The Enemy is Always the State

Lew Rockwell has a nice summary of why opposing statism seems to make people wander all over the political spectrum, as "both sides" of our current political debate embrace statism in all its ugly power and glory.

The link led me to the Web home of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, where Tuesday's lead article is "The Government's Statistical Whopper of the Year," as Robert P. Murphy deciphers how — believe it or no — the U.S. government reported that gasoline prices fell 4.6 percent in April. No, really. And I took Rockwell's advice to read "Our Enemy the State" by A.J. Nock and downloaded the short book off the Mises literature site.

This fun little excursion is all courtesy of Ender's Review, Tom Ender's weekly digest of "Web articles of likely interest to individualists found during the preceding week." I almost never get through the whole list because I end up on side excursions like the one described above. There doesn't seem to be enough time to find and post links to all of the good writing about the state and the individual that is written every week, so I'm grateful for Tom's weekly effort. I don't think I've mentioned that enough, so I just did.

Running with the mute-ants

OK, for a while I've been less prolific and wondering if I was just too busy with the day job and such, or if something else was going on. Then I found myself nodding in agreement with much of what Taran Jordan is experiencing ... some excerpts:

It’s an odd thing, but for months now, I have felt very little desire to speak out on issues, or get into debates with sheeple. Even, or maybe especially, about freedom ...

Now, too, when I hear of abuses, I don’t get het up with anger or outrage anymore either, the way I used to. (And it was that energy of fed-upness and violated justice that motivated a lot of my writing.) I do often feel for the victims, if true innocent victims they are.

But the feeling I now experience toward the perpetrators is a cross between indifference and quiet resistance. And I think it’s that quiet aspect that has me not talking or writing about my thoughts, concerns or plans.

It’s a struggle within, because one voice in my head says, “But these issues are vital and should get some exposure, and you can give them that!” The other voice, though, counters, “Those who care at this point are already aware. The rest aren’t interested in being preached at by you. Let reality educate them, as it soon will.”

No coincidence, then, that last week, heavy into this mood, I decided to reread Atlas Shrugged.

I can't say I feel exactly the same — I'm not ready to do the gulch thing and I continue my plans to race into print this summer to speak out with a collection of thoughts called Refuse to be Afraid — but I feel Lightning's pain, if pain is the right word to describe it.

The voice of freedom these days is a lonely voice crying in a wilderness. The statists who declare man and woman to be herd animals have long held the upper hand, to the extent that we who seek to live on a little land in a wooded area find ourselves fighting a nagging feeling that we are guilty of a selfish something called "urban sprawl." Why would a good little human want to separate from the herd and inhabit an area larger than a comfortable little lot surrounded by other good little humans, after all?

But then there's the bigger nagging feeling, the one that feels like The Real Me yearning to break out, the one that says man and woman are not dogs, not pack animals. You cannot define me by the color of my skin, my sex, the ethnic history of my family, the region of the world I have chosen to inhabit, or even the philosophy I have have adapted and adopted as my own, because there has been no one quite like me in the history of the world and never will be again — I am, in short, a unique individual, and you cannot lazily define me with words like "white man" or "libertarian" or "journalist" or "Scandinavian American" — and this is the most important part: Every soul I encounter today is just as unique, even (perhaps especially) those whose eyes are glazed over and are running with a pack, and I cannot dismiss them as anything less than a distinct individual.

Atlas Shrugged portrays a nightmare world where the herd mentality has won the day, but those chosen as shepherds have had enough of perfectly capable humans expecting them to be sheep herders, and they separate themselves, leaving those who believe themselves part of a herd to fend, unsuccessfully, for themselves.

In the memorable dystopian TV fantasy The Prisoner, our protagonist screams, "I am not a number, I am a free man!" even as he is forcibly kept captive in a jolly village and always addressed as Number Six — we never learn his given name. I understand Taran's feeling of quiet resistance, just as I understand the gulchers in Atlas Shrugged, but I don't think her weariness is indifference. I think it's just weariness. Rest a while, mute-ant friend, and see what comes next. Seems like for all this quiet, a novel is chugging its way along the rails of your soul, for example, a novel that addresses many of these themes — so you're not as indifferent as you might believe. You're just quiet, and resisting.

Funny thing about freedom, though: It's hard to stay quiet. You know everyone has a Real Me screaming to get out, and sooner or later you have to get up, run to the window and urge people to start yelling. We are free men and women, after all.

Ender's game is changing

I have been remiss in not welcoming Tom Ender to the blogosphere, sort of. Tom has been around since before I was, with his indispensible "Ender's Review" of the best freedom stuff on the Web every week and his invaluable "This Weekend" preview of the best freedom-related films coming up on television. (As someone who dumped premium movie channels in exchange for the ability to choose my "Netflix," it's a little frustrating to see how few freedom movies are shown on "free" cable channels - but then, maybe it's true what our rulers say: Freedom isn't free. You pay extra for organic food, too.)

Until the recent launch of "Memory, Making, Meaning," Tom has limited his writing to the occasional essay as one of Sunni's Conspirators and/or his Endervidualism site - he shared a blog or two but now he's got his own. It's fun to have another place to visit for thoughts, odds and ends every day.

Tom uses the blog today to say he's pulling back from "This Weekend" while he develops a more efficient format. Seems doing it the old way was so time-consuming he didn't have time to work on the fix.

Now there's a frustrating situation that I'll bet many of us have encountered here and there - "I know I could do this task in a better way, but it takes so much time to do the task that I don't have time to develop the better way." It takes a little courage to just stop doing the task for a while, develop the better way, and then go for it - but in the long run, everyone'll be happier, methinks.