What is safety to a paranoid schizophrenic? What is freedom to one who is scared of choice? The values of “safety” and “freedom” are highly coveted as personal values instrumental in an individual’s decision making, but what are they? These values may be both an objective truth of what is “safe” and what is “free”, but simultaneously the irrational feelings one may have of their situation. Does there exist a quantifiable metric of probability for harm or merely the personal belief that one is free from harm, is “freedom” an evaluation of the rights an individual is imbued or the belief that one is free from consequence? I argue that in an age of the personal becoming public at an unprecedented rate, these differing values of freedom and safety are becoming increasingly meaningless.

The societal interpretation of these values can be evaluated to differ from an individual's beliefs in the example of the Patriot Act. With the 9/11 attacks which occurred not two months previously, the American consciousness was situated squarely on preventing such an unexpected breach of safety from ever happening again. Though freedom is one of the most expounded virtues of the United States, the Patriot Act would allow the government to have unrestricted access to customers' private information on the Internet and permits the monitoring of suspects’ computers. Perhaps in a climate not saturated with the fear for life and limb, such measures would be considered a breach of privacy and lambasted by the public for government overreach, but the majority of people agreed with its necessity to prevent the threat of terrorism. The problem comes with those that did not value their “safety” above “freedom” in this case. Say someone does not believe that people have a right to know any information about them that is not shared to those specific people willingly by the individual who is to be known. Do we not reach an impasse if others believe that it is imperative to their own safety to know information about any individual without their express consent? We now must compare 8 different values, the personal and objective beliefs of the individual on both their safety and their freedom, and the personal and objective beliefs of the government on their safety and freedom. Which is more important? I contest neither.

The Jungian concept of the collective unconscious, the attributes shared by all of mankind at a base, inaccessible level, is similar to the way I contend the personal values of safety and freedom exist. A “feeling” of safety passed down through generations of evolution and basal impulses. In comparison, the objective values do not find themselves with the same shared basis for their evaluations, differing based on the philosophical beliefs of whatever person or persons absorb the evidence. Neither of these values are more “true” than the other, for one is unexplainable and one is infinitely debatable. Boiled down to its base components, there is no way to determine how free or safe someone is, because without existing both in their reality of personal experience and the reality of everything else besides that person,  you cannot assess all the variables necessary to make an informed decision.

So, until the time comes that these paradoxes of experience are resolved and we all transcend into collective cyber-unconscious we must consider ourselves perpetually in a metaphysical cave, where there are always knives lurking in the shadows, or not, or maybe so, but only in your head. You could leave at any time, but would you want to and is that freedom? Is anything? I don’t think it matters because these words and values only exist in the world of intelligibility and not the world of forms. Simply put, safety and freedom are inherently paradoxical concepts, shaped by individual experiences, societal norms, and the collective unconscious. The question of which value or facet of value holds more importance remains unanswered, as there is too much left unknown. Thus, as personal and societal contexts continue to change and evolve, so too will the debate over the primogeniture of safety or freedom, reflecting the ever-changing nature of human understanding and experience.