Britney Spears is at it again. Over the past few years, the Early Aughts phenomenon has taken to Instagram to post videos of herself dancing, oftentimes with dangerous objects, in minimal attire. A recent video of Britney dancing while taking puffs of a cigarette and staring at the camera with smiling, sunken eyes caused her fans to voice concern for the star. In most videos, the oscillations of her midsection take center stage as she spins about — a Britney Spears choreographical trademark.
In a case that gained much traction, thanks to the viral campaign to #FreeBritney, Britney sought to end the conservatorship that had been in charge of her finances — and her person — since 2008. For most of that time, her father, Jamie Spears, was in charge of her accounts and her independence. Britney accused her father of being abusive — under the conservatorship, she said, she had been drugged, compelled to work against her will, and prevented from going off birth control.
After the great slew of media coverage — and the mobilization of Britney freedom fighters online and on the ground — Britney’s conservatorship was officially terminated by a Los Angeles judge in the fall of 2021. While her fans all celebrated her newfound freedom — and hoped that the star would finally have a happy, healthy life — the course of Britney’s return to the world post-conservatorship has not been particularly optimal.
Apart from swinging knives and smoking cigs for Instagram, the singer has had skirmishes with the law, has made erratic and unseemly social media posts, and has separated from Sam Asghari, her husband of 14 months. Perhaps hardest of all, her two teenage sons have cut off contact with her as of August 2022 and have moved to Hawaii with their father (Britney’s ex-husband Kevin Federline).
Of course, no outside observer can know with certainty the trials and tribulations of any person, but it seems safe to say that Britney’s life did not ascend a clear, upward trajectory after her conservatorship ended. In the earnest words of one of her devoted fans, it is “very sad” to see.
And so the great campaign to #FreeBritney ended, not with a bang, but with a whimper. Among the ups and down of the campaign for her freedom, a truth regarding the nature of freedom has emerged: Freedom without limits is not freedom at all.
To quote Russell Kirk, the masterful prophet of ordered freedom:
“To begin with unlimited freedom,” Dostoevsky wrote, “is to end with unlimited despotism.” . . . The final emancipation from religion, the state, moral and positive law, and social responsibilities is total annihilation: the freedom from deadly destruction. When obsession with an abstract Liberty has overcome personal and public order—why, then, in Eliot’s lines, we are “whirled Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear In fractured atoms.”
Paradoxically, Britney seems no more free having gained freedom from her conservatorship. Perhaps Britney needed not greater freedom, but loving limits set by those who actually had her best interests at heart.