The Illusion of Freedom

[RonneJJones]

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue
the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain,
they will just take down the scenery, pull back the curtains, and you will see
the brick wall at the back of the theater.”

— Frank Zappa

[RonneJJones]

The political illusion is:


That "the people" control the state in a democracy


Voting controls the course of events
[changing those in office means to change nothing, as politicians simply deal with with ephemeral matters or work within constraints (i.e. "iron rails")]


"The people" participate substantially in the doings of the state


Organizations, such as parties or trade unions, channel popular desires
[these organizations require men at the top who are professional politicians concerned with little else than the eternal struggle to attain and retain power against rivals in their own and all other camps. Therefore, these men are interested only in having the support of numbers, and the hopes and aspirations of the rank and file are filtered not up but out.]


Information provided to "the people" is relevant and pertinent
[citizens in a state, are dependent upon the information fed them, and the state, party or union hierarchs are expert in managing information and in preventing all nonconforming forces from emerging.]


Politics provides real solutions
["the people" demand political solutions, but no political solutions exist for genuine political problems consists of truly contradictory facts that merely permit equitable settlements. Yet the technicians more and more present all political problems as solvable equations, and "the people" expect solutions for everything]


http://www.cumberlandbooks.com/jacquesellul.php

[RonneJJones]

The book, The Political Illusion speaks to a matter about which many Christians seem to be very confused, namely the possibility of influencing society for the good through political means. The author explains not only that this is flat-out impossible, but that the political system is deliberately designed to create the illusion of control through participation so as to keep the average person engaged and thereby distracted from doing the simpler and less glamorous things that might actually make a difference.


THE POLITICAL ILLUSION concludes that all facets of political activity as we know it today are a kaleidoscope of interlocking illusions, the most basic of which are the illusion of popular participation, popular control, and popular problem-solving in the realm of politics.

The first great evil from which most other evils spring is politicization (the act of suffusing everything with politics and dragging it into the political arena). In our modern world, contrary to what was the rule in all previous ages, everything is politicized: men seek political solutions for everything, whether the problem be freedom or justice or peace or prosperity or happiness.

Anything not political does not arouse widespread interest; it is not accorded any independent existence in our politicized world.

As a result of this politicization of all aspects of life and of the orientation of all thought and energy toward politics, men increasingly turn to the state for a solution of their problems, though the state could not solve them if it tried. And everywhere in the world this increasing inclination to turn to the state leads to three evils:


1. boundless inflation of the state's size and power;
2. increasing dependence on it by the individual;
3. decreasing control over it by the "people" who think they control it, whereas in reality they merely surrender all their powers to it.

This state, then, engages in politics. But even though the state ceaselessly talks through the mass media-through those who represent it, whether they are democratically elected or not-of noble things and cherished values, momentous decisions and great goals, essentially it deals with tinder. Two things limit all its political endeavors:


1. on the one hand, politics inexorably follows certain patterns over which the politicians have absolutely no control-they do what they must;
2. on the other, where a certain margin of freedom of action remains, they deal with ephemeral, basically unimportant things that are made to seem important for public consumption.

The political leaders merely manipulate the images among which modern man dwells. Whereas in the Middle Ages man had direct knowledge of the limited range of things that concerned him, he now lives in a world of images reflecting faraway places, people, and conditions brought to him as "information" by the mass media. This universe is not, the author says, a tissue of lies, "but it permits any and all interpretations and translations," and the graver the situation the more "managed" and "edited" will be the version fed to the public. The whole of these images is then translated by contemporary men into a view of the world....

In the second half of the book, the author arrives at what he considers the three essential aspects of the political illusion:



1. The first concerns control of the state. the author rejects the idea that in a democracy as we know it "the people" control the state with their ballots. They do, he says, control to some extent who is on top of the pyramid, but that does not mean control of the state; the elected representatives have no way of controlling-or even thoroughly knowing the behemoth under them. To change those in office means to change nothing: these men inevitably are faced with le politique, which by the author's definition is either dealing with ephemeral matters or moving along "iron rails," for which reason they are not effective leaders. And in our technological age they are the creatures of the technical experts they employ.

2. The second essential aspect of the political illusion is that of popular participation; if "the people" cannot control the state, do they not at least participate substantially in its doings? No, the author says. Just as their ballots cannot control the course of events, their organizations, such as parties or trade unions, do not channel popular desires so as to make them effective. The principal reason is that these organizations require men at the top who are professional politicians concerned with little else than the eternal struggle to attain and retain power against rivals in their own and all other camps. Those men are interested only in having the support of numbers, and the hopes and aspirations of the rank and file are filtered not up but out. Moreover, members of the rank and file in an organization, like the citizens in a state, are dependent upon the information fed them, and the party or union hierarchs are expert in managing information and in preventing all nonconforming forces from emerging.

3. The third aspect of the political illusion is the eternal, illusory quest for "political solutions." This is the greatest pitfall of all. After peace or freedom, education or the living standard, or even the law has been advertised and accepted as a political problem, people demand political solutions. But there are no political solutions for these problems; in fact there are none even for genuine political problems. For while, say, arithmetical problems indeed have a solution, political problems have none; indeed the author's definition of a genuine political problem is that it consists of truly contradictory given facts, i.e., that it is insoluble in the precise meaning of that term. Political problems merely permit equitable settlements. Yet the technicians more and more present all political problems as solvable equations. And because we believe them, or the politicians who obey them, we expect la politique to find solutions for everything, and we therefore make it and the state the guardian and executor of all values which, as a result, wither away....

[Editor's Note: Despite this excellent analysis, ultimately the author rejects "depoliticization" or abandonment of the state.]

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3894/is_199908/ai_n8869373/

[wizardwatson]

What then are we to do? Stick our heads in the sand?

What are non-political means?

[ScoutsHonor]

What then are we to do? Stick our heads in the sand?

What are non-political means?

This is THE question.

[Joe3113]

Education. And that can also be done... through running political campaigns.
But it can also be done outside of it. Both work at spreading the message.

These may be of use to you though. Props to Conza who compiled some into a list ages ago.




The Case for Radical Idealism by Murray N. Rothbard
http://mises.org/story/1709

Do You Hate the State? by Murray N. Rothbard
http://tinyurl.com/9g57et

Why be Libertarian? by Murray N. Rothbard
http://mises.org/story/2993

Toward a Theory of Strategy for Liberty by Murray N. Rothbard
http://mises.org/story/2651

Ending Tyranny Without Violence by Murray N. Rothbard
http://tinyurl.com/cvmptu

Libertarians of Will, Intellect, and Action by Murray N. Rothbard
http://mises.org/story/2469

United We Fall by Frank Chodorov
http://tinyurl.com/cnqf72

On Resisting Evil by Murray N. Rothbard
http://tinyurl.com/dxj4a7

Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty by Murray N. Rothbard
http://tinyurl.com/cjlbe8

Isaiah’s Job by Albert Jay Nock
http://tinyurl.com/2gz8gv

How to Advance Liberty by Leonard E. Reed
http://fee.org/videos/23/

What is to be Done? by Murray N. Rothbard
http://tinyurl.com/da9zfu

Sell Out and Die by Murray N. Rothbard
http://tinyurl.com/5f25rb

The Dangers of Compromise by Gene Callahan
http://tinyurl.com/d9mggj

Murray Rothbard: Go and Do Thou Likewise by Gary North
http://tinyurl.com/ddm8gn

[RonneJJones]

Education. And that can also be done... through running political campaigns.
But it can also be done outside of it. Both work at spreading the message.

These may be of use to you though. Props to Conza who compiled some into a list ages ago.
Very interesting list. Thanks for posting, as I had not read these. The following article, On Resisting Evil by Murray Rothbard, is quite interesting and I am reposting here for others to read.


How can anyone, finding himself surrounded by a rising tide of evil, fail to do his utmost to fight against it? In our century, we have been inundated by a flood of evil, in the form of collectivism, socialism, egalitarianism, and nihilism. It has always been crystal clear to me that we have a compelling moral obligation, for the sake of ourselves, our loved ones, our posterity, our friends, our neighbors, and our country, to do battle against that evil.

It has therefore always been a mystery to me how people who have seen and identified this evil and have therefore entered the lists against it, either gradually or suddenly abandon that fight. How can one see the truth, understand one's compelling duty, and then, simply give up and even go on to betray the cause and its comrades? And yet, in the two movements and their variations that I have been associated with, libertarian and conservative, this happens all the time.

Conservatism and libertarianism, after all, are "radical" movements, that is, they are radically and strongly opposed to existing trends of statism and immorality. How, then, can someone who has joined such a movement, as an ideologue or activist or financial supporter, simply give up the fight? Recently, I asked a perceptive friend of mine how so-and-so could abandon the fight? He answered that "he's the sort of person who wants a quiet life, who wants to sit in front of the TV, and who doesn't want to hear about any trouble." But in that case, I said in anguish, "why do these people become 'radicals' in the first place? Why do they proudly call themselves 'conservatives' or 'libertarians'?" Unfortunately, no answer was forthcoming.

Sometimes, people give up the fight because, they say, the cause is hopeless. We've lost, they say. Defeat is inevitable. The great economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote in 1942 that socialism is inevitable, that capitalism is doomed not by its failures but by its very successes, which had given rise to a group of envious and malevolent intellectuals who would subvert and destroy capitalism from within. His critics charged Schumpeter with counseling defeatism to the defenders of capitalism. Schumpeter replied that if someone points out that a rowboat is inevitably sinking, is that the same thing as saying: don't do the best you can to bail out the boat?

In the same vein, assume for a minute that the fight against the statist evil is a lost cause, why should that imply abandoning the battle? In the first place, as gloomy as things may look, the inevitable may be postponed a bit. Why isn't that worthwhile? Isn't it better to lose in thirty years than to lose now? Second, at the very worst, it's great fun to tweak and annoy and upset the enemy, to get back at the monster. This in itself is worthwhile. One shouldn't think of the process of fighting the enemy as dour gloom and misery. On the contrary, it is highly inspiring and invigorating to take up arms against a sea of troubles instead of meeting them in supine surrender, and by opposing, perhaps to end them, and if not at least to give it a good try, to get in one's licks.

And finally, what the heck, if you fight the enemy, you might win! Think of the brave fighters against Communism in Poland and the Soviet Union who never gave up, who fought on against seemingly impossible odds, and then, bingo, one day Communism collapsed. Certainly the chances of winning are a lot greater if you put up a fight than if you simply give up.

In the conservative and libertarian movements there have been two major forms of surrender, of abandonment of the cause. The most common and most glaringly obvious form is one we are all too familiar with: the sellout. The young libertarian or conservative arrives in Washington, at some think-tank or in Congress or as an administrative aide, ready and eager to do battle, to roll back the State in service to his cherished radical cause. And then something happens: sometimes gradually, sometimes with startling suddenness. You go to some cocktail parties, you find that the Enemy seems very pleasant, you start getting enmeshed in Beltway marginalia, and pretty soon you are placing the highest importance on some trivial committee vote, or on some piddling little tax cut or amendment, and eventually you are willing to abandon the battle altogether for a cushy contract, or a plush government job. And as this sellout process continues, you find that your major source of irritation is not the statist enemy, but the troublemakers out in the field who are always yapping about principle and even attacking you for selling out the cause. And pretty soon you and The Enemy have an indistinguishable face.

We are all too familiar with this sellout route and it is easy and proper to become indignant at this moral treason to a cause that is just, to the battle against evil, and to your own once cherished comrades. But there is another form of abandonment that is not as evident and is more insidious – and I don't mean simply loss of energy or interest. In this form, which has been common in the libertarian movement but is also prevalent in sectors of conservatism, the militant decides that the cause is hopeless, and gives up by deciding to abandon the corrupt and rotten world, and retreat in some way to a pure and noble community of one's own. To Randians, it's "Galt's Gulch," from Rand's novel, Atlas Shrugged. Other libertarians keep seeking to form some underground community, to "capture" a small town in the West, to go "underground" in the forest, or even to build a new libertarian country on an island, in the hills, or whatever. Conservatives have their own forms of retreatism. In each case, the call arises to abandon the wicked world, and to form some tiny alternative community in some backwoods retreat. Long ago, I labeled this view, "retreatism." You could call this strategy "neo-Amish," except that the Amish are productive farmers, and these groups, I'm afraid, never make it up to that stage.

The rationale for retreatism always comes couched in High Moral as well as pseudo-psychological terms. These "purists," for example, claim that they, in contrast to us benighted fighters, are "living liberty," that they are emphasizing "the positive" instead of focusing on the "negative," that they are "living liberty" and living a "pure libertarian life," whereas we grubby souls are still living in the corrupt and contaminated real world. For years, I have been replying to these sets of retreatists that the real world, after all, is good; that we libertarians may be anti-State, but that we are emphatically not anti-society or opposed to the real world, however contaminated it might be. We propose to continue to fight to save the values and the principles and the people we hold dear, even though the battlefield may get muddy. Also, I would cite the great libertarian Randolph Bourne, who proclaimed that we are American patriots, not in the sense of patriotic adherents to the State but to the country, the nation, to our glorious traditions and culture that are under dire attack.

Our stance should be, in the famous words of Dos Passos, even though he said them as a Marxist, "all right, we are two nations." "America" as it exists today is two nations; one is their nation, the nation of the corrupt enemy, of their Washington, D.C., their brainwashing public school system, their bureaucracies, their media, and the other is our, much larger, nation, the majority, the far nobler nation that represents the older and the truer America. We are the nation that is going to win, that is going to take America back, no matter how long it takes. It is indeed a grave sin to abandon that nation and that America short of victory.

But are we then emphasizing "the negative"? In a sense, yes, but what else are we to stress when our values, our principles, our very being are under attack from a relentless foe? But we have to realize, first, that in the very course of accentuating the negative we are also emphasizing the positive. Why do we fight against, yes even hate, the evil? Only because we love the good, and our stress on the "negative" is only the other side of the coin, the logical consequence, of our devotion to the good, to the positive values and principles that we cherish. There is no reason why we can't stress and spread our positive values at the same time that we battle against their enemies. The two actually go hand in hand.

Among conservatives and some libertarians, these retreats sometimes took the form of holing up in the woods or in a cave, huddling amidst a year's supply of canned peaches and guns and ammo, waiting resolutely to guard the peaches and the cave from the nuclear explosion or from the Communist army. They never came; and even the cans of peaches must be deteriorating by now. The retreat was futile. But now, in 1993, the opposite danger is looming: namely, retreatist groups face the awful menace of being burned out and massacred by the intrepid forces of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms in their endless quest for shotguns one millimeter shorter than some regulation decrees, or for possible child abuse. Retreatism is beginning to loom as a quick road to disaster.

Of course, in the last analysis, none of these retreats, generally announced with great fanfare as the way to purity if not victory, have amounted to a hill of beans; they are simply a rationale, a half-way house, to total abandonment of the cause, and to disappearance from the stage of history. The fascinating and crucial point to note is that both of these routes – even though seemingly diametrically opposite, end up inexorably at the same place. The sellout abandons the cause and betrays his comrades, for money or status or power; the retreatist, properly loathing the sellouts, concludes that the real world is impure and retreats out of it; in both cases, whether in the name of "pragmatism" or in the name of "purity," the cause, the fight against evil in the real world, is abandoned. Clearly, there is a vast moral difference in the two courses of action. The sellouter is morally evil; the retreatist, in contrast, is, to put it kindly, terribly misguided. The sellouts are not worth talking to; the retreatists must realize that it is not betraying the cause, far from it, to fight against evil; and not to abandon the real world.

The retreatist becomes indifferent to power and oppression, likes to relax and say who cares about material oppression when the inner soul is free. Well sure, it's good to have freedom of the inner soul. I know the old bromides about how thought is free and how the prisoner is free in his inner heart. But call me a low-life materialist if you wish, but I believe, and I thought all libertarians and conservatives believed to their core, that man deserves more than that, that we are not content with the inner freedom of the prisoner in his cell, that we raise the good old cry of "Liberty and Property," that we demand liberty in our external, real world of space and dimension. I thought that that's what the fight was all about.

Let's put it this way: we must not abandon our lives, our properties, our America, the real world, to the barbarians. Never. Let us act in the spirit of that magnificent hymn that James Russell Lowell set to a lovely Welsh melody:

Once to every man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah,
Offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever
Twixt that darkness and that light.
Though the cause of evil prosper,
Yet 'tis truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold,
And upon the throne be wrong,
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch above His own.

[RonneJJones]

What then are we to do? Stick our heads in the sand?

What are non-political means?
Everything can be accomplished through non-political means. I challenge this forum to assemble a list of what is important, and then to brainstorm non-political avenues for achieving said goals. I guarantee you that you will develop numerous alternatives. But you have to try to do it for it to happen. Focusing on the political will only result in political means. It's time to expand ones focus.

[lynnf]

What then are we to do? Stick our heads in the sand?

What are non-political means?


as has been said before, soap box, ballot box, jury box, cartridge box



lynn

[Romulus]

Everything can be accomplished through non-political means. I challenge this forum to assemble a list of what is important, and then to brainstorm non-political avenues for achieving said goals. I guarantee you that you will develop numerous alternatives. But you have to try to do it for it to happen. Focusing on the political will only result in political means. It's time to expand ones focus.

example?

[mport1]

What then are we to do? Stick our heads in the sand?

What are non-political means?

Civil disobedience, non-compliance, education, agorism. The state gets its power not from guns but from the minds of people who support it and our compliance with their demands.

[Romulus]

Civil disobedience, non-compliance, education, agorism. The state gets its power not from guns but from the minds of people who support it and our compliance with their demands.

truth.

[RonneJJones]

Bump

[Dionysus]

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue
the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain,
they will just take down the scenery, pull back the curtains, and you will see
the brick wall at the back of the theater.”

— Frank Zappa

This is so true. And I know it can sound cliche. But it's really hard to get the point across to someone who was born into the system, of what the system really is. There are many ways to describe it, but you all know what I'm referring to.

[ScoutsHonor]

D,

It sounds like you are describing "The Matrix". Or alternatively, "Plato's Cave", if you're familiar with that.

Sort of an hypnotic state where you just can't seem to reach the person you're talking to?

:confused:

[cheapseats]

This is THE question.


What then are we to do? Stick our heads in the sand?

What are non-political means?

STARVE THE BEAST.

That IS the answer.

[ScoutsHonor]

STARVE THE BEAST.

That IS the answer.

*Please* explain - this sounds interesting!

[Bucjason]

Anytime I hear the National Anthem now, and it gets to the " land of the free home of the brave" part , I throw up a little in my mouth....because it has become bullshit...

[cheapseats]

Anytime I hear the National Anthem now, and it gets to the " land of the free home of the brave" part , I throw up a little in my mouth....because it has become bullshit...

l

LAND OF THE FEE, HOME OF THE KNAVE
l

[cheapseats]

STARVE THE BEAST.




*Please* explain - this sounds interesting!


When America means business, "we" impose Economic Sanctions.

Same deal-i-o between Public Sycophants and Public. People whose taxes are not automatically withheld DO have recourse, yes? I personally require a Redress of Grievances prior to assessment of taxes. Otherwise, I would be sending money I actually NEED to people who are actually lying and cheating. Get screwed over six ways from Sunday AND pay for it? Lemme think . . . DONE. I think not.

Strategic boycotts are imperative. I will present what I obviously think is persuasive argument that Starbucks, McDonalds and Exxon-Mobil should be the targets. Or the first targets, if Ruling Elite remain stiff-necked.

The bottom line IS the bottom line. If they're making money doing it the way they're doing it, why would they do it any differently? Because the People are unhappy?

In the marketplace, CLEARLY IN A NATION THAT BILLS ITSELF AS CHRISTIAN BUT ALSO AMONGST A PEOPLE WHO CLAIM RIGHT-MINDEDNESS, conspicuous consumption while their country languishes at war is OBSCENE.

Cut 'em off. If you don't absolutely NEED it, don't buy it.

They still think they're the Boss, on account of we're still doin' what they tell us to do. Not me, though.

I am At Liberty. When I say ENOUGH IS ENOUGH, I mean it.

[ScoutsHonor]

Very interesting list. Thanks for posting, as I had not read these. The following article, On Resisting Evil by Murray Rothbard, is quite interesting and I am reposting here for others to read.*
Some very worthwhile answers seem to be here--I like these ideas and think they are worth a try as we have Nothing to lose.

*I will repost this..

[ScoutsHonor]

cheapseats:
I am very much in favor/agreement with your ideas. And here are some more for us to consider; they have an All-American spirit. :cool::)
**The post below this one is the post that contains IDEAS we ought to consider implementing..


Quote:
THE POLITICAL ILLUSION concludes that all facets of political activity as we know it today are a kaleidoscope of interlocking illusions, the most basic of which are the illusion of popular participation, popular control, and popular problem-solving in the realm of politics.

The first great evil from which most other evils spring is politicization (the act of suffusing everything with politics and dragging it into the political arena). In our modern world, contrary to what was the rule in all previous ages, everything is politicized: men seek political solutions for everything, whether the problem be freedom or justice or peace or prosperity or happiness.

Anything not political does not arouse widespread interest; it is not accorded any independent existence in our politicized world.

As a result of this politicization of all aspects of life and of the orientation of all thought and energy toward politics, men increasingly turn to the state for a solution of their problems, though the state could not solve them if it tried. And everywhere in the world this increasing inclination to turn to the state leads to three evils:
1. boundless inflation of the state's size and power;
2. increasing dependence on it by the individual;
3. decreasing control over it by the "people" who think they control it, whereas in reality they merely surrender all their powers to it.This state, then, engages in politics. But even though the state ceaselessly talks through the mass media-through those who represent it, whether they are democratically elected or not-of noble things and cherished values, momentous decisions and great goals, essentially it deals with tinder. Two things limit all its political endeavors:
1. on the one hand, politics inexorably follows certain patterns over which the politicians have absolutely no control-they do what they must;
2. on the other, where a certain margin of freedom of action remains, they deal with ephemeral, basically unimportant things that are made to seem important for public consumption.The political leaders merely manipulate the images among which modern man dwells. Whereas in the Middle Ages man had direct knowledge of the limited range of things that concerned him, he now lives in a world of images reflecting faraway places, people, and conditions brought to him as "information" by the mass media. This universe is not, the author says, a tissue of lies, "but it permits any and all interpretations and translations," and the graver the situation the more "managed" and "edited" will be the version fed to the public. The whole of these images is then translated by contemporary men into a view of the world....

In the second half of the book, the author arrives at what he considers the three essential aspects of the political illusion:

1. The first concerns control of the state. the author rejects the idea that in a democracy as we know it "the people" control the state with their ballots. They do, he says, control to some extent who is on top of the pyramid, but that does not mean control of the state; the elected representatives have no way of controlling-or even thoroughly knowing the behemoth under them. To change those in office means to change nothing: these men inevitably are faced with le politique, which by the author's definition is either dealing with ephemeral matters or moving along "iron rails," for which reason they are not effective leaders. And in our technological age they are the creatures of the technical experts they employ.

2. The second essential aspect of the political illusion is that of popular participation; if "the people" cannot control the state, do they not at least participate substantially in its doings? No, the author says. Just as their ballots cannot control the course of events, their organizations, such as parties or trade unions, do not channel popular desires so as to make them effective. The principal reason is that these organizations require men at the top who are professional politicians concerned with little else than the eternal struggle to attain and retain power against rivals in their own and all other camps. Those men are interested only in having the support of numbers, and the hopes and aspirations of the rank and file are filtered not up but out. Moreover, members of the rank and file in an organization, like the citizens in a state, are dependent upon the information fed them, and the party or union hierarchs are expert in managing information and in preventing all nonconforming forces from emerging.

3. The third aspect of the political illusion is the eternal, illusory quest for "political solutions." This is the greatest pitfall of all. After peace or freedom, education or the living standard, or even the law has been advertised and accepted as a political problem, people demand political solutions. But there are no political solutions for these problems; in fact there are none even for genuine political problems. For while, say, arithmetical problems indeed have a solution, political problems have none; indeed the author's definition of a genuine political problem is that it consists of truly contradictory given facts, i.e., that it is insoluble in the precise meaning of that term. Political problems merely permit equitable settlements. Yet the technicians more and more present all political problems as solvable equations. And because we believe them, or the politicians who obey them, we expect la politique to find solutions for everything, and we therefore make it and the state the guardian and executor of all values which, as a result, wither away....

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m...8/ai_n8869373/ (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3894/is_199908/ai_n8869373/)

[ScoutsHonor]

Quote:

How can anyone, finding himself surrounded by a rising tide of evil, fail to do his utmost to fight against it? In our century, we have been inundated by a flood of evil, in the form of collectivism, socialism, egalitarianism, and nihilism. It has always been crystal clear to me that we have a compelling moral obligation, for the sake of ourselves, our loved ones, our posterity, our friends, our neighbors, and our country, to do battle against that evil.

It has therefore always been a mystery to me how people who have seen and identified this evil and have therefore entered the lists against it, either gradually or suddenly abandon that fight. How can one see the truth, understand one's compelling duty, and then, simply give up and even go on to betray the cause and its comrades? And yet, in the two movements and their variations that I have been associated with, libertarian and conservative, this happens all the time.

Conservatism and libertarianism, after all, are "radical" movements, that is, they are radically and strongly opposed to existing trends of statism and immorality. How, then, can someone who has joined such a movement, as an ideologue or activist or financial supporter, simply give up the fight? Recently, I asked a perceptive friend of mine how so-and-so could abandon the fight? He answered that "he's the sort of person who wants a quiet life, who wants to sit in front of the TV, and who doesn't want to hear about any trouble." But in that case, I said in anguish, "why do these people become 'radicals' in the first place? Why do they proudly call themselves 'conservatives' or 'libertarians'?" Unfortunately, no answer was forthcoming.

Sometimes, people give up the fight because, they say, the cause is hopeless. We've lost, they say. Defeat is inevitable. The great economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote in 1942 that socialism is inevitable, that capitalism is doomed not by its failures but by its very successes, which had given rise to a group of envious and malevolent intellectuals who would subvert and destroy capitalism from within. His critics charged Schumpeter with counseling defeatism to the defenders of capitalism. Schumpeter replied that if someone points out that a rowboat is inevitably sinking, is that the same thing as saying: don't do the best you can to bail out the boat?

In the same vein, assume for a minute that the fight against the statist evil is a lost cause, why should that imply abandoning the battle? In the first place, as gloomy as things may look, the inevitable may be postponed a bit. Why isn't that worthwhile? Isn't it better to lose in thirty years than to lose now? Second, at the very worst, it's great fun to tweak and annoy and upset the enemy, to get back at the monster. This in itself is worthwhile. One shouldn't think of the process of fighting the enemy as dour gloom and misery. On the contrary, it is highly inspiring and invigorating to take up arms against a sea of troubles instead of meeting them in supine surrender, and by opposing, perhaps to end them, and if not at least to give it a good try, to get in one's licks.

And finally, what the heck, if you fight the enemy, you might win! Think of the brave fighters against Communism in Poland and the Soviet Union who never gave up, who fought on against seemingly impossible odds, and then, bingo, one day Communism collapsed. Certainly the chances of winning are a lot greater if you put up a fight than if you simply give up.

In the conservative and libertarian movements there have been two major forms of surrender, of abandonment of the cause. The most common and most glaringly obvious form is one we are all too familiar with: the sellout. The young libertarian or conservative arrives in Washington, at some think-tank or in Congress or as an administrative aide, ready and eager to do battle, to roll back the State in service to his cherished radical cause. And then something happens: sometimes gradually, sometimes with startling suddenness. You go to some cocktail parties, you find that the Enemy seems very pleasant, you start getting enmeshed in Beltway marginalia, and pretty soon you are placing the highest importance on some trivial committee vote, or on some piddling little tax cut or amendment, and eventually you are willing to abandon the battle altogether for a cushy contract, or a plush government job. And as this sellout process continues, you find that your major source of irritation is not the statist enemy, but the troublemakers out in the field who are always yapping about principle and even attacking you for selling out the cause. And pretty soon you and The Enemy have an indistinguishable face.

We are all too familiar with this sellout route and it is easy and proper to become indignant at this moral treason to a cause that is just, to the battle against evil, and to your own once cherished comrades. But there is another form of abandonment that is not as evident and is more insidious – and I don't mean simply loss of energy or interest. In this form, which has been common in the libertarian movement but is also prevalent in sectors of conservatism, the militant decides that the cause is hopeless, and gives up by deciding to abandon the corrupt and rotten world, and retreat in some way to a pure and noble community of one's own. To Randians, it's "Galt's Gulch," from Rand's novel, Atlas Shrugged. Other libertarians keep seeking to form some underground community, to "capture" a small town in the West, to go "underground" in the forest, or even to build a new libertarian country on an island, in the hills, or whatever. Conservatives have their own forms of retreatism. In each case, the call arises to abandon the wicked world, and to form some tiny alternative community in some backwoods retreat. Long ago, I labeled this view, "retreatism." You could call this strategy "neo-Amish," except that the Amish are productive farmers, and these groups, I'm afraid, never make it up to that stage.

The rationale for retreatism always comes couched in High Moral as well as pseudo-psychological terms. These "purists," for example, claim that they, in contrast to us benighted fighters, are "living liberty," that they are emphasizing "the positive" instead of focusing on the "negative," that they are "living liberty" and living a "pure libertarian life," whereas we grubby souls are still living in the corrupt and contaminated real world. For years, I have been replying to these sets of retreatists that the real world, after all, is good; that we libertarians may be anti-State, but that we are emphatically not anti-society or opposed to the real world, however contaminated it might be. We propose to continue to fight to save the values and the principles and the people we hold dear, even though the battlefield may get muddy. Also, I would cite the great libertarian Randolph Bourne, who proclaimed that we are American patriots, not in the sense of patriotic adherents to the State but to the country, the nation, to our glorious traditions and culture that are under dire attack.

Our stance should be, in the famous words of Dos Passos, even though he said them as a Marxist, "all right, we are two nations." "America" as it exists today is two nations; one is their nation, the nation of the corrupt enemy, of their Washington, D.C., their brainwashing public school system, their bureaucracies, their media, and the other is our, much larger, nation, the majority, the far nobler nation that represents the older and the truer America. We are the nation that is going to win, that is going to take America back, no matter how long it takes. It is indeed a grave sin to abandon that nation and that America short of victory.

But are we then emphasizing "the negative"? In a sense, yes, but what else are we to stress when our values, our principles, our very being are under attack from a relentless foe? But we have to realize, first, that in the very course of accentuating the negative we are also emphasizing the positive. Why do we fight against, yes even hate, the evil? Only because we love the good, and our stress on the "negative" is only the other side of the coin, the logical consequence, of our devotion to the good, to the positive values and principles that we cherish. There is no reason why we can't stress and spread our positive values at the same time that we battle against their enemies. The two actually go hand in hand.

Among conservatives and some libertarians, these retreats sometimes took the form of holing up in the woods or in a cave, huddling amidst a year's supply of canned peaches and guns and ammo, waiting resolutely to guard the peaches and the cave from the nuclear explosion or from the Communist army. They never came; and even the cans of peaches must be deteriorating by now. The retreat was futile. But now, in 1993, the opposite danger is looming: namely, retreatist groups face the awful menace of being burned out and massacred by the intrepid forces of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms in their endless quest for shotguns one millimeter shorter than some regulation decrees, or for possible child abuse. Retreatism is beginning to loom as a quick road to disaster.

Of course, in the last analysis, none of these retreats, generally announced with great fanfare as the way to purity if not victory, have amounted to a hill of beans; they are simply a rationale, a half-way house, to total abandonment of the cause, and to disappearance from the stage of history. The fascinating and crucial point to note is that both of these routes – even though seemingly diametrically opposite, end up inexorably at the same place. The sellout abandons the cause and betrays his comrades, for money or status or power; the retreatist, properly loathing the sellouts, concludes that the real world is impure and retreats out of it; in both cases, whether in the name of "pragmatism" or in the name of "purity," the cause, the fight against evil in the real world, is abandoned. Clearly, there is a vast moral difference in the two courses of action. The sellouter is morally evil; the retreatist, in contrast, is, to put it kindly, terribly misguided. The sellouts are not worth talking to; the retreatists must realize that it is not betraying the cause, far from it, to fight against evil; and not to abandon the real world.

The retreatist becomes indifferent to power and oppression, likes to relax and say who cares about material oppression when the inner soul is free. Well sure, it's good to have freedom of the inner soul. I know the old bromides about how thought is free and how the prisoner is free in his inner heart. But call me a low-life materialist if you wish, but I believe, and I thought all libertarians and conservatives believed to their core, that man deserves more than that, that we are not content with the inner freedom of the prisoner in his cell, that we raise the good old cry of "Liberty and Property," that we demand liberty in our external, real world of space and dimension. I thought that that's what the fight was all about.

Let's put it this way: we must not abandon our lives, our properties, our America, the real world, to the barbarians. Never. Let us act in the spirit of that magnificent hymn that James Russell Lowell set to a lovely Welsh melody:

Once to every man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah,
Offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever
Twixt that darkness and that light.
Though the cause of evil prosper,
Yet 'tis truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold,
And upon the throne be wrong,
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch above His own.