Truth requires no coercion. Any moderately intelligent person can make choices appropriate to him or her, based on what is available and feasible. Any healthy human society runs on the basis of average people making innumerable such ‘common sense’ choices. This, in practical terms, is what the average person understands by the word ‘freedom’. 

Depriving a society of such freedom leads to misery. Despots – that is, glorified goons – deprive a society of the vitality that springs from this freedom.