Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for a lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. – Hermann Göering Gilbert, G.M. Nuremberg Diary. York: Da Capo Press, Inc., 1947 Words like freedom, security, and history evoke strong emotional responses that many of us accept without question. Such emotions can lead to poor decisions, especially with regards to public policy decisions,… Read more Control of Language, Control of Thought →
Conspiracy is as natural as breathing. And since the struggles for advantage nearly always have a rhetorical strain, we believe that the systematic contemplation of them forces itself on the student of rhetoric. Indeed, of all the motives in Machiavelli, is not the most usable for us his attempt to transcend the disorders of his times, not by either total acquiescence or total avoidance, but by seeking to scrutinize them as accurately and calmly as he could? (Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1962,… Read more Veiled Paradigms →
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. Mencken, H.L. A Mencken Chrestomathy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956, p. 29 The winner of the last contest, a very powerful man, walks down the ramp to the deafening sound of thousands of fans cheering his name, holding up signs with his name, catch-phrases, etc. The challenger, follows in a like manner albeit with a smattering of boos thrown in, but with his own… Read more Politics as Pro-Wrestling →
I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American… Read more Democrazy: Democratic Fascism? →
Ernest Jones, a biographer of the father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, said of Nietzsche that he “had more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who ever lived or was ever likely to live”. I find it difficult to categorize Nietzsche sometimes because he was so decidedly anti-system and went out of his way to not create a philosophical system. His approach to epistemology has sometimes been described as perspectivism, a sort of philosophical safeguard to protect against philosophic system-building and dogma. It is safe to say the Nietzsche… Read more Nietzschean Libertarianism →
Anomaly, Tea-O-Conned, and New Word Order warn against top-down, authoritarian attempts to détourn dissenters back into the fold. The good news is that despite some efforts to the contrary, there really is no “New Word Order” dictating meaning from the top down to us plebes. Now if only we can let our fellow humans know this! The fact is that the meanings of words change across time. This is why we have the study of etymology, to track that change. For example, etymologically speaking the term ‘libertarian’ was originally used to differentiate… Read more Language & Liberty →
Libertarians sure are a contentious group; they love to quarrel. Did you know that Murray Rothbard wrote a one-act play satirizing Ayn Rand called “Mozart Was A Red”? Did you know that Robert Anton Wilson wrote an entire book satirizing Murray Rothbard’s natural rights approach entitled, “Natural Law: Or Don’t Put a Rubber On Your Willy”? Getting all of us to agree on anything has been likened to herding cats. That’s ok by me, I like the various factions and schisms since I am a Discordian Libertarian. I suppose it… Read more Thomas Paine Was A Red: A Primer on Libertarian Welfare →
Having been a long-time libertarian, the over-arching moral directive of my adult life has been the idea of voluntarism, i.e., that all forms of human interaction should be consensual. This emphasis on the primacy of consent in all social avenues often leads libertarians to hold positions that seem counter-intuitive to the uninitiated. Maybe my point is best summarized by the popular online libertarian joke/meme: “I want gay people to be able to protect their marijuana plants with guns they bought untaxed.” As a libertarian I am opposed to violent, coercive… Read more Nobody Expects the American Inquisition →
The attention of most libertarians seems to be easily directed at economic or political topics, but really there are a number of topics in other fields that warrant our concern as well. I wanted to bring up what I call “Social X”, i.e., social experiments. Understanding the implications of these experiments can become a form of mental self-defense for living in the 21st Century. Here are five that I find particularly important (followed by 8 that your should know about too): 1. Rosenhan’s Experiment David Rosenhan wrote “Being Sane in Insane… Read more Social X →
I want to share a concept that is very near and dear to my heart, one that hopefully resonates. This concept is something I call Personal Anarchy (PA) which is NOT anarcho-capitalism. I do not consider “anarcho-capitalism” tenable for many reasons. One main reason is that the concept “property” is doomed to being eternally ill-defined. Right now, as it has always been and likely will always be, there are many competing theories of property out there and they all justify violence under certain circumstances. For example, some anarchists vehemently believe… Read more Optimistic Anarchism: Avoiding Enforcement Zones →
Alex Wissner-Gross, Harvard Ph.D. in physics, has developed an equation that may explain intelligence itself, which some libertarians may find very flattering: Intelligence is a physical process that seeks to “maximize future freedom of action and to avoid constraints in its own future.” Reading this really got me thinking about how libertarianism would be best defined, especially since, if as the late, great Thomas Szasz said, “The battle for the world is the battle for definitions.” …then it is probably important for libertarians to attempt to define “libertarianism”—if we don’t… Read more Defining Liberty →
Mental Self Defense 