On freedom, regret, and infantilizing authoritarians

By JD Goulet

27 March 2024

Today’s writing sprung from my musings as I was out walking my dog, Tramp, this morning. We now live on a rather treacherous stretch of narrow, and often slick, cobblestone road in Portugal. It's a surprisingly busy street, and depending on the time of day, parked cars lining the side may leave only enough room for a single car to pass through. Crumbling and narrow sidewalks appear and disappear, seemingly at random, and cannot be counted on for safe passage.

As you can imagine, this can turn walking a dog into a life-or-death activity, especially if I were an un-vigilant steward of the strong-willed, clueless kind of dog like I have. Tramp was raised in a typical American suburban home with a big yard he could run in, carefree. He simply was not brought up as a city dog who is accustomed to walking on a leash, being navigated through the hazards of an urban environment by his dogparents. As his environment expanded, so too did the dangers, for which I am responsible to help him survive.

He often shows me how much he resents the leash. “I want to go this way!” he tells me with his defiant tugging, even when this way is directly into the path of an oncoming car. Sometimes I can tell by the dark clouds and rising winds that it's time to hurry home before we get caught in a downpour. Neither of us enjoy walking in the rain. If only I could explain to him why, he'd be glad the walk is being cut short. If only I could explain why he can't eat the discarded mystery “food” on the sidewalk, he wouldn't keep trying to drag me towards it as if to say, “But moooom, I want to eat that, can't you see it?! It's right there!!” He is incapable of making the connection between eating garbage and getting a tummy ache later and possibly ending up in his least favorite place, the vet's office. He can't make the connection between running into the street and being hit by a car.

His well-being, and in turn, my own as his loving and responsible dogparent, depends on my keeping him on a leash and remaining vigilant about the hazards of our new environment. My fear that he will come to harm and the accompanying fear of my own regret and grief and loss ensure that I do my best to protect him from doing something he can't regret. Because dogs are incapable of experiencing regret like we humans can.

Our relationships with our human children start out much the same. Raising children is a process of being vigilant about keeping them safe before they can understand the hazards in their environment and helping them learn to navigate their world until we know they are reasonably capable of keeping themselves safe and then setting them free.

All parent-child relationships are situated within a spectrum of permissiveness and strictness that expands and contracts, but ideally bends towards expansion as the child grows and learns and gains more independence and freedom.

Inevitably, with that freedom comes the possibility of experiencing regret. Unlike my dog, who is incapable of regretting snatching a piece of chocolate from the table because he cannot connect eating the forbidden treat to his feeling sick and possibly dying from toxicity, we humans have the capacity for connecting the cause and effect of our actions and inactions and making decisions by weighing the risks against the rewards. If we are informed and capable of reason, but are deprived of the capacity to do a thing we may regret, we do not have true freedom. Any removal of our agency to act in ways that we may regret is a suppression of the very thing that distinguishes us from dogs.

Arguments in favor of stripping our agency to choose abortion, or to choose to live our lives as a gender that is different from the arbitrary one placed on us at birth before we were capable of informed consent, in the name of possible regret, are arguments that we humans are no more than dogs that must be kept on short leashes by the State. When it comes to children exercising agency, it should be a conversation and decision between loving, informed parents and their informed, consenting child to navigate where the individual child is at on their path of intellectual development to understand cause and effect. When the State takes that decision away from a family, they are saying those family members have no more intellectual capacity or agency than a dog.

Social change has been expanding our conceptual environment, as it always does, exposing many of us to people, ideas, and situations that are unfamiliar and may seem treacherous. But unlike dogs, who rely on a guardian to keep them safe in the conditions of their environment, we humans have a broader intellectual capacity to make connections between cause and effect, to learn, and to grow.

Any invocation of possible regret as a justification for anti-abortion or anti-trans policy is infantilizing, coercive, and authoritarian. It is a demand that we must submit to the leash like the animals they see us as. Understand, once the State starts taking the liberty of deciding who does and does not need to be kept on a leash, more and more people start to look like dogs. In the logic of a tyrannical State, no one is capable (or worthy) of figuring out what's best for themselves, so they must be placed on the Authority's short leash. They will continue to root out the people who haven't been restrained yet until the only uncollared neck is their own.

JD Goulet (they/she) is an American-born former corporate writer/editor & learning product designer, political leader, Planned Parenthood board member, and secular movement leader. Throughout her career, she has been an educator and champion for inclusion and wellbeing, especially at the intersection of disability, neurodiversity, sexuality & gender, and class. Their bylines appear in Harvard Business Review, Tumbleweird Magazine, Solarpunk Stories, and various regional publications. She lives in Portugal with her wife and two dogs.

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