It was a rude shock to many of us in 2020 to find out that Australians are not lovers of freedom or cynical about government.

We don’t love freedom.

It turns out we deeply love and trust government. We enthusiastically believe nearly everything governments and their appointed experts tell us.

We love promises of safety.

Make no mistake, we still don’t like politicians. Bagging them out is a national pastime and makes us feel like we’re independent, critical thinkers.

But we’re not.

They can thinly veil their preferred policies behind appointed bureaucrats and ‘experts’ like Chief Medical Officers or a Law Reform Commission because we want to believe them when they tell us even more government is good for us.

Normally conservative Christians were the ones to surprise me the most, misapplying Scriptures about submitting to civil authorities like no one living in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan or under the boot of the Chinese Communist Party could.

Shut down church completely while Bunnings, bottle shops, and brothels were deemed ‘essential’ by the bureaucrats? Sure – no problem. Praise the Lord, forsake the fellowship, and stay in your pyjamas! Untrustworthy governments who abuse their power only happen in other countries – right?

I’ve now come to understand the simple but profound problem leading to the complete devaluation of freedom in our nation, and it occurs consistently across most Western societies.

We don’t value freedom because we don’t understand freedom. We don’t understand the telos of freedom – its end, objective, or purpose. We’ve been led to believe freedom is its own end, and that the more freedom we have, the better.

If freedom is all there is at the end of suffering and sacrifice, it’s not enough. Keep your cost of freedom, we’ll take comfort thank you very much!

But freedom isn’t the destination, it’s merely the vehicle to a much more important destination than freedom in itself.

On the other hand, when the telos, the purpose of freedom isn’t understood, freedom can be abused as much as it can be neglected. Allow me to illustrate.

For ‘free speech absolutists’ it is offensive to suggest there are natural boundaries to freedom of speech. But in 2018 when I promoted a speaking tour by some celebrity YouTubers, our private events on private property were plagued by lawless thugs who fancied themselves and their rights to free speech more important than the freedom of other people to speak or listen.

They weren’t merely trying to make themselves heard, but were actively trying to stop others from being heard. The effect of their freedom was literally destructive to freedom.

G.K. Chesterton profoundly said, ‘There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.’

The proof of the mob’s insincerity was their unwillingness to organise their own private event or to civilly publish their ideas like we did. They preferred to forcefully impose their opinions on people who did not agree with them, and thus they abused freedom as a means to oppress. They should have been shut down with the government’s full monopoly on violence.

But the police stood by impotently.

It would be simpler for them to prevent and punish such behaviour if society understood the purpose of freedom, and didn’t either cheaply sell freedom or idolise it as an absolute good in and of itself.

The purpose of freedom of thought, freedom of conscience, freedom of belief, freedom of religion, freedom of association, freedom of speech, freedom of protest, and even freedom of press – the telos of freedom is this: Truth.

Without freedom to think, believe, form convictions and act on them, associate, speak, protest, or publish ideas, it is impossible to search for Truth, or to have any confidence in what someone else claims is true. Without the natural freedom to pursue Truth, there can be no well-founded confidence in science, engineering, history, the press, Parliament, or even religion.

While many people throughout history have surrendered safety and willingly paid the ultimate sacrifice for the freedom of their family and fellow citizens, many people have also sacrificed both safety and freedom for the sake of Truth. Not many people are willing to die for living a lie though.

This is what makes movies like The Matrix and A Few Good Men compelling. The hero is the character willing to take great risks to shatter mass deceptions for the sake of the sincere pursuit of objective Truth. To live with lies is to live in chains. What freedom is useful to anyone if Truth has been outlawed?

Truth is paramount. Promises of safety are hollow when underlying assumptions and data cannot be scrutinised, and even debate amongst professionals is ruthlessly punished.

The meaning of life is very simply answered, and it’s not in achieving freedom from things like poverty or tyranny. The purpose of our lives, our telos, and what separates us from animals, is our ability to search for Truth beyond our own existence; to ask the biggest questions about the Universe and reality itself.

The telos of government is also instructive. Its purpose is to protect the natural freedoms of its citizens from domestic and foreign, individual and assembled enemies of those freedoms. So it is a complete inversion of the purpose of government to liberally engage in legislating an ever-diminishing space to sincerely pursue Truth.

Laws against discrimination violate the universal freedom to pursue Truth in the name of feelings. Suffocating laws limiting the expression and exercise of religious convictions violate the freedom to propagate the Truth we believe we have discovered, condemning others to learning the same things the hard way, or condemning them to ignorance of answers to the most important questions about this life.

But can there be any greater example of government hubris than the proposed category of laws against so-called ‘misinformation’? The condescending presumption of government to be qualified to, as former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arden claimed, ‘be your single source of truth … unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth’ is perhaps unrivalled.

It is time for a revived understanding of the value of the freedoms of speech, religion and the press as a united battle for the freedom of Truth.