In an excellent column, Matt Taibbi wonders how Americans came to fear and dislike freedom. In my view, souring on freedom was a long, gradual process. Childhood went from the relatively unsupervised environment of my youth (1950s/1960s) to the Soviet panopticon/Skinner box experience of today. My youthful existence had its risks (wandering alone in streets and woods), and it had its confrontations (bullies and other unpleasant sorts). But this required one to develop life skills, to deal with problem situations, to make friends out of enemies, and to simply think of ways to fill one’s time. One of the gifts of this time was silence--time alone to ponder things. Then, pincer-like, two things happened. The physical layout of communities made my free-range childhood impossible, and as a substitute, schools and other institutions filled kids’ time and shielded them from risk, unpleasantry, and beneficent solitude. When you’ve grown up with zero freedom, it’s hard to imagine the virtues of free thought. I discussed this in detail recently in “Whence Fall Snowflakes” (graboyes.substack.com/p…).