The Real Essence of Freedom

Having freedom to do good opens the door to having the freedom to do bad, or to waste one's life entirely. Such is the nature of freedom. It allows us to decide who we are and what we do.
    The freedom we espouse is something different. It presupposes a personal authenticity that is rooted in conscience. Without a healthy, on-going integration of conscience, the individual is incomplete. Freedom loses its purpose. One might rejoice from being free from the iron grip of the tyrant, while never realizing the true benefits of freedom that make us complete.
    Freedom should not be seen as license to just do as one pleases. It is a challenge to complete the length, breadth and depth of one's life in the time allotted. Freedom, and nothing less, makes that possible by giving life to virtue, thereby completing who we really are.
    A knave may be free to exploit people, or commit crimes, or turn his back on the needy, but we sense immediately that his own depth of conscience is missing. Perhaps it is shackled or buried alive, or ignored to obsolescence. Without that vital part of him engaged, and the virtues that arise from it, he in only a pompous shell of his life, and for no one's benefit-not even his own. He has not just adopted an unjust path, he had denied his truest being. He is reason for us to mourn.
    Chivalry-Now does not trifle with freedom. It points to conscience as our own manifestation of Nature's Law. Its claim for autonomy stems from that. It is a claim for the autonomy of virtue, not of selfishness. There is more to human nature than presently meets the eye, and we seek to raise and honor it. This amounts to a kind of rebirth, through which we no longer view the world as a child. Ego is set aside in order for conscience to shone forth. Once you understand this fully, once you taste it, you will find that the truth does indeed set you free.
    Chivalry-Now holds this concept of freedom at its core. It does not look for followers, or people willing to relinquish their responsibility to conscience for title or for wealth.
    For this reason, we bow in reverence to no one. We bow instead to ideals that define us at our best, and serve humanity itself by doing so.

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