality, but the beginning of the change is, at its core, an internalization of the struggle. One must fight themselves in order to love life. And to fight oneself is inherently self-destructive. Thus, one must be self-destructive to affirm life. Any sense of security is a perversion of life that stagnates the individual in a sense of complacency.

When one cannot destroy the self any longer internally, then it is necessary for external modes of destruction. If those external means of destruction are not met, then the individual becomes not merely a parasite on society but a parasite to the self as well. And so one must always self-reflect and be vigilant for the time where their own self reawakening is not possible.

Destruction is the means by which we arrive at a healthy life, for it is the idealization of the past in which we can no longer arrive at the future. That is why political documents like the Constitution are useless pieces of paper. They have no purpose in dictating modern life because they were established precepts of a different time. It is many people’s idolization of these precepts that make them believe that liberty can be obtained, but that is merely the lie they retain to keep the falsification going. The only way to obtain liberty is through destruction and then reinvention, not preservation and constancy.

Those that wish to stand in the way and idolize the past are expendable commodities that the moral physician should willfully terminate, since it is these idolizers that condemn society to repetitive failures. It is not a matter of political party, but moral constitution to know and execute the necessity of the will.

Often times we hear that these documents helped society, and surely they did, precisely because they were fashioned for the necessities of the society they were created in. But in order to sustain ourselves, we must reframe the boundaries of what constitutes a body, both individually and socially. To ignore such a necessity and merely reinterpret outdated precepts, adding amendments and additions to refashion its antiquity, is to then establish a precedent of security.

And so, ultimately the Founding Fathers established a society that would invariably question itself and destroy itself, in order to better reformulate a better civilization in a constant reimagining. The Founding Fathers indeed wouldn’t agree with modern society, not because it’s unrecognizable from the past, but rather because we’re still trying to cling to what’s already died long ago. But again, society begins at the individual level, and so we must each destroy ourselves in order to fully realize our potential in affirming life, since presently we all hate life.