Passivity V. Tyranny = Suicide

 "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.

Public Governance

 It should be clear to anyone who has given careful thought to the notion of "government", that it is not the correct solution to the issue and challenges of general governance.  This is most especially true of the governmental architectures of the so-called "nation states" of what we may call the relatively modern era of, say, the past 300 or so years.  By their very architectures, "governments" thwart the natural propensities of men in ways the outcomes of which have shown to be detrimental to humanity as a whole.  Perhaps the greatest ways in which such thwarting has damaged the fabric of human civilization lies in the invalid prohibitions on behavior that are consensual, and therefore not criminal.

Take dueling, for example.  One's initial response to the notion tends to be that of revulsion and a feeling that we speak of a self-evident absurdity.  Even if we were all to agree that it is in fact so, that we agree on the matter, it does not follow that we are within our rights to prohibit such activities so long as the participants engage in it with informed consent, and bring no others to harm in the process.   This may be difficult for many to accept, and yet it is clearly true once one gets past the initial, conditioned response that was spoon fed them by the culture in which they came up.

We humans have an overwhelming propensity for falsely criminalizing non-criminal behavior that we find objectionable.  Some might chafe at homosexuality and wish it criminalized, which once it was and remains so in many jurisdictions around the world.  Others support the false criminalization of illicit drug possession, use, manufacture, and distribution.  The list of criminalized non-crimes is rather long, the prohibitions of which have served no demonstrable good, but have in fact rather damaged the social fabric.

Bear in mind also that just because we acknowledge the validity of public governance (v. "private"), it does not follow that we condone the notion of "government".  The general belief of many self-professed lovers of liberty is that anything non-private is "statist", the single gravest insult such people can hurl at another human being, in their eyes.  This amounts to presenting a false dichotomy that hog-ties the mind, thereby eliminating avenues of alternate solutions.  There are few hazards so grave as cutting off valid solution spaces, especially for some of the more serious problems, yet this is precisely what many self-described "anarchists", "voluntarists", and "agorists" do when they rail and rave at anyone who fails to toe their line of across-the-board privatization of the entirety of human existence.

What such people have failed to properly dope out is that the essential problem is not that of the evils of public governance, but rather the evil that is the very concept of government.  Governance is an activity, whereas conceptually speaking government is a thing, an object unto itself with an existence separate and independent from humanity itself.  The idea of government may not have originated with the intention of becoming this monobloc object in the minds of people, but it has largely become precisely that.  This is how many people view "government", along with the attendant and often tacit assumptions of its vast inherent powers and authority, not so much to govern, but to rule.  Consider the old saw, "you can't fight city hall", as just one example of how the notion of objectively real government has distorted human perception so wildly out of sound shape that we now as matters of average behavior tend to obey with great and timid compliance any any all edicts issued therefrom, regardless of how wildly idiotic, dangerous, and criminally violative of our rights as Freemen.

As I have written elsewhere, remove all people from the earth, and with them "government" vanishes without a trace.  Government is the root of the problem, along with the darker side of human nature, regardless whether public or private.  Private government, in fact, poses at least an equal threat to liberty, and make no mistake about it, whatever you call it, when people become unaccountable for their actions as agents of "government", a people are already well on their ways to being lost.

Therefore, it is imperative that human beings utterly reject the concept of the object: government.  Rather, they must embrace the notion of governance which, properly defined and administered, can but only produce far improved results where liberty is preserved and tyranny stamped out with brutal and cold indifference.  When we see people we now view as Merecogs in the machinery of "government", we tend to see them as unassailable because we tend to see "government" in the same way.  They become sacrosanct by extension and association, and why?  Because "government" says so.  A prime example of this is the fact that in most US jurisdictions, if you so much as place a friendly hand on the shoulder of a police officer, he is falsely authorized to arrest you and have you charged with a felony.  It is absurd, and yet it is a reality as common as dirt.

In this way have we built our own prisons of thought and perception with indomitable walls that cannot be gotten over, under, around, through, or be sapped.

Also be clear on the fact that in a truly free land, governance is the first responsibility of the individual, the duty which he discharges primarily by governing himself in accord with the principles of proper human relations.  This is key, because the purpose of having agents of public governance is mainly to deal with those cases where self-governance has failed to meet the standard.  Murders, robberies, rapes, beatings, and other real and actual crimes are the purview of governing authority, and not the valid praxeological prerogatives of Freemen.  Without the proper comportment of what I will conversationally term the "vast majority" of a people, governing agents become necessarily either overwhelmed wherein they quit their now-precarious positions, or they turn to responses that seem uncomfortably close to those of tyrants.  Even this latter may be valid when grave circumstance leaves no choice in what we may call an existential crisis, but such powers may validly hold only for the shortest of periods until such time as people recover proper possession of themselves and return to the ways of proper behavior in the company of others.  History shows, as we are living through this very circumstance as of this writing, that once such emergency powers have been assumed, those who have taken those reins are often loathe to relinquish them.  But this is a problem more of human nature than of the architecture and implementation of proper governance in a free land.

The moment we strip away the false facade of "government", exposing it as nothing more than a collection of fellow human beings with no greater authority to act than your own, the pictures in our minds suddenly, radically, and somewhat indelicately change.  When you see the police officer in this way, he no longer stands as an irresistible monument of state-sponsored force against those over whom he lords.  Rather, he is at best a public servant beholden to serve you in all the theoretically proper ways, and at worst a murdering coward and felon.  This alteration of one's perrceptions, of course, does nothing to alter the behavior of cops.  Resist their predations and other felonies against you, and you stand to be violated in ways up to an including being murdered outright.  But this change in perception, while impotent to alter third-party behavior overnight, at least leads to the possibility of better times to come,.  If a critical mass of public awareness is reached, hand in hand with the necessary attitudinal changes by those same people such that public tolerance of tyranny wanes to a point where people become willing to put their lives, their honors, and their fortunes to risk for the sake of their own liberty, as well as that of all those for whom they hold love and affection, a deep transformational improvement cannot be far off.

With the right change in the perceptions of enough people, the tyrant and his agents are backed into a corner wherein the choice is foisted upon them: cease all malversation, or pay with your lives.  This is a reasonable path to change, and I daresay it is the only one precisely because so many people in positions of power tend to wander from the path of reason such that no message other than that of the threat of imminent personal destruction gets through to them.  Their positions lead them to behave as petulant, spoiled, well-armed children prone to pitching tantrums that know few limits when the proles fail to toe their lines.

Privatizing government does nothing to ameliorate this situation precisely because the minds of the governed remain saddled with the same baggage with respect to the ways in which government is perceived, and therefore regarded.  Furthermore, privatization invariably leads to diverse definitions of "proper governance", with nothing in principle to assure that any given jurisdiction will indeed govern properly with respect to the principles of proper human relations, which is what governance is supposed to be all about.  Furthermore, there is nothing in principle to stop such a private jurisdiction from running off the rails, especially when they have at their disposal a body of armed, able, and willing enforcers, a commodity syndicate all too easily obtained and bent to one's will, especially when imbued with the imprimatur of "authority", whether valid or false. In most cases, as may be readily seen, it is the latter.

The advantage of public governance is that in the minds of people there tends to be the trend toward seeing the propriety and necessity of a uniformly architected code of guidance and control (when needed) that is to be uniformly administered such that justice is fair and equitable across all social lines, regardless of status, purport to authority, or any other phony baloney exception or claim to immunity from being held accountable.

You might now wish to point out that this is what we currently have as you read these words, and I would be forced to agree.  You might then point out that despite this standard, we are awash in corruption, political falderal, deceit, lies, injustice, and outright tyranny.  Once again, I would be obliged to acknowledge the truth of the fact.  And finally, you might then ask, "if this be the case, then your theory of the benefit of public governance is disproved", to which I would have to respond by saying "not so fast!"

The problem is not public governance per sé, but rather the fact that we the people fail to hold accountable those who commit gross and criminal violations upon the people to whom they are in principle beholden by virtue of their sworn oaths of office.  I have attempted to offer a fair swag at a remedy for this most grievous and dolorous circumstance with my idea for Amendment XXVIII (28) to the Constitution of the United States of America.  Therein I set forth the notion and basic architecture for holding sternly to account every human being who has sworn their oath of good faith and competent service to the people of America.  To my knowledge, no modern nation-state has ever yet saddled their governing administrators with such requirements, threats, risks, and grave punishments.  As in the Amendment, I maintain that when those vested in the Public Trust quake in nauseated, sweating apprehension at the very thought of committing a violation against those to whom they swore service, malversation will for all practical purposes become a relic all but forgotten.  Those few cases that would on occasion arise to the attention of the public would be punished with extreme prejudice, thus serving as good reminders to the rest of what awaits them when they misbehave as agents of governance, sworn to uphold and protect the very rights upon which they had trespassed without cause or authority.

I have asserted and I maintain that the solutions to tyranny are simple: hold the criminals who transgress against the Public Trust accountable in such a manner that none but the most severely insane criminals would dare engage.  The small handful of psychopaths failing to comport themselves to the reasonable standard may be fed to the flames with a clear conscience as the elimination of the most grave of threats to humanity's inherent freedoms and the rights that issue therefrom stands as a vlid response to such threats, just as shooting the ghost from a rapist's carcass is a most appropriate response by the intended victim.  Nail their wicked hides to the church door in the town square that all may bear witness to the condign fate of tyrants and their minions.  In the matters of governance under the specifications of Special Trust, only the most brutally non-equivocating responses will keep the wolves at bay.  Anything less invites and encourages the disaster that is today's human world.  This reality is harsh and in many ways ugly, but ask yourself this: is it any uglier than the results of seventy five years of Soviet-style communism?  It is uglier than the ongoing tyranny that is the Red Chinese "government"?  Is it uglier than the Khmer Rouge picnic in Cambodia?  Idi Amin?  Hitler?  Any of the other grand butchers of human history who served only to sow death, disease, poverty, and misery unto all whose lives they touched?

What would you prefer, given there are no other practically effective alternatives: millions murdered in wars and under the various tyrannical purges of murdering lunatics, or a world that holds the tiny minorities of such people to account for their crimes in a manner that leaves the rest of us not just with reasonable feelings of assurance that we are protected from such people as a general rule, but that we are all give something about which to think as the hangman's rope snaps tight upon the neck of the man who would see your children relegated and reduced to abject servitude, and perhaps even extinction?

I, for one, am fully in favor of killing off smaller numbers of tyrannical administrators of governance, rather than allowing those same people to murder innocents by the boxcar load on trains that stretch for miles into the vanishing horizon.  It is not that I wish to see people brought to great harm.  It is precisely that I wish nobody to suffer such fates, while recognizing the irremediable nature of the tyrannical personality type.  I am willing to see evil for what it is, meet it head-on, and remove it as a threat to good and decent, and peaceable people who wish nothing more than to live their lives as they see fit while bringing no harm to their fellows.  This is not an ill-reasoned desire, but is the very essence of the lives of Freemen.  Do what thou wilt, but bring no unjust harm.

Thanks once again, and as always please accept my best wishes.

Private Governance Is Not A Solution

 The problem with most anarchists and those of similar philosophial bents is that they categorically reject governance.  In their understandable desire to see the elimination of the evils of "government", they toss all dedicated public  governing activity to the winds with the claim that the "market" will act as the governing mechanism, as if by its own and seemingly magical accord.  This notion holds understandably strong appeal with those who love the notion of freedom, but does so in a way similar to the way in which the Star Trek franchise of low-quality science fiction appeals to its fans; the great benefits without having to do any real work.  What these presumed lovers of liberty have failed to calculate in this model are a few factors that arise as problems, at least one of them even greater than that of so-called "government".  

Allow me to explain.

Firstly and for example, when we speak of "private courts" as do so many anarchists, as being the free-market solution to issues of crime, tort, equity, and justice, there is the tacit assumption that those courts are to be beholden to those whom they ostensibly serve.  This notion is all well and good, so far as it goes, but it never goes quite far enough.  When such a private court goes rogue or corrupt in some other manner, and here it matters not whether it happens once, multiple times, or even becomes a habitual phenomenon, it matters no whit whether it is taken to task if the parties for whom injustice has been served have been irreparably damaged.  This is especially true in cases where significant time has passed since the beginning of a sentence and time has already been served.  How does one compensate those whose irreplaceable time has been stolen from them?

Yes, one can compensate with money, but that is a timid replacement for time, careers, opportunities, and family lost, as well as the rest of the grand miseries heaped upon the innocent without either just cause or authority.  And who is to say that the courts in question will be held accountable, or even that they can be?

There is an angle played by anarchists that says the competitive marketplace will handle such situations, but of this I hold grave doubt.  For one thing, who will establish the authority for a man or group thereof to hold a court accountable for its failures?  By what authority does such a man or body thereof claim the valid power to do so?  What is their standard of judgment, who gets to establish it, and by what authority do they do so?  Of one thing we may rest assured is that such a court will deny any such authority, which brings us right back to the original problem we face today: an effective "governMENT" having been established and having positioned itself above those whom it is supposed to act as a servant, but in point of practical fact acts as master.

Secondly, the next grand assumption is that there will be market competition whereby multiple courts act in a given market space to countervail the excesses, corruptions, and incapacities of the another; the good old idea of "balance of powers".   What of monopolies?  Consider the case where a court does better enough than the rest to put their competition out of business, thereby becoming, let us assume, a regional monopoly.  What is to stop them from pulling the Walmart trick whereby as the competition recedes into extinction, the prices are then gradually raised, leaving shoppers little choice, save perhaps to drive long distances to find better venues?  What is to stop such a monopoly from going corrupt, and once done, who will hold them accountable?  Bear in mind the wholly predictable human habit of seeking greater powers with a stern determination never to allow oneself to relinquish that power, once acquired.

What does one do when such a court comes into power and stands unchallenged?  What does a population do when such a court becomes practically unchallengeable by any means other than that of open warfare, replete with killing, maiming, terrorizing the innocent, and the destruction of all manner of valuable property?

Such issues are never to my awareness addressed by the proponents of these theoretically free-market driven societies in any detail, save to assert that the market will see to them, presumably in a fair, equitable, just, and non-violent manner.  I do not buy this for a moment, the reason being that the people of the United States of America have on their books every means of doing precisely this, and yet now suffer under one of the most virulently corrupt and dangerous governments on the planet at the time of this writing.

Let us imagine a group of citizens manages to overthrow such a monopolized court.  What then?  Does that population go without the benefit of a venue in which they may seek justice?  For how long?  What of the pending cases of the overthrown court?  What of the cases closed where people are in prison for crimes they may not have committed?  What of torts that never actually happened, yet for which parties had been held responsible?  What of equities imposed that were not at all equitable?  What of judgments that can now no longer be trusted in any manner or degree?  What of the records of such events?  What if no other private court steps up to fill the void?  How would such a court be held accountable for its actions?  By what standards and procedures would the new court take up its position? 

The litany of such queries is vast and many of those questions lead to mine fields of thorny issues that are not so easily solved.

Let us bear in mind here that these courts are privately established, privately held, and privately operated.  There is no principled mechanism by which such entities can be held accountable for their actions, save that the people break out the torches and pitchforks.  Each process of establishment of such courts would be private matters, technically beyond the question of the marketplace.  Granted, such establishments would almost certainly have to toe a line upfront.  But in time and as it gained effective power, such courts would invariably seek to increase their influences, even if done in very thin increments that do not arouse the suspicions and possible anger of the people served, which is precisely what commonly happens with so-called "governments" in universal fashion, if at varying degrees of advance.

And what of arresting those accused of crimes who have been brought before a judge? Under what authority does one human being appropriate the liberties of another man, effectively kidnapping him for judgment by others?  I cannot say that such authority does not exist, but that its application can run amok most wildly and in very short order, unless there are rules.  But who drafts them?  By what authority do they do so and by what standard?  Who holds them accountable to the integrity of the rules they pass into what we may call "effective Law"?

What of the arrestee who objects to the private court to which he has been taken, perhaps claiming his distrust of the ability to get a fair shake there?  What if there are no other venues in the given locale?  What of the difference of opinion on such matters of trust between arrestor and arrestee?  Will the private court have its own private enforcers to affect such arrests?  How would such enforcers, whether officers of the court in question, or ordinary citizens, be held accountable for their actions, most particularly in the case where the accused is found to have been innocent of the charges?

We could go on for days hammering out the various questions, not to mention the ways in which practical administration can go wrong.  Furthermore, by now we should be able to see that there stands a grand gorilla in this room that speaks to the need for a consistent and universal standard by which justice is best to be administered, however imperfectly at times.  Private means private, which means that within the bounds of the entity, what they say, goes.  Anyone not seeing the great and looming hazard there is either not paying attention, or suffers from some grave deficiency, mental or moral.

And so we come in a sense, full-circle, in that it can be seen that a public system of courts remains the best solution in this imperfect world.  But a proper public court system would differ from that under which we now suffer in some fundamental ways.  More broadly speaking, a proper system of governance would be public, yet very different, not so much structurally, but rather in terms of the nature of the powers of the parties in question, that is, the servants and those whom they are charged to serve.

Today, "government" stands as the de-facto master, the people being the serfs; the proles; those whose faces are effectively smashed with Orwell's proverbial boot.  In a properly formed and administered system of governANCE, the word "government" would be dismissed from service, once and for all time.  The powers of the people to regulate most directly the ways in which the servants of governance (we may call them SOGs just to be cute) comport themselves in the discharge of their duties, would be clear and unassailable in principle.  Making such powers practically invincible would, as in all cases, be left to the people.  Americans hold that power now, yet they have allowed themselves to be cowed into serfdom by forces that have consistently acted against their better interests: the interests of their status as Freemen.  The responsibility for this dolorous and rue-worthy outcome rests almost wholly on the people.  While it may be said that the so-called "politicians" had neither cause nor authority to engage in their felonious perfidies against the people to whom they swore their oaths, it can come as no surpriser that they have done so, just as it is no surprise that a man is bitten when he carelessly chooses to play with a sidewinder.  It is only to be expected that a political office holder or other agent of "government" is going to inevitably go wrong, left to his devices unsupervised.

Because this devolution is perfectly predictable in effectively all cases, there can be only one practicable solution: the people must hold and exercise the power to hold accountable all such agents of governance who stray from the narrow path that defines their duties, such as they may be in each case.  The people must be able to punish such violators of the Public Trust in ways brutal and cruel such that all who occupy positions of Special Trust (in other words, SOGs) are given the occasion graphic reminder of the tenuous nature of their positions and that they serve at the pleasure of the people.  I have outlined the basics of such powers and responsibilities in my Amendment XXVIII to the Constitution of the United States of America, a proposal I would see added to the document yesterday and made the Law of the land forthwith.

When the people are able, ready, and eager to bring violators of the Public Trust to justice, and to mete out grave punishments for those duly convicted of their crimes against those to whom they swore oaths of good faith and competent service upon their words and their honors, the face of the world will change to vast improvement in short order.

We suffer the slings and arrows not of the chances of outrageous fortune, but of the mostly synthetic machinations of other men, whether their actions are the products of blundering incompetence, good but wrong-headed intention, or outright criminality.  It is up to us to change this.  There is no cavalry coming to rescue us from the boogie-men of "government".  We must be our own cavalry.  We must insist upon the changes needed to wrest our freedoms from the hands of the most dangerous men on the planet, keep those liberties close to our bosoms, and guard them with Patrick Henry's jealously, the more greenly covetous, the better.

At the end of the day, what is required is knowledge and determination sufficient to the maintenance of liberty.  There will always be those who seek to take from you that which is yours without your consent.  The only way to adequately ensure agains this is an attitude of absolute intolerance for trespass in enough of a population to make the consequences far too ghastly to even contemplate.

The problem with "government" lies in the minds of men, and not in anything materially substantive.  There is nothing wrong with "government" as a concept, but the practice tends to be far removed from theory.  That can be remedied, but the cost is high, requiring a vast adjustment in the attitudes of most people.  When people take "government" as something that actually exists in itself, independent of humanity, they have sealed their fates as serfs and possibly even as slaves.  But when people recognize that "government" is nothing other than a collection of other people no different from themselves, everything becomes open to change in that they see their own authority to hold to account those in whom they have vested their belief that the agents of "government" will execute the functions of governance with competence and faith to that trust.

The solutions to the problems addressed here lie with you and you alone.  Get yourself educated; develop a love of liberty; learn to see the challenges and risks as blessings of freedom and not a curse. Finally, spread the gospel of freedom to everyone you know and have them do the same.  It is not too late to reclaim that which has been so wrongly and feloniously stolen away, but you have to act.  Waiting for someone else to come to the rescue will assure your fate as a less-than-human.

Be well my friends, and as always please accept my best wishes.