Indeed, while the MSM is selling their collective souls for ratings and fearmongering points, some of the best writers and thinkers can be found on Facebook. So I share this with you. Written by Billy Beck.
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“Please, I would love to see a detailed manifesto of your position and supporting materials.”
To begin with: I don’t argue “detail[s]” without proper understanding of principles.
It’s necessary to now point out that “politics” is not what almost everybody means when they use the word, now. (e.g. — the party warfare between the Democrats and Republicans.) Politics is the fourth branch of classical philosophy, and it comprehends the general study of human social organization.
My first political principle is *freedom*. I would expound that America was the first individualist polity in world history. (That happened in 1776, and it was categorically different from the French Revolution thirteen years later, which was the birth of socialism. Anyone competent with Marx or Lenin will not dispute this.)
Individualism is an *ethics*. (Ethics is the third branch of classical philosophy, and studies the nature of values.) It’s a matter of understanding what’s necessary for the conduct and flourishing of human life. The individualist understands that values are only possible to individual human beings (a precept well-known throughout the whole history of human experience, and written in phrases like, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”), and that *freedom* — the leave for every individual to make their own life — is necessary to successful “pursuit” of those values.
It’s the whole reason why Jefferson wrote that phrase, “pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence.
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I absolutely abhor the political principle of democracy.
Democracy is pitched to people as “the rule of the people,” and similar confections. It’s never (or only very rarely, and certainly never in the state education program) explained that it’s actually the tyranny of majorities over minorities: that the individual people in the minority are going to have the terms and conditions of their lives dictated to them by the majority.
It virtually never occurs to people convinced of democracy to ask questions that might seem absurd, but which really run-out the logic of democracy to its conclusions: What if the majority decided to haul-off and, say, burn Jews?
That actually happened. Oh, they didn’t all get together in a single plebiscite and decide the question then & there. They did it in a series of parliamentary actions over time, and set in the special political contexts (yes; there were many) of interwar Germany, but every step of the way was democratically contoured to that situation, and that’s what they did.
It was a matter of law in the United States that kept black people in bondage until the middle of the nineteenth century, and then suppressed them just short of slavery until the middle of the twentieth. Understand what I’m saying: it was *government force* that did that.
My principles don’t tolerate that.
This is not a dim sensation of “feelings,” to me. I can explain — from metaphysics (that’s the first branch of philosophy: it studies the nature of existence and reality) on up — exactly why freedom is necessary to individual human life, and why the unilateral use of force against anyone is an abomination of reality (it violates what we are), and therefore rightly judged as immoral, and that nothing about government exempts it from this. All government is evil, because it begins with force.
“Freedom” is a word, denoting an entire concept, which was once at the foundation of this country’s existence. It has virtually disappeared from the popular lexicon. (Listen, and you’ll notice.)
This is *why* this whole country now sounds like a bar-fight. I have seen — watched in detail — this steady decline of the culture for longer than some people reading this have been alive. People who never knew America before all of this probably won’t understand and they’ll be skeptical of what I’m saying. (This is the “okay, boomer” impulse.) Some people here might understand.
It’s all because we’ve all been pitted against each other by countless factions in this gang-warfare that people call “democracy”.
I would never do that to any of you. It would never occur to me to, for instance, build a government that would take anything of what you earn for any reason at all. I wouldn’t dictate how much you could earn, or what you could own, or what you could do with what you own, or what you could smoke, or even whether you could have an abortion, which I also abhor but is none of my business.
I would not do any of it to any of you. This is because I understand *freedom* as the best way to live.
8:17 am on March 30, 2020
