What Freedom Requires
20 hours in Austin, Texas considering 250 years
I spent last Tuesday standing in the Texas Hill Country with a pistol in my hand, thinking about the Declaration of Independence.
That’s not a sentence I expected to write. But here we are.
A few weeks ago, I co-invited a small group of people I respect to join the Institute for Humane Studies and me for a day at Staccato Ranch, just outside Florence, Texas. The idea was simple on the surface: spend the afternoon together on the range, then sit down together over dinner and wrestle with a single question.
What does freedom require?
Not as a fun thinking exercise. Not as a policy debate. As an honest, personal reckoning. The kind you can have after you’ve spent a few hours side by side doing something physical, something that demands focus and trust, before anyone tries to sound smart.
The ranch sits on a stretch of land about an hour north of Austin that feels like it belongs to another century. Rolling terrain. Dry wind. A clubhouse that smelled like mesquite and Texas BBQ. We arrived around noon, shook hands, grabbed plates, and settled into the kind of small talk that happens when you put a roomful of curious people together with no agenda yet.
By one o’clock, we were on the range.
Staccato’s team ran the experience like the absolute pros they are (PS-if you’ve never fired a Staccato pistol-OMG. Their reputation as a premier firearms manufacturer is very well deserved). Professional range masters were running training at every station. Protective gear, ammunition, magazines, all provided. Golf carts shuttling us between the clubhouse and the various stations, as if it were the most natural commute in the world.
There’s something about the range that strips away pretense. You can’t fake competence. You can’t bluff your way through trigger discipline. Everyone starts at the same place: present, focused, a little humbled. I watched people who run companies and build organizations quietly take instruction from a twenty-something range master without a flicker of ego.
At one point, they set up a friendly competition on a dueling metal tree. Timed runs, 3 targets each, bouncing them back and forth. And I may or may not have come to a draw with a special forces operator. Now, I’m not saying I beat him. I’m saying the result was inconclusive, and I’ve chosen to interpret that generously. (It’s possible he was being polite. I don’t care.)
By four o’clock, we were back at the clubhouse. Some folks looked at the gear. Others grabbed drinks and wandered outside. I walked out with a new Staccato P4, which I am unreasonably excited about. The energy had shifted. Not louder, just looser. It’s always amazing the way a room changes when people stop performing and start being somewhere together.
Then came dinner.
We were shuttled a few minutes down the road to the Vineyard at Florence, a crazy, weird, cool wine villa tucked into the kind of landscape that says “this developer wants me to think I’m in Tuscany, even though I know I’m in Texas.” There was dinner at one long table, and then the question, finally, in the middle of the room.
What does freedom require?
I’ll keep the details of the conversation private. That was the deal, and it’s the only way a room like that actually works. But I can tell you a little of what I brought to the table, because it’s been sitting on my chest for a while.
This year, America turns 250.
Think about that for a second. A quarter of a millennium. We’ve been running this experiment so long that most of us have forgotten it is an experiment. We talk about our rights like they’re weather, just the background condition of being American. Something that was always here and always will be.
But they weren’t always here. That’s the part that pricks me when I actually sit with it.
Every single person who signed the Declaration of Independence was a normal human being. Farmers. Lawyers. Doctors. Tradespeople. Merchants who had businesses to protect and families to feed. They were not superheroes. They were not ideologues living in some abstract philosophical cloud. They were people with mortgages (or the colonial equivalent), with reputations in their communities, with children who needed them to come home.
And they bet all of it on an idea that had never been tried.
Individual rights. The notion that a government derives its authority from the consent of the governed. The freedom to speak your mind in public without being jailed for it. The right to own property. The radical, almost absurd claim that human beings are born with inherent dignity that no king, no parliament, no institution gets to revoke.
These ideas weren’t safe. They weren’t popular with the people in power. And they came with no guarantee of success. Not even close.
What they came with was a cost.
At dinner, I read the last line of the Declaration out loud.
Not the famous opening. Not the part about self-evident truths, which is beautiful and important and also the only part most of us ever think about. I read the closing. The part that seals the whole thing. The part that makes it real.
“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”
Our Lives. Our Fortunes. Our sacred Honor.
Then I asked the question I’d been carrying all day.
Would we actually make that trade?
Not theoretically. Not in a social media post. Not in a bumper sticker or a campaign ad. Would we, the people sitting at this table, be willing to pledge our actual lives, our actual money, our actual reputations in defense of these ideas?
The room got quiet. The good kind of quiet. I was honest-I’m not sure I would, if push came to shove.
Here’s what I think most people miss about that line. It’s not a statement of belief. It’s a receipt. Those 56 men weren’t declaring what they hoped to do. They were declaring what they were already doing. By the time the ink dried, they were criminals. The British Crown considered them traitors. Several of them lost everything. Their homes were burned. Their families were harassed. Some died broke and forgotten.
They knew that was on the table. They signed anyway. And the thing that both inspires and convicts me is that we are still living in the house they built. We’re riding on the coattails of decisions made by people who risked more than most of us have ever been asked to risk. We inherited the upside without realizing we’ve also inherited the cost.
Which brings me back to the question.
Because freedom doesn’t sustain itself. It never has. Every generation is asked, in its own way, to decide whether these ideas are worth protecting. Not just celebrating. Protecting. The distinction matters. Celebration is easy. It looks good. It costs nothing. Protection requires something from you. It might require your comfort. It might require your popularity. It might require you to say something true in a room that doesn’t want to hear it.
I don’t think the answer to “what does freedom require” is a policy platform. I certainly don’t think it’s a political party or a single election. I think it’s something quieter and harder than that. I think it requires people who take personal responsibility for ideas that are bigger than their own lives. People who are willing to be inconvenienced by conviction. People who understand that the freedoms we enjoy were not inevitable, they were chosen, at great cost, by ordinary people who decided the risk was worth it.
That’s the part that got to me in Texas. Looking around the table at a group of people who actually give a damn, who are building things, leading things, showing up in ways that cost them something, becaus they believe they have a responsibility to this experiment. That it matters.
IHS, in part, exists to develop the people and ideas that carry freedom forward. Sitting in that room, after a day on the range, after reading those final words of the Declaration out loud, it hit different. Carrying freedom forward isn’t a tagline. It’s a job. And it’s not someone else’s job.
It’s mine.
America is about to turn 250. And I think the best way to honor that birthday isn’t with fireworks or speeches (though I’m not against either). It’s by honestly asking ourselves whether we’d sign our names to the same line as those 56 individuals.
Our Lives. Our Fortunes. Our Sacred Honor.
I don’t know if I’m fully there yet. But I know I’m closer than I was before last Wednesday.
🎯