LIBERTY AND DISCIPLINE

 Liberty and Discipline

When you get in your car or on your bicycle, you can choose where you want to go. That is liberty. But, as you drive or ride through the streets, you will keep to the left of the road. That is discipline.

 There are four reasons why you will keep to the left: 

your own advantage 

consideration for others 

confidence in your fellows; and 

fear of punishment 

It is the relative weight which we give to each of these reasons that decides what sort of discipline we have. And that can vary from the pure self-discipline of the Sermon on the Mount to the discipline of the concentration camp, the enforced discipline of fear. 

Inspite of all our squabbles, the British are united when it comes to most of the things that matter and liberty is one of them. We believe in freedom to think what we like, say what we like, work at what we like, and go where we like. Discipline 1Sa restraint on liberty, so many of us have a very natural inclination to avoid it. But we cannot. Man, ever since the dim prehistoric past, has had no option but to accept the discipline of some kind. For a modern man, living in Complex communities, in which every individual is dependent on others, discipline is more than ever unavoidable. 

All history teaches that when through either idleness, weakness or faction, the Sense of order fades in a nation, its economic life sinks into decay, then, as its Standard of living falls and security vanishes, oneof thet wo things happens.

 Either some more virile militant power steps in to impose its own brand of discipline or a dictator arises and clamps down thei ron control of the police state. Somehow, eventually, discipline is again enforced. The problem is not; "Shall we accept discipline?" sooner or later we have to-; it is "How shall we accept it?" Shall it be imposed by physical violence and fear, by grim economic necessity, or accepted by consent and understanding?Shall it come from without or from within? 

The word "discipline'" for some, flashes on the screen of the mind, a jack-booted commissar bawling commands across the barrack square at tramping squads. But that is dictatorship, not discipline. The voluntary, reasoned discipline accepted by free, intelligent men and women is another thing. It is binding on all, from top to bottom. 

One morning, long ago, as a brand new second-lieutenant, I was walking on to parade. A private soldier passed me and saluted. I acknowledged his salute with an airy wave of the hand. Suddenly behind me, a voice rasped out my name. I spun round and there was my Colonel, for whom I had a most wholesome respect, and with him the Regimental Sergeant Major, of whom also I stood in some awe. "I see," said the Colonel, "you don't know how to return a salute. Sergeant Major, plant your staff in the ground, and let Mr. Slim practise saluting it until he does know how to return a salute!" So to and fro marched in sight of the whole battalion, saluting the Sergeant Major's cane. (I could cheerfully have murdered the Colonel, the Sergeant Major, and my grinning fellow-subalterns). At the end of ten minutes,the Colonel called me up to him. All he said was: "Now remember, discipline begins with the officers!" 

And so it does. The leader must be ready, not only to accept a higher degree of responsibility but a severer standard of self-discipline than those he leads. If you hold a position of authority, whether you are the managing director or the charge- head, you must impose discipline on yourself first. Then forget the easy way of trying to enforce it on others-by just giving orders and expecting them to be obeyed.You will give orders and you will see they are obeyed, but you will only build up the leadership of your team on the discipline of understanding

There is more to a soldier's discipline than blind obedience and to take men into your confidence is not a new technique invented in the last war. Oliver  Cromwell demanded that every man in his new model army should "know what ne fights for, and love what he knows." Substitute "work" for "fight" and you have the essence of industrial discipline too-- to know what you work for and to love wna you know. 

is only discipline that enable seen to live in a community and yet Elaine individual liberty. Sweep away or undermine discipline, and security for the weak and the poor vanishes. That is why, far from it being derogatory for any man or woman voluntarily to accept discipline, it is ennobling. 

Totalitarian discipline with its slogan-shouting masses is deliberately designe a to submerge the individual.The discipline, a man imposes on himself, because he believes intelligently that it helps him to get a worthwhile job done to his own and his country's benefit, fosters character and initiative. It makes a man do his work, without being watched, because it is worth doing. In the blitz of the late war not a man of the thousands of the British railway signalmen ever left his post. They stood, often in the heart of the target areas, cooked up in flimsy buildings, surrounded by glass, while the bombs screamed down. They knew what they worked for, they knew its importance to others and to their country and they put their job before themselves. That was discipline. 

No nation ever got out of a difficult position, economic or military, without discipline. Democracy means that responsibility is decentralised and that no one can shirk his share of the strain.And some of us, a lot of us, in all walks of life,do not. If everyone not only the other fellows we are always pointing at- really worked when we were supposed to be working,we should beat our economic ERISA hollow. That takes discipline, based not only on ourselves but backed by a healthy public opinion. 

We are apt these days to think more of liberty than of responsibility but, in the long run, we never get anything worth having without paying something for it. Liberty is no exception. You can have discipline without liberty,but you can not have liberty without discipline.