Viktor Frankl, the famous Austrian neurologist, psychologist, and psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust, was once invited to the United States to give a series of lectures on logotherapy. Logotherapy is a technique or method of psychology founded and developed by Frankl that is based on the search for meaning in life and freedom.
During his visit to the United States, he visited the famous Statue of Liberty, on Liberty Island in Upper New York Bay. After seeing the Statue of Liberty, he said he was very pleased to see it, but was surprised to discover that no one had thought to build another statue on the other coast of the country.
His listeners responded that it does not make sense to have two statues of liberty even if the second one would be on the West Coast. Frankl replied that he was not talking about building another Statue of Liberty, but rather a Statue of Responsibility, because freedom alone is not enough—it must be accompanied by responsibility.
Freedom without responsibility is licentiousness. Just law—whether the civil law, or above all, the Law of God—is not contrary to freedom nor does it limit freedom, but rather it helps freedom so that it does not forget that necessary complement: responsibility.
Each person is responsible for the good or evil they do with their freedom, and that good or evil that each person carries out with their freedom shapes the person as “good” or “bad” according to the free choices they make. Freedom, as a faculty of the person, is responsible for what he or she becomes, but if we let freedom act according to an indeterminate spontaneity—meaning by whims and momentary desires without thinking about the consequences of actions—and forget the responsibility we have to be good people and to do good to others, then we are not acting freely.
That is precisely licentiousness: a misuse of freedom. Freedom was not given to us to do whatever we want, but to make us good, to make us upright people and people of goodwill. That is the responsibility of our freedom: responsibility for the good. Therefore, as stated above, law—when it is good or just—helps us because it guides our freedom toward the good.
