Monday, October 13, 2014

How to Be Free?

The "farm" comparison is absolutely insightful and right on, and deserves wider recognition. [Watch]

That said, just realizing you're in a cage doesn't make you free. If it did, I'd take a stroll through Central Park with an unregistered M16 and not encounter a problem in the world. How you "get there from here" remains hypothetical and untested against real world force intent on stamping out anything that might pose a threat to the ruling order.

I've had people in the past offer very smug dismissals of my efforts, telling me instead how easy it is to be free if I'd just embrace a different paradigm, be it returning to the Articles of Confederation, establishing a private contractual society (and I think the most promise for the next step lies there, but it needs to be done right), or, taking a different tack, insisting that we can defang admiralty courts that use gold-fringed flags if we only know the right incantations.

Isaac Newton noted if he had seen farther than others, it is because he stood on the shoulders of giants. Technology develops and advances under freedom. If freedom technology -- and we ought to think of  liberty safeguards in those terms -- is ever to advance beyond what the Founders envisioned, it will have a better chance of blossoming and growing if it starts from a plateau of relative freedom  -- one that offers more opportunities for experimentation and validation than more primitive, and thus oppressive, forms of "government."

You can't invent a car until someone invents a wagon. You can't invent a wagon unless someone invents a wheel.  

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I concur that merely gaining awareness of the existence of modern Western slavery is not the only step to freedom - but it is a necessary step.

If someone discovers the meaning behind the phrase "unalienable right to life" and just how thoroughly it is violated in the present-day USA, they will either mentally reject it, or effectively be forced down a path of examining their previously-held premises - most of which will not survive scrutiny in the light of the new knowledge that human beings individually own themselves.

Beyond that, I, too, am at a loss as to how to advance that knowledge. I merely communicate that knowledge to any who show interest while attempting to live my own life by it in an ever-increasing amount of ways.

-PG