Advice for Our Children, Circa 2012

If liberty is the natural orientation of mankind, then we can trust that our children and grandchildren will turn to that light, seek the warmth of freedom, and always resent their chains.

I hope our children will innately remember liberty, and somehow understand that it is indeed their birthright.

There are three things we might be able to do now to help the upcoming generations. The republic has already fallen, as thousands of pages of laws have replaced fundamental rule of law, and every citizen today is no more than a felon in waiting. A new American culture of dependency on the state has replaced healthier cultures of personal independence and market productivity.

The past eras, when both rich and poor boldly rejected European and third world statism and took a one-way trip to America, are long gone. They will not return. Today, no more geographic new worlds exist for those who value freedom more than security, or risk-taking and creativity over fascistic centralized control. The task at hand is to recreate republics outside of top-heavy militarized socialism, underneath the ahistorical and moronic state media, and above state educational systems.

We and our children have one overarching mission today. We must ride out the failure and ragged collapse of national and global socialism with our lives and souls intact, and with the skills and vision to rebuild a better system of trade and governance, one that is liberty-oriented, decentralized, and inexpensive.

We have some of the tools we need already – we are human and love freedom. In some ways we are addicted to liberty – when we have a little, we envision more, we accomplish and produce more, and we want more freedom to do so. Freedom is dangerous to the state. With neither force or fear, freedom motivates and rewards every human action in a single moment. Freedom produces value, and it creates its own demand.

First and foremost, we ought to create in our children and grandchildren a taste for freedom.

For the past thirty years, the emphasis in public schools and in society has been to foster the development of "self-esteem" in young people. This has been and continues to be done by avoiding hard knocks and adventure, discouraging strongly held opinions, replacing logical judgment with authoritarian mandates, and promoting groupthink. The self-esteem movement is part and parcel of a broader strategy of feminization in public education. Feminization of public schooling de-emphasizes the role of individualism and liberty in creating and fostering peaceful productive communities, while creating habitual followers. This was not done by hiring women in the school system, but rather by systemic and pharmaceutical promotion of "feminine" qualities of submission, obedience, cooperation, compromise, and avoidance of passion that are considered culturally acceptable feminine qualities. Students (many of our own sons and grandsons, as well as daughters and granddaughters) failing to sufficiently demonstrate these qualities are punished, held back, medicated and even incarcerated.

The feminization of the public school and university system creates exactly what the state needs – a marriage of a feminized population with the masculine state. But thirty years of public school feminization was predated by what the welfare and entitlement system has done to American families. Senator Patrick Moynihan complained nearly 50 years ago, in 1965, that the welfare system was already having the measureable effect of replaced human husbands with the husbandry of the state. The state would be pronounced breadwinner, rulemaker, and guarantor of safety and survival, till death.

To state as "father" and state as "husband," add in state as "mother." This has been subtly achieved through the friendly and cooperative yoking of media and the state that began before World War II. Americans today have consumed nearly 70 years of streaming state propaganda that encourages us to believe and accept that unrepublican and unconstitutional government in Washington, D.C. is in fact both republican and constitutional. With rare exceptions, we have been told that the warfare-welfare state is not an empire, but instead a shining city on a hill that the rest of the world envies and admires.

When I reflect on what socialism in American has wrought – I worry less about the next four years of Obama and more about the last 75 years of American statism’s unarguable success in shaping the bulk of the population into passive, weak, unimaginative slaves and serfs.

Yet – for this unending diet of socialistic illusion a percentage of Americans have remained awake, and many more are awakening today to the fundamental realities that socialism isn’t free, and that our government lies, cheats, and steals as a matter of policy.

The abundant and rapidly growing home school movement has been one response to the counter-logical and anti-liberty message of the state to our children. Today, over 5.5 million young people are in private schools, and another 1.5 million are homeschooled. Beyond that is adult self-education being pursued by tens of millions as a result of the Internet. Ironically, this self education is aided by the state fostered underemployment that has created a troika of frustration, curiosity, and time to pursue interesting ideas from people all over the world and from past generations. I would suggest that we have more Rothbardians today than when the great man was alive, and we probably have more Randians today than when Ayn held court. I wonder if we also don’t have fewer true Marxists than when Marx and Lenin were alive – because the Internet and modern events have put forth the failed record of Marxism for all to see. Certainly, countries that suffered lost decades and generations under Communism and subsequently transitioned to something slightly more market based and libertarian are not filled with Marxists any more, if they ever were.

This is cause alone for hope – statist systems collapse but people don’t. Our children – and ourselves – should aspire to be not just survivors but rainmakers and change agents. This means we must, as soon as practical, divorce the state as husband, reject the state as mother, and abandon the state as father. We do all of this much as we would divorce a real husband, reject a real mother, or abandon a real father. Prepare, consider strengths and options, and then leave the state family to go out into the world and test ourselves, produce for ourselves, and take on for ourselves those wonderful qualities of father, mother, and husband. This means we exercise courage, work hard, learn rapidly, and become more alert and aware of both past and present, and more willing to boldly look over the horizon to an unpredictable future.

This is what the state currently attempts to do for us. It is "courageous" so we don’t have to be. It works, as Obama has said, and it builds our businesses. It learns while dumbing us down, and it looks to the future and plans our role in that future. Today, as the political mouthpieces have been saying, the state is taking us over a cliff, at full speed ahead.

We must give ourselves and our children an awareness and understanding of real freedom, and real independence. We must divorce the state, as individuals and as extended families. To survive, we and our children must be prepared to jump off the speeding train, leap out of the back seat of that car being driven over the cliff by Red Thelma and Blue Louise.

Beyond fostering a sense of freedom’s possibilities and demands, we must prepare physically and economically for the collapse of the state-led family – and that means, much as the collapse of any family, uncertainty, doubt, economic hardship, new kinds of jobs and even relocating. We would do well to revisit George Carlin’s famous "stuff" skit. The stuff we have ought to be useful for the next phase – meaning an era of independence, creativity and survival, self-education, production and provision of what we and others people need, and NOT what the state needs.

The state needs your payroll income, it needs you driving to and from state-approved activities, and it needs centralized control. Divorced from the state, and post-state, we ought to examine what it is that people and communities really need. I would submit that centralized control, payroll income, and state approved activities are going to be low on the list of what we will be needing – so think on these things and start practicing now. Help our children differentiate between community and market self-perpetuating order and the heavy-handed controls of the state that poses as "order."

If we help our children and those around us to understand freedom, seek it, if we take steps to divorce the state’s many assumed roles in our lives, and if we prepare physically and educationally for living and producing above, below and beyond state awareness and control, we have done much. Unplugging from the state can be done, slowly and bit by bit, while we have the chance and the choice. Unplugging may also give us more time to think, to learn, to study to practice new skills and most importantly, to strengthen our relationships with people. Our networks and extended families, and our like-minded communities will be critical in surviving and thriving the metastasizing cancer of present-day American fascism. They will be imperative if we intend to thrive in the coming post-socialism era.

We crave and need liberty, and liberty is our God-given birthright. We must divorce the state, unplug from socialism, and prepare for the collapse that always occurs when debt and poverty collapse a government semblance of order. Humans are strongest and healthiest with a combination of active intellectual growth and hard physical work. My advice for my children is to embrace both with equal enthusiasm.

This originally appeared on Freedom's Phoenix's e-Zine.

August 7, 2012

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, blogs occasionally at Liberty and Power and The Beacon. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here or join her Facebook page. She ran for Congress in Virginia's 6th district in 2012.

Copyright © 2012 Karen Kwiatkowski

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