Playing the Long Game: Attacking Liberty's Antagonists

One of the key takeaways from reading The Aristotle Adventure is that people tend to suppress ideas that they find threatening. And the forms that the threats take vary in subtlety and violence.

• Direct physical threats to books are rare.
• Physical threats to people by mobs, assassins, and inquisitors was much more common
• Other forms of threats included: ostracism, ex-communication, denial of access to books (this is back before public libraries) and other scholars, loss of income, banishment, and intereference with careers.

In the 1800 years that the works of Aristotle had to survive, they had to be copied by hand again and again in order to do so. The printing press was not invented by Johannes Gutenberg until 1450. Before this, copying was a tedius, error-prone, and expensive process. As a result, the subtle challenges listed above present severe existential threats to a body of work.

Many of the tactics listed above are archaic. The Catholic church of current day doesn't have the pervasive influence on government that in the days of monarchy based on the "divine right of kings," following fall of the Roman empire through the Renaissance and the Scientific revolution.

Of the subtler tactics listed in the final bullet, many of these can still be employed in our current day and age in university settings, and government research institutions, and the think tanks funded by the government. (I'd say they could also be employed in corporations, but most corporations are pragmatic rather than ideological). Ostracism, loss of income, and intereference with career are all real threats that can be used against a person that a bully wants to silence. This helps to silence one speaker but The Internet has made it harder than ever to silence someone completely. Although I suspect that most of us feel pretty frustrated with how to make oneself heard in all of the noise.

In spite of how hard it is to be silenced completely, the work to maintain the current state of liberty is still crucial. We must fight to keep what we have attained by aggressively exposing and denouncing those who would hack at the support pillars of free speech.

We can also fight by choosing better stewards for the machinery which protects our liberty. The source of many attacks on freedom of speech come directly from government.

The administrators of government have unique privileges to arrest people, tax them, and drag them down with legal or regulatory procedures. They have many levers of intimidation. They can do so for seemingly arbitrary reasons. This is why we want the most long-sighted stewards that are willing to take the job making leadership decisions in our governments.

Government shouldn't just be a job with prestige. It should be a sacred trust.

This is also why we do not want anyone with a tactical ideological agenda in power. A tactical ideological agenda can come from religious sources but can also originate from any kind of pseudo-scientific notion that attempts to survive challenge by any means other than reason. For the latter, imagine a new economic order or social justice agenda.

(side note: I'm all for efforts to connect people and foster acts of kindness, but I prefer these to be organized independent of the government and without government funding)

What I'm saying in short is that to vote "on the issues", for a candidate whom will do whatever it takes to get some thing done is to play a dangerous game with a system of safeguards which is responsible for protecting us all from the ugliest and most opportunistic power mongers.

We should be voting on fundamentals. This will do the most to protect the foundation of our liberty: the freedom to hold an idea, to express it, and to act upon it so long as you do not violate the rights of another.

Here is the guidance from the founding fathers as I understand it in simple fundamentals: Limit the exercise of government power to ensure the maxiumum liberty of choice and action to each person.

Although NONE of the top 3 Presidential candidates are exponents of this kind of restraint, this is what we need to look for and support even if they belong to a third party. It's time to fire the two largest political parties in the USA. They do not care about liberty.

References

Many of these notes are from The Aristotle Adventure, by Burgess Laughlin.

News is Not Information And Liberty Needs Church/State Separation

It's easy to view #muslims as a monolithic other. But 1-billion plus others is a lot of people.

Agreement is Rare

I want to take us into a thought experiment in the lives we know best... our own. Consider any ism that you have ever been a part of. Libertarianism, Vegetarianism, Christianity-ism.

Now take a random sample set of yourself and any 1 or 2 other people whom you can think of that have self-identified under that label.

Then ask yourself the question: "did we agree on everything that fell under the principles of that ism? Did we agree on how those principles translate into action?"

No matter what ism, you will not find 100% agreement on principles and implications. The more people you add, the lower the overlapping level of agreement in the massive venn-diagram.

One Billion Ideological Carbon Copies?

How then does this apply to a billion such people? It becomes impossible to believe that they see exactly the same things as true and important and worthy of action. Except for the sorts of things that most human beings have in common:

• we want to live our lives
• we look out for the well-being of those we care about

We, as non-muslims, can take a moment to fully take in the heterogenity of the full body of muslims. Not all of them will be conservative or bigotted or sexist. Some of them may not even care about politics: live and let live.

Ideas come and go in perpetual motion and there is constant change on which ones are fashionable.

Our mainstream media do a bad job of representing reality in a statistically correct way. Anything that gets reported on seems to be statistically prevalent to our easily-fooled psyches. People who want to just live their lives are not news. People getting along with one another is not news.

We have this conception that "news" is information. And while this is true, as far as statistical impressions go, it is total misinformation.

Regardless, I'd like to take heart in the news story listed below under References (1), "Tunisian Islamists Ennahda move to separate politics, religion".

The separation of church and state is a fundamental principle with huge implications to liberty. Every innovation, including the ones made in the realm of liberty, begins as heresy against the mainstream fashion that came before. Heresy is attacked with prejudice by any state that is involved in policing your ideas.

We must support the freedom to express ideas and therefore we must support any effort no matter how small toward states and political movements that compose themselves as independent of religion. We must support secular politics and we must denounce and resist any effort to marry state with religion as an attack upon our lives and liberty.

So what can we do?

People in the mainstream media can certainly do something: stop putting forward the loud obnoxious conservative bigot muslims as their "authentic" voices. You are not an authority on one billion plus people.

People who are not media can stop watching CNN and Fox News. They are not in the business of informing you. You are not "learning" when you hear their interpretations. Remember: They are in the business of selling your eyes to advertisers.

References

1: Tunisian Islamists Ennahda move to separate politics, religion | Reuters
2: Maajid Nawaz

Everything You're Not Supposed To Do After Paris is Attacked

So Paris was attacked on Friday. And all over social media people started telling each other what to do and what not to do. I collected a list of things that it is in appropriate to do so that the next time this happens, we can be prepared. Here goes nothing!

• Don’t talk about “unimportant things”. I don’t want to hear about your toddlers… Paris just got bombed.
• Don’t say things that I disagree with. “Unfriend me if you do.”
• Don’t be silent. We must show the enemy we are not afraid and we will not accept threats. Paris needs to know that we pay lip service. Symbolic gestures (tell the enemy that they) are important.
• Don’t let revenge motivate you. We must measured in our responses, or we let the enemy set the terms of engagement.
• Don’t profile. I don’t care that a key mental mechanism of scientific advancement is noticing patterns. It’s only okay to profile if it conforms to notions of “political correctness”.
• Don’t blame religion, we believe in freedom of religion! Especially not Islam or Christianity. (But atheism isn’t a religion… you can blame that all you want. You can’t have morality without a god to punish you in the afterworld.)
• Don’t be “intolerant” of any ideas. Even if the ideas imply that it’s okay to murder you if you offend/blaspheme some notion of some god(s). Even if the ideas lead to the brutal oppression and mutilation women. Who are you to judge?
• Don’t ever even suggest that Saudi Arabia is involved in exporting the ideas that animate coordinated mass murder. They are our “friends” and they sell us oil (it may seem like it’s for profit but they have our best interests in mind).
• Don’t verbally mention Islamism or Islam. If we don’t talk about it, we can’t be called intolerant.
• Don’t ever suggest war. War is not the answer.

It really does seem like when you add it all up, people really do want us to do nothing. That is, unless we happen to agree with them.

Using notions of what is “socially acceptable”, many voices emerge to pressure people and selectively work to constrain the conversation so that no one is saying anything too “upsetting”. Of course, the definition of what is “acceptable” and what is “upsetting” shifts depending on who you are. That’s how you end up with so many “Dont’s” that seem to contradict one another.

Sometimes the people doing the pressuring are you and me. We are playing the role of “thought police” any time we take it upon ourselves tell someone to pipe down and be politically correct or to act with decorum. We all have the potential to pressure others and shut other people down nowadays. The worst of us act to embarrass and humiliate and shame others until they submit.

In the aftermath of public mass murder, who does this serve and who does it harm? Does it help the victims to suppress speech? I can’t see how it would. One could argue in reason, however, that suppression of speech is completely in concert with the aim of the perpetrators of public mass murder.

How about we let the people who are still alive speak their words and trust them to revise their words and thinking as they go along? How about we let people react in their own ways? How about we let ourselves work through it?

The enemy wants us silenced. They want the ideas they don't like suppressed and they want the ideas that constrain us from acting in retaliation against them repeated loudly.

Let us defy them. Let us speak openly about the flaws of some of our ideas and begin to revise them. Let us name the enemy’s ideas: Islamism.

Scratch Notes on Benevolent Self-Interest

• On a grand scale, no one else can figure out what you need to take care you.
  • Secure your own mask before helping others with theirs.
  • Self-interest gets a bad rap when the range is lop-sided. When we see a person destroying their long-term goals (and maybe those of others) in pursuit of the short-term gain, it’s hard to feel like this person is doing justice to himself/herself or the world. Self-interest is often benevolent when the range of a person’s actions are not lop-sided.
  • It is easier to trust a person when you can understand how they benefit from their own actions and that it isn’t at your expense.
  • Self-interest doesn’t preclude and often includes concern for the well-being of your associates and respect for those engaged in a similar struggle.
  • Two people engaged in a relationship that don’t speak their minds will find that the relationship will reach a point of frustrating mediocrity. You have to represent your perspective, your likes, and your interests. You have to take positions and be willing to revise them.
  • Free-Market Capitalism, the political philosophy of self-interest-therefore-liberty, has done more for the poor than the altruistic and tyrannical political philosophies.

Every American understands these things on some gut level but a lot of Americans struggle with being identified as self-interested.