Work out your own salvation?
That or go to Hell in your own way.
Be selfish, be an ass, or throw your life away.
Something out of Fitzgerald, maybe, or perhaps Jane Austen.
Fame as a philosopher, composer, financier, self-made billionaire, or novelist.
Or the obscure life of a country farmer, and perhaps a poet.
Or a pipe-fitter, mechanic, or electrician.
Architect, engineer, or bank president.
Whatever works for you.
A world of such lives, chosen or fallen into, planned or serendipitous or even damned bad luck, is free.
The fundamental freedom, the first freedom, is not freedom of speech, freedom of thought, or even freedom to go armed.
It is freedom to live for yourself, as you damned well please, rather than at someone else's behest, for someone else's good, or according to someone else's design.
The society that affords the greatest variety of interesting possibilities along those lines or shows the greatest multiplicity of such choices is most free.
IMHO, just now.
Precious little to any of this of altruism, of living for others.
Not a lot of the greatest good of the greatest number.
And even that little only voluntary.
Slaves don't have this liberty.
Nor do wage-slaves.
Nor, indeed, do draftees, whether digging foxholes or building habitats for humanity.
On the other hand, the conditions of slavery are not always and for everyone equally rigorous.
One thinks of Epictetus.
And the same is true of wage labor, obviously.
But the Greeks were not silly to think no man is free who has to work for a living.
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