"When we, through our educational culture, through the media, through the entertainment culture, give our children the impression that human beings cannot control their passions, we are telling them, in effect, that human beings cannot be trusted with freedom"
About this Quote
Keyes isn’t arguing about hormones or screen time so much as he’s staging a political trial: if you teach kids that desire is destiny, you quietly make the case for rule by restraint. The line turns “educational culture,” “media,” and “entertainment” into a single diffuse actor - a cultural machine - and then indicts it for undermining the moral prerequisite of a free society. It’s a familiar conservative move, but a deft one: he reframes culture war grievances as civic architecture. This isn’t prudishness; it’s a theory of government.
The quote works because it swaps the usual direction of blame. Instead of saying kids misbehave because they consume permissive culture, Keyes says permissive culture is doing something more corrosive: it’s lowering our expectations of agency. “Cannot control” is absolute language, and that absolutism matters. If passions are uncontrollable, then responsibility becomes a fiction, punishment becomes mere containment, and freedom becomes an unsafe luxury. Trust is the hinge word here. Democracies run on an unspoken wager that ordinary people can govern themselves most days. Keyes is warning that when cultural institutions normalize impulsivity as inevitable, they give political cover to paternalism - more surveillance, more policing, more regulation of private life - because who would hand freedom to the untrustworthy?
Contextually, this lands in late-20th-century American conservative rhetoric that fused personal morality with constitutional liberty. Keyes is also subtly elevating the family and faith as counter-institutions: places that teach self-mastery. The subtext is stark: a culture that denies self-control doesn’t just corrupt kids; it rewrites the moral argument for democracy itself.
The quote works because it swaps the usual direction of blame. Instead of saying kids misbehave because they consume permissive culture, Keyes says permissive culture is doing something more corrosive: it’s lowering our expectations of agency. “Cannot control” is absolute language, and that absolutism matters. If passions are uncontrollable, then responsibility becomes a fiction, punishment becomes mere containment, and freedom becomes an unsafe luxury. Trust is the hinge word here. Democracies run on an unspoken wager that ordinary people can govern themselves most days. Keyes is warning that when cultural institutions normalize impulsivity as inevitable, they give political cover to paternalism - more surveillance, more policing, more regulation of private life - because who would hand freedom to the untrustworthy?
Contextually, this lands in late-20th-century American conservative rhetoric that fused personal morality with constitutional liberty. Keyes is also subtly elevating the family and faith as counter-institutions: places that teach self-mastery. The subtext is stark: a culture that denies self-control doesn’t just corrupt kids; it rewrites the moral argument for democracy itself.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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