Activity 3: The Balance Between
Chaos & Oppression

Understand how total control over everything and total freedom are both problems and what we can do to balance between the two.

Freedom: The Balance Between
Chaos and Oppression

Welcome to the third activity of the Give Me Liberty awards program. In our last activity, we talked about rights and how they’re connected with responsibility. When you give up your responsibilities, you lose your rights.

In this activity, you’ll learn the connection between rights and responsibilities and our government structure. Let’s start by watching this short video.

Transcription:

Politics is kind of weird, right? In the US we talk about things being on the left or right. But, there’s a completely different way to look at how governments work. The founding fathers saw things on a different scale, with chaos (total freedom) on one side, and oppression (total control) on the other.

In government, oppression means the government controls every aspect of your life. The government says it’s trying to protect other people and help everyone. However, that means exchanging your responsibilities to have security and comfort. It also means the government makes your decisions for you.

Let’s think about that scale again. You’ve got oppression on one end, and chaos on the other. Oppression is when the rights of the group are heavier than the individual rights. If everyone in your class voted to beat you up and steal your lunch, would that be ok? NO!

On the other end is chaos. Chaos means there are no rules and individual rights matter most. People have complete freedom, and complete responsibility for everything, like protecting their families from danger, building roads, and much more.

So, let’s go back to that scale. Chaos is when individual rights matter more than the rights of the group. If one student in class decides to distract the class so no one can learn, that’s not very fair, either. You have to balance chaos or individual rights with oppression, or group rights to make society work.

Think about it this way. When your mom or dad tells you to clean your room, you might feel oppressed because they decided something for you. On the other hand, if you never clean your room, it becomes a huge mess and you can’t find stuff or do what you want. True freedom, or liberty, comes from balancing chaos and oppression. You have to balance what you want to do, like playing with friends, with what you have to do, like cleaning your room.

During the American Revolution, the founders fought the British government, which wanted to make many choices for the Americans. It was on the “oppression” side of the scale. After the war, when the Americans made their own government, they went to the “chaos” side of the scale, and the country almost fell apart until they created the Constitution.

The founders learned that the best way to help people find real liberty was to balance chaos, or the rights of the individual, with oppression, or the rights of the group. That way, people would be free to do the stuff that really mattered to them, while making sure everyone in the group was treated fairly and kept safe.

In our next video, we’ll tell you how they did that.