When you reach the place where two roads diverge in the woods, would you prefer to stand alone? Or would you rather have someone there by your side, ready to lighten the burden of responsibility?

In the end, it doesn’t matter what we want. We are never standing alone at the fork in the road. Neither do we stand there beside a friend or mentor. No—we are all being blindly marched along in a line with others, surrounded by the din of identical steps. When we do choose which path to take, it is not of our own volition. It is because a man far, far ahead of us in the line decided that it would be so.

If being marched along in this line makes you feel secure, it is because you fear yourself.

Don’t.

Trust in your own judgement of virtue rather than accepting subjugation to the judgements of another. Celebrate liberty and strive to attain more.

To maximize the development of individual character, promote respect and diversity and prevent a fall into tyranny, liberty must be the founding and governing principle of our society.

Liberty is nothing other than the absolute ability to act as you see fit. It is the right to select your own values and beliefs—whether in accordance with the popular creed, in opposition to it or outside of it entirely. It is the right to rely upon your own beliefs rather than following a moral structure hand-fed to you by authority.

Liberty requires us to embrace diverse ideas, cultures and ways of life. It forces us to trust in the kindness, rational capabilities and self-preservation instincts of those who surround us.

The free individual is not forced to perform the virtues their society perceives as superior—not made to do whatever benefits industry or bureaucracy. Instead, they may make their own choice between intellectual fulfillment, altruism or personal happiness. They are free to nurture or abuse their body as they choose, even to destroy their own life and suffer the full consequences of their actions. This freedom remains no matter how unorthodox their choice is in comparison with the popular creed or how repugnant it seems to us or how unlikely we would be to choose such a course ourselves.

It is thus that liberty humbles us. It decimates our savior complexes, our elitist worldviews, our paternalistic desires to enforce a single ideal way of living.

Liberty also allows that, no matter which path you take, the choice and its consequences are yours alone. This is a great responsibility, but it speaks far more strongly to individual character than obedience does. If you act purely because of instructions from an authority, does the action even reflect positively upon you? Think of the line of people tramping blindly through the woods. They have no right to be proud of having taken the right path—did they know whether they were walking on a path at all?

Virtue requires participation, action and care, none of which can be legislated. They must be chosen—chosen by you, for yourself, for your own reasons.

It is possible and practical to found governance upon the principle of liberty. Social consequences and natural punishments will maintain civilized society. There are undeniably controversies around the degree to which the non aggression principle should be enforced and whether pure liberty allows for the existence of a state at all. But these apparent paradoxes do not relegate liberty to a useless concept. A resolution to these questions is entirely feasible as the task of any state that leads with liberty.

If the state disregards liberty and chooses to preoccupy itself with victimless crime laws and unnecessary exercises over private life, oppression will inevitably follow—no matter the good intentions expressed by the governors. Claiming that liberty exists only as secured by equality or in the form of “freedom to do right” is simply the same disguised desire to subjugate oneself and others. Punishing citizens without just cause is tyranny, which will occur unless we embrace full liberty.

Historically, societies have been doomed not by an excess of liberty but rather by the regime’s unyielding enforcement of its own dogma. The prioritization of what those in power choose to define as “virtue” over the reality of existence as a human will lead to societal collapse. Virtue is not to be enforced. When virtue is creed rather than choice, there is nothing virtuous about it at all.

I am aware that I neglect to provide specific justification for the historic interpretation above. It merits far more exploration than the word limit allows me. Thus, more to come—and in the meantime, I encourage you to gratefully exercise your constitutional freedoms and open up a history book or two.