Being Free Is No Picnic

I used to be a consulting engineer. I ran my own small firm and made fair piles of money. Then one day my phone stopped ringing because apparently I was too old. I now work a second career making about 7.5 percent of my former earnings, and I don't complain about it. I could cry and wail and shriek "age discrimination", but I don't because were I to do so, I would be a dishonest scoundrel attempting to secure something to which I am not entitled: a job guaranteeing me my former going rate. I would rather starve than stoop to such depravity.

So I work on a construction crew. It keeps me from getting fat at 68, keeps my other skills alive, and to be honest, it is more interesting and satisfying than dealing with whiny clients who make all manner of wildly stupid decisions despite your strong analysis, the upshots of which tell them in clean and concise language that those decisions are big time risk-laden losers.

I am owed NOTHING by this world, and neither are you, save that we respect one another's equal rights. I make my way and if one day I cannot, then I will leave this world for want of whatever it was I could not secure for myself. I can accept that precisely because I understand I am owed nothing, save respect for my natural rights, just as I owe the same to all others. Make your bones using your best honest effort. Some will win and some will lose. This is the nature of things.

If you want to learn and become reasonably wise, then learn this. I promise that it will serve you well.

Freedom, for which actual "anarchy" is nothing fancier than a somewhat arcane euphemism, demands seven things of a man:

1 Intellect
2 Smarts
3 Integrity
4 Respect
5 Generosity
6 Responsibility
7 Courage

Choose these and you will be a free man. But none of it is easy; much of it being terrifying at times, and aggravating much of the rest of the day. Then there is that slice of your soul that is going to rebel against each of these virtues precisely because they are all difficult, and therefore chafe against the part of you that is just a little bit rotten, wanting free stuff and cheap ease, not to mention having the world precisely to your liking.

That's your inner two-year old, and make no mistake, we all of us have one.

Being an adult means putting the brat in a box, burying him, and never again letting him darken your door - an effort that must continue unabated for a lifetime because that spoilt toddler is eternal, and he never ever gives up trying to strong arm you into caving to his insistence and, at times, tantrums. Why do you think people rob banks, end up in prison, dead, or destroy their lives with drugs and violence? It is because the leave their inner runt in charge, rather than keeping the little beggar on a choker with a very short leash.

Choosing to be an intact, free and sovereign adult can at times be a miserably difficult task. But when you choose correctly, you enjoy a brand of liberty that no amount of self-indulgence can ever come close to matching. Letting your base self run amok is the guaranteed path to disaster and death. Keeping him in his box is really the only reasonable path to a life worth living. The dividend of self-respect - knowing that you are the captain of your fate - is priceless, and nothing in this world can beat it. I know because I've been on both sides of that line.

The good news here is that the more diligently you practice the habit of holding your inner destroyer at bay, the easier it becomes; the more familiar, and therefore the more comfortable. Bear also in mind that maintenance is a whole lot easier than getting up the slope in the first place. And at some point, much as with the practice of good mannerliness, it becomes pleasurable habit from which one gains endless satisfaction because you have become your own master. Few things are as satisfying as knowing that you are beyond some specific corruption not because you are inherently immune, but because you have chosen to be. That is the truest and greatest power a man can cultivate. You are in control of who you are and what you do, come what may. And what comes is not always the thing that you think you want, so be prepared for disappointments. Those are the times when it pays to be stubborn because giving in to the screaming brat may make you feel better in the moment, but down the road you are guaranteed to regret the decision.

The quality of your life is 90% dictated by your attitude. Choose to be a whiny cur and your life will be riddled with miseries at every turn. Choose to be an adult in control of your emotions, impulses and desires, and you will benefit from it in ways you cannot now imagine. Learning to eat bitter and yet remain intact and in control of yourself is high attainment. Comparatively few are able to do it; far fewer are willing to even try. But the failure is almost never one of capacity, but of will. People just decide that there's no point in being that good. And so they settle for being lesser men for the sake of getting what they think they want. This is the very definition of the Weakman.
Johnny gives in to the appeal of Eileen's legs because he just cannot (WILL not) stop thinking about what it must be like having them wrapped around his head.  And so he dwells and dwells until his sense of what is right (like not cheating on his loving wife) shrinks in comparison to his sense of what he wants, resulting in all manner of rationalizing as to why it's OK, even if only for one time, to hit on Eileen.  And that is just one of the manifold ways in which people run their lives off the rails with all the best of intentions.

You will never lose by choosing to be a free man, which is a man of knowledge; a man who runs himself, which is to say a man of self-control. Of that you have my sincere promise, but the path is difficult with most giving up, which is a terrible shame, for were they to stick with it, I confidently estimate that 90% or better of all the problems of which so many complain, would vanish as if by magic.

Ron Paul used to quip that "freedom is popular". He was wrong. Freedom is decidedly unpopular and it is so because of those seven requirements for being a free man.

Ball's in your court.

It always was. God bless you all, and until next time please accept my best wishes.

Hierarchy Isn't A Problem

For the past several years I've noticed a disturbing simplism with people who claim to be "anarchists", most of them on the younger side of things, with respect to the notion of hierarchies. Many such people rail on endlessly about the evils of all hierarchies, pledging to see them eliminated in toto, no matter the cost. This tendency to simplistic views is now extremely common, it having grown steadily in America since at least the mid- to late-1960s. We could see it with the hippies as they spewed their half-baked notions of freedom, war, culture, and politics in general as they served well enough in their roles as useful idiots to the progressives. But at least many of those young adults recovered, at least in some part, once they stopped the LSD, dropped dope smoking, and of necessity had to go get jobs so they could eat and have a place to sleep that wasn't some stranger's couch or the back of a van. Sadly, the trend of simplistic world views has grown not only to ubiquity in certain populations, not all of them of a "progressive" or "left" bent, but it has done so in a manner such that it seems civil discourse with such people has become just this side of impossible with large legions of them. In that vein I would like to zoom in on those who self-ID as "anarchist": this Bud's for you. I would begin by noting that here my use of "anarchy" is not as jargon, a snippet of heavy baggage that the term has carried for well over 100 years now, and which is why I prefer "autodiathism", from the Greek for "self-determination". Men such as Gavrilo Princip are prime historical examples of minds run amok to the extent that world-altering changes ensue in the wake of the material choices of action they make pursuant to the chaotically errant beliefs they embrace. One such current fad beliefs among so-called "anarchists" is that all hierarchies are inherently evil and that they must be eliminated... probably by any means necessary, and regardless of who gets hurt. And so I feel obliged to correct this false belief for the sake of humanity's future, not that anyone's listening. There are a great many different types of hierarchy, the salient idea being the plain and simple fact that hierarchy in sé is neutral. Claiming the idea of hierarchy as some sort of inherent evil as so many go on about until the eyeballs of reasonable men roll from their sockets, is plainly non-credible. It is like blaming the gun for the murder of the poor fellow working the graveyard shift at a corner bodega. It is so obviously wrong, it astonishes those same reasonable men as to how it is possible that anyone with an IQ is able to accept it as even worthy of considerations, much less as valid and true.

The bottom-line value of any hierarchy lies in whether it brings the employers of such structures to the satisfaction of their objectives, all else equal. A hierarchy is just another tool. It can be used for good, or otherwise.

Communist and other authoritarian political hierarchies, particularly when applied to populations larger than the typical Irish Catholic family of three generations past, have proven as universal failures because they chafe against everything that is human in people, most particularly those who have to work to support those who loaf; it pisses people off and leaves them with attitudes which are understandably antithetical to that which is generally considered constructive and desirable. Reasonable people do not like being robbed, defrauded, or played for fools.

As for hierarchies in businesses, an area of consideration that gets all sorts of truly foolish lip service in so-called "social media" discussions, those are mostly private matters. Little Johnny Dough and his brother Dill, may have jobs at Glominoid Corporation, but they are by no means entitled to those jobs in any absolute sense, contrary to what some people might believe. Therefore, if they don't like their circumstance as applies to their employment, they are free to seek other arrangements. If they cannot secure other employment, then they are out of luck in that regard, and are then faced with the choice to cowboy up and get with their employer's program, quit, or risk being given the heave-ho when their less-than-satisfactory attitude comes to the boss's notice.

It's a tough world out there, but not nearly as tough as it might be. People would do themselves a big favor in remembering that. Not only are hierarchies not inherently evil, in many situations they are absolutely necessary. The lowest hanging fruit there, of course, would be the case of warfare. Imagine Galithia has just marched its army over your northern border. They are well-trained and disciplined. They operate on a hierarchical basis and function like a well-oiled machine. This is what I call "superorganization": when a group of people come together pursuant to a common purpose in order to accomplish things that a solitary individual could not achieve on his own. Could a single man have built the Great Pyramid at Gizeh in Egypt? Not likely, especially with the technological capacities we currently assume were available in those days. But gather twenty thousand men of manifold skills and sprinkle twenty or so years of time liberally about, and before you know it, VOILA! Superorganizations must perforce be managed. Your body is a superorganism in cellular terms, and it is a hierarchical system that manages the various functions. You don't have cells in the tendon of your left big toe managing heart rhythms or the lining of your colon doing your thinking for you... well, at least most of us don't. The organs such as brain, kidneys, heart, liver, etc. are arranged in a form of hierarchy insofar as the regulation of their respective functions are concerned, as well as their inter-relations. Someone one needs to tell the gall bladder when to dispense its contents to the stomach, how much, and when to stop. That represents a functional hierarchy with which you would not be able to properly digest your food intake, which would eventually lead to the arrival of your expiration date. Consider the erection of a 150-story office tower. Without a properly designed, constructed, and functioning hierarchy, the task becomes utterly impossible to so much as get off to a reasonable start, much less complete. Yet I hear "anarchists" railing one endlessly about the universal evil of hierarchies as a class of arrangements. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Now we look at the other side of the coin, where hierarchies bring some form of evil to the world. A prime example is always found in political schemes. Communism/socialism is perhaps the premier example of hierarchies that produce nothing better than unvarnished evil in the forms of poverty, degradation, servitude, disease, misery, and death. In such cases, the anarchist's complaint stands valid, almost to a fault. Consider the political corruption that now rampages through the halls of America's Congressional offices. What was once at least marginally better in such terms, is now utterly absent any pretext of respect for either the Constitution, or the rights of Free Men its putative purpose is to protect from harm. The well designed hierarchy of American governance has been turned against the people it is supposed to serve, this example underscoring the way in which the tool has been turned from proper application that produced net good results, to something which foists net evil upon the people. Just as a hammer is a tool, or capitalism, hierarchies can produce fine results, disaster, or just about anything in between. It is neither good nor evil. The good and the evil that results rests wholly at the feet of those who design, administer, and operate a given hierarchy. This isn't rocket surgery. And to rather than going all crazy, losing one's mind over <GASP> hierarchies, it pays good dividends to dig just a little more deeply where it will be revealed to anyone with an open mind that the value of such structures predicate almost completely on the results they produce, all else equal.

So do yourselves a big favor and lock away your emotions run amok, calming yourself, and adopt demeanor of reason backed by solid logic. I promise that you will thank yourself in the end. There are endless dragons in the human world against which to do battle. Hierarchy, as such, is not one of them. Be well, and until next time, please accept my best wishes.

Today's Diatribe, 22 January, 2026

The grand testament to the unforgivable stupidity of spoiled and overyly-pampered Americans lies in the fact that we now have a significant minority who actually believe that socialism/communism is the answer to the world's problems.

The danger here is almost incalculable, and the enemy is us.

The history of authoritarian collectivism is now plenty long enough - and the absolute bloodiest in all of humanity's blood-marinated history - to be validly assessed as first-order evil and the greatest possible danger to all that is good between men.

Genghis Khan was a low-rent amateur in comparison with the Marxists, Leninists, Maoists, and all the other viciously murderous simulacra who butchered and starved their ways through the decades of plunder, death, disease, poverty, slavery, and abject misery.

Those wicked, murdering fiends contrived the kind of personal hell that strips away any abstract debate about numbers or "direct vs. indirect" causes. Those soulless simulacra didn't just murder — they engineered suffering on a scale that mocks the humanity it claimed to want to save, while brazenly posturing as "liberators". What greater irony in bald-faced lying could possibly devolve? The Soviet hypocrisy - the unmitigated brass they manifested - of daring to vilify Hitler while outdoing him in body count and systemic sadism by an order of magnitude... The NAZIs were choir boys in comparison with communist/socialists. There is simply no comparison. Such notions constitute a bottomless depravity that exposes the subhuman nature of their false convictions, and the endless corruption that lies at the very heart of forced collectivism.

No words are sufficient, no form of condemnation equal to the debt of rightful justice owed to the memory of those who perished at the hands of communist/socialist demons, not to even mention the unmitigated tragedy of the viciously abused people who miraculously survived the physical meat grinder, only to have had their lives consumed and reduced to ruin by the most toxic and deeply, dangerously idiotic contrivance of all human history.

What do we say to the dead, and to those whose lives were wasted in brutish cruelty and abject servitude to the most evil criminals ever to walk the earth? "OOPS"?!

The adherents to the most unforgivable evils ever vomited forth from hell's gizzard into the lap of abused and slaughtered humanity must never be forgotten for what they made of themselves by conscious choice. Let them serve as eternal reminders of the worst that humanity has had to offer unto itself, that we may never again fall into such felonious error.

And let the Free Men of the world come finally and perpetually to grim intolerance of those who advocate for yet another round of such stench-generating depravity, regardless of intentions fair or foul. Let Free Men give fair augury to the carpet bagging peddlers of such decay and tyrannical danger, that their machinations will not be far tolerated; that they will be reduced to ash if they persist in their attempts to pollute the minds of sovereign people with the lies that corrupt through enticement, and which are the black heart of what is among the greatest of all evils, second only to that of human corruptibility itself, upon which it relies for its ingress.

And if perchance it proves that there can be no peaceable avenue to the just, and proper resolution of such dolorous threats of ragingly deadly ignorance and malevolence, then may Free Men find the wisdom, resolve, and the much needed courage to take what measures desperation may require of them in order to preserve all from the ravaging falsehoods that threaten to shackle our wrists, ankles, necks, and our minds.

The era of tolerating of the intolerable must now come to an ignominious end at any cost because it is destroying us.

God bless America, human freedom, and may destruction and castration find all tyrants, petty and grand. May all Weakmen be reduced to irrelevancy, forever quiesced by their own blatant corruptions of ignorance and avarice in the faces of their betters, that they may pose no material threat to the best interests of free and sovereign humanity. Until next time, please accept my best wishes.

Government Of The People

 Notice how the president is not calling up a militia in the face of the grave troubles now coming to boil in Minnesota; nor is anyone else in "government".

I make no judgment on this fact as to cause or intention, yet I cannot help but wonder why it is so, for the possible reasons are several fold.

Because of the way utter failure has increasingly progressed by "government" in America over the past umpteen decades, one can only wonder whether this is yet more scheming intended to leave "government" as the tacitly assumed sole authorized wielder of such powers and roles, the rest relegated to dependence upon "government" to handle all problems no matter how great or petty, through prohibition. This is a valid concern, and IMO time is here for Americans to stand and take matters into their rightful hands through assertion of their sovereign rights and authority to put crimes against liberty to proper ends, most especially when those crimes are committed in large scale such as we now see in places as rioters burn cities and bring innocent people to unjust physical harm.

The "state" is not the only entity qualified to correct such excursions from peaceable daily life. "Government" is in fact the least qualified to correct such problems even in the best of times, much less so after 150 years of ever growing corruption and failure.

Arm yourselves in body and mind in preparation not just of the current and escalating troubles, but to become the proper and perpetual instruments of just and rightful governance, first and foremost of yourselves, but also of those of your fellows who fail to do so in criminal fashion.

Remember and never forget: "government" OF the people, first and foremost. YOU are "government". You must be, because if you will not govern, you WILL BE governed by others in whose intentions, integrity, and capacities you can never be quite certain. Giving yourself over to police, mayors, governors, legislators, and village dog catchers is to put your very life in the hands of people whose trustworthiness is PERFORCE never sufficient to the day.

The choice is ours.

It always has been. Until next time, please accept my best wishes.