Tell 10 schoolchildren that they must decide together what they want: donuts, or bagels. They must now act as one - but of course they do not all agree! What follows is a surrender of individual liberty; since everyone cannot win, and indecision would result in neither bagels nor donuts, the liberty of the minority voters is sacrificed, begrudgingly, in service of the whole. Well now, suppose a few high school bullies come along and take all of their food. Now, some of the children go to the principal, to give account of the wrongdoing. But suppose one or several of the schoolchildren do not go to the principal, and do not want a confrontation with the highschoolers. But the policy of the school is to act automatically on behalf of those who are deemed "vulnerable". So the principal, acting in accordance with the policy, preserves the liberty of the schoolchildren to eat without disturbance, and punishes the highschoolers.
In the first scenario, individuals voluntarily surrendered liberty in exchange for what they desired. In other words, they were their own oppressors. In the second scenario, the administration suspended the liberty of some, in order to preserve the liberty of others. So, the school was, in truth, the oppressor; Though to a collectivist, there is no oppression, since the designation of "vulnerable" is the boundary of agency. The individual is a neuron, only relevant as a means to provide the collective entity with a decision. This is of course why collectivism always becomes authoritarianism; It's illogical to sacrifice the means, the individual, to the end, the ideal, so when the two come into conflict, it is the problematic “means” that is done away with.
What we live in now is a mediation of collective and individual liberty, which allows the concept of "protected" attributes. These laws define you simultaneously as a member of a collective, with a shared, collective liberty, which acts on your behalf, and also an individual, with natural and inalienable rights. This seems advantageous at first, to have the law expressing your rights automatically. But if the law is deemed capable of expressing your rights, then it is capable of oppressing them, and if the law could oppress your rights, even in theory, then they are no longer inalienable, but rather a construct of the law, which is a result not of nature, but of people. So you see, our compromise of collective and individual liberty is about as good as any compromise, in that the benefit of the original thing is utterly lost. Liberty is only rightly applied to that which is inseparable - the individual - and a misapplication of liberty to something which is divisible results in the inevitable breakdown of the rights of the individual.
"It is not that liberty should never be lost, but that we have the paradoxical right as individuals to choose the terms on which we lose it."