Since the conclusion of the American Civil War at Appomattox, political and social equality have been the organizing goals of society. As such, aspects of social reality that deviate from this goal ‘consecrated’ by the dead of the Civil War are either ignored or seen as great problems to be solved through political agitation.

Through successive social revolutions, Americans have attempted to give everyone regardless of ability or social station both autonomy and security. A slave has almost no autonomy, but perfect security. A free laborer has legal autonomy but only limited security. The labor movements and socialism itself are an attempt to guarantee both to everyone.

The reason why security trades off with autonomy is that it is impossible to make long-term legal agreements with completely autonomous individuals. The entire purpose of a contract is to restrain the behavior of all contracted parties to encourage predictability, harmony, and productive collaboration.

Recognizing this mutually exclusive trade-off is currently blasphemous to democracy.

If a worker can do whatever he likes during the work day, it is not possible to guarantee him the security of a salary that will last a decade. If a worker must remain at his job for 30 years to receive a guaranteed pension, to the ideologue, this is intolerable: why should the worker forsake his autonomy? The worker should have both the freedom to quit his job or malinger and the security of a guaranteed pension.

The mad expectation is similar in how marriage has been politically and socially transformed. The wife should have the perfect autonomy of being able to carry on affairs, along with the perfect security of a guaranteed income from the state or from her husband in the event of divorce.

What’s needed is to recognize that autonomy and security balance one another out. Our situation in which all desires for autonomy in all things are praised, but then the logical insecure consequences of that pursuit are condemned as unjust, is in need of correction.

Not everyone is either fit for an autonomous life or even wants it. Egalitarian America promises unlimited possibilities to anyone and rarely delivers them, because it is not possible to deliver impossible things to people. We can understand the repeated failures of contemporary politics as an attempt to achieve both unlimited freedom and unlimited safety. Occasionally, people of all political persuasions become willing to make trade-offs (because they’re necessary to operate in the real world), but to say that plenty of people should not have legal autonomy until they demonstrate the capability and desire for that responsibility probably violates seven different international treaties and human rights declarations.

In the same way that many recognize that children need to have their level of autonomy managed, so do adults. We currently force everyone into a social position that they are ill suited for. The results are disorder, dis-coordination, and creeping Third World shoddiness. The Civil War dead have been in the ground for almost 150 years. It’s time to recognize that the American dream that ‘all men created equal’ is delusional. It is a threat to the continuation of our civilization.

Responsibilities are the reciprocal of rights. Failing to uphold the one makes the other unsustainable. Banish the thought that ‘rights’ are magic that can be guaranteed through verbal promises alone. They have costs that must be paid continuously, or they become defunct.