There’s a natural correlation between the Middle Orders of family, community, education, and business (which must not be conflated with the High Orders of state and government) and personal (Low Order) liberty.   We lose liberty, not when we interact naturally with family, church, and other Middle Orders (which is what Rousseau claimed, and Marx after him) but rather when the Middle Orders are destroyed or displaced by the High Order state.

Our culture has been now shaped by those who have intentionally conflated state and community, particularly with a view to supplanting Middle Orders and their rightful tasks of education, healthcare, and charity.  In doing so, they trap individuals in a dependent orientation to the state (which deTocqueville called soft-despotism), which also means that individuals are left with a damaged social structure  when they attempt to interact with the natural Middle Orders of society like their own families.

We’re seeing the fruit of this failed Rousseauian experiment today.  Today, people often do not know how to function in their primary relationships of family, employment, and social responsibility without looking to the High Order of the state to step in and cover for them.  Culturally, we have crippled interpersonal relationships.  This is perhaps a worse crisis than the fact that the Middle Orders provide the only protection we have from despotism; we have permitted the deterioration of the natural context where human people learn how to live in the kinds of community we were created for.  A boy without a father will bear out the consequences of that broken structure in his own home.  Indeed, natural Middle Orders call for relational responsibility, but it is responsibility in the context of community where there is natural accountability and support, so that the weight of child-rearing, education, and so on becomes bearable.

But when the Middle Orders of family, church, community level education, and local personal businesses, are eroded or replaced, and individuals are left only in relationship to the state, whatever responsibilities we face seem suddenly overwhelming.

Of course, at that point, Rousseauian High Order advocates are only too happy to step in with programs and state structures designed to walk with the individual through life.  And at that point, only government programs seem able to help.  What individuals enter, then, is not community, but slavery: gentle, benevolent and happy as it may be.

With that, real liberty is lost.

With that, humanity itself is defaced.  Disfigured.  Distorted.