How then can we live free in this environment? Do we push back directly, or use a ju jitsu feint? Do we try and change the politics, the technology, the economics, and the language of the state to produce a more decentralized and liberty-tolerating and even liberty-promoting system? Do we stand up parallel alternative systems, and participate only in those spheres? Do we ignore the problem and just live our lives?
The answer, I believe, is yes.
But before I discuss some specifics and answer some of your questions, I want to talk about how we each already live our lives contrary to social norms and political guidelines. When we look at ourselves, we can identify habits of thought and action that already exhibit the kind of independence and uniqueness that are the seeds of living free. To really think about this topic philosophically, one can read Harry Browne's book How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World.
And there are many other sources for how to liberate your thinking and your life, and many people here have already explored and enjoyed works by writers and philosophers like Ayn Rand, Richard Bach and Scott Peck. There is a lot out there on how to liberate ourselves mentally, physically, creatively, and emotionally.
But I am pretty lazy, and sometimes I don't really want to have to work that hard. Instead, if we consider the fundamental ways we already interact with the world, we might be able to simply emphasize the personal approaches to the world that we already embrace, and just tweak them, just a little, towards liberty and against the state.
A new book was published this spring, called Why Liberty edited by Marc Guttman up in Connecticut. It contains the stories of how 54 people from around the world and from all walks of life, discovered liberty and embraced peace and freedom in their lives. One review of the book, by one of the contributors, economist Arnold Kling, points out that a common trait in all of the contributors was a "a willingness to go one's own way politically." He brought up the role of personality, and the so-called "Big Five" personality traits. These traits are defined as openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Kling suggested that libertarians were as a group, low on agreeableness, especially when it comes to politics. Agreeableness is defined as "a tendency to be compassionate and cooperative rather than suspicious and antagonistic."
Kling could be correct in this, but I would suggest that libertarians are just as likely to be high in the trait of openness, and they are probably low in the trait of neuroticism. Openness to new ideas and interpretations (beyond standard state-published pablum) for how things work, and especially how state and society works, would be a trait that would lead one to question the state. And questioning the state is extremely powerful. It doesn't take a majority of people to ask the right questions for real change, and for societal paradigm shifts to occur.
When a person one is persistently or strongly demonstrating the trait of neuroticism, it is seen in fear-driven behavior. Wikipedia says those who score high in neuroticism are "likely to interpret ordinary situations as threatening, and minor frustrations as hopelessly difficult." On the other hand, those who are low in neuroticism are said to be "are less easily upset and are less emotionally reactive.
They tend to be calm, emotionally stable, and free from persistent negative feelings." One might translate this as optimistic and pessimistic outlooks. Rothbardians, anarcho-capitalists and anarcho-libertarians, anti-staters of all flavors, tend to be cheerful, enjoy humor, and they are optimists in the long run (even as we are usually sharply pessimistic over the short run). A more general indication of having that desirable low score in the trait of neuroticism is simply self-confidence.
To live free means that you have accepted the truth about human liberty, not just that it is something people of all ages want and enjoy, but that free societies are truly better than unfree societies. To the extent that liberty is present in society, we see self-organizing, self-moderating, highly productive and correspondingly, generous, compassionate and fundamentally peaceful people. Real freedom to think, live, move, produce and trade pushes human beings to be active rather than passive, because being active in mind and body is rewarded, and being passive in mind and body is less rewarded. Free societies tend to value all of its members, be they young or old, male or female. In a free society, personal biases and beliefs, subcultures, native languages or accents are not viewed as barriers to economic or societal acceptance -- the members of a society are instead judged on how agreeably and satisfactorily they live their lives, honor their contracts both written and unwritten, and produce and trade their goods and services.
If you think about how the state, and not just the US state, but all modern states, have classified and divided people by age, it demonstrates the sheer hatefulness and dehumanization that statism is known for. Through the age of 18, children are dependents, and basically made to be slaves in preparation to pay taxes for a limited working life. After age 65, the state has termed human beings again as dependents, and as with the young people, not considered productive or particularly valuable. When I think of George Washington, the first of the post-Constitutional Convention presidents, I don't think of him chopping down a cherry tree. I think of him as the 16-year-old surveyor's apprentice traveling with his employer making maps and surveys of land Virginia and West Virginia, over the very land that I now call home. In an era where the life expectancy for free men was around 54 years, George Washington was fighting for secession from the British empire and eventually serving as President until he was 65 years old.
Today, the U.S. life expectancy is about 78 -- by the standard set by our first president, we should expect productive and valuable goods and services from Americans through age 93.
On the other side, the state demands children and teenagers sit quietly in their seats, instead of sailing around the world, flying or driving or starting companies. Even as we marvel at what teenagers can accomplish, the state and its minions generally tut tut and frown when they act on their natural abilities to produce, to think, and to act.
As a state, we forbid and denigrate the idea that a productive life should begin in or before one's teens, and should end in our 90s. As a free society, we would celebrate this potential, and realize it as a matter of course.
The first step in living free is orienting our own thinking to liberty. This means we must begin with our own perception of the world, our own knowledge of how free markets, free choice, free movement, and free speech work. We ought to learn a bit about what great minds throughout history have had to say about freedom, about challenging the Goliaths of the world, about truth and honor in our personal lives. I mentioned these three things specifically because I do not believe that living free means rejecting our religious heritage, no matter what heritage that is. All great religions value honesty, courage, and personal responsibility. For many of us, this first step means we need to read a bit more, study a bit more, listen a bit more, and be open to learning something that will be very different than what we have been taught in government schools and by government institutions and often, our own families and cultures. I would specifically recommend the Mises Institute, the Foundation for Economic Education, and the Future of Freedom Foundation, but the whole world of thinking on liberty is available on the Internet, and you can read, watch, listen to and benefit from thinkers who have already paved the way for all of us.
I think the
second thing we can do to begin to live free is also something that
all people already exhibit -- a certain degree of neuroticism, or
as it is sometimes characterized, low emotional intelligence and
less developed interpersonal skills. To live free in a free society
requires us to have more emotional intelligence and better-developed
interpersonal skills -- i.e. to be less neurotic, less fearful, less
pessimistic. These are the gifts of the trader, the talents of the
deal-maker.
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