"Understand finally this: if violence were to begin this evening, if neither exploitation nor oppression had ever existed in the world, perhaps concerted non-violence could relieve the conflict. But if the whole governmental system and your non-violent thoughts are conditioned by a thousand-year-old oppression, your passivity only serves to place you on the side of the oppressors."
- Jean-Paul Sartre
It is our passivity, regardless of our motives, that is killing liberty. I have been telling people this for thirty years, yet they reject active non-equivocation based in the extreme prejudice of knowing what it right between men, v. what is evil.
Passivity in the face of tyranny is tantamount to a self-imposed death sentence, whether it be the death of one's freedoms and the rights that evolve therefrom, or actual physical death at the hands of the butchers. This is one area where the so-called "lefty" or "progressive" seems to hold an understanding superior to those who claim themselves far more broadly as champions of freedom and the liberties man's natural state of being implies. I have found it astonishing that this might be the case, given that in reality those of a progressive ideology, are actually in favor of the very societal/governmental elements that lead to the destruction they claim they wish to avoid. The irony is so thick there, one cannot cut it with a well-sharpened saw.
But when examined a bit more carefully, we see that one of the problems with left-looking individuals is threefold.
Firstly, their conception of freedom is stilted in that it is ever so narrow in scope. Leftists tend to see freedom as far more narrowly circumscribed than does, say, an anarchist. For example, sexual libertinism sits at the forefront of the list of progressive priorities for individual prerogatives. To be able to engage in whatever sexually-based action one wishes, regardless of its nature, is a very large part of how progressives view their very narrowly defined universe individual freedom. Drug abuse is yet another, and while in principled terms they may be said to be correct on each count, the fact that these two issues constitute perhaps the majority of the corpus of what they view as valid human praxeological prerogative give clear indication of just how narrow is their world view.
Contrarily, the progressive views the right to keep and bear arms as non-existent, and that all arguments in favor of that right are invalid and should be met with utmost bile, venom, and in many cases violence of any sort needed to see their wills made manifest in terms of daily practice.
Secondly, the progressive view of liberty is perforce and by it's one-sided and unprincipled nature, hypocritical. "Only our list of liberties is valid. Nobody else's counts, save where and how they coincide with ours." Progressives are champions of a very narrowly circumscribed view of freedom and are absolutely and most violently opposed to any deviations from the boundaries that have been defined for them and that which they accept with such blind intolerance of even the least variation.
Thirdly, the mean progressive paradoxically favors the application of tyrannical force pursuant to the imposition of his stunted notion of freedom upon the entirety of the human race. He makes no allowance for the diverse interests of individuals and cultures, a truth made so ironic in the face of his never ceasing pulpit-pounding regarding "diversity, inclusion, and equality".
And yet, they well understand that refusing to actively defy and countervail that which they (often correctly) see as tyranny is the express-lane to the loss of all hope for achieving their utopian goals, such as they may be. This is a lesson that all freedom-loving men need to learn, understand, embrace, and pursuant to which to develop the requisite habits of intolerance with respect to tyrannical acts, and how they choose to comport themselves with regard to those acts, both philosophically and as matters of daily practice, both as individuals and as members of a population whose fundamental daily goals includes the maintenance of proper individual liberty and the rights which follow therefrom.
To tolerate violation carries with it the implicit acceptance of the trespass. This in turn implies that what would otherwise constitute a felonious encroachment upon the sovereign rights of Freemen, is with grave mistake elevated to the status of a valid act. Few human follies rise to this level of wild and wooly danger. Every human failure resulting in tolerating the intolerable serves only to bolster the tyrant's position and his arguments in favor of his perfidies. It endangers not just the individuals against whom the crimes are committed, but by extension all humanity as such acts become rapidly normalized and deeply entrenched in the human psyche. Our history is rotten with examples.
Passivity in the face of tyranny is death to one's freedom, not to mention culture.
Until next time, please accept my best wishes.
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