Freedom is neither permission nor entitlement
When I am protected from others killing me, that does not mean I have permission to live. Using the word permission makes it appear that my life is not mine.
The American founding fathers wrote the Bill of Rights to ensure American freedom would not be taken away, even if elected officials attempted to do it. When I am aware of my rights, I am aware of the political requirements necessary for me to live as a human being in a social context. If I am aware of rights, I agree with them, and I uphold such principles…then I am civilized.
Civilized men like me grant me no permission or entitlement. My life does not belong to civilized men any more than theirs belong to me. Civilized men are simply recognizing the fact that they are thinking beings, and they need thinking in order to live. If they want to live as thinking beings, they can only deal with other thinking beings through voluntary exchange, not through the use of threats, guns or fistfights. They know that violence suspends man’s mind and therefore this is not how they ought to deal with civilized men like them.
When people are civilized, they recognize that conflicts may arise, so they establish rules upfront to ensure that such conflicts are resolved peacefully through the application of objective law that exists to protect their lives as thinking beings.
Civilized men agree to such a system because they want to live as the civilized human beings they surely are. They know that to do so, they must live in peace. Whoever is uncivilized is treated accordingly by them.
Civilized men want freedom not because they seek permission from others or wish to entitle others. They recognize a fact about their nature: they are thinking beings, and their lives are sustained by the products of their thinking. Therefore, they need to be free to think and act according to their own judgement (I know I am being repetitive here, but it’s on purpose).
So they choose to live freely, and they gather with other civilized men to ensure that this remains possible, because they know that, as human beings, everything necessary for their survival must be produced—including a political system that makes it possible for them to live as human beings.
The American Revolutionaries created a symbol to convey the fact that it was dangerous to attempt to disrupt their lives as human beings. The symbol was the Gadsden flag. But there was a fundamental problem with that symbol: humans are not snakes.
Humans think in order to survive. I will not offer too much evidence here except asking what a human being would do first if he was left alone in a desert island and he wanted to survive.
Humans capacity to think is too important to ignore. If humans do ignore, they will reduce people to unthinking animals, freedom disappears, and in an age of AI and nuclear weapons, human life will certainly vanish with it. That outcome would surely be deserved because there were not enough humans willing to protect a way of life that is proper to thinking beings: the civilized way of life.