2---freedom outweighs
Patterson ’19 (ORLANDO PATTERSON, like the SOCIAL DEATH AUTHOR guy [Harvard University Sociology Department].), “Stability and change in americans’ perception of freedom,” Summer 2019, Contexts Magazine, https://contexts.org/articles/stability-and-change-in-americans-perception-of-freedom //ike
Freedom is one of America’s most cherished values. The cognitive scientist George Lakoff considers it the nation’s “most important idea… at the center of all other important ideas.” Likewise, in his studies of American values in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the social psychologist Milton Rokeach found that freedom was by far America’s most important political value, ranked behind only world peace and familial security in the nation’s hierarchy of values. Behind this commonplace agreement on the centrality of freedom in American life, however, lurk three fundamental questions.