As noted on Tuesday, I’m an extremist – at least, according to the DFL, most of the Strib’s columnists and, apparently, Janet Napolitano.  This is the second of a seven-part series exploring just how extreme I am, and what being an “extremist” really means in society today.

The first and foremost reason I’m an “extremist” is that I believe in Liberty.

But what is liberty, exactly?

Liberty sounds simple, at least on the surface.  Liberty means You Have Rights. Of course, the left and the right believe in rights; a conservative believes that these rights are inalienable, endowed to us by our creator (whether God or Biology or Vishnu or a remarkable physical coincidence); a “progressive” might believe that, or that they are the output of a benign government that works in the peoples’ best interests.  Either way, nobody argues that we have the right (from whatever source) to speak, publish, assemble, worship, privacy and security in our persons and possessions, due process and vote; guns and abortion are contentions that I won’t argue here.

And for a conservative, “liberty” involves having the government keep its appetites under control, so that I have more of the “fruits of my labor” – money – for me and my family.  Larry Pogemiller’s assertions aside, I do know how to use it better than he does.  I’d also appreciate the liberty to defend myself, my family and my neigbhorhood from criminals, and it’d be great if government would quit diddling about with censorship.

But that’s the easy part.  Everyone agrees on most of those.

But what is “Liberty?”

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In Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1993 classic Blue, Juliette Binoche finds herself “free”.  And it sucked.

Blue, mind you, was the first part of Kieślowski’s “Three Colors” trilogy (White and Red completed the set), a three-film series based on the colors of the French (and, by the way, American) flag.  Each installment was based on a color, and its meaning; Liberte (Blue), Egalite, or Equality (White) and Fraternite, or Brotherhood (Red).

Liberte came to Binoche’s character, Julie De Courcy, early in the film; a young mother and wife of a noted composer, Mr. De Courcy accidentally swerved off a road and smacked into a tree, killing himself and their young daughter.  Binoche’s De Courcy survived – and then had to deal, not only with surviving, but dealing with real, true “Freedom”.   Julie discovered that Liberte – genuine freedom – is not just the right to do what you want, but something that has huge, sometimes unintended, sometimes very difficult effects on everyone involved with her.  Julie De Courcy spends a good chunk of the film trying to ensure she never again experiences the pain she felt in losing her husband and child – one of life’s most epic “failures” – and found that it was impossible.  Or, rather, that one loses more by preventing failure than by failing.  (It’s a fantastic movie, by the way – one of my ten favorite of all time.  It’s not your typical Hollywood fare, though; it doesn’t even qualify as typical French fare.  Kieślowski was an interesting character himself.  But more on him, and his films, some other time).

Liberty is not just the freedom to do what you want; it’s the freedom to screw up royally.

It’s that last part that’s the problem.

Failure is hard.  Nobody likes it.  It hurts.  Sometimes, it’s disastrous.

And averting disaster – cheating the idea of failure, on a personal and societal level – is a key part of “progressivism”, which believes that human failure, or at least many of them, can be ameliorated, prevented or outlawed.  In ways small (campus speech codes) and large (the welfare state), “progressivism” tries to insulate people from failures small (being offended) and large (wanting for material necessities).

But failure is a key part of improving the human condition.  People, as individuals, learn more from failure than from success.

And what happens to a person who is never allowed to fail?  Exactly what society is learning today as the children of a generation of “helicopter parents”, insulated from serious consequences for much of anything from falling off bikes to losing baseball games to failing classes, grows up unmotivated and glutted with unearned “self-esteem” and utterly unaware of how to fail, and thus how to really learn.

The same goes for societies.   After every epic failure of capitalism has come the “creative destruction” that comes at the crossroads of enlightened self-interest and learning from failure; that, in turn, leads to success.  Or more failure.  And the cycle continues.

And societies efforts to outlaw failure (beyond the utterly necessary efforts to prevent starvation and abject misery) have backfired.  The unintended consequences of outlawing failure are worse, in many ways and in the long term, than the pain that society tried to prevent in the first place.  Generations of comprehensive welfare have led a huge subculture that seems incapable of surviving without government help (or so they seemed; welfare reform efforts, in states that implemented them, turned the pathology around, just like letting your kids sink or swim will reverse excessive dependence on you); trying to prevent a segment of society from “failing” to own houses helped lead to an epic market distortion that led to the recession/depression we’re in today.

Failure is not only a fact of life; it’s not just sometimes a good thing; failure is, in fact, essential to development, whether you’re developing a child, a business, an economy or a society.

True liberty, really, is the freedom to fail (although not the freedom to maliciously or criminally inflict the consequences of your failure on other people) and, then, to learn from the failures, to fail again, to rise, to fall, and rise again – each time just a little better, if you’re doing your job right.

To bottle that up – to ban failure – is to ban true success.

And that’s what I support – the human right, the “liberty”, to fail and to succeed on one’s merits.

Yep.  I’m an extremist.