Libertarians are in the healing profession, TLC and reason are the way to succeed

And the best recent presentation of the healing power of love lies in Dr. Mary Ruwart's marvelous work, Healing Our World: In an Age of Aggression(1).  Normally, I don't create a column over a book and author, but this week I'm making an exception.  Dr. Mary is a key truthbearer.

All truth passes through three stages.  First, it is ridiculed.  Secondly, it is violently opposed.  Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

— Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher
(from the frontispiece of Our World)

For those of us who feel reason-liberty is the elemental truth of our day, Mary's book provides the best, most poignant advocacy of the nonaggression principle(2) out here.  Shortly, this principle will be a conversational standard in the American political arena.  (Katie Couric and Matt Lauer will bring it up incessantly.)  And Dr. Ruwart will certainly go down in history as a linchpin of success for the reason-liberty movement (RLM).

Note  -  This column is mainly focused toward the audience of people dedicated to the RLM.  For my general-audience readers, please feel free to read on, and certainly go out and purchase a copy of Healing Our World.  We're all in this together; our country/planet is dying and we're going to need everyone's help to save it.

Mary and I go back to the early days of the Libertarian Party, and I have taken issue with her on a number of occasions.  When the first edition of Our World came out in the early 90s I recall having a dim view of the work.  Being a young libertarian/Libertarian activist of Randian origins, my approach was far more judgmental and argumentative.

I felt we needed to convince people with the elegance of our arguments, make an ironclad case with passionate reason.  Healing Our World was unique at the time in tugging at our heartstrings.  It even attempted to identify with the reader by generous use of the first-person-plural "we," as in "we often feel like pummeling our neighbors (for their own good of course), but we shouldn't give in to such unhealthy feelings."

It seems to me in retrospect she didn't offer enough specifics against the various acts of state aggression.  Nor do I remember many practical alternatives or examples.  These shortcomings, if they ever truly existed, are certainly corrected in the second "World of Aggression" edition.  She walks through case after case of the "pyramid of aggression," from restrictions on property, redistribution of wealth, corporate privilege and monopoly, government schools, government money systems, and so on.

And she patiently, lovingly, explains how recognition of the nonaggression principle solves each problem, heals the social wounds, restores life and balance to a diseased system.  By the time we finish the book, we are convinced by her tender simplicity.  We see all thinking, feeling people now embarked on a common mission to heal our highly damaged world.

Mary helps people understand, especially people deep inside the RLM, that ours is a spiritual mission.  We do not impart the spirit of freedom through angry judgmentalism, rather through caringly and lovingly holding up a vision of success all may share.  For example, instead of telling your friends they're fat and ugly (disease) because they eat wrong (the cause), you tell them they're slim and beautiful (health) as they eat right (the cause).

Positive motivation works better than negative motivation, and success is more durable.

We've talked a lot in these columns about the center of maximum liberty.  This is where we RLM people need to reside spiritually and physically to achieve maximum effect.  My grand strategic sense is as follows:

• Broad onslaught of ideas (thinking and writing) by rational libertarian intelligentsia (mainly today found here and on companion sites on the Web), books such as Mary's, several movies, documentaries that expose power-elite depredations, and so on.
• Elevation of the cultural reason component beyond what happens at The Objectivist Center.  As fine as TOC is, we need to see multipronged gatherings of likeminded people who hold reason as an absolute; we need a worldwide "neighborhood" of reasoning people.  (Note, the Council for Secular Humanism is certainly a resource.)
• Continued support of the Libertarian Party, particularly at the local levels where younger libertarians are moving into city and county positions.

Note  -  Nationally, the LP is busted until rational, knowledgeable political experts (with access to enough funding to break through corporate-government television media blockades) ascend.  The membership must grow to exhibit more practical reason and less rampant emotionalism in order for a respectable national party to emerge.  By respectable, I mean with a chance of winning statewide and national races.

• Practical success in creating a free country.  This road is available to Americans at the moment through the Free State Project, which aims to move a threshold number of citizens (20,000) to a low-population, freedom-receptive state (New Hampshire) within a year upon that number having signed a pledge to move.  By participating in the political processes in the Free State, we will create an area radically more free than the other states and lead them to freedom by example.

Note  -  By the time you read this, the 2d Free State Project Porcupine Festival will be in swing in Lancaster, NH.  We have a correspondent covering this year's event, just as we at last year's Porc Fest.  Stay tuned.

• The Bill of Rights enforcement concept.  I sense a coalition of many individuals and groups to gather and insist on holding government officials to their charter.  The Bill of Rights essentially mandates the nonaggression principle across the board, certainly for the federales, and all laws that infract the Bill of Rights are null and void.

The final element of grand strategy is what I'm suggesting by this column: it lies in the approach we take in spreading the universal truth of the nonaggression principle.  There is none higher.  Mary Ruwart and her marvelous, approachable tome provide the best connecting vision of this "sacred" principle for decent people who simply want health and life for ourselves, our children, our country, and our planet.

Share the love, find our way.