Thoughts on why liberty does not exist

[LibForestPaul]

I have been having discussions with neighbors and friends, here are some findings:

1. People will do whatever it takes to keep their loved ones happy. Relative needs a 400k operation, beg, borrow, steal. Doesn't matter that Mom is 80.
2. People's biases are played by ruling class as skillfully as Mozart and Beethoven played the piano. Each and every bias.
3. People's fear, of their own capabilities and power, keep them content as serfs or slaves.
4. Indoctrination works. The difference between easterners who have emigrated and native millennials are staggering. Strange hearing Chinese and Russian who have grown up under communist rule have such a disdain for central authority, while millennials lick the boot until it shines.

Not certain how people come out of their caves. Anyone would like to share how social systems were displaced (such as the dark ages by enlightenment), feel free.

[r3volution 3.0]

Liberty does not exist because democracy does.

[ThePaleoLibertarian]

"The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty - and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies."

-- H.L. Mencken

[r3volution 3.0]

^^It also takes a special kind of man to read that without squinting.



As to the substance of the issue...

Yes

[Ronin Truth]

As is often the case, it may just finally boil down to precisely how you define 'liberty'.

"The map is not the territory."

[osan]

I have been having discussions with neighbors and friends, here are some findings:

1. People will do whatever it takes to keep their loved ones happy. Relative needs a 400k operation, beg, borrow, steal. Doesn't matter that Mom is 80.
2. People's biases are played by ruling class as skillfully as Mozart and Beethoven played the piano. Each and every bias.
3. People's fear, of their own capabilities and power, keep them content as serfs or slaves.
4. Indoctrination works. The difference between easterners who have emigrated and native millennials are staggering. Strange hearing Chinese and Russian who have grown up under communist rule have such a disdain for central authority, while millennials lick the boot until it shines.

Not certain how people come out of their caves. Anyone would like to share how social systems were displaced (such as the dark ages by enlightenment), feel free.

Liberty cannot likely exist in the midst of Empire.

How is Empire built and maintained? Through slavery. It is nothing fancier than that.

What is the outward mark of Empire? Generally speaking, large works... Buildings. Monuments. Roadways. Rockets to Mars. Incomprehensible war machines whose ostensive purpose is to defend, but which are instead used to aggress, destroy, and murder on scales impossible in free worlds.

Why must slavery be the keystone of Empire? Because no free, happy, strong, well-adjusted people are going to volunteer for the bleary, mind-numbing misery that is the reality of life under Empire, especially for those who have to build and maintain it for the Masters. Seriously now - and be very careful when thinking on this, for the assumptions on which you base your answers may remain cagily latent and may be terribly flawed: What person in his right mind would choose this world and the life it provides over one of good health, general happiness, freedom, love, respect, and prosperity, despite the absence of cell phones? Would you?

Empire is the Great Lie, purporting to be that which it is not. It is the grandest of all hypocrites. It offers the individual nothing more than those lies - the mere appearances of grandeur that belies the horror and the rot that is its only truth. Museums, theatres, grand roadways, hospitals, jet aircraft, vast networks that provide any information at any time and in any quantity at one's demand - these are just a smattering of the endless lies of Empire; the mere tokens for which people trade their away souls. The buildings and monuments speak to a glory that exists nowhere but in the imaginations of men. But because they speak to a putatively idealized vision - one that is nonetheless twisted, perverted, and mutated far away from the truer good - people crave it. Think on that: virtually every man walking the planet who is not laying in some desert shack, about to die of starvation or disease, is pining for the great raft of lies that is Empire.

The human sense of power has been so distorted and maimed that people would sell their mothers and children into a bordello to be consumed in that especially cruel manner in order to get it. Nothing else matters to them. Strip away the noise - the particulars of circumstance - and you will see it everywhere. It doesn't matter the brand or degree. Some want drugs. Others want that welfare check because getting something for what appears to be nothing is indeed and in fact a form of power, and those who crave it do so because they are hopelessly addicted to the idea of it.

The core of it is this: I want. Therefore, I will do whatever it takes to get it, no matter who gets hurt.

And I submit that Empire arose due to this corruption of basic human nature in the breasts of some men, and because of its own nature, set up a feedback loop of ever increasing desire, ever lessening care for the welfare of others, and therefore ever greater Empire. This vicious cycle speaks all at once to the most deeply seated midbrain fears and desires of men in the grandest stick-and-carrot game ever conceived. It makes liberty an impossibility, despite all our clever efforts toward its establishment. This is why I believe that nothing short of my so-called "reset event" is going to hold out any hope for the future of the race of men as being free beings.

The moment pandora's box was opened and all the lies of Empire were allowed to fly freely out into the world of mens' thoughts, humanity was doomed insofar as their states of freedom were concerned. Some people eagerly and wantonly traded their integrity, autonomy, ACTUAL POWER, and freedom for those wingèd lies which they were able to catch in the nets of their thoughts, and employed them to get that which they wanted, no matter who got hurt.

By the time people realized their error, it was too late, for those at the top had their well-fed, armed, "authorized" bullyboys at their sides, willing and ready to gut as fish anyone so much as daring not to show how happy happy happy they were to be under the "protections" of the great and beneficent king. Lies upon lies. Lies so thick and common that even Theye lost track of the beginnings. But as the old beer ad quipped, "why ask why?"

And as Empire advanced through the march of progressing technological knowledge, more and more of Pandora's Little Wingèd Lies have been caught, adding shine and glitter to the bait that keeps people sucked in on the carrot side of the scam. On the stick side, the ever growing fears that arise as interdependence grows and people become ever more removed from the roots of self-sufficiency. Couple that with every increasing fear of damned near everything that is foreign to them, including work and effort, and you end up with a race of spolied-brat-child-beings who want want want, but are afraid and hateful of the work needed to get get get, and are therefore willing to sell their souls to the DevilHimself in order to have have have... no matter who gets hurt, so long as the men with guns provide it for them. And it is all whitewashed, even in the midst of a parent's grief at the loss of not one, but all five of her sons as they go to the bottom at the hands of a Japanese torpedo. The happy faces are painted not only upon the mother's agony,but the memories of the corpses as well with the saccharin sweetness of the rank and rancid lie that takes on many seemingly different forms, especially the mindlessly idiotic slogans and saws:

Sacrifices have to be made
We all have to pay our fair share
They gave their lives in a noble cause
It is for the greater good
It was meant to be
They did their duty
You can't do that
You must do this

And so on down a dizzying and nauseating list, long enough to consume every scrap of paper on the planet, were they all to be written down in 2-point type.

The cost of true freedom includes courage to face adversity and risk - something vanishingly few are willing to do anymore. It demands responsibility and accountability for one's words and deeds. It demands proper, due, and unceasing respect for the lives and conditions of one's fellows insofar as his own choices may impact those around him. Its reward is itself - freedom: the ability to do and say and think as one wishes - to achieve as ability and circumstance may permit, barring the violation of others. The ability to feel true exhilaration.

People pity and disdain the low and seely heroin or methamphetamine addict, what with his bad skin, rotting teeth, and the hopeless, vacant eyes. More's the cause to pity themselves as their own addictions are more perfect still precisely because the addict cannot see that which has him by the throat, the same being invisible to nearly all his fellows who suffer the same afflictions.

For pity's sake, last year I watched an otherwise and apparently well put together woman walk face-first into a pole on the street because she could not pry herself away from her stupid cell phone as she marched down the boulevard. It was the nutshell snapshot of Empire Man (my apologies to Vitruvius and DaVinci), so hopeless in their seamlessly invisible addictions to having, not to mention the bottomless self absorption that drives them to walk into poles in this manner, that they are not even aware of their own wretched condition. These MereCogs, the most stricken beings of all creation, in the selfsame manner of the openly wretched meth addict, fail to recognize their true conditions, thinking themselves so clever and intelligent and prosperous and happy. FAIL.

And just as with the abject drug addict, the addiction to the lies of Empire leads one to think less and less upon how his own actions may impact upon the welfare and rights of his fellows. So long as he gets what he wants, and the range of those desires is as broad as human imagination and often seems like something other than what it really is, it is all good.

The cost of Empire is one's soul.

[luctor-et-emergo]

I have been having discussions with neighbors and friends, here are some findings:

1. People will do whatever it takes to keep their loved ones happy. Relative needs a 400k operation, beg, borrow, steal. Doesn't matter that Mom is 80.
2. People's biases are played by ruling class as skillfully as Mozart and Beethoven played the piano. Each and every bias.
3. People's fear, of their own capabilities and power, keep them content as serfs or slaves.
4. Indoctrination works. The difference between easterners who have emigrated and native millennials are staggering. Strange hearing Chinese and Russian who have grown up under communist rule have such a disdain for central authority, while millennials lick the boot until it shines.

Not certain how people come out of their caves. Anyone would like to share how social systems were displaced (such as the dark ages by enlightenment), feel free.

They say if you give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, but if you teach a man to fish.... then he's gotta get a fishing license, but he doesn't have any money. So he's got to get a job and get into the Social Security system and pay taxes, and now you're gonna audit the poor $#@!, 'cause he's not really good with math. So he'll pull the IRS van up to your house, and he'll take all your $#@!. He'll take your black velvet Elvis and your Batman toothbrush, and your penis pump, and that all goes up for auction with the burden of proof on you because you forgot to carry the one, 'cause you were just worried about eating a $#@!ing fish, and you couldn't even cook the fish 'cause you needed a permit for an open flame. Then the Health Department is going to start asking you a lot of questions about where are you going to dump the scales and the guts. 'This is not a sanitary environment', and ladies and gentlemen if you get sick of it all at the end of the day... not even legal to kill yourself in this country. Thanks again, John Ashcroft, you weird bible addict, can't even handle your own drug. You were born free, you got $#@!ed out of half of it, and you wave a flag celebrating it. [audience member]: Hey, don't hold back! [Doug]: You got an argument? [a.m.] No, keep goin'! … The only true freedom you find, is when you realize and come to terms with the fact that you are completely and unapologetically $#@!ed, and then you are free to float around the system.

Doug Stanhope.

[PaleoConPrep]

Liberty is a very vague term. My definition of Liberty is not the same as yours, and your definition isn't the same as another guys. You guys need to come up with a better term. You'll sound a lot like Classical Liberals.

[Ronin Truth]

liberty defined

About 437,000 results (0.33 seconds)

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=liberty+defined

[Ronin Truth]

Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom (pdf)

[Jesse James]

Liberty is a very vague term. My definition of Liberty is not the same as yours, and your definition isn't the same as another guys. You guys need to come up with a better term. You'll sound a lot like Classical Liberals.

we are classic liberals. GTFO

[otherone]

Liberty is a very vague term. My definition of Liberty is not the same as yours, and your definition isn't the same as another guys. You guys need to come up with a better term. You'll sound a lot like Classical Liberals.

Liberty is sovereignty. Either one is a slave or is not.

[Brian4Liberty]

Not certain how people come out of their caves. Anyone would like to share how social systems were displaced (such as the dark ages by enlightenment), feel free.

My personal hypothesis is that the black plague created the enlightenment. Supply and demand. When so many people died, the supply and value of each individual increased. Liberty is proportional to the value of the individual. Likewise, a surplus of people diminishs liberty.

[Swordsmyth]

My personal hypnosis is that the black plague created the enlightenment. Supply and demand. When so many people died, the supply and value of each individual increased. Liberty is proportional to the value of the individual. Likewise, a surplus of people diminishs liberty.

Typo I assume?
But hey I like it.
Interesting theory by the way, and a sad comment on the average sheeple's morality/ideological nature.

[Brian4Liberty]

Typo I assume?
But hey I like it.
Interesting theory by the way, and a sad comment on the average sheeple's morality/ideological nature.

LOL. Fixed. Typo courtesy of our friendly computer overlords (i.e. auto correct).

[osan]

My personal hypothesis that the black plague created the enlightenment. Supply and demand. When so many people died, the supply and value of each individual increased. Liberty is proportional to the value of the individual. Likewise, a surplus of people diminishs liberty.

Then perhaps we need nights and long knives.

[Brian4Liberty]

Then perhaps we need nights and long knives.

Don't include me in that "we", but unfortunately, nature's standard method of balance is rarely pleasant. And most centrally planned attempts to avoid the cruelty of nature lead to results even more cruel.

[Ronin Truth]

"Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." -- H. L. Mencken

[osan]

Don't include me in that "we", but unfortunately, nature's standard method of balance is rarely pleasant. And most centrally planned attempts to avoid the cruelty of nature lead to results even more cruel.

I am by no means referring to anythi g centrally planned

[NorthCarolinaLiberty]

We sold our liberty for stuff.

[NorthCarolinaLiberty]

[QUOTE=r3volution 3.0;6228620]


[QUOTE]





Where can I get me one of them hats?