The Libertarian Challenge

Author’s Note: I began writing this with the intention of posting it on the party website of the Scottish Libertarians, unfortunately as I explored these ideas it grew and grew.  On account of the length and possibly some controversial points I decided to post it here instead.  This may change should party members deem it appropriate for the  party site.

Nearly one year ago I agreed to the post of party leader for the Scottish Libertarians. At first it was easy. The job was all about laying the foundations. This is the party image, this is the party organisation, this is the party platform, and here is our webpage. Then things got difficult. We were all dressed-up, but where should we go?

I started thinking about what we as a party needed to do. Libertarians are great when it comes to criticising government economic and social policy. The mass media is rife with examples of things to complain about. We also have a talent for proposing theories of how things should function, or bringing-up historical examples of things that worked and where things went wrong. There is also plenty of information on economic policies from libertarians and their think tanks. Oh, and let’s not forget the internal and external arguments of how things should be. What’s missing is action.

In this last United States presidential election, the libertarian Republican Ron Paul created quite a stir and gathered a passionate following, but failed to gain the nomination (partly due to GOP trickery). The Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson received just over a million votes, which was one of the best showings in party history, meanwhile President Obama won with just over 50 million and Romney lost by just under the same figure. So what did the American libertarians do? They followed the standard playbook for the modern elections. They campaigned, debated, and lost to both parties 100 million to one.

In the face of such disappointment, the question becomes “What are we as libertarians to do?” I see two challenges facing the movement. One involves changing public awareness and the other is about preparing ourselves to manage that change if and when it comes.

Challenge 1: Invisible Slavery and the Slave Mind

The primary message of libertarians is liberty. This means each individual may choose their actions free from outside force or coercion. To a libertarian, the opposite of freedom is slavery. What people fail to grasp is that slavery is insidious – something seemingly harmless but to grave affect.

During the entire history of slavery in America there were only half a dozen slave uprisings despite the large percentage of slaves and freed slaves. This is a shocking figure because it is difficult for us to comprehend with our modern mindset how accepted the institution of slavery was in society.

There are two reasons for this. For one, humans have an incredible capacity for self-subjugation. History shows black slaves in North America and white slaves in North Africa assuming the same docile and servile attitude and they perceived the goals of their master to be their own. In exchange, he provides all the necessities of life. This is the second reason. On the plantations, the slaves were accorded numerous privileges of free movement and entertainment, provided they showed-up for work sober and ready. It was also common for slaves to be allowed to keep excess crops which they sold for some spending money. Thrifty slaves even purchased their freedom and some even went on to own slaves themselves.

Of the handful of slave rebellions, the two most famous were those of Nat Turner and John Brown. Turner was by all accounts a model slave who claimed to have a great love for his master, but he had divine visions instructing him to rise-up when a sign was given. He read an eclipse as the sign and went on a murder spree with a few friends that eventually grew to about forty slaves. Most were killed by local militia, some turned on their comrades, and eventually Turner was put to death. To me the interesting thing about Turner is that this clearly deranged individual did what we today would consider to be the only sane act given the institution of slavery, but at the time it was deemed a part of his madness.

John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry is part of American legend. He had planned to attack the town of Harper’s Ferry with his band of white abolitionist and a few blacks, take control of the armoury, arm the slaves there to bolster his ranks, and strike a blow for freedom. The slaves did not rise-up to join him and he lost. Brown’s story ends at the gallows.

For those who saw slavery as an injustice, John Brown was a martyr who gave his life in a fight for freedom. For those who could not conceive anything wrong with slavery, as was the mainstream point of view for centuries, then John Brown was a domestic terrorist. Likewise, Nat Turner was a religious fanatic reminiscent of David Koresh in Waco or any number of Muslim extremist. Nat Turner and his band slaughtered men, women, and children because God told him to, but for many he is a hero for his rebellion against slavery because we see slavery as immoral.

The French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau observed that society is driven by the General Will of the people. This is not the will of the majority, but rather a sort of gestalt produced by the interactions of each individual’s will. It is similar, if not the same, as zeitgeist, the Spirit of the Age. The General Will may not be based on majority opinion, but the majority view has the power to create the accepted narrative of what people consider being “normal”. Anything outside the normal is viewed as backward, stupid, corrupt, weird, or even evil. When the General Will holds the narrative that slavery is the acceptable norm, then any call for liberty is fringe at best and evil at worst. In fact, those people socially conditioned to the norm cannot even conceive how something like slavery is wrong.

Another place to look is the American War of Independence. Americans make a big deal over their country and its history. Fact is that until the early part of the last century no one really cared. The American victory was the back page story in the first edition of the Glasgow Herald. The United Kingdom drew more revenue by far from Jamaica then from all of the Thirteen Colonies combined. Because of their limited value, Britain pretty much ignored British North America, and as a result the colonies established their own local governments that ran for centuries. Then the Seven Years War happened.

This was the first truly global war fought between Great Britain and France. In North America, it was known as the French-Indian War. When it was over, Britain expected the colonies to pay their share of the cost of defending them and levied small taxes to this purpose. These were the taxes that led to events such as the Boston Tea Party. The fact is that due to changes in the East India Company, tea in Boston had never been cheaper, even with the tax (which had just dropped from one shilling to three pence per pound). The Tea Party was not a protest over the amount of tax. It was a protest over the right to tax. Also, it was not merely a protest. It was an act of destruction with £10,000 worth of property destroyed. Based on average earnings, that is about £15 million in today’s currency.

To truly understand history and learn its lessons, we must imagine a world where we have a personal investment in the story. So imagine a group of fringe protestors complaining about a tax on iPads. For you, the amount of the tax is so trivial that you do not care, and even if you did care, you know that there is nothing that you can do about it so just accept it. Then you read in the paper that a group of protestors broke into a warehouse and destroyed a recent shipment of iPads worth £15 million. How would you feel? Especially when you planned on buying one. So how does this news story strike you? Were the protestor’s actions a bit extreme?

The average New Englander in 1773 had a better standard of living than an Old Englander. By the same token, the average slave on a Southern plantation had a better living standard than a free Northern factory worker, but after the American Civil War the former slaves were even worse off economically. So if one judges a living standard as the sole measure of good, then there was no reason to rebel against either the government or the plantation system.

The challenge facing libertarians is that the General Will of the people accepts as the norm what we as libertarians consider slavery. Our protests are ignored because people have so deeply accepted their condition that they do not see themselves as slaves.

The demonization of the institution of slavery has clouded the issue in people’s minds. If you see slavery as a state of bondage, chains, and regularly whippings, then no, we are not slaves. However, when you recognise that slaves were given a great many liberties provided they showed-up for work, it does not look that different from our current situation where rights, the right to actions, are viewed as being allowed by the State rather than being inherent.

People do not want to rock the boat that they are standing in or willing to bite the hand that feeds them, at least until the boat starts sinking and the food runs out. Until that time, if it ever occurs, libertarians will continue denouncing a slavery invisible to all but themselves and thus remain on the fringe.

Challenge 2: The Will to Fight for Freedom

There are five primary tools in the box when it comes to resolving conflict. The first four are avoidance, accommodation, compromise, and collaboration. Avoidance and accommodation are self-evident. The difference between compromise and collaboration is that in a compromise both parties lose something, but in collaboration we are looking for the win/win resolution. The fifth tool is the hammer – force.

Thomas Jefferson said, "When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny."!" A version of this quote has become popular among libertarians as taken from the film V for Vendetta. "People shouldn't be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people."

So how do we instil fear in the government? How about we write a strongly worded letter to our representatives, perhaps make a Youtube video, and if we can get enough people together, then we can march around carrying signs for a few hours and shout at them. That should put the fear into them.

What many libertarians do not seem to understand is that liberty is about power. It is a cliché to say, “Power to the people”, but that’s what libertarianism is. We seek to remove power from the State and redistribute it among smaller and smaller groups all the way down to the individual. People with power, as well as those dependent on that power, do not want this redistribution. Looking at history, it is very very rare for any person or body to relinquish power voluntarily. It is taken by force, not negotiation or peaceful protest.

Take the average bureaucrat backed by the power of the State, its laws, and its law enforcers. Do you think he fears the petitioner begging the government to get off his back? Of course not.

I’m from Los Angeles. Back in the 1980’s there was a rash of shootings on the freeways there. The result is that people became more courteous drivers. Manners and common courtesy were born of fear as any insulting behaviour may result in a duel and your death. Even now we use the phrase, “teach him some manners” as a euphemism for getting into a fight.

Now suppose a local city government is pushing forward some kind of legislation that will result in someone losing their home. A man attends all the council meetings stating his case, but is continually ignored, even while he is speaking. After all, he has no power, so why care what he thinks. The resolution passes and the man is left destitute. So he arms himself to the teeth, goes into city hall, and massacres ten men and women before killing himself. The news portrays him as a loner and a psychopath denouncing his evil and mindless act of violence. What is lost in translation is that this was an act of rebellion.

When the number of people with nothing to lose due to a sense of powerlessness reaches critical mass, it erupts into revolution. Until that time, if it ever occurs, what you have are sporadic rebellions. These isolated incidences are easily dismissed as the work of deranged or evil individuals, like Nat Turner, John Brown, or arguably Timothy McVeigh. These rebels are so convinced of their rectitude that they assume others see the world as they see it and are only awaiting opportunity, but alas the people failed to rise. They are so conditioned to their invisible slavery that it is easier to dismiss these violent incidences as acts of evil, insanity, or terrorism.

Revolutions are messy affairs sparked more by rage than ideology; nonetheless a narrative eventually emerges in the inferno. Rage precedes ideology. People choose to fight and later the intellectuals put a label on it. Think of revolutions as lower-class rage wrapped-up in middle-class values funded by upper-class ambition.

Here’s a modern example from the London riots of August 2011 taken from The Metro newspaper:

The 17-year-olds were drinking stolen rosé wine at 9.30am yesterday as they laughed about the previous night’s disturbances in south London and made vague complaints about ‘rich people’.

One told the BBC: ‘Everyone was just on a riot, going mad, chucking things, chucking bottles – it was good, though.’

Her friend added: ‘Breaking into shops – it was madness, it was good fun.’

One of the girls bragged about ‘getting a couple of free things’, before insisting: ‘It’s the government’s fault. I don’t know. Conservatives, whoever it is. It’s the rich people who’ve got businesses and that’s why all this happened.’

They said further crimes would ‘hopefully’ follow.

These girls hardly seem the heralds of revolution, but consider that the Boston Massacre of 1770 was instigated by a group of drunken men emerging from the pub who thought it would be quite fun to throw shit (literally) at the soldiers on guard duty. In the nervous pandemonium the soldiers opened fire killing the men. They were later exonerated in court, but the incident was still used to fuel the revolution.

In the case of these two girls, they are not exactly politically astute, but they are parroting a message – a socialist one. Indeed, these fun-fuelled attacks on small business owners in a poor community were transformed in some media circles as the people rising against capitalist oppression. Rage, or in this case opportunistic, destructive fun, precedes ideology.

Libertarians have the ideology, its precedents, and their arguments, but this is all just polite, middle-class, socio-political economic theory. Nice people do not instil fear, but is important to remember that fear and respect are linguistically linked.

Here is how the pattern usually plays out. The revolutionaries of the polite middle-class intellectuals incite the poor to anger and they act on their rage violently. In the midst of the chaos the revolutionaries condemn such violent behaviour in the media, but then add that such problems should be expected given the current state of affairs. This way they keep their hands clean while still achieving their purpose.

Libertarians seem to lack this understanding of revolution. They seem to think that by simply making their intellectual case that the day will be won through peaceful and rational discourse and the ballot box. History shows this rarely if ever wins the day.

I am by no means advocating or encouraging violence or bloody revolution in pointing-out this historical pattern. I am illustrating that libertarians lay-out all their tools for conflict resolution on the table, but leave the hammer in box. We speak of fighting for freedom, but we mean only metaphoric fighting because literally fighting would be too risky and messy. People with power do not fear metaphoric threats.

American libertarians are always speaking of their right to bear arms as a defence against the government. The fact is that owning a gun will not protect you against the local cops let alone the might of the US government. To put the American War of Independence into a modern context, local militias would need to be armed with F-22 Raptors and tomahawk missiles to pose a threat. In a modern revolution, the hammer becomes a dangerous tool to wield because the opposition has more and bigger hammers, but that does not mean it should be left entirely in the box.

Summary

I see two challenges facing the global liberty movement. One is invisible slavery and the other is the willingness to fight that slavery. The only people who respond to the message of liberty are those people who recognise the existence of slavery, the absence of freedom. Speaking out against invisible monsters is crazy, but it’s even crazier to fight them. That only makes you look like an evil psychopath.

For the Classicists, I would say that we are living on the Island of the Lotus Eaters, but for the more modern audience, let’s just call it The Matrix. People go about their lives working, loving, and entertaining themselves completely unaware that they are nothing more than a battery powering a system. They have enough without realising that they could have more, the more that is being taken from them.

Now suppose you convince people of their slavery, what then? White people are often condemned for the institution of slavery in America, but truth be told the fault does not lie entirely there. First, there were very few slave uprisings on account of the slave mentality, which is partly inherent in human nature but was also encouraged by the white masters. Secondly, of the few uprisings many slaves took arms to defend their masters from other slaves. This is due in part to the afore mentioned slave mentality, but also slaves do not like other slaves acting above their station. All slaves are equally slaves. Some slaves may be granted special privileges for services rendered or special punishments for misdeeds, but no slave likes to see another slave demanding more than they themselves are willing to accept.

This demonstrates that convincing people that they are slaves is only part of the battle. Beyond that some people perceive themselves to be benefitting from their slavery and are more than willing to defend it even with the knowledge of their status. Others have a risk aversion. They do not want to lose what they have got. I know a few libertarians who took jobs in the public sector and any anti-government activism could threaten that. This is no ill judgement on them, but simply a fact of life.

Then there is the issue of violence. Intellectually, I can see the necessity. In the heat of passion, I may call for it. However, like most libertarians I am not violent by nature or willing to take what I consider foolish risks that may jeopardise my own little comfort niche. So what is to be done?

I consider myself to be a Nineteenth Century kind of guy, in other words we need to fight. However, the vast majority of my fellow libertarians are more Twentieth Century, this means holding protest rallies, handing-out literature, getting into the mainstream media, and electing libertarians into public office. Then there is the growing Twenty-first Century approach. This involves internet postings, blogs, and chat room debates. Finally, there is the Apocalypse non-approach. This group foresees the inevitable collapse of the current system under its own weight, similar to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and figures that nothing can be done except to brace yourself for the inevitable crash and let libertarianism rise from the ashes.

As I ponder my leadership role I find myself torn because I agree with all of these approaches while at the same time cannot advocate any of them because their efficacy eludes me. Do we fight? Sure, but fight who and to what benefit? Protests don’t work and the mainstream media will tell their story not ours. Any politicians we elect will be grossly outnumbered and may even go native. The internet is wonderful, but like the protests it is full of sound and fury signifying nothing. The duck and cover scenario makes sense, but at the same time seems too nihilistic and escapist.

Whenever I get stuck like this there are two places I go. One is back to basics and the other is collaboration. The first looks at human nature and the other looks for the win/win relationship between all these conflicting ideas.

Humans are small group animals and civilization begins with a gang that becomes a tribe united by common purpose. So the solution is for libertarians to form their gangs. Ignore the big set pieces. You cannot change the world or your country and you probably cannot even challenge your city council effectively. What you can do is form immediate relationships. By immediate I mean people at hand, so do not count your Facebook friends thousands of miles away. Once you found your gang, then start doing things together. Go to the pub, see a movie, or find some physical activity. The important thing is building the relationships. What everyone will naturally bring to the table is their beliefs and their friends. The beliefs provide the common purpose and the friends bring recruits.

As for purpose, the goal of every libertarian should be freedom. Not freedom from oppression since most slaves are not literally oppressed with whips, chains, and imprisonment and thus do not see themselves as oppressed. Just freedom from slavery. The first step in this is simply to nudge people to anger. In sales this is called, “pushing the bruise”. It is better for people to be angry than afraid. If you see an opportunity to speak out against the current system in your daily life, then do it.

Another part of this local tribal approach is children. The dominant ideology today got there not by protests or revolution but by taking over the education system. I tend to avoid children, but if you like the little rugrats, then go be a role model for them as a libertarian.

Finally, I do not advocate violence, but do not be afraid to get your hands a little dirty. Feel free to vandalise propaganda either from the government or from rival ideologies or special interest groups. There is no need for their lies to go unchallenged. If perchance some rebel commits some horrible act, then denounce it, but do not be afraid to insinuate that the guy may have had a point there. You do not have to use the hammer, but do not be afraid to put in on the table alongside the other tools for conflict resolution.

I am not implying that libertarians should reject the traditional approaches to political activism. Right now that’s all we’ve got. Simply that the primary focus should be community. If all the libertarians scattered throughout the world started just looking after their own little monkeysphere, then chances are that the change we are looking for will eventually take care of itself as local groups grow, expand, and potentially join other groups.

It could be said that the greatest challenge facing libertarians is a lack of several forms of power; we lack the money, the influence, the numbers, and the guns, all of which the opposition has in abundance. I think the challenge has more to do with the General Will. Either way, we should do what groups in our position have done in the past. Be the gang of rebels and outsiders nipping at the heels of an unjust system in hopes that our example will inspire the people to rise.