Of all the possible freedoms, the “freedom to take a risk” is overlooked but of paramount importance. Implicit in this freedom is the responsibility to accept a bad outcome. Every time we get in a car, we risk dying in a traffic accident. On the more mundane side of risk-taking, we regularly expose ourselves to being wrong, failing, or creating some other calamity.
Although not enumerated in the Bill of Rights, the right to be wrong (or freedom to fail) is an essential ingredient of a free society. The fundamental is that a bad outcome is not compounded by social or governmental punishment. Such a society will be innovative and productive because the risk-taker can determine an acceptable level of risk. Members of society learn that one who does not give up ultimately prevails in reaching the happiness codified in the Declaration of Independence. Those who reject risk surrender to failure.
On the same day that President Kennedy was assassinated, Admiral Ben Moreel (founder of the Navy Seabees, the forerunner to the Navy Seals) delivered a speech in Birmingham Alabama in which he related how the Haitians did not appreciate everything that the Navy did for them during disaster recovery because the Navy was not letting the Haitians make their own mistakes.[1] The Haitian engineer explained the importance of making mistakes:
”It is true that you have built many fine things. But ‘man does not live by bread alone.’ In doing them for us, you have deprived us of one of our most precious rights, the right to make our own mistakes; that is to say, the right to be wrong. All human beings err. Most of us learn from our mistakes. But we cannot learn from your mistakes. (emphasis added)
In this case, our Navy was enervating the Haitians, just as deTocqueville had predicted the effects on the citizens of the modern welfare state.[2] The engineer went on to describe such guarantees are antithetical to liberty and freedom:
To grow in wisdom and moral stature, man must be free to choose between alternatives. Given freedom of choice, some men will choose unwisely and will suffer thereby. In some instances, the entire community will suffer, as when men choose to commit acts of aggression against their neighbors, to murder, steal from, defraud or defame them. But the risk of making the wrong choice is the price we pay for freedom. It is well worth it. For ultimately, there are only two choices; either we have individual liberty, with personal responsibility, or we submit without protest to those who occupy the seats of power. In the latter case, we become a society like that of the ants and the bees, where each member is born to do a predetermined job, which he does with blind allegiance to his society and with no consideration of personal interests or preferences. (emphasis added).
A free society is a happy society that flourishes via productivity. The people accept the scrapes and bruises and just “rub some dirt on it” and go on.[3] A wary society becomes a dour one. The ultimate enervation is the socialist, totalitarian state. No one can “fail.” The government makes sure of it. Everyone is “safe” and “secure”—except from the government.
[1] Moreel, Admiral Ben. “The Right To Be Wrong.” Vital Speeches of the Day. Speech presented at the Regional Conference for Conservatives, November 22, 1963.
[2] Tocqueville, Alexis de, Sanford Kessler, and Stephen D. Grant. Essay. In Democracy in America, 304–8. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000.
[3] This is what American mothers used to tell their sons when they got nicked during a sporting event. A healthy understanding between a serious injury and what’s not is important. Perhaps we used to be too cavalier about long-term injuries, but the pendulum has swung way too far in the other direction.
