First, I respect both of these men. They have opened a lot of eyes and they have said some profoundly paradigm shifting things (for those who actually listened). I even agree 100% with their end goals.
I will continue to support both of them. I see them as the popular mouth pieces that have honed their craft of communication to such a degree that they can wake a lot of people up to new ways of thinking. This is critical. People need to begin to think for themselves, they need to be willing to question anyone and anything, and they need to realize that it is not only okay to be wrong about things, but that those are huge learning opportunities. If a person is never wrong then can they truly learn?
Introduction: About Me
I am one of those that was awakened by Ron Paul. I even was a delegate for him in 2008 and 2012. It is also one of the only times I've had a "politician" though many of us called him a "statesman" bring tears to my eyes as I listened to him. It was purely due to never expecting to hear an honest person, consistently speaking what he saw as the truth and not swaying over decades from that truth no matter how much people treated him like a crazy person. It was inspiring to me. I felt for the first time in my life like I had encountered someone I truly considered heroic. Someone going totally against the status quo no matter how much he was mocked and battered.
It even went further than that. Many of the things Ron Paul said when I first heard him I thought sounded crazy. It went against so many of the things I had been taught. I took the time to research them. I would eventually realize using logic, reason, and research that it wasn't crazy at all. The crazy thing was the status quo that we are pushed by our society and educational system to accept as the norm.
I began considering myself a Libertarian. Prior to that I didn't really identify with any party. I registered as a Republican and operated as Ron Paul himself did in his behalf in that party since the system is so rigged that if you are not a Republican or Democrat you have essentially no chance. The two times as a delegate also provided me a chance to witness the factions within the GOP first hand, to witness the corruption, breaking of rules, imposing of rules, etc to try to stop people like Ron Paul.
I am currently back at being an independent.
This intro is going to be long, and I will provide a header below so you can skip it if you like. Perhaps it would have benefited you the reader if I had indicated that earlier.
I entered the trenches of reddit many years ago and would get battered and bruised in that mental trench warfare. I often frequented r/libertarian, r/conspiracy, and a few other places. One day someone told me I should join r/anarcho-capitalism as they thought what I was talking about would fit there. I remember thinking they were crazy, as why would I want to embrace anarchy? Yet, I shrugged and as I did with Ron Paul I went and checked it out anyway.
I quickly learned that my definition of anarchy had been instilled in me by the same education system that made my knee jerk reaction to Ron Paul's ideas seem crazy, so was my reaction to the word anarchy. I thought it meant chaos. I had visions or road warrior and the Sex Pistols dancing through my mind. Once I realized what it meant then I didn't think it was crazy at all. Anarcho-Capitalism is the direction most Libertarians should gravitate towards if they truly want to minimize and eliminate government and maximize freedom.
For those of you reading this that do not know the meaning of anarchy. It simply means no rulers. No one can dictate rules for other people that they must follow. A leader is not the same as a ruler. A leader is someone you can voluntarily choose to follow or not follow. We do this instinctively for most tasks. If you're going to cook something as a group the group will typically let the best cook lead. When that is done perhaps they go back to creating a garden as a group and then the best gardener leads. This is completely voluntary. No one is being coerced or forced to follow a leader. When coercion and force enter the picture that is a RULER. Anarchy is from An-Archos which simply means no rulers. That is an idea I can get behind, and I believe a lot of people can when they truly think about it.
I haven't seen people specifically refer to it but the term Voluntaryist is used a lot these days. I have noticed this term being used much more often than anarchist lately. I suspect this is just to avoid the large amount of wasted time in trying to reverse the education and biases lumped on the term anarchy, or anarchist.
As such I consider myself a Voluntaryist.
[End Introduction]
Response to Adam and Larken
My current thoughts to both of you involve following many of your works but the most recent two that are most freshly in my mind are:
and
Socialism: Expectation vs. Reality
Both of these were great. The Socialism one in particular I think Larken hit the nail on the head. However, in watching that so closely before watching the debate between the two of them it did make me come up with the reason I am writing this post.
It hinges upon something Larken wisely kept telling the proponents of socialism.
It is basically along the lines of if they want socialism then they need to first explain why the previous implementations of socialism failed and lead to mass death, and how their proposed implementation of socialism would avoid this. This is largely because, the common argument from would be socialists is that "It wasn't implemented properly" yet they don't typically expand upon how it was implemented improperly, and what they would do to insure that didn't happen again. We currently have dozens of implementations of this ideology which have all been disasters.
I am a voluntaryist. I am an anarchist. I would like to see the world be the place that I am certain Larken, Adam, and I all hold a shared vision of.
Yet I think Larken when arguing against socialism unknowingly hit upon my biggest problem with this movement.
If we were to eliminate government today, tomorrow, one year from now, etc I believe the improper definition of anarchy is what we would actually get. It would be chaos, and I would expect large amounts of death. In other words, I don't think our results would be any better than those of socialism.
This is not because the ideas are bad. They are beautiful and are the only truly free ideology I am aware of.
The problem is the foundation upon which we would build that free society.
That foundation is the people, their minds, their education, and their abilities.
As parents we realize we must impose rules upon our children as we teach them how to survive, navigate, and become self reliant in the world. Our rules for our children should cease at the moment they can care for themselves. So while I am an anarchist I do recognize that our children are not born into this world capable of caring for themselves. Part of their development occurs in the womb, and the rest occurs outside of the womb.
We could call this maturing, or maturation.
The reality is the state has increasingly encroached upon this. They take the children away from their parents for ever increasing lengths of time to EDUCATE them as the State dictates. The parents expect this as they are increasingly expected to spend more of their time at one or more jobs in order to survive, and care for the children. This means the bulk of the education and ways of thinking are coming from the state.
There are trends in this. Modern Education in virtually every nation follows the Prussian Education System model from whence the term "school" originates. It is big on memorization, repetition, and it discourages challenging authority. It makes students vulnerable to Argument from Authority Fallacies, and in fact the odds of anyone ever learning what that actually means in this education system are very slim. This was actually seen as a positive reason for embracing the Prussian Education System by those that devised it. More compliant workers, and citizens who would not question the authority of the state.
Much like a religion. Do not question, have faith. In a sense the State becomes a new religion not to be challenged. If you challenge it you are crazy, you are a heretic, you are a conspiracy theorist. Whatever ad hominem attack is suitable in the given case.
The amount of Critical Thinking has greatly declined in the education system to where it is almost non-existent. You will encounter the edges of it in science classes when you are learning the scientific method. You will skirt the edges of it when you study mathematics at the level you must provide proofs. Yet, it is a very limited touch upon critical thinking, logic, and reasoning. Critical Thinking and Reason require two traits they increasingly are erasing from society. The ability to question, question yourself, question others, question authority is one of them. The other is the understanding that being wrong is not a bad thing. Recognizing when you are wrong about something means you now have the opportunity to correct that, seek answers, and learn. If you are never wrong then truly you can never learn.
Now to go along with this not challenging authority the idea that the answer to every problem is government has increasingly removed self responsibility from people. "It's not my fault, I just did what I was told. It is a law!" "It's not my fault, I didn't vote for him, you did." "She made me do it." "It's okay bad things happened to them they are from a group I dislike."
The people are made to give up more of their freedoms, their choices, and have the government tell them what to do. Many of them likely never admit they are wrong. They likely always have an excuse.
They haven't learned how to make choices. The government decides for them. They haven't learned to accept responsibility. The government will take care of that. They literally often have no clue how to survive without government.
They are immature children in terms of mental and experiential abilities while walking around in adult bodies.
So what would be the obvious outcome of eliminating the government rapidly? I believe that should be the goal. Yet, are we going to be as the Communist and say it is okay if all of these people die?
They don't actually know how to take care of themselves without government. The education system did not teach them that.
They have been taught that emotions, feelings, and whether they are offended or not define truth.
Those things will not help them survive at all when it is suddenly put upon them.
So while my desires to reach the vision and society of freedom drive me I have come to the conclusion it will not be rapid, and likely will not happen during my life time. If it must happen rapidly then I have to be willing to accept the concept of collateral damage.
Collateral damage to me is an evil concept. If collateral damage is accidental and was not foreseen then that is something that we can't avoid completely. However, when you know there will be collateral damage and you do it anyway, then that is evil.
Each of us has the paths we can walk. I am not a celebrity. I fight my little battles here and there with the sole goal of getting people to start researching and learning critical thinking on their own. If they can at least do that then there is always the hope they can be adaptable and learn when confronted with new situations. They won't need to rely on the government to make their decisions for them. It also makes them someone who won't blindly follow, and will use reason, ask questions, and think.
I think Adam's plan of walking in and abolishing the government or writing his plan to abolish it is unrealistic for this reason. The foundation of the population is not there mentally to handle this.
Adam could however go in there and slash as many of the rules as he could, work towards abolishing the institutions in the government that keep fueling the mass indoctrination and perhaps we can get back to educating the population how to think for themselves, and how to survive. Perhaps instead of adults with immature minds, we can simply go back to having adults.
Once the population can think then the risk of mass deaths due to sudden dissolution of the government will be mitigated. Or at least that is my hypothesis.
So while I am advocating working within the system, my advocacy involves a controlled roll back of freedom stealing ideas while providing the opportunities to equip our population with free minds.
Without that the resulting anarchy would be what those that defame it try to define it as.
Solutions
Now I do want to part with some positives. We are uniquely positioned thanks to technological advancements that we could accomplish the goals with existing tools.
What would we do without government?
How about we just crowd source everything? Support the services, products, and ideas you are interested in and let others do the same.
Who will build the roads? The same people that do today. The government doesn't build the roads, they just act as a corrupt middleman between the citizens and the other citizens that actually build the roads. Crowd source it. Same people would build it, yet we wouldn't have some corrupt middle man.
What would stop people from screwing other people over? Reputation. People could form voluntary contracts between each other. If a person breaks a contract that would be known. They would likely find it increasingly difficult to get good contracts or contracts at all if they become known as someone who does not honor their contracts. In the worst case they may need to be completely self reliant if no one is willing to risk a contract with them.
It is possible. Yet the population is not prepared for it. That is what we need to rectify first. Each of us can do this in different ways.
I don't actually see Adam and Larken as opposing each other. Larken is much like a great prophet speaking wise words that wake more and more people up. Adam can do some of this as well. Adam potentially could do it from within the system as well, but I think it is important to be realistic and think LONG TERM rather than thinking flipping a switch and doing it NOW is a good idea.
Don't make the same mistake the continual proponents of socialism make.