Freedom 101 - Pillar 10

Pillar 10: Strategy

I include this pillar as a set of "How To Get There" thoughts, because times are particularly poisonous toward liberty at this hour on the planet.  Our culture, after a century of statism, is seeing the chickens come home to roost (like in Alfred Hitchcock’s, The Birds).

Consider the circumstances of our current governance, particularly at the federal level: a president who has committed the highest, most despicable crimes and felonies, in front of an opposition party that refuses to launch impeachment proceedings.  Americans and foreign civilians are being killed overseas in an illegal, immoral war and occupation.  The treasury is broke.  Welfare-corporatists have forced millions of creative people from the workplace.

Prospects of economic salvation exist, but few intelligentsia of stature are seeing through the haze of the government’s command economy.  Aside from libertarian and (some) Objectivist thinkers, the culture is intellectually bankrupt.  Millions of reason-renouncing Christians have ascended behind the throne, leading us toward a Talibanistic imperial theocracy.

The oil-obsessed American national security state (NSS) has enabled radical Islamic terrorists to attack Americans, then used those attacks as justification for commandeering oil-producing states in the Middle East, Eurasia, and Latin America.  Nor has the collectivist left ceased its clamor for continuation of the welfare state.  Both sides are disastrous for viable energy supplies and a healthful environment.

The Bill of Rights, having become a dead letter through the recent decades, is now on the verge of total abrogation (violation).

My fellow Americans, to be quite candid: We are in deep doodoo.

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Nonetheless, I am thoroughly confident we will achieve freedom in our time.  Remember the adage "it’s darkest just before the dawn." 

The reason-liberty movement has been building inexorably (unstoppably) in America and around the world since the middle of the previous century.  The ideological force of these concepts has been pent up—barriers of ignorance placed in its path like so many sandbags before a flood stage river—desperately, by the political classes.

What I’m going to present is a handful of key ongoing strategies that loom as major players in crashing through the barriers toward the imminent achievement of our freedom.  Note, this column is only a brief listing (with teeth); a full grand strategic analysis requires a much larger integration.  Perhaps RTF will sponsor such an effort in the near future.

So, now, mainly to stimulate thinking:

• Shared Cause of the Reason-Liberty Movement (RLM)—Until there is a broad sociological consensus, a concept that provides the common denominator of what all good cause-oriented people desire for their country and their planet, we won’t reach point B.  RLM is as good an identification as any.  When the millions of good people working for justice embrace RLM as the umbrella cause, victory over superstition and statism is imminent.

The Reason-Liberty Movement.  RLM.  You heard it here first!

• Free State Project—"The Free State Project is an agreement among 20,000 pro-liberty activists to move to New Hampshire, where they will exert the fullest practical effort toward the creation of a society in which the maximum role of government is the protection of life, liberty, and property."—A personal favorite.  The FSP is genius in conception.  By making their effort a Project the achievement is more likely than by an ordinary political organization.

• Impeachment-911 Project—Several sites and groups are behind this project.  We’ve identified the need and the approach, giving suitable links to people on the streets.  The removal from office of George Bush (and Dick Cheney) is a symbol that the body politic wants to recover its health and sanity.  I predict this effort will succeed by the end of 2006.  This strategy is vital because of its urgency.  Toward this end, let me especially plug two highly important, reputable sites: The Four Reasons and 911 Truth.

• The Internet—Take some time and surf some of the links referenced by the Links selection on the Reason to Freedom home page.  The freedom of inquiry available on the Internet is producing the best journalism and pressuring members of the reluctant major media to snip their chains and let the truth out.  The tyrants will not escape the avalanche of truth.  Our efforts at RtF embody the Internet strategy.

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come...

— Victor Hugo

• Civil disobedience and boycott—For most libertarians civil disobedience takes the form of living on the periphery of the system, learning to survive without the state.  "Atlas shrugging" is a form of civil disobedience: when the men of the mind go on strike economic collapse is inevitable.  Street protest is valuable, but secondary; when we have gained the peoples’ minds, their feet will follow.

  When Gandhi led Indians to stop wearing English-woven garments, the boycott had the well-formed idea of liberation behind it.  A similar boycott might be for every American to take 99 deductions and not file an income tax return.  The idea here is the people are in charge of the government.

• The free economy—Also referred to as the underground economy, the black market, or the market, voluntary market relationships that are not controlled or taxed by the state are closely aligned to civil disobedience.  In 1998, the IRS estimated the size of the underground economy, measured by noncollected taxes, at ~$200 billion.  It’s probably a lot higher than that.  Every dollar earned from honest work that is outside the control of the state is a dollar satisfying human needs in the most direct way; this is a wonderful pro-life thing.  If you can join the free economy, you’ll be helping yourself and your country by being a key part of the RLM.  Just be careful until we can wrest Constitutional government from the criminals in charge now.

• Political action—We mean conventional political activity in America.  Not that it isn’t important elsewhere, but no other country has a tradition of recognizing the supremacy of individual rights.

• Radical resistance—some may call it revolution, throwing off a tyrannical government by resisting and countering its aggression.  Jefferson also had something to say:

  The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of patriots and tyrants.

  — Thomas Jefferson

  The most cohesive program holding forth for radical change by nonaggressive though potentially confrontational action is through Rational Review.  The RR program performs a wonderful public service by delegitimizing the gang of thugs who currently occupy all three branches of government.  What RR says is basically if an action isn’t consistent with the Bill of Rights and the nonaggression principle, it isn’t valid.  And we will defy it and thwart it, restore our natural rights, by any means appropriate.

  Freedom: It's the Law!

  The latest thinking in how to effect the Bill of Rights (BoR) is through an American citizens’ organization that tracks infractions of the BoR by public officials.  The organization tracks these infractions and assesses penalties, to be imposed under due process of law, in accordance with the nonaggression principle.

• Initiative, Referendum, and Recall—Many states have these Progressive Party-era laws that enable the people to change their constitutions and laws directly.  A libertarian-founded organization called Citizens in Charge is working to extend initiative and referendum to all the states.  For example, the initiative process would enable me to launch a petition drive to repeal the seat belt law in Michigan.  In general, initiatives lead to greater freedom; only rarely, as with same-sex marriage sanctions, do they restrict freedom.

• Libertarian Party—a traditional method that has been stymied of late at the national level.  The problem (at that level) is conveyed in the RTF column on the 2004 National LP Convention.  My feeling is the LP is still a great mechanism for activism in local government; its full potential nationally and locally will be realized when reason becomes a cultural standard.

• Republican Party and Democratic Party—the two older parties can be redirected by dedicated libertarian cadres within.  Immediately, I see some leverage possibilities more within the Democratic Party by galvanizing dissatisfaction with the imperial tyranny of the Bush-Cheney syndicate.  The Republicans already have a formal Republican Libertarian Caucus.

• Media mining and breakthrough—Letters to the editor are vital, and everyone who has been fired up by the RLM should make a habit of writing at least two per month to the paper of their choice.

  At the national level, especially, we are waiting for the brave journalist who will resist the government-infiltrated and controlled corporations that manage most of the daily news.  This journalist, like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein with Watergate, will bring the truth to the people about 911 and other depredations of the current administration.  Like Nixon, Bush-Cheney will then fall.  As focused RLM members, get in touch with journalists on a personal basis and encourage them to expose the evils of the NSS.

• Education of the young—A real challenge here, mainly on account of the government schools that have practically destroyed the minds of generations of children, raised them to be blindly obedient to authority, and not to engage in critical independent thinking.  Good teachers are the exception, and good anythings burn out in a government system.  We have promoted homeschooling on these pages.  Any private effort to inculcate the virtues of reason and freedom in the minds of the young will pay massive long-term dividends.  A vital contribution to the RLM.

• Personal growth and life extension—Please refer to previous columns, particularly "Nourish to Flourish."  An important book to be reviewed soon on RTF is Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, by Kurzwell and Grossman.(8)  As more of us become healthier and live indefinitely long and young, the notion of an omnipotent state will become more and more quaint.  Much of the pretense for state power is the altruistic notion to help the old and infirm; when we’re all young and healthy, that will be even less of a good argument.  Clearly the RLM is served by selfish happiness, and ideas of radical life extension couldn’t be more conducive to that.

• Wealth development—Similar to health development, as we increasingly use technology to end scarcity and enable people to release their creative energies even further, the reason-liberty movement is boosted.  Specifically, today we need more wealthy people to use their money for liberty—an example is George Soros who is using his billions to fight the drug laws and other injustices around the world.

  In the connection of wealth enhancement, let’s include a movement that folds in well with the RLM, the "rise of the creative class."  The book(9) on that subject by Dr. Richard Florida shows how we creative rational-libertarian minds can take back our economy just as readily as we can take back our government.

• Environmentalism—Sometimes environmentalism gets a bad rap because of its occasional early association with leftist anti-business ideology.  The fact is the planet is all we humans are likely to have to support our existence for many years to come; as such its imperative to take care of it as a matter of survival.  The right of property needs to be refined in common law to prevent damage and trespass by the poisons of someone else’s process, whether corporations or individuals.  The RLM is the ultimate umbrella for environmental health, and even provides a basis for encouraging natural beauty as a cause.  More to the point, true environmentalists are libertarian enemies of "the Man," big businessmen who pay off the state to let them trample the property of others.

• Individual freedom organizations—These are as plentiful as flowers after a desert rain.  The anti criminal-injustice-system organizations mean the most to me, such as Fully Informed Jury Association, Families Against Mandatory Minimums, Amnesty International, Drugsense, National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, and so on.  But every abuse of liberty has dozens of organizations fighting to restore it, whether it’s gun freedom, homeschooling, eminent domain issues or whatnot.  If you have a freedom you love especially, then go find a group that fights for that freedom and get active in it.  This makes a HUGE contribution to the RLM.

• Libertarian "theology"— I foresee a handful of quasireligions of reason developing, sometimes around a strong central figure, sometimes as a systematic confederation of groups of inquiring minds.  Back when Marxism pretended to have some moral power a few decades ago, people spoke of liberation theology.  It was a shorthand to identify everyone’s basic premises.  The RLM can have basic premises, also conveyed by slogans: "Power to the rational individual" doesn’t sound too good, but you get the point.  Someone will develop the emotional tools from the philosophical shovel work.

The above are offered mainly to stimulate ACTION on your part.  Get into the RLM and be a major player.  Many hands make light work, and we can use your help.  It is in your own self-interest.

A handful of other concepts have occurred to me in the course of writing this section, including technology alternatives, the "indirect approach" (where you accomplish an objective by making an end run, so to speak; an example might be to launch a project to get psychological profiles on all public servants), self-awareness, and passion.

Maybe some young charismatic leader with money will come along and galvanize the masses into rational libertarians in record time.  It’s an open universe, and the reason-liberty movement is the only one with a future… if a free, rational humankind is to have a future.

Just remember, freedom was the original idea.  Now let’s go out and get it.

ReasonToFreedom.com, Freedom 101