I always feel the urge to
write a piece or two around my birthday.
I don’t have an answer as to why this urge comes over me other
than to say it makes for a good time to measure how far one has come along in this
life and then reflect on the lessons in that time.
So, as it is, I feel in a
bit of quandary as to my role on this stage.
This feeling isn’t because I neglected to carve out a nice piece of pie
for myself and my family –I have. Nor, do I feel any sense of regret as to
anything I’ve done thus far –I couldn’t imagine it any differently. I suppose those on the outside would say of
me that I have a pretty nice life, whatever that means – I suppose I do. I asked my wife the other day if I were a
complex person or simple person. She
replied that I was simply complex and then asked if that made sense to me – It
did.
My quandary is one of my own
making, I suppose. It wasn’t until this year that I truly found out it being
so. It is, after all, a time to look
back on things and assess and process. For a good part of my life I have been a
person with an eye on freedom. Freedom’s
decline since the time I was old enough to understand it has, to me, been so
apparent that I had difficulty in understanding why hardly a sole didn’t see it
too. I had found a small remnant that
also picked up on this trend with the same concern as I. I cannot say how I
found this remnant of people other than I remember seeking them out. When one finds a fruit tree it isn’t long
before you find those eating the fruit. As any good orchard will tell, you have
to bring your fruit to the market and ideas are no different.
My friends and I brought our
ideas to the market. Others in the
remnant had been bringing ideas to the market for decades, my own involvement
only being a dozen or so years. At this
time I believed that we had a sizable marketplace for these ideas. After all,
who would not want freedom? I had an overwhelming sense that the masses of
people were simply not aware of the situation.
Perhaps they were too busy to notice or just didn't fully understand how
to make sense of it all. I felt
compelled to bring the news to folks that libertarianism was the answer and
that statism was not. I cannot even begin to remember all the remarkable things
we tried to do in bringing these ideas to the market. We were and still are dedicated individuals who are completely serious about what we feel is our duty to civilization. We had thought up every trick, scheme, and strategy in hopes of changing the minds of people in our own communities. We "worked" all the regular events and even
the not-so-regular. We did gun shows, walked parades, rallies of all kinds,
County fairs, Christmas events, conventions, protests, stood in unbearable
weather for hours. We had given so much
of our own time, energy, and money to the cause with so little results for
years and no new members to our group to show for. I think I can safely say
that our little libertarian group was more interested in spreading the news
than electing any certain people for party purposes- Although we spent our fair
share of promoting these bastards as well.
I, unfortunately, once walked a parade holding an "Elect Bob Barr
for President" sign, for Christ sake!
I say unfortunately because even at the time of his nomination to be
Libertarian candidate for President, we knew that Bob Barr was scantly libertarian. Even when the tide seemed in our favor, we
were knocked back down to Earth, as was the case with the very first Tea Party
events in our area -which of course, we organized.
In the case of the Tea
Party, I experienced my first great awakening, an almost spiritual event that
changed me forever. The “Tea Party” is
of course now a complete joke, but at the time of its spontaneous arising we
saw it as a sort of perfect storm to organize people who were in all likelihood
on our side of the fence. What a huge
success the first Tea Party was in drawing people! Finally, we thought, the
tide was turning and people were waking up.
However, even with all the success of the first Tea Party event, we had
nothing to show for it. The second Tea
Party event, which was right around the time it was being hijacked by
Neo-Conservative talking heads, was a complete disaster. Again, what little gains we made here did not
translate to any new membership or change any minds. Today, nearly 3 years after, the membership is
the same.
So, I reflect and assess the
time since these life changing affairs and it has brought me to a frightening
conclusion. After all our extraordinary effort over the years, we were no
closer than when we started. We were
like immigrants that landed in a new world who had a beautiful and erotic fruit
to sell that nobody had a taste for. Let me put it more bluntly; the great
masses of people do not want freedom.
That is to say, not here, not right now, and most likely not for a long
time. Of course, when asked if one wants
freedom outright, you will scarcely find a soul to admit being against it, but
their actions prove otherwise. When asked about whether a “necessary” function
of government should be eliminated or which current war they approve of, you’ll
have your answer. As Thoreau once said, “there
are some, who, if they were tied to a whipping-post, and could but get one hand
free, would use it to ring the bells and fire the cannons, to celebrate their
liberty.” Attempting to bring any rational argument to these people will also
prove to be pointless. The language has changed and now it is common to hear things
like freedom and democracy, for example, as interchangeable synonyms of one
another.
I know that to the reader
this must sound impossible, unnatural, even insane to suggest that people do
not want freedom- It came to a great surprise to me as well. The processing of
this has become clearer as time passes and with how those with larger audiences
had fared as well. Perhaps it is unfair
to say that Ron Paul’s message of, “people want freedom”, as he declared, can
be tested by the fact that people brought us the likes of Mr. Obama or Mr. Romney
or any other criminal in congress, but these are the facts. Ron Paul’s message, like the messages of
Goldwater and Taft before him, will be marginalized and ultimately forgotten
except by those with their eyes on freedom. Ron Paul may go down as the
greatest champion of libertarianism in all of history to this date and we need
only take a walk down any street in America and ask what libertarianism, the
Federal Reserve, or Austrian economics means to people to have an idea of just
how successful Ron Paul’s fruit stand was in ratio to ours in our own community.
I was part of a discussion
on why more people were not influenced by the Ron Paul movement. The consensus of that discussion was that the
message failed with some because Ron Paul did not speak to the lowest common
denominator of the worst in humanity – which is inherent in the vast majority
of people -I agreed. People can’t stand for their own freedom because that
would mean that others would be free as well.
The thought of people having their own liberties is so frightening to the
moralist, unrewarding to the knave seeking privilege, and dangerous to the psychopath
craving power. Our age is so full of
these people that one wonders if any progress will ever be made. What Ron Paul did accomplish very well was
making libertarians more libertarian and that accomplishment should not go
unnoticed. However, this in no way
undermines my thesis that the great majority of people do not want freedom.
This brings me to my self-imposed quandary. If knowing that
people do not wish to buy the fruit that Libertarians are selling, if not
giving away, why try? Perhaps we should pack up our stands and head for those lands
more receptive to the taste of our fruit? This is supposed to be the part where
the writer makes his argument for something different, but I have no idea how
to move ahead. One thing that is
remarkably clear is that moving the message of liberty through the political
means is an enormous waste of time, energy, and money. This should at least now be the basis of where
to start out with the message of libertarianism, but I doubt that will change
either. Those with more experience in
the cause to spread the news have started enterprises outside of the political
means with more success than within. It is surprising that libertarians cannot
grasp the fact the political means does not work for them because it is
contrary to their ideas. It strikes me
that each year they are dumbfounded they gain nothing in the polls and cannot
understand why. Perhaps more disturbing
to me is that some libertarians believe they are gaining ground when all
evidence shows otherwise.
It is not my intention to “beat up” libertarians or diminish
any type of success, perceived or otherwise, they may have felt
personally. Nor is this a defeatist
piece about how nothing libertarians try will ever work. I happen to believe that over the very
long-term, our ideas are winning. The
change is so slow that it doesn’t feel as though any progress is being
made. However, we may be currently in a great
valley of an overall upward trend. Ideas
are moving faster and are getting easier to find as time marches forward. Better
ideas always win in the long run. Of the
some 10,000 years of human existence total, it was only 400 years ago that
Earth was discovered to not be the center of the universe. It was only 150 or
so years ago that people felt it proper to physically own other people. It may
take another 150 for the rest to discover they are slaves too.
My intention, of course, is only to help my fellow libertarians
start from a new basis on which to start selling their fruit so they can
minimize their start-up costs. Believing that masses of people actually want
freedom is untrue -Those who wish to start out with the premise they do, be
warned. I will leave the reader with the
words of José Ortega y Gasset from his book, “The Revolt of the Masses”:
I know well that many of my readers
do not think as I do. This also is most natural and confirms the theorem. For
although my opinion turn out erroneous, there will always remain the fact that
many of those dissentient readers have never given five minutes' thought to
this complex matter. How are they going to think as I do? But by believing that
they have a right to an opinion on the matter without previous effort to work
one out for themselves, they prove patently that they belong to that absurd
type of human being which I have called the "rebel mass." It is
precisely what I mean by having one's soul obliterated, hermetically closed.
Here it would be the special case of intellectual hermetism.
