My experience, without doing a "study," is that people always fall along a continuum of every human characteristic, and that the concept of a ""universal hunger for liberty" is false. Some want freedom, some want to look to a higher power (either civil or supernatural) for guidance, protection, and control.
Those are two outlying points of that continuum, at opposite ends. I do not mean to imply that this is a binary distribution, a "one or the other" type of thing, like flipping a coin, but that people fall along that continuum, with these two discrete points included herein as touchpoints for illustration.
The thing here is that those who wish liberty are the ones who are outspoken about it, whereas the more "passive" among us, who seek this external guidance, protection, and control, do not have the "passion," the fire in the belly" about freedom, and therefore do not display any passion for freedom --or lack of it.
Again, bearing in mind that this all falls along a continuum, and use of a "two-point" selection is only for illustration.
My conclusion is that the idea of a "universal passion for freedom" or hunger for liberty is a false premise, based on a biased sample.
Terry, 230RN
ETA
I just want to add that a "continuous" distribution can be generated from a set of binary outcomes. Flipping one coin results in a true binary distribution, but flipping 1000 coins 1000 times looks more like a continuous distribution. And more so as the number of coins and the number of repetitions of the coin-flipping (or die-casting) experiment increases. The point here is that if a "characteristic" of humans is comprised of a number of underlying binary factors, the more factors, and the more humans that are included in the experiment, the more the distribution of that human characteristic looks like a continuous distribution.