Why Both Tradition and Liberation Fail Us Alone

Philip Rieff's dialectic of "givens" and "releases" identifies the structural tension at the heart of every social order. Givens are the axiomatic, pre-reflective frameworks — religious, cultural, institutional — that individuals find themselves always already inside. They are not experienced as constraints until the subject has already entered the posture of seeking liberation from them. They provide what might be called existential quilting: the psyche is anchored, identity feels non-negotiable, and the social world appears as natural fact. But this same quality of unquestioned givenness is precisely what Hannah Arendt diagnosed as the condition for the banality of evil — atrocity normalized as routine.

Releases are the hard-won freedoms from those structures, achieved in the name of individuality, equality, and moral progress. They represent genuine ethical Advancement. Yet they generate their own pathology: when all commitments must be chosen rather than inherited, nothing carries the weight of authority. The chosen thing feels contingent, and contingency cannot ground the self. Daniel Garner's "Belonging Again" framework takes this as its central problem — the modern subject, freed from all givens, does not experience liberation but existential overwhelm.

This overwhelm is the precise psychological condition that makes authoritarian movements so appealing. Strongmen and totalitarian ideologies promise to restore the feeling of givenness — to make the world feel solid and unchosen again. The conservative instinct toward tradition and the liberal instinct toward liberation are thus both correct and both catastrophically incomplete. What remains missing is what Aristotle would recognize as a fitting mean: not a compromise between givens and releases, but a way of inhabiting both simultaneously without collapse.