I feel strongly about Freedom being the most precious of gifts. Freedom is the most important thing a human can have. Without it, whether a person gives it up knowingly and willingly, or it is taken by government or other agency, we are not able to fulfill our full intellectual, spiritual or emotional potential. Suppression or oppression is not good for our souls. Souls need freedom. Lack of it can kill. This I feel more strongly about than virtually anything else, because it is from freedom that all other good things come. If two people can allow each other to feel free, the beauty of relationship can blossom into ecstasy.
Freedom is not just about having good inter-personal relationships, though, it is about our very existence as rational human beings, our ability to fulfill our dreams, our pursuit of knowledge, and much, much more. Freedom is multi-faceted. To me we must have Economic Freedom, Religious Freedom, Social Freedom, Intellectual Freedom, and Freedom of Expression. Within my arbitrary categories are a miriad of freedoms we must have, must understand and must hold onto and defend vigorously. But, a big but, with freedom comes a moral obligation to exercise it responsibly so as to not infringe the freedom of others. Unbridaled freedom can lead to social, intellectual and spiritual anarchy and chaos.
So we need minimal basic rules of interaction to allow us all to have freedom, some people refer to such a set as a moral compass as it is founded on the premise that not everything is relative. Some basic rules are such that they form a moral compass. Oddly, the Biblical Ten Commandments provided a minimal set of basic rules about 3,000 years ago. This set of rules forms the basis of the Judeo-Christian tradition which was, in turn, the tradition of the founding of the United States and our Constitution.
In the name of religion, secularism, Marxism, and other ideologies, men have fiddled with, expanded, detracted from and otherwise created a morass of rules, laws, codes, strictures, Politically Correct social engineering, and other ways to restrict personal freedom and control people. What exists today, unfortunately, is a legalistic, confusing and often conflicting set of rules that do not provide a moral compass for human interaction. Having a moral compass allows humans to interact in a moral manner that places great value on not harming one another. It guides their lives, not as a morass of codes and laws, but of simple to understand principles a person can follow in living a good life. I am not implying that since the Ten Commandments became part of the Judeo-Christian tradition that all people have or ever will follow them. But they still provide a guide unrivaled by any other.
Change in a society doesn't usually take place suddenly. Rather it evolves, either as a result of normal human interaction and random changes in ideas and practices, OR as a long orchestrated agenda of somewhat disconnected changes, or so they appear at the time they occur. But a planned long term strategy to change the political and cultural nature of a society, can gather strength over, perhaps 80 years until the pieces begin to meld into the perfect storm of radical change. The critical mass of adherents to the underlying philosophy of those who believe in the change becomes large enough to make political, cultural and economic changes that the majority may not really want, but by being ignorant of the overall plan, the majority lets it happen. And then: it is too late.