A neurotic personality complains that no one wants to buy my products; the less neurotic personality finds out why and figures out something new and better to do. If we are to support ourselves, and eliminate the nanny state that we all hate, we need to develop our emotional intelligence and our interpersonal skills -- and in doing this we begin to recognize not only the inherent value of all the people we meet and work with and trade with, but our own inherent value. And that leads to self-confidence, and a self-confident person is well-suited to liberty.
Arnold Kling's suspicion that libertarians are a bit low on the agreeableness trait, at least in politics, may have merit. And if you already disagree with the state, and refuse to budge, knowing that the state is not only evil, but an aggressive evil, you are doing just fine. In a truly free society, we will all be at this point, and we will guard against statist thinking in our homes and public spaces, as much as we might guard ourselves and our loved ones from contagious diseases and drug-resistant bacteria. But to be disagreeable in politics, and really anywhere, requires that you understand and are able to both emotionally and intellectually explain why you are opposed.
This requires some work. Some education. Some practice. And it requires some basic principles that you live by which I think, for libertarians and many others, should be the Ron Paul campaign theme. Peace, prosperity and liberty.
I will diverge here a bit to criticize the Libertarian Party, self-proclaimed party of principle. A significant minority of libertarians, including some influential and popular politicians within the party, happen to be pro-war. They praise the state for martialing soldiers and building bombs to kill people in other states, for some state-defined rationale that is consistent only in its variability over time. Of course, supporting state wars -- especially given what we now know about the ways states go to war and justify those wars throughout history -- is inconsistent with freedom. The state's language gives us a clue, because it generally puts forth that the state is always fighting FOR freedom, rather than extinguishing it (which is what a war-time state does both at home and abroad). I believe the state abuses the language this way because human beings were designed to exercise and intuitively love real liberty.
A liberty-minded person should encourage his or her friends and neighbors, if those friends and neighbors were advocating that the state act on behalf of this or that just cause, at home or abroad, to review the Christian parable of Jesus and young wealthy man who sought to do right. We should advise our friends and neighbors, in their passion for justice, to take the whole of their property, and give it away for the cause. They don't even have to go that far, they could perhaps send money, weapons or aid. But certainly, if they advocate in an intervention by our state, they should not wait, but instead immediately travel to the distant land or domestic city, take up arms or aid, and fight the good fight.
A statist instead would say, well, let's tax and take a bit from everyone, and then send a few young men who can't otherwise get jobs, or have been infused with false patriotism and blind obedience by their families and state-funded education, to go fight for us. The individual cost will be low, and we can all feel like we are doing something. And a statist is illogical about destruction of property. He or she believes that rebuilding or fixing damaged structures and people (whether it is the foreigners we want to change or the injured or maimed and mentally fractured soldier we want to heal afterwards) is productive. They see no difference between that, and the alternative, where the same capital would have been channeled into creating and building more, new and better things. A statist doesn't think about the insanity of their reasoning. Like babies playing peek-a-boo, statists haven't yet learned that even when you can't see something right in front of you, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. As Bastiat explained, there are costs we can see, and those that are unseen -- and both types of costs matter and must be considered in understanding our choices and actions.
If we have developed a certain preparedness of mind, a certain openness to liberty; if we have worked on our interpersonal skills, increased our fundamental sense of optimism about ourselves and others, gained self confidence; and if we understand logically and historically why we hate the state, we are living liberty in an unfree world. At this point, we haven't done a thing except open our minds, discipline our thinking towards logical and analytical thinking, and attempted to love people even as we hate vertical and force-based institutions. We have not yet changed or directed our attention to changing any other person, much less attempted to change or weaken the state.
Or have we?
We are social creatures, and society is made up of individuals, who flavor the soup whether they are trying to or not. I would submit to you that living free can be achieved by only these three basic mental steps. And while they seem like easy steps, they are not. Having an effective level of openness, a high degree of self-confidence, and a serious depth of understanding of why we love liberty and hate the state will allow us to act freely, and to teach others by our interactions, our work and our example. But it isn't easy, and it's a long road for most. But it is a most worthwhile goal.
Liberty-minded people are extremely hard for the state to control. They make terrible soldiers and impolitic generals. They ask a lot of questions, and they listen carefully to the answers, attuned to falsehood and fallacies. I spoke earlier about ageism and the state. Liberty minded people are a bit like teenagers, and like teenagers, they tend to feel things a bit more powerfully, and to imagine things a bit more colorfully, and love truth a bit more fearlessly than their parents. It is often said that teenagers don't really understand mortality, and they take risks that other sectors of society don't take -- emotional and physical risks. They challenge authority.
If we are only slightly liberty-minded, we will do all these things, and we will refuse and resent vertical organization and control. The state -- like an angry parent -- will be upset, but we will cope with that anger, brush it off, and do it our way. Perhaps Kling was correct after all in his assessment that libertarians are "low on agreeableness." If we develop liberty-loving minds, we will certainly be seen by the state as disagreeable.
Is there a cost involved? We could be harassed, economically punished, and condemned. We will be asked hard questions, by both the apparatus of the state, and by our society and community. But for the liberty-loving mind, these are not roadblocks. The questions are opportunities to practice our tactics, improve our strategies and our effectiveness, and strengthen our resolve.
We wonder, "How can we live free when the state is a massive powerful enemy of freedom, and the only effective political mechanism is not rule of law, but an iron triangle between lawmakers, the bureaucracy of state, and favored industries or groups?" But, as with so many other questions we could ask, there is an answer we want to hear, and then there is the honest answer. We want to hear that we could live free if only we could eliminate the state, or make it more "libertarian." Eliminating the state when most of our neighbors believe in it and rely upon it would only lead to the rise of a subsequent state, possibly one that is even worse and less free. Making the state "libertarian" while most of our neighbors believe in and obey state power would corrupt both libertarians, and the very concept of liberty.
The honest answer is we have to start with ourselves, and we have to practice living liberty in such a way that it informs, inspires and ultimately induces and helps our neighbors to turn their own backs on the state. Etienne de la Boetie realized that all states, kings and dictators, democracies, and republics, rest on the consent of the ruled. In each moment, and in the myriad of ways that human beings reject the state, lose faith in the state, and withhold their consent, we achieve liberty and we proportionally destroy the power of the state. It happened to Rome, and to Moscow. It's happening today in Egypt and Tunisia, Libya, Yemen and Bahrain. It is happening in the United States too, not in an organized or vertical way, but by the cumulative daily acts of liberty in mind, body and economy of millions of real people. To live free, we need only to greet them, commend them, and join them.
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