by Zen Master This
[Delivered in the Anabuddhist Temple on the top floor of General Memetics/Blastfishing World Headquarters, July 4, 2007]
"Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
--Jean Jacques Rousseau
Let's face it: the American ideal of individual freedom is under serious attack from within.
Forget about the threat of terrorism from outside our country; our own institutions are choking individual freedom to death far more quickly and thoroughly than some band of loosely-organized psychotic thugs ever could.
Culturally, we Americans have become a neurotic bunch. These days we are more inclined to define ourselves by what we consume than what we create. In our growing reluctance to express and assert our genuine individuality through our own creations, we instead choose a sublimated identity displayed through the homes we live in, the cars we drive, the food we eat, and the clothes we wear.
This last neurosis in particular is reinforced by increasingly strict social imperatives to bodily shame which, upon closer examination, are found to be completely without intellectual merit. Body-phobic religionists tell us that the human body in its natural state is shameful, and must be covered-up, relying on faith rather than facts to support their position.
The Law, in the form of a fundy U.S. Attorney General, insists that a semi-nude statue called "The Spirit of Justice" must be covered. The Law, in Bartholomew County, Indiana, orders White River Truck Repair and Yard Art to move cement copies of classical statues out of public view because they are "obscene." In some places The Law even says that being uncovered alone on a beach or in a lake is de facto sexual predation, while ignoring context or abundant anthropological evidence that human nudity and human sexuality are orthogonal. More and more, public school kids are even prohibited from showering in their school locker rooms after their sporting events. With our legal system sinking to this low intellectual level, can a burqua mandate be far behind?
Madison Avenue's consumer culture machine tells us to fear, fix, and/or mask our bodily "imperfections" as compared to unattainable fashion model standards. Bowing to them we conform and cover, or risk becoming social outcasts. Paradoxically, that same machine also tells us to aspire to their arbitrary standards of sexual attractiveness, through strategic selection and application of their wares.
It seems everywhere we turn in America we are warned to deny our basic humanity and our inherent, natural beauty. Note that this is not a universal trend in the "civilized" world. Our more socially (if not economically) enlightened European cousins, for instance, have largely adopted a mentally healthier, secular, even anti-consumerist approach to life. They are much more inclined to say "What the FKK" and go enjoy nature as nature intended.
In the political arena we see the media and politicians casting liberals and conservatives at opposite ends of a unidimensional political continuum, always ignoring the possibility of that second important political dimension: individual freedom.
A cursory investigation shows that modern liberals and conservatives really both stand at the same, "statist" end of this dimension. Liberals say "We know better than you how your money should be spent, and we don't want you to have a choice." Conservatives say "We know better than you how you should behave -- even when you're minding your own business -- and we don't want you to have a choice."
With liberals and conservatives crowding the "statist" end of the individual rights continuum, the "freedom" end is looking rather under-populated these days. Once, the U.S. was the birthplace of a revolution of freedom-oriented "classical liberalism," a political and economic philosophy that emphasizes limits to political power, and support of individual liberty and private property. Now, while many Americans still quietly hold classical liberal values, many also reflexively equate the independent-minded ideas of classical liberalism with "crackpots," with no further examination.
A full, accurate reading of our history has made patriotism unfashionable with the liberal set, who are inclined to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Yes, there are many horrific examples of human mis-treatment in our country’s history, and a lot of hypocrisy with respect to professed classical liberal ideals as spelled out in our constitution. These should not be forgotten. But it’s not the ideals which were faulty; it was the expression of those ideals.
Conservatives demand nothing less than total, unflinching loyalty to "country," without ever stopping a moment to define "country." Ironically, most of the tinfoil hat government conspiracy types come from this wing of the statists. The conservatives' fundy faction dreams of a return to a Christian nation that never existed nor, under the constitution, never legitimately could.
Our country has peaked in the expression of our defining ideals, and we are now on a course heading steadily away from them. And it’s not only the expression of those ideals, but also the ideals themselves which now are under attack. The legislatures and courts are no longer the individual’s friend. Witness recent laws and rulings on eminent domain, free speech, surveillance, probable cause, and equal protection. Witness our ever-burgeoning social and corporate welfare states. We are becoming used to thinking only in zero-sum, statist terms. The cognitive dissonance barely registers any more.
This is a bad thing. While most of us are still very wealthy by world standards, this trend nevertheless does affect our economic freedom, that is, our freedom to use the fruits of our labor as we see fit rather than as some armed monopoly tells us they must be used. To not challenge the morality of this grab would be derelict. Maybe this trend hasn’t affected our personal social freedoms ... yet. But if we wait until it does, it might be too late. Furthermore, as civic-minded individuals and lovers of humanity, it is our duty to speak out and act out against this trend. It would selfish and morally reprehensible of us to simply say “Well, it doesn’t affect me or anyone I know, so why should I care?”
We are gradually becoming something other than American. We are becoming a nation of cowards; frightened constituencies who feel increasingly powerless because we have over decades negligently ceded our power as individuals to state and federal governments, and now have little choice but to vote our fractured interests in vain hopes that things won't get much worse for us.
Our intuition tells us that Democrats and Republicans are more alike than they are different, but we're not sure why. We hold our noses as we vote for the lesser of two evils once again, return home to scrub vigorously with pumice, and mutter reassuringly to one another about how wonderful it is to live in a democracy where every vote matters. We can hardly bear to think any more about the possibility of a break from what has essentially become a one-party system.
We try to feel-good-about-doing-something by electing people to pass "campaign finance reform" measures, but these miss the point. As long as there is power to be sold, there WILL be money to buy it. The only solution to the problem of statism -- liberal or conservative -- is to make the power unavailable for sale in the first place.
Of course, power cannot be made unavailable entirely. We still need systems of courts and police to protect individuals from force and fraud, and to enforce agreements. At several key points in our history, our legislatures and courts have been instrumental in pushing our constitutional ideals forward, as well they should have been. We still need a military to protect us from foreign invaders. Maybe we need a few other things as well. But we’ve come a long, long, loooong way from that point. It’s the modern concentration of power that’s the problem. The statist mentality creates powerful incentives to achieve goals not through merit or persuasion, but by buying legislators’ influence to divert taxpayer funds or taxpayer-funded property this way or that, to secure tax breaks, or to force peaceable people to behave or not behave in some way. Would there still be buying and selling of influence in a “limited government” state? Of course there would, but the incentives and the economic and social impact of those transactions would be much more limited.
We must begin a re-awakening to the fact that this country was born of individualism and dissent; that vigorous open debate is good; that frequent challenging of authority is necessary; that individual freedom is a value worth fighting for. We must reverse the erosion of will and intellect which have enabled so much of this awful learned helplessness which now pervades and perverts our society.
Neither voting, "changing the system from within," or violent rebellion are likely to achieve meaningful change. The system is heavily rigged to ensure that trouble-makers are eliminated or neutralized before they can attain positions of serious influence. While we as a people are relatively well-armed, we are also clearly out-gunned.
These times demand nothing less than an outright cognitive assault on the populace, while there's still time. Our only real hope lies in memetic subversion; in creating, planting, and propagating memes which raise society's skepticism (or even cynicism) to a critical level, and get people believing that they'd be better-off doing and thinking for themselves. Our goal must be to cause the liberal, conservative, and religious orthodoxies of the U.S. to collapse under the weight of their own contradictions, and if we happen to have a whole lot of fun and make a whole lot of money in the process, so much the better. What happens after that, I'm not sure.
So, where do we start?
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