Absolute freedom is a sure recipe for Armageddon

Being a specially gifted species, humanity can always strike an admirably delicate balance between freedom of the individual and orderliness by the whole society. Yet the one thing about freedom is that its real meaning never appears generally known to members of any human society worldwide.

Ideally, all members of particular societies, especially the political elite, should always be aware of what freedom means as a concept. For they, indeed, it is who should lead a nation in disseminating that kind of human knowledge. Yet, by its very nature, social orderliness does require laws collectively imposed to minimise the mindless opening of mouths so characteristic of human beings, especially among the Third World’s allegedly “educated elite”.

In Kenya, however, very many members even of the topmost echelons of the intelligentsia do not seem aware of it. That is probably why every society may impose laws requiring all to behave with a keen oral consideration for one another all the time.

The law against libel is a good example. That is why its social significance should be known to all public communicators.

Indeed, freedom of expression is vitally important to a species with a brain as large as humanity’s. The question, however, is: Do you know any human being who is not a communicator? That question raises this other effective question: Among the earth’s specific animals, is society possible in which every individual is free to hurl the most stinking abuse at every other individual?

Nature has, nevertheless, so constructed humanity’s specific brain as to enable each human being to remember from experience that, in any field, any overdose of freedom is always most likely to culminate in a social helter-skelter so great as to overwhelm the production of all social survival requirements. That is why libertarianism is such a grave danger to humankind.

So the human intelligentsia condemns as libertarian any systemless freedom, libertarianism being the condition where everybody behaves without considering how his or her behaviour is affecting everybody else’s behavioural rights. That is why freedom must be demanded and used with utmost care.

For, if you do not deploy your words with enough circumspection, a circumstance is always sure to arrive in which your mere “freedom” to speak begins to overwhelm even you, the very user of the word freedom. For freedom to be of any avail to all members of a society, the people must always deserve it.

To deserve “freedom” fully, you must use the word “freedom” itself with circumspection. Even the freest society may reach a stage where its leaders keep freely trading words threatening life lives and social order.

Surely, it is in freedom’s name that the media freely brandish that word. But whenever a nation reaches that stage – as Kenya appears to have done – its leaders are playing with the same fire that one remarkable ancient Mediterranean community knew as Armageddon. That is why every citizen of the Republic of Kenya must pay the closest attention to what a central member of Uhuru Kenyatta’s Government said about it the other day.

Indeed, Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’I always utters it publicly.

As the Chief Secretary in charge of security, Dr Matiang’i always speaks – not only to Kenyans but to the world as a whole – on behalf of our central authorities.

And Fred Matiang’i never minces any words about it.