Welcome Traveller. Where does my path lead? Hopefully, towards finding people all across the globe who value individual sovereignty, ethics, and peaceful exchange as the most successful way to achieve prosperity and happiness.
I realize that such ideas are taboo to most people, as they were at one time to myself. I understand that I cannot make anyone accept that peaceful cooperation and voluntary association are the most efficient ways of organizing society. Making people do things is the domain of the state and I’ll have none of it. I too was once lost in authoritarian fantasies foisted upon me from my earliest moments. I had faith that obedience could bring utopia, until I saw that such ideas were myths and that that no utopia can be achieved. Utopia is the lie that is sold to us in order to get us to accept servitude. My ideals are the absence of utopian dreams and are firmly rooted in the notion that some people will always be evil.
Because of this realization, there should be no monopoly of law and justice. People must be free to associate with whom they feel provide law and justice the best. There is no one size fits all standard that everyone must be forced to obey without question. Each person must be free to choose the kind of legal fabric that best espouses their values. Living amongst others depend on one’s freedom to find where they belong, or to create a new home for others.
I do not know how best to provide what everyone will want or need. That is the whole point. No single person or group has such knowledge. Rather the knowledge of how society is organized comes from each of us, choosing what is best for themselves and those they care about, while respecting that others may have that choice is well. People will step up to the plate with new creative ideas to solve age-old social problems and we cannot predict what those will look like. All we know is that when unbounded by the heavy hand of the state authority, humanity flourishes.
This blog’s purpose is to help me lay out the path from where we are, with the hungry leviathan that dominates almost every aspect of our lives, to some distant point in time where people will look back upon our notions of Nationhood, Patriotism, and Monopoly Government as crude relics of a more barbaric time. The way we nowadays look back toward the fiefdoms and duchies of medieval times.
Many others focus on what that world of the future might look like once we reach that point, but who is answering the primary question of “How do we get there from here?”. My goal is to answer as much of that as I can, which I dare say may not be much at all. But furthermore, to inspire others to take up that challenge as well.
I reject that violent revolution can install a peaceful society for any length of time. Almost immediately after the American Revolutionary war were the powers of the fledgling national government suppressing the Whiskey Rebellion. How about the French Revolution? Or the October Revolution? Look at the results from those bloodbaths. Shall we repeat the same mistakes, attempting to replace the villans by villainous means?
I think not.
How then, can we have peace and prosperity? By getting a critical mass of the populations of the world to see that Peace and Virtue cannot be wrought from War and Vice. That only the methods of Peace and Virtue can bring a lasting revolution.
I recognize that the inculcation by the rulers upon the young is the primary mode of perpetuation of these ancient traditions. If we are to wrest liberty from leviathan’s maw, we must undo the training that each new generation receives. This cannot be done with well-reasoned and articulated arguments because the people are not accustomed to such methods. The state is one giant appeal to fear, and as such, we must show, by example and demonstration, that those fears are unfounded. Only when the masses lose faith in their leaders, and the institutions that bind them, will people be free of the emotional bonds that tie them to the state. People must see with their eyes before they may see with their hearts.
We should not hold hatred, or anger, or rage, or anxiety, or fear towards them and their state. We should have pity, and compassion, and kindness, and charity, as it isn’t their fault. The people did not choose the state as is claimed. It chose itself over them and trained them to obey it. It isn’t their fault that they do not know of any other way, but only the ways of obedience.
We must lead by example. We must lead lives of peace, of virtue, of prosperity. We must not argue with them, or cajole, or insult, or ridicule. We should quiet our voices, and set diligently to working with our hands and our labors to show them another way. We should demonstrate in our bonds of family and friendship the strength that follows from our devotion to peace.
Long it will take and much must be sacrified along the way. I believe the states of our world do not know how to deal with such people as we, for the only means the state knows is hate and fear and violence. Those are not our means, nor our aims.
That is my Path. Walk with me awhile, traveller.
Valhelion's Path 