“At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
When Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote these words in 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey, he crystallized a view of freedom now defining our cultural moment. It sounds noble, even profound. But this vision of liberty, untethered from any external reality, doesn’t lead to human flourishing. It leads to chaos.
The Root of the Problem
Georges Buscemi calls this kind of liberalism “a 250-year-old cancer” destroying Western culture—”a false understanding of liberty which brooks no limits whatsoever: even objective reality must be set aside in order to give free rein to the subjective—and often insane or maladjusted—feelings and thoughts of individual persons.”
Buscemi’s critique is spot-on. He’s accurately describing what liberalism has become in our modern world; the same philosophical framework Kennedy was articulating from the bench. But this isn’t what liberalism has always meant. Instead, it is a relatively recent mutation that transformed freedom from “liberation from tyranny” into “license to do whatever I want.”
The irony is profound: what claims to be liberty’s fullest expression is actually its destroyer. Understanding how this happened helps us see why our culture is fracturing. More importantly, it shows us the way back.
How We Got Here
This shift didn’t begin in psychology departments or courtrooms. It had already been brewing in progressive political thought at the turn of the 20th century.
Woodrow Wilson, our first president to hold a Ph.D., explicitly rejected the Jeffersonian principles that had shaped the American founding. In his 1913 book The New Freedom, Wilson argued that “freedom to-day is something more than being let alone. The program of a government of freedom must in these days be positive, not negative merely.” This was the birth of “positive liberty”—the idea that true freedom means government actively removing barriers to help people actualize their potential and fulfill their desires.
Not freedom from government overreach, but freedom through government direction.
In Wilson’s complex modern world, the average person was helpless without government assistance, at the mercy of large corporations and social forces beyond their control. Liberty, therefore, required government intervention—not restraint of government power, but its active deployment. As scholar Ronald Pestritto notes in Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism, liberty in Wilson’s view “was not found in freedom from state actions but instead in one’s obedience to the laws of the state.”
Read that again. Liberty through obedience to the state. Not freedom from government overreach, but freedom through government direction. This was the intellectual groundwork for a transformative redefinition of what liberty meant.
This political philosophy found an unlikely ally in therapeutic psychology. Sigmund Freud and later humanistic psychologists had argued that the conflict between our inherent desires and society’s restrictive conventions was the root cause of human unhappiness. The path to flourishing, they claimed, was removing social constraints—especially around sexuality, which Freud saw as the most fundamental aspect of human identity.
When Wilson’s progressive politics merged with this therapeutic worldview, “positive liberty” evolved into something even more radical: the idea that becoming your “authentic self” requires not just government removing economic and social barriers, but society itself affirming and celebrating whatever desires and identities individuals claim.
Justice Kennedy’s words are the legal culmination of this century-long transformation. Liberty becomes the right to create your own reality and define your own truth—accountable to no one but your inner compass (unless your truth conflicts with someone else’s, in which case the state decides whose “liberty” wins).
This might sound and feel like freedom. The catch is a compass that points wherever you want it to isn’t actually helping you navigate. It’s just spinning.
What Liberalism Actually Meant
Classical liberalism looked radically different. It championed liberty but not unrestrained liberty. It was a careful balance of freedom and limits built on three convictions:
- Natural law exists. Reality has a fixed design, woven into the fabric of life itself, giving humans inherent rights to life, meaningful work, and free expression. These rights come from the Creator, not government or social consensus—meaning they can’t be arbitrarily removed or redefined by popular vote. This is what the Declaration of Independence means by “inalienable rights”.
- Human nature is corrupted. “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” Lord Acton famously commented. People tend toward self-interest and abuse. European history and their own experience with British monarchy had proven this over and over. While the Founders held varying theological views, they knew their Bibles and their history: left unchecked, human nature bends toward tyranny.
- Government must both protect rights and restrain corruption. We need government to provide limits. But since government itself is made up of power-wielding people, it too must be limited. Hence: rule of law, separation of powers, checks and balances. Not as bureaucratic red tape, but as safeguards against humanity’s worst impulses.
This was “negative liberty”—freedom from interference, particularly government overreach. But it still had boundaries. Rights weren’t limitless. Your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins, as the old saying goes.
The Modern Reversal
Modern liberalism, rooted in progressive and Marxist thought, flips this entirely. When Kennedy wrote, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence” what he was really articulating is the belief that at the heart of existence is the right for man to define reality for himself.
There is nothing ontologically wrong with human nature; the problem, like Freud argued, is social systems themselves. Remove the things that inhibit my desire and true freedom will result.
This is Genesis 3 in real time: humanity dethroning the Creator and declaring the unrestrained self and its desire as ultimate authority. If there’s no God behind nature, there are no fixed boundaries. If humans have replaced God at reality’s center, there’s no authority beyond the self defining right and wrong.
Buscemi is right: This isn’t just about abortion—it’s society’s death knell. The unrestrained, corrupted human heart consumes everything around it trying to maintain its stolen crown.
When everyone has the “right to define their own existence,” whose definition wins when concepts collide? Whoever has the most power—which returns us to the problem classical liberals tried solving: corruption and abuse of power.
Unlimited freedom for all paradoxically becomes unlimited freedom for none—except those strong enough to impose their will on others.
The Way Back
Classical liberalism’s underlying worldview aligns remarkably with biblical theology. This alignment points us toward genuine freedom. As God’s image-bearers, we’re designed for freedom and genuine choice. But that freedom exists within boundaries of God’s created order. We rule over creation—but under God’s ultimate rule.
Think of a fish swimming freely through the ocean. That’s genuine freedom. But a fish isn’t free to live on land—not because some tyrannical force oppresses it, but because that’s not how fish are designed. The “constraint” of needing water isn’t limiting the fish’s freedom—it’s the very condition making freedom possible.
True liberty is the capacity to live according to one’s design.
When humanity violated God’s design in Genesis 3, the consequences were catastrophic—not because God was arbitrary, but because we’d stepped outside the boundaries where human flourishing is possible.
Classical liberalism recognized this principle. Nature itself is designed for freedom and flourishing—and that very design creates boundaries. There are ways of living that lead to freedom and others to destruction. Actions have consequences. Reality pushes back.
Now, did the practitioners of classical liberalism in America live up to these principles perfectly? Hardly. The nation fell tragically short, favoring economic liberty for some over social equality for all—slavery being the most glaring example. But ironically, these failures prove the system’s core insight: human nature is corrupted and power tends toward tyranny. The inability to recognize slaves’ equal rights wasn’t a flaw in the philosophy but evidence of the very problem it identified.
“God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else.”
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
This is precisely why the rule of law matters—we needed it because we couldn’t trust ourselves to do right without it. But critically, classical liberalism grounded that law in the design of a transcendent Creator, not in the “positive” intervention of a powerful government itself operated by the same fallen humanity it was meant to restrain.
The framework was sound. The people implementing it were fallen—which is exactly what the framework predicted.
C.S. Lewis addresses this deeper problem in Mere Christianity. He traced vices and violence of human history back to one fundamental error: “the long terrible story” of humanity’s attempt to find happiness apart from God.
Why will this attempt always fail? Lewis explains with a brilliant analogy: “God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else.” You can pour anything else into the tank—water, orange juice, your own homemade concoction—but the car simply won’t run properly. Not because someone is being restrictive or arbitrary, but because that’s how cars work. You can’t give a car more freedom by removing the steering wheel and brakes. You destroy its ability to do what it was made for. Those limitations are the very thing that make the car usable.
We’re not cars, of course. We’re image-bearers of an infinitely creative God. But the principle holds: our freedom and flourishing are found not in throwing off all restraints, but in discovering and living within the good design our Creator made us for.
God’s design for human life is that it flourishes and is completely free only when it is lived in joyful obedience to his lordship, under his rule and reign. Our spirits were designed to be fueled by his spirits, as Lewis describes. That design includes genuine freedom—the freedom to choose, to create, to love, to build. But it’s freedom with a tether, grounded in reality rather than spinning in the void of our own desires.
The question before us isn’t whether we’ll have limits. We will. The question is whether those limits will be rooted in something real—in the created order, in human nature as it actually is, in the character of a good and loving God—or whether we’ll keep chasing the illusion that we can define reality itself.
One path is restraint and limits leading to true flourishing. The other leads to chaos masquerading up as freedom.
