Here, they say, is what we are, we have nothing to hide. Genetic variation, however, guarantees that sometimes a rebel will be born, and you may be sure the culture has come up with a way to deal with him. So, in order to find out what's really going on, we investigate how the culture reacts to threats, we look for the people who do not fit, we look for the oddities, the strangenesses. But Honorable Ellin, of course they are. This is what makes reading history so amusing.
Most cultures think of themselves as free while regarding others as coerced.
They do so because they are following 'traditional values,' and the generations of coercion that resulted in those values is long forgotten. On Old Earth, in one society, women rejoiced that they were 'free' to have children, when in fact they had been coerced into excessive reproduction by a profit-driven culture that required a growing population. Men felt they were 'free' to ingest deadly substances or own deadly weapons, when in fact they were coerced into desiring them by industries that had to sell weapons and drugs to survive. Weapons, poisons, and large families were all parasites on the population. The people weren't free, they had been molded into consumers, which is what the mercantile culture needed.