Sunday, May 23, 2021

The consistency of liberty


Liberty is completely consistent. But those who decide to reject it won't see the consistency because they don't understand what they are seeing.

Years ago a good friend of mine made the argument that gravity isn't consistent. She said gravity works on Earth but not in space. She also claimed that airplanes are defying gravity when they fly. She thought this showed that gravity doesn't always work.

She was no dummy-- very smart and in her mid-80s.

I tried to explain that gravity is consistent everywhere (even though its strength varies from place to place in the Universe due to the uneven distribution of matter), but due to different conditions, it looks different in space than it does on Earth. 

I tried to explain that "zero gravity" in orbit is just the result of falling around the planet. A "downward" falling path that misses the ground and keeps going around. Orbiting wouldn't be possible without gravity. (Deep space would be a different situation.)

I tried to explain that without gravity, airplanes couldn't fly the way they do. Gravity holds the air to the planet so they can use it for lift and thrust.

She wouldn't have any of it. To her, it looked different under those different conditions and she didn't understand the physics behind it, so that was the end of it. Gravity was inconsistent and unreliable, in her view.

Those who don't (or won't) understand liberty are much the same. They see different situations, and imagine that it looks like liberty is different in those situations-- that it doesn't work in every circumstance. But that's only because they don't understand what they are looking at.

Is it possible to explain it to them? Maybe not, but it works the same regardless of whether they accept and understand it or not.

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