Such rhetorical sensibility as I have leads me to believe that one of the principal charismatic terms of our age is “freedom.” The greatest sacrifices that contemporary man is called upon to make are demanded in the name of “freedom”; yet the referent which the average man attaches to this word is most obscure. Burke’s dictum that “freedom inheres in something sensible” has not prevented its breaking loose from all anchorages. And the evident truth that the average man, given a choice between exemption from responsibility and responsibility, will choose the latter, makes no impression against its power. The fact, moreover, that the most extensive use of the term is made by modern politicians and statesmen in an effort to get men to assume more responsibility (in the form of military service, increased taxes, abridgement of rights, etc.) seems to carry no weight either.[178] The fact that what the American pioneer considered freedom has become wholly impossible to the modern apartment-dwelling metropolitan seems not to have damaged its potency. Unless we accept some philosophical interpretation, such as the proposition that freedom consists only in the discharge of responsibility, there seems no possibility of a correlation between the use of the word and circumstantial reality. Yet “freedom” remains an ultimate term, for which people are asked to yield up their first-born. There is plenty of evidence that “democracy” is becoming the same kind of term. The variety of things it is used to symbolize is too weird and too contradictory for one to find even a core meaning in present-day usages. More important than this for us is the fact, noted by George Orwell, that people resist any attempt to define democracy, as if to connect it with a clear and fixed referent were to vitiate it. It may well be that such resistance to definition of democracy arises from a subconscious fear that a term defined in the usual manner has its charisma taken away. The situation then is that “democracy” means “be democratic,” and that means exhibit a certain attitude which you can learn by imitating your fellows.