Make that 'refuse to be controlled'

Acknowledging that I have recently started resisting a severe case of Fear of Rejection - which, as Sunni notes in a comment, caused a severe case of paralysis of will - came just before the latest round in the "War on Terror," with its revelations of plans to blow up airplanes with liquid bombs and a new ban on bringing anything on board that might contain liquid. So it's a good time to be talking about fear.

"Refuse to be afraid" is shorthand. Fear is a real part of every person's soul. You can't refuse to be afraid any more than you can refuse to be hungry or refuse to be comfortable snuggling with the love of your life. Any rational human being is going to feel a pang of fear at the prospect of falling out of the sky - perhaps even a pang of terror.

The danger of fear is not the fear itself (Sorry, FDR) - it's that paralysis of will. When I say "refuse to be afraid," I mean refuse to let fear control your actions to the point where you fail to do the right thing. In my personal case, don't be so afraid of rejection that you fail to put the work out there to be judged. In the case of terrorism, don't be so afraid that you allow yourself to be locked in a cage.

Yep, irrational folks believe killing innocents will change people's thinking. Someone out there wants to make a political point by killing a bunch of airplane passengers, many of whom no doubt would be sympathetic to their cause if presented in a more reasonable fashion than "The world must see the righteousness of my cause, therefore you must die!" Of course, doing violence against someone almost never changes minds - but fear of that violence can change the way we act.

Fear can make us unable to see when a disconnect occurs between the problem and the solution. It may very well be prudent to be more vigilant about who is boarding airplanes with what materials - but strip-searching blue-haired old ladies is an overreaction to the problem. Surveillance of those suspected of plotting or having commited violence is a logical course of action - surveillance of everyone's e-mail correspondence is not. Seizing the assets of proven terrorists may make some sense in suppressing terrorism - forcing all citizens to display a federally approved ID card before they can open a bank account does not.

In other words, take proper precautions against the possibility of violence, but don't let the fear of violence control you - and definitely don't let others use your fear of violence to control you. "Refuse to be afraid" means times will come when you have to overcome the fear any normal human being will feel under the circumstances, and go ahead and act anyway.

Pack a proper parachute before you jump, and most of the time you'll land safely. Allow people to exercise the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and most of the time you'll have a healthy group of living, free, often happy people - if one, two or even a small handful of pathological murderers creep into the mix, deal with the murderers, don't suspend the vast majority's rights. That's the disconnect - that's where we need to refuse to let them use our fear to control us.

Why they need us

[This musing assumes you have seen the film V for Vendetta. If you have not and wish not to view "spoilers," go watch the darn flick and come back later. You've been warned. You're welcome.]

Towards the climax of the great movie about violence and the state V for Vendetta, megalomanical leader Adam Sutler declares the time has come for the rulers of totalitarian England to remind the peasantry "why they need us." What follows is a montage of news reports clearly intended to cow the citizenry into a state of fear, reminding them that the government is the only thing standing between their security and utter chaos.

A civil war drags on in the former United States. Water shortages are reported and predicted because of a lack of sufficient rain for two years. Police arrest nine suspects who were hoarding vaccine against the deadly avian flu. Twenty-seven people have died in the wake of the discovery of a new airborne disease. New evidence links the terrorist V to an attack on London 14 years earlier - reminding them of the attack that made citizens turn to the government for protection in the first place. A skeptical bar patron says out loud: "Can you believe this shit?" Of course we can't, and we shouldn't.

The truth revealed by the movie is that the state is the source of the chaos. The titular character V, either a freedom fighter or a terrorist depending upon point of view, helps detective Finch uncover the reality that the central terrorist attack of his age was staged by government forces seeking control of citizens' lives under the cover of providing more security. V himself is the product of secret government medical research gone awry.

A central theme of the movie is the same as mine: Refuse to be afraid. The standard political script has been unchanged for decades now: Remind people about something they fear. Offer yourself as the solution to that which they fear. Once elected, strip people of freedom in the name of fighting that which they fear. Rule with an iron fist or a velvet glove, but rule; do not let people live for themselves in freedom.

I would like to dig one notch deeper: V himself preys upon fear, as well. He manipulates people's fear of the state and their fear of losing their freedom - a healthy fear, no doubt, but a real and palpable fear. Notice that V's agenda is first vengeance against the people who conducted the secret medical research on him - hence the title V for Vendetta. He justifies his vendetta by wrapping it within the more worthy cause of freedom: "People should not be afraid of their governments; governments should be afraid of their people." But this little proverb betrays his agenda: Someone should be afraid.

Fear is the great irrationalizer. People do stupid and terrible things when they are afraid. Therefore governments, comprised of people acting as a collective, do stupid and terrible things when operating out of fear. It is one thing to be aware of danger; it is entirely a different thing to be so afraid of that danger that you do or allow stupid and terrible things.

Being aware of the state's incomprehensible assault on our freedom is a healthy thing. Allowing yourself to become afraid of the state, and acting based on that fear rather than rational awareness, is unhealthy.

The state wants you to be afraid. Refuse to be afraid of their straw men and speculations. But go one step beyond: Refuse to be afraid of the state itself. When folks like me show you examples of the state's fear-mongering, use the information to think for yourself - don't be afraid of the state's power, because fear is part of the fuel of their power. We do not need the state to take care of us; the real truth is about how much our leaders need us to believe we need them. And that brings us to the second half of my mantra above: Free yourself.

The character Evie is unable to think clearly until she has no more fear. She reaches that condition of bliss only after a lifetime of horror and several weeks of torture - not a regimen any of us would like to undergo. Perhaps the best we can do is acknowledge our fears and refuse to allow the fear to control our actions and decisions. But that is the key - defeating the fear and living free.

What am I doing here?

It never hurts to review. So who is B.W. Richardson and why I am I writing this Montag blog?

Actually, who I am is irrelevant. I'm a writer with a job in the media industry. Why I'm writing this is much more interesting.

The purpose is to encourage people to live and think independently. Refuse to be afraid to be yourself. Refuse to be afraid to express yourself. Refuse to be afraid of government and any other authority that portrays itself as a way out of the scary stuff. That which they want you to fear is not as scary as the compromises to your Self that will happen if you turn responsibility for your safety and security over to someone else. Those compromises inevitability make you less free.

By the way, you should also refuse to be afraid of anything I say. I'm not trying to scare you; I'm just trying to make you aware of the fear mongers and fear-mongering, which is often done by well-meaning people. Fear is an emotion that short-circuits reason. Refuse to be afraid.

My purpose here is to emphasize the good news behind the bad news concerning the loss of our civil liberties. It's contained in the words of the theme song of the television show Firefly, which asserts forcefully, "Take my love, take my land, Take me where I cannot stand; I don't care, I'm still free: You can't take the sky from me." You can't be made a slave without your consent: "Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." My goal is to encourage people to be free despite the ongoing efforts to enslave us and further empower authority. Refuse to be afraid.

Refuse to be afraid

It's been about a year now that I've used the name Brian Wilson Richardson. If you look in my archives, you'll see the first entry is dated July 18, 2005. I like the name, and when I recently visited some newly acquired friends it felt odd but comfortable to be addressed as "B.W."

Not long after I started writing Montag regularly, a coda began to emerge: Refuse to be afraid. It came up so often, I made it the "subtitle" of Montag. That was a reminder for me as much as for you. It's so easy to let fear direct our lives, even though our basic nature yearns to be free. It's just that so many people, whether they intend or not, try to influence our behavior - restrict our freedom - by making us afraid.

Here's a problem - so much of what draws my outrage and ends up being discussed in this space could make a person fearful, too - afraid that so many people are doing so many things to deprive us of so much freedom, there's nothing we can do to stop them or reverse the trend. Sometimes I look at stuff I've written over a period of days, or on and off over months and years, and I detect that kind of resignation creeping in. "What's the use? The statists have won: A vast majority wants the government to take care of all our problems." And that may be true. Hell, it IS true: Not that the statists have won, but it's true about the vast majority.

So what's a self-respecting freedom-loving individualist individual to do? Well, first, refuse to be afraid. There are worse things in life than being alone. (For one thing, there's being not-alone in a roomful of rabid statists.) And you're not alone, anyway: If you believe you have the freedom to live your life as you please as long as you don't step on someone else's freedom, I'm with you. And so are the folks I've provided links to over there on the right, and so are a lot of the other folks they've provided links to. We're a minority, but we're a pretty feisty minority, and you may not know this, but a pretty feisty minority is what made 13 free and independent states out of the American British colonies.

(No, I'm not suggesting we take arms against the oppressors - England initiated the violence we now know as the American Revolution. The former colonies just wanted to go their way in peace, and the king didn't cotton to that. Oppressors tend to do violence even to nonviolent free people - but don't be afraid of that, either: They can't hurt the idea of freedom, and they can't make you not-free without your permission.)

I suggest simply that as we share the various outrages against freedom in this supposedly free nation, we remind ourselves why we're outraged, and that is: It's not supposed to be this way. By accumulating the evidence, we slowly but surely are building a case to prove our contention that we are not free, and slowly but surely that contention is being heard. How else does a movie like V for Vendetta get made, for example?

There's nothing we can do to win back our freedom? Balderdash. For one thing, we can write little essays like this one and share them as far and wide as we can. The war of ideas is never over: If today a majority is content to let the Vast Machine run their lives, tomorrow a handful of people will read this and decide not to be content, and they will share this little essay with a handful of others or, even better, write or speak these thoughts in their own words. And that's just the beginning. Claire Wolfe wrote a book called 99 Things to Do 'til the Revolution and then thought of 78 more ideas.

Agitating for freedom in an increasingly unfree society may win you more adversaries than friends in the early going especially, but it will win you friends. And it all begins with a decision: Refuse to be afraid.

Of course the book will be late

I had a cup of coffee with a friend the other day and told him I was writing a book called Refuse to Be Afraid. By the startled look in his eyes, I could tell that just the title strikes a chord.

These are timely times for such a message. The whole purpose of this drama we call a "presidential election" is to strike fear in the darkest depths of our souls, and offer one of these two champions as the solution. There are dark whisperings the price of gasoline and food will never go back down, and the economy will collapse within weeks. The news brings word daily of new deaths abroad, new murders on our urban streets, new layoffs in our businesses and industries, new sources of cancer in everyday foods and even in the air and water.

It's almost as if, perish the thought, our rulers had gathered in a room and decided that the little people needed a few lessons to remind them "why - they - need - us!" Well, we don't need them, and the source of their fear is that we will figure that out, take charge of our own lives and lead a peaceful life based not on their tyranny and fear but on, oh I don't know, "My freedom has no limit except so far as I don't infringe on your freedom" or "Do unto others as you would have them do to you."

So of course a book called Refuse to Be Afraid could be like a hand grenade tossed into a crowded room — no, strike that, your honor — a book called Refuse to Be Afraid could be a lighted candle carried gently into a room that has been sealed off from the daylight for far too long. The reaction could be as, um, electric as my friend's.

And of course, then, the book will not be ready by July 15, my deadline. I am, after all, the fellow who wrote The Imaginary Bomb in 1988 and first published it this past winter. My collaborator is the guy who wrote The Adventures of Myke Phoenix in the early '90s and Wildflower Man in April 1996. Only this year are they all out there. How could we possibly publish a new book on time?

I do expect to complete it soon. This has been the dominant theme of this blog and may be perhaps the most important advice I can pass along in these times, and I do want to say these things and have them be heard as soon as possible. It will, however, be late. I hope and pray it won't be too late — I'd say I'm "afraid" it may be too late, but that would be a bit ironic, don't you think? The fearful little man holding a candle in the dark, hands shaking and saying, "I'm afraid I'm too late, but we all need to refuse to be afraid"?

While you're waiting, feel free to stare at the seven words at the bottom of my banner until they sink in a bit: Refuse to be afraid. Free yourself. Dream. That's the whole book anyway.

Refuse to be Afraid: The book

This will be the first Richardson & Bluhm book from the 21st century. The Imaginary Bomb and The Adventures of Myke Phoenix are things we found in the attic and said, "Why didn't these get into print in the 1990s when they were written?" But Refuse to be Afraid is where I've been going since I first started these little scribblings 33 months ago, and I hope to have it in your hands on or about the third (!) anniversary of my first, tentative post.

How do you like the cover? Too stark? Too bland? Right colors? Horrendous colors? Your constructive criticism is more than welcome.

It took only a few weeks after I launched Montag for the predominant theme to develop, and I'm building longer pieces around the "unfinished essays and spontaneous eruptions" of this little corner of the Web. (And thanks for the phrase, Wally!) A couple of excerpts from the opening chapter:

As this book heads to press, the United States is waste-deep in a presidential campaign. As in all other political campaigns, it seems, the issues are our fears. One candidate plays on our fear of being unable to make ends meet, of living from paycheck to paycheck, and the terror of what might happen if the paychecks stop coming, of what might happen to our loved ones if anything were to happen to us. Another candidate plays on our fear of those terrorists, of the people with difference faces than ours who want to destroy our way of life. Both candidates promise that if we will turn ourselves over to them, we will be safe and secure.

There’s really only one place where you’re totally secure: A jail cell. Surrounded by four walls with barred doors and windows, you can’t be hurt. (We’ll set aside your fear of earthquakes for the moment.) Government leaders who promise you safety from outside influences can only deliver by caging you – by stripping your liberty away, either one freedom at a time or all at once.

Benjamin Franklin was right, presuming he really said these words attributed to him: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety” ...

The book is called Refuse to be Afraid, but you’re not human if you’re not afraid from time to time. What I hope to encourage you to do is to keep your fear at bay. Don’t let it control your thoughts and actions. I’ve been writing about Big Fears, the fears that lead to airport checkpoints and surveillance cameras and sometimes even to wars, but little fears make us miserable, too. We don’t speak out for something we believe in, because we’re afraid of the repercussions. We don’t ask that attractive person for a date, because we’re afraid of being turned down. We don’t start writing the Great American Novel or quit our jobs and start that business we really want to start – because we’re afraid it won’t work out. Worse, we’re afraid of the changes success will bring in our lives.

When I say, “Refuse to be afraid,” I’m not telling you to deny that anxious little feeling or that paralyzing terror. The fear is real. I’m just suggesting that the thing that terrifies you can’t possibly be as awful as the paralysis. And yielding control of your life, i.e., your freedom, is likely to produce scarier results than an environment where everyone is free.

For now, tidbits like these are only available by browsing this blog. A good place to start is down there on the right, with the list I've immodestly labeled "B.W.'s Greatest Hits." Come summer, you can sit in the hammock or at the picnic table and enjoy this stuff out in the sun. R&B doesn't yet have the capability for advance orders, but once we figure out how to get that done, you know we will.

While you're waiting, nothing is stopping you from enjoying the little bits of light reading we've produced for you thus far. Click here and you're on your way.

Rinse. Repeat.

Refuse to be afraid. Free yourself. Dream.

Rinse. Repeat.

I've found the little three-step exhortation at the top of this page has multiple applications. Longtime readers know that I started saying "Refuse to be afraid" because so much of modern communication seems to be about raising fears. Terrorists are lurking in every dark corner of the land, most of the food you eat may give you cancer or make you obese or both, and termites may eat the foundation of your house unless you treat it with a certain product.

My advice was simply not to fall for it. Refuse to be afraid. OK, you're nervous and/or scared, but don't let it control you. Refuse to be controlled by your fear.

Then I realized not being afraid was only the first step. You're not afraid, fine. Now what? "Free yourself." Get loose of what you were afraid of. Resist the solutions offered by the politicians and the salesmen and create your own answers. Fly.

But free yourself to do what? Fly where? That's where the dreaming starts.

Releasing the fear makes you free — free to dream — dream of doing something amazing.

How do you apply this advice? It depends on what you're afraid of, or what someone else is trying to frighten you with. But it seems to me the process is the same in most cases. Refuse to be afraid. Now that your fear is under control, you can free yourself to consider many options or take the action you feared. Once free, you can set goals, objectives, dreams ... and go for it! (Whatever "It" may be.)

And then move on to the next fear ... rinse, repeat.

Fear is a poison

Crash has stayed with me for a couple of nights now, and I think I've figured out why. It's because the point of the movie is the one at the top of my page: Refuse to be afraid.

Crash is the story of people who alternate being fearful of each other and being angry with each other. But in a series of interlocking events, we see the damage that is done by being afraid and the triumph that is possible when you refuse to be afraid.

It's a brilliant movie.

Maybe it's the lingering winter. March is the dreariest month of the year and also the most full of hope - first days of spring, but the last days of winter. But it's been hard for me to ignore my own advice lately.

I've been afraid.

Uncertainties have been creeping into my life, and instead of embracing them and moving on against the challenges, I've been afraid - afraid of being irrelevant, afraid of being too relevant, afraid of being heard, afraid of being ignored, afraid to do something, afraid of standing still, afraid of dying, afraid of living. I've been every politician's dream - they like us scared, you know. Makes it easier for them to wield the power they crave.

Then Crash comes along to show us how wrong it can get if you yield to your fears, your anger, your hatred.

It's a brilliant movie with a brilliant message: Refuse to be afraid. Be careful, but refuse to be afraid. It's not easy advice to follow, but it's the best advice in the world.

Oh, and one other thing: Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is a cracking good movie, too. I'm so glad it won Best Animated Feature. I haven't laughed so hard since, well, since I saw Serenity for the first time. You know, the box office may be depressed, but 2005 brought us some great, great movies.

Dream.

Listening to: "Free Yo'Self," Captain Tractor

"We were born to be wild; we were born to be free — come with me."

The first tenet I posted under my blog's title was "Refuse to be afraid." As I started these semi-regular musings, I began to see a pattern so clear that if I were a conspiracy theorist, I would suspect a conspiracy.

But it's as simple as this: In advertising, marketing, politics, sales and many other aspects of human interaction, an effective strategy is to make your target afraid of something and offer them a solution. When it's a fear of zits or greasy hair, the solution of a medicated cream or shampoo is a happy one. When it's a fear of "terrorists" or "communists" or "those people," the solution often involves removing some of your freedom and/or other people's freedom, and that is not a happy outcome.

So I posted "refuse to be afraid." I decided to use this blog to encourage people not to let your fears stand in the way, not to let politicians or others manipulate you into doing or condoning something by making you afraid. As Tom Petty wrote, "Most things I worry about never happen anyway." Or Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Do the thing you fear, and the death of fear is certain."

The second tenet I added was "Free yourself." My observation was that the thing fear obstructed most often was freedom, or the taking of steps that could lead a person to greater freedom. So "Refuse to be afraid" and "free yourself" seemed to flow together into one thought.

And that leads us to today. It occurred to me that when you wrestle your fears into a manageable shape, you take the first step toward freeing yourself, and one of the biggest results of that process is that your dreams begin to seem possible, and your dreams even begin to come true. A person who been twisted under by fears and slavery for long enough may have forgotten the importance of dreams — so I thought I'd remind folks that they're part of a single process where one step leads to the next: Refuse to be afraid. Free yourself. Dream.

What would you be doing today if you could control your fears and you were free to do it? That's your dream talking.

Nothing new: The politics of fear

"We are again being told to be afraid. As it was before the two world wars, so it is now; politicians talk in frightening terms, journalists invent scare-lines, and even next-door neighbors are taking up the cry: The enemy is at the city gates; we must gird for battle. In case you don't know, the enemy this time is ________."

The quote is from Frank Chodorov, November 1954, recalled in Murray Rothbard's The Betrayal of the American Right. (Page 135 - and watch for more about this book in days and weeks to come) I left the blank because it could be anytime, anyone. Chodorov was writing that day about fear of the Soviet Union. I could write it tonight about terrorists, or China, or illegal immigrants, or obesity or Big Tobacco.

We are always being told to be afraid, by politicians, by journalists and even next-door neighbors. These influential people remain more focused on the fear of death than on the joy of living. Politicians want you to be afraid, because it makes you easier to manipulate. Journalists, most of them anyway, are only reporting what they hear, and what they hear much of the time is about what politicians want their readers, listeners and viewers to fear. Next-door neighbors ought to know better, but they just parrot what they hear from politicians and journalists.

As Rothbard, Chodorov and countless others concluded, the fear-mongers were right: The enemy is at the gates, but the enemy is not Russian, Arab, terrorist or even a tobacco farmer. The enemy is the politician who would strip you of your freedom in the name of protecting you against the terror du jour.

Here's the dirty little secret: There is nothing to fear. Chances are close to 100% that the dark-skinned fella behind the counter is not a terrorist. The typical Iraqi is more concerned about feeding his kids than converting you to Islam. That bag of French fries is not going to kill you, and neither is that cigarette, at least not today, not by themselves.

As long as you let them scare you, you are the pawn of the politician. Here's what to say to the fear monger: I'm not afraid. I'm not even afraid of you, who want me to be afraid so I will voluntarily to submit to an unconstitutional search, so I will voluntarily disarm myself, so I will voluntarily stop telling my friends and neighbors not to be afraid of you.

I've said this before, and I don't have a death wish - I simply say this because it's true, and guess what? You're going to die someday anyway, and so am I - In the end, the only power the fear mongers have over a free human being is that they can kill you. They simply can't make you a slave without your permission. But, like the legendary vampire who can't enter a home without an invitation, the fear mongers will try every trick in the book to obtain your permission to enslave you. Bottom line - Charles Dickens' Jacob Marley was right: We forge our own chains.

You were born free. You can live and die free if you choose. First, refuse to be afraid.

Richardson & Bluhm update

Listening to: Kingdom Comes, Sara Groves

As I told you last month, the plan is to release four books during 2008. The easy one, The Imaginary Bomb, is already available at Lulu.com, and why the bejeebers haven't you ordered your copy yet? You know you've wanted it ever since you finished listening to Uncle Warren's podcast of my inaugural interstellar romp. And thanks to those who've already purchased it to sweep The I-Bomb up to #34,223 at the Lulu marketplace!

The hard one has been the fourth one. Despite a promising start, all I had until a few days ago was a cast of characters — actually a small list of archetypes — and a general feeling that I wanted to write about freedom, revolution, nonviolence and the Zero Aggression Principle. This, my "Great Freedom Novel," is on the plan for release Oct. 15.

Then I realized something important about the early returns on The I-Bomb: Some of the people who really, really like it are bright young men (I know they're bright because they like the book) in that 8-15 age group. I started thinking about Robert Heinlein's so-called "juvenile" fiction — not that I compare myself to Heinlein, but it doesn't hurt to think about his audiences — and wondered what I would want to say to that "young adult reader" audience. Suddenly, as I wrote to a couple of these guys' moms, my brain exploded.

I didn't intend to return to the time of imaginary physics, but here I am. This is not going to be another story about Bob Whelan, Pete Wong and Baxter Hetznecker, but the novel is set in their universe, and it involves Sirius 4's declaration of independence, which plays a key role in The I-Bomb. The working title: The Imaginary Revolution. (A quick search turns up another book with the same name, but I'm guessing they would not be confused with each other. Still, I expect the writing process will suggest an alternative to me.)

A couple of quick notes about the other projects.

+++ Warren Bluhm's collection of short stories is still more or less on track. Working title: Wildflower Man, a collection of short stories. Maybe that'll be the final name, maybe not. Most of these are scribblings he created in the early to mid 1990s, with the major exception of a new short story he just started working on.

Another interesting highlight: Once upon a time he wanted to update and revive the concept of the dime novel, inventing kind of a hybrid between the old pulps and comic books — few or no pictures, but shorter stories. The farthest he got with this concept was a superhero named Myke Phoenix — he actually had two years' worth of stories plotted and several issues in various stages of completion. The book will include the two most fully realized Myke Phoenix stories: "Our Best Hope: The Origin of Myke Phoenix" and "The Strange Ultimatum of Quincy Quackenbos." Target release date: April 15. Gulp!

+++ Our dual-bylined book Refuse to Be Afraid is more or less on track for its target release date of July 15. The main news on this front is UW continues to threaten to record a new collection of his songs for public release, some of which you may have heard on his "Uncle Warren's Attic" podcast. One song you have not heard would be the title song of his collection, which for obvious reasons would also be released July 15: "Refuse to Be Afraid."

The plan today is to sit down and map out a way to get all of the above accomplished by the indicated target dates. One important thing I've learned about goals is that when you make the deadlines public, it generates a real incentive. So as I write this, I have no idea how we're going to get it all done, but I'm telling you now to further my goal to have at least five items on the Richardson & Bluhm homepage eight months from now. Thanks for listening!

What do they want from us?

Bing! My "Refuse to be Afraid"-o-meter clicked on last evening as I stumbled across a sound bite of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke staring into the camera and threatening the talking heads of a Senate committee.

I believe if the credit markets are not functioning, that jobs will be lost, that our credit rate will rise, more houses will be foreclosed upon, GDP will contract, that the economy will just not be able to recover in a normal, healthy way.

Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson have spent the past few days implementing H.L. Mencken's vintage formula regarding the ruling class:

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

The populace is indeed alarmed and clamorous to be led to safety, but this is the worst time to be alarmed and the absolutely worst time to be terrified. When rulers send their minions to whip you into a state of irrational fear, the question always to ask is, "What do they want from us?" Well, clearly they want the "bailout plan" that appeared overnight to be passed, preferably without most of us reading the fine print or considering the ramification of the federal government taking ownership of the means of production financial sector.

Journalist William Greider, writing in The Nation, is among those saying "Hang on just one darn minute, fellas." He begins an article titled "Goldman Sachs Socialism":

Wall Street put a gun to the head of the politicians and said, Give us the money--right now--or take the blame for whatever follows. The audacity of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's bailout proposal is reflected in what it refuses to say: no explanations of how the bailout will work, no demands on the bankers in exchange for the public's money. The Treasury's opaque, three-page summary of plan includes this chilling statement:

"Section 8. Review. Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." In other words, no lawsuits allowed by aggrieved investors or American taxpayers. No complaints later from ignorant pols who didn't know what they voted for. Take it or leave it, suckers.

You always have to wonder when a government agency seeks carte blanche power and immunity from prosecution. Oh, wait, no, you don't have to wonder. You just have to refuse. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. (For the semi-literate, that's a Shakespearian reference, not a sudden change of subject to Copenhagen politics.) In the end, Greider drinks the Kool-Aid, opining that if the Bernanke-Paulson power grab doesn't work, the next step should be to "force-feed new life into the real economy with government spending on public projects and capital formation. How much spending? Rescuing America from irresponsible Wall Street is worth whatever it costs to save the bloodied bankers." And then how do we rescue America from irresponsible government spending?

As I've confessed over the past few days, I don't know enough economics to propose a different answer than borrowing $700 billion to give to banks that have borrowed too much. I do know enough personally about bankruptcy to recognize that getting a new credit card only postpones the crash. Oh, and I know that the crash is never as bad as you feared and in many ways even a relief.

And I know that fear is the mind-killer. Others are writing good writings about what it all means and how to protect your assets as best you can. My sole advice is for you, before you take any action, to take a deep breath and repeat Frank Herbert's litany of the Bene Gesserit from his Dune novels:

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

We're All Gonna Die

My eye was caught at the antique store the other day by a thick, well-worn book titled "Modern Medical Counselor." By its condition it was clear the book was anything but modern, and the price ($2) was right, so, figuring it would be an interesting excursion into the past, I brought it home.

What actually caught my attention was the section that I casually opened to, even before I brought the book home: "Survival in Atomic Bombing." The copyright date of the book is 1951, so browsing through this book will be a traipse through an era where communism and nuclear death were our greatest fears.

With the knowledge of what was to happen in the next 54 years, we know the fears were largely unfounded. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still the only cities ever destroyed by atomic bombs, and while the great communist bogeyman reared his ugly head many times over the years, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics fell apart under the weight of its totalitarian follies and China has decided to try burying us the good old American way, by establishing government-subsidized monopolies.

In other words, the fear that was used as an excuse to impose on our liberties never came true. Communism and nuclear catastrophe did not destroy us.


Today, the fear is of small groups of terrorists (and "rogue nations") with
nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. The fear is that an influenza virus that kills birds will find a way to migrate into humans and cause a pandemic. The fear is that standing too close to a person smoking a cigarette will give you cancer. We can let those fears control us, we can let others use those fears to justify locking us into cages, or we can refuse to be afraid and live our lives as free men and women.

Here is the fear that lurks behind all of these fears: We are afraid to die. We are especially afraid to die before we experience a ripe old age.

Here is the truth: We all will die, some of us "before our time." The real choice we all have: We can live and die as slaves, or we can live and die as free men and women.

Most of our lives we exist in the gray area between freedom and slavery, convincing ourselves that we are making our choices freely: When we hand the chains to our government and our bosses and our creditors, we rationalize that we are making a free decision to enslave ourselves. And it usually is a freely made choice - in the beginning.

Like Jacob Marley's ghost, we accumulate shackles as we progress through life, usually out of fear - fear of poverty, fear of going hungry, fear of not having a reliable car. And the biggest fear of them all is the fear of death.

Accepting that you will die is the beginning of freedom. I've never heard the song "Live Like You're Dying," but its title is the message.

These thoughts could be misconstrued as advocating violent resistance against the slavemasters. Nothing could be further from the truth. The revolution I advocate is an internal one.

Refuse to be afraid. Resist the impulse to yield to the fear and let someone strip your liberty in the name of security and protection. Live like you were dying - because you are, someday, so better to live free than in chains.

On beyond paralysis

Let's get one thing straight: The main thing so many people are frightened is because The Powers That Be are trying so hard to scare us all. The why of it was obvious back when the giant Mencken was walking the Earth:

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

As we clamor to be led to safety, TPTB are forging new chains. To this point in our history, they have been economic chains — confiscatory taxation, debts, rules and regulations — and it seems a matter of time before they become literal chains, but those won't be necessary if we let them succeed. Economic chains well-forged make literal chains unnecessary.

Always — Always! — when the news of the day causes you to grow anxious and afraid for your future or your children's future, look around: Who is it who benefits from your fear? How do the "practical politicians" propose to solve the crisis caused by the latest menacing hobgoblin — and how do TPTB profit by passing this legislation (it's always legislation)?

Resist any solution that steals more freedom or independence from you or your business or your property. Ask why. "Why is this hobgoblin such a menace that the only solution you propose is to restrict our freedom and take our liberty away?" Shine a light and the rodents may scurry away — even if they don't, the things they tell you to fear won't seem near as big and terrifying shining in the sun as they do now, hiding in the midnight darkness.

Refuse to be afraid. It's hardest to keep your fears under control when so many forces are trying so hard to alarm you. No doubt they have fearful purposes of their own, but they feed on our fear. Refuse to be afraid. It's the first step on beyond the paralysis of fear, the first step toward freeing yourself and following your dreams.

Living life on purpose

In the first song of his valedictory album Brainwashed, George Harrison caught me up short with a line I've since come to realize is an old one, but it was the first time I'd heard it.

If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there.

All of the self-help books I've ever encountered seem to come down to a few basic truths, and that's one of them. Expressed more positively, it's simply: Know where you want to be, set a goal to get there, and act on the goal.

The Earl Nightingale and James Allen pieces I referenced the last couple of days, use agrarian examples to make their point, Nightingale referring to a farmer and Allen to a gardener. Their point: If you want to grow flowers, or corn, you till the land, plant the seed and do what's needed to bring the plant to fruition — weeding, watering, etc. And you'd better plant in the spring if you want the food by the end of the summer.

Their point is that the mind is like the soil, and goals are the seed. You set the goal and do what's needed to bring it to fruition. And you'd better set a deadline if you want to reach the goal. Without a specific timeline, you have no way to know whether knee-high by the Fourth of July is a sign of coming success or of impending failure.

The farmer analogy works well because most people understand how hard farmers work, with a single-minded purpose — grow the corn, keep the cows milked. Setting your mind and going for a goal is not easy. As my friend John Newman reminded me the other day in an e-mail, have you ever tried to think about just one thing for two minutes straight? It's pretty much impossible; your mind has a will of its own and will skip off on a tangent. Keeping eyes on the prize is a simple concept, but not an easy task. If it were easy, everyone would reach the goals they set.

Allen takes it a step further, however, suggesting that everyone does reach the goals they set — and because most people don't set goals, they reap what their minds sow (or failed to sow). "If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there." Allen says:

Man is buffeted by circumstances so long as he believes himself to be the creature of outside conditions, but when he realizes he is a creative power, and that he may command the hidden soil and seeds of his being out of which circumstances grow, he then becomes the rightful master of himself.

And on a subject that recurs frequently here:

The will to do springs from the knowledge that we can do. Doubt and fear are the great enemies of knowledge, and he who encourages them, who does not slay them, thwarts himself at every step. He who has conquered doubt and fear has conquered failure.

We all face doubt and fear on a daily basis, and manipulative men and women encourage us to be afraid so they we will buy into their self-serving solutions. Refuse to be afraid — that is, refuse to let doubt and fear control you — and you're on the road to freedom.

As I wrote during the last election season, "Freedom is not about having the right ruler. Oh, wait, yes it is. Freedom is understanding that I am the boss of me." You can live a life without doubt and fear weighing you down; you simply have to live it on purpose.

Happy Gandhi's Birthday

Tuesday, Oct. 2, is the 138th anniversary of Mohandas Gandhi's birth. For a little more than two years, I've had posted on the wall next to my computer a resolution from Gandhi that seems as fine a way to start the day as I can muster (if only I looked at the wall every day!):

Let the first act of every morning be to make the following resolve for the day:

* I shall not fear anyone on Earth.

* I shall fear only God.

* I shall not bear ill will toward anyone.

* I shall not submit to injustice from anyone.

* I shall conquer untruth by truth.

* And in resisting untruth, I shall put up with all suffering.

I shall not fear anyone on Earth. So many men and women work hard to make us fear them - or to make us fear something that they want to (forcibly) rescue us from. Begin the day deciding not to be afraid, not to let fear control your behavior, and you are already on your way to a good day.

I shall fear only God. I know this site is visited by agnostics, atheists and believers alike, so let me just suggest that this is a corollary of "I shall not fear anyone on Earth." I also choose to remember (since to me God is a comforting concept, not something to be afraid of) that the words translated in the Bible as "fear of God" can also be translated as "in awe of God." This works for statement #1, too - I shall not be in awe of anyone on Earth; I shall be in awe only of God (or nature or flying spaghetti monsters or anything bigger than this life).

I shall not bear ill will toward anyone. I spent most of eight years hating Bill Clinton for ... oh, why bother explaining? The point is that hate is a force that drains so much life out of you. Many, many folks, especially in Bill's (and his counterpart George's) line of work, should never be trusted - but you will only debilitate yourself if you bear him ill will, and you certainly will never accomplish the miracle of converting him to the cause of liberty if you hate him - because your hate will be obvious and make his ears deaf to your voice.

I shall not submit to injustice from anyone. This is a tough one to follow. Sometimes it's easier to submit than to cause a scene, and I confess sometimes I take the easy course. Or I simply avoid the injustice - as in, I haven't been on an airplane since the spring of 2001, because I prefer freedom to what would happen to me if I object to the unjust and unconstitutional search of my person and property in the airport. Still, if I can point out an injustice and refuse to submit, I will try to muster the courage to do so.

I shall conquer untruth by truth. That's one reason I keep writing this stuff.

And in resisting untruth, I shall put up with all suffering. Well ... hey, I'm a big weinie and I hate pain. I keep my wage-slave job, for example, because I'm not ready for all that suffering. And I do have the occasional opportunity to conquer untruth by truth there.

Mahatma Gandhi proved you don't need violence to fight the state successfully. He proved the power of a commitment never to initiate force. We can argue until the sacred cows come home how well he succeeded, or for how long, but he gave us a good example and much to think about regarding how to make this a better world. Happy Gandhi's Birthday!

On hypocrisy, goals and imaginary lovers

Because I'm forced by circumstance to live in this skin, no one is more aware of its imperfections and contradictions than I.

I write cheery little bits and pieces about refusing to be afraid and smiling if you love freedom - but then I go off the deep end and write frightening little rants about how we're descending into a police state. Strike that, yer honor, make that frightening little rants about how we have descended into a police state. It is hard to refuse to be afraid, when the person encouraging you to do so seems discouraged.

I write cheery little condemnations about wage slavery and the hazards of big bureaucracies, but I take timid little steps toward freedom from the wage managers while toiling away in what might be described as one of the larger bureaucracies the private sector has to offer.

You may not be thinkin' it, but I sure am: Why should you listen to that hypocrite Richardson? He hasn't even delivered on his promise to entertain you with a book that was due last Sept. 1!

I write cheery little essays intended to help you cope, and then I divert to self-centered little whines about how I don't always cope so well.

What's a mother to do?

Well, lesson No. 1 is that your freedom and your happiness are up to you, because even the most optimistic encouraging souls are going to let you down from time to time. Mine such nuggets as you can from my essays and try to ignore my pratfalls. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and while I have my ups and downs I do aspire to be more reliable than a stopped clock (although now that I mention it, a slow clock is right less frequently than a stopped clock, because time catches up - oh please, B.W., you're off on a tangent again!).

And I'm in the process of learning lesson No. 2 - if you aspire to get out of wage slavery, you must treat your self-imposed deadlines seriously. The reason Sept. 1 got away from me is that I didn't treat it as a "real" deadline. At the wage slave job, certain tasks have to be done by a certain time, and I reached my lofty place in the pecking order by being good at meeting those deadlines. But I didn't take my personal deadline as seriously as I take my master's deadlines. So, dear reader - and self, I hope you're paying attention here - one of the secrets of emerging from wage slavery is to set a deadline and take it seriously. "One of these days I'd better finish the novel" doesn't cut it.

There! I launched into a self-flaggelating moan and emerged with the things you can learn by my bad example. I hope you've picked up some valuable tips from this, class - even if it's "boy, I'm never going to be that whiny when I start my Web site ..."

Refuse to be Afraid of death

A line caught my eye the other day in coverage of TV consumer advocate Clark Howard's announcement that he's been diagnosed with very early stage prostate cancer.

Because it was caught this early, Howard said: "I have virtually a 100 percent chance of survival."

Well, yes and no. The odds are very good that this is not what will kill Howard, but truth be told, he — as all of us — has a 100 percent chance of not surviving. That's the tough thing about this plane of existence: No one gets out alive.

That is not only the tough thing about life, but it's the most empowering thing, as I alluded a few weeks ago. I think that's in part because one of the greatest motivators is a, um, deadline.

It's one thing to say, for example, "I'm going to quit this job and start my own business someday." As long as it's "someday," you're likely to just tinker around the edges of the dream. But if you say, "I'm going to quit this job and start my own business by May 1," all of a sudden you've added a sense of urgency. You start working on OK, if it needs to get done by May 1, what do I need to do today, where do I need to be at the end of next month, etc.

"Someday" is a dream. A deadline is a plan. And death is the ultimate deadline. The difference is you don't know precisely when time's running out.

You have only two real choices with death: You can live your life in fear, avoiding anything that could be risky — I'm not talking about stepping in front of a bus here, but more everyday-risky things like submitting to injustice or putting up with abuse because you're not sure how (or if) you'd survive. Or you can embrace the inevitable and make the best use of the time that is left.

The reason the mere title of the song "Live Like You're Dying" has such impact is because it's a philosophy rolled up in four words, and because if you think about it for more than two seconds, it smacks you in the face: Live like you're dying, because you are dying — someday. There's that fuzzy word someday again.

Running out of time is a helpless feeling. That's why one of the greatest Super Bowl ever ended with the guy reaching towards the goal at the 1-yard line with another guy dragging him down: We all felt the helplessness of the ball carrier and the desperate urgency of the defender as the clock ticked down to zero. But great Super Bowls have also ended with teams making the best use possible of the time that's left, and scoring the winning touchdown before the clock ran out.

Having a deadline forces you to prioritize what's important. If you knew at 5 p.m. today your heart would quit, or a drunken fool would drive his car into your lap, you'd organize your day differently.

Here's the good news: You're probably going to survive the day. It's not all that desperate. There's no need to fear. Here's the bad news: Time will run out someday. You have a finite amount of time to leave your mark on history, however it is you wish to do that.

You can let that scare you and let death catch you short of the goal, or you can make the best use of the time that's left. Oh, and by the way, everyone's scared — the successful folks have figured out you can convert the negative energy of fear into the positive energy of motivation. That's the gist of what I mean when I say: Refuse to be afraid.

April 19, 1993

One of the recurring themes in my writing is you don't need to wait for someone to give you permission to be free - you are free to do what you want or need to do as long as it doesn't infringe on your neighbor, so just go do it. Our forebears set up a country where the government essentially has to ask permission to infringe on your freedom - you don't have to ask it for your liberties.

Of course, that is not exactly how things have played out over the years. Yesterday I emphasized how liberty was exercised on April 19 231 years ago. I was deliberately trying to avoid thinking about how liberty was trampled 13 years ago, live on TV.

Another theme I try to emphasize is be optimistic and, in the sense that most days the police aren't going to break down your door and seize your person and property, it doesn't hurt to be optimistic and unafraid. But somewhere today, police are breaking down someone's door and seizing persons and property, often to enforce bad laws. And outside Waco that day, the lawbreakers were the law enforcers. So while it doesn't hurt to be optimistic and unafraid and to expect the best, it also doesn't hurt to anticipate the worst, so that while most of the time you'll be pleasantly surprised, you also will be prepared should the worst happen.

I try to remind you and myself that freedom is a state of mind - "You can't take the sky from me" - and "they" can't. But I can't help but notice when a week goes by and the majority of my thoughts have been about stolen freedoms and lost liberties, as the last week has. Lots of ranting around here lately, about everything from the smoking gestapo to the ATF massacre.

And fixing the problem will take a more profound shift than replacing Republicans with Democrats or vice versa, as Anthony Gregory notes in a must-read article at lewrockwell.com, "Waco and the Bipartisan Police State." Some excerpts that jumped out at me:

"The continuity between the Clinton and Bush presidencies on issues of civil liberties demonstrates something that many people don’t want to wrap their minds around. America’s police state is utterly bipartisan. It is designed to persist and indeed extend its reach with each administration, no matter the party in charge. In fact, the political party illusion serves to distract people from the real issues, the state’s trampling of our liberties, and instead devote their hopeful attention and energy to getting one dictatorial gang elected rather than the other." ...

"America’s had this bipartisan police state for a long time. It was Republican Abraham Lincoln who waged war on half the country and suspended the Bill of Rights in the other half. It was Democrat Woodrow Wilson who really honed the art of imprisoning dissenters. It was the Republicans in the 1920s who adamantly enforced alcohol prohibition. Democrat Franklin Roosevelt tossed the Japanese Americans in concentration camps. When Republicans turned the heat on leftists during the Cold War, they were only emulating their Democrat predecessors' surveillance and harassment of Old-Right and far-left dissenters in the 30s and 40s. The war on drugs has been advanced, expanded and internationalized by members of both parties. Both Republicans and Democrats are fervently pro-gun control. Neither party has ever done anything significant to rein in the IRS. And just as Clinton’s men helped to whitewash the massacre at Ruby Ridge, which occurred on the first Bush's watch, Republican fixers were eager to cover up the Clinton administration’s wrongdoing at Waco." ...

"If ever Americans are to have their rightful liberty, a political realignment must emerge that shatters the dishonest and distracting constructs of left and right, Democrat and Republican, and focuses instead on liberty versus the state."

This is an article about issues that need to be addressed. At this point I don't know where we find political leaders who will focus on liberty rather than the state. I think so many are so willing to defend the state's alleged right to tread on us, we need years and even decades of re-educating and writing and speaking about the basic truths about freedom and liberty before a majority begin to understand. But that might be overly pessimistic. So I'll spend the rest of my days doing my bit to remind people the default position in life is freedom, so refuse to be afraid and free yourself. My grandpas lived into their 80s, and my 80-something dad is still kicking, so that's potentially 30-plus years of agitating to go - maybe we'll see something in my lifetime yet.

P.S. What a difference an apostrophe makes - states' rights is an essential foundation of this republic; but the ruling class has been exercising the state's rights to oppress us. Theoretically and constitutionally the state has no such rights; when will folks understand?

Staying focused

I'm going to pull dare2befree's comment from Thursday out of the comment section because it's so perfect (and this software makes you click one more time to find comments so you may have missed this) ...

Thank you. Your post had wonderful timing for me today.

Allowing yourself to be paralyzed is a choice. It can be hard to stay focused, but it is easier when you are able to recognize the fear as what it is. See it, analyze it, learn from it, and move on.

refuse to be afraid - dare to be free

The interesting thing is that dare2's post had perfect timing for me.

I've been a little scattershot lately. The lure of the Web is that you can be in the middle of a project and, if your mind wanders, you can be reading about something else in seconds. Why focus on the task at hand when you can be somewhere else entirely?

In the sense that procrastination can be an expression of fear, this wild wonderful Web (like any other instrument!) can be an instrument of fear. The next time I'm paralyzed by another review of Star Trek or even a worthy essay about freedom when my task is to finish my own writing, I'll think back to that thought: "Allowing youself to be paralyzed is a choice."

Everything is a choice, even the choice to make no choice. That's why freedom is our default position — every moment we are faced with choices and free to make one. Choose to be free — dare to be free!