Letters to the Editor • Philosophy: Libertarianism
Crisis Letter To FP.com: The Forcible Rape Of Libertarian Principles
Dear Ernie,
This crisis letter addressed to you and FP.com flows downstream from the merit of your headlined report "Libertarian Party of the United States on Egypt and the role/non-role of USA" to which my response "FP.com Libertarians Should Not Stonewall Egypt’s Critical Issues In The Name Of Freedom" has been given equal/parallel exposure in this site’s front page.
The purpose of my response was to create a collegial online discussion in this ["our"] libertarian website of freedom, with what Libertarians of Reason knew about the problems of Egypt and if possible view a prospective recommendatory solution by applying the acceptable concept and principles of liberty which we do not only cherished but sincerely believed are worth dying for. To me this is one of those rare occasions well-meaning Libertarians shouldn’t miss to let the world know the rationality and/or reasonableness of our interpretation of the real meaning of liberty and freedom, which today is the life-and-death issue of Egypt in turmoil.
Unfortunately, a couple or so minarchists and very angry anarcho-absolutists hiding inside the protective shell of libertarian principles run into a vacuum of knowledge about what’s going in troubled Egypt, and instead engaged in labeling [synonymous to libeling] this writer with false names. This Leftist-Libertarian I am referring to [see the rude intervention-comment below my letter to the editor at http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Letter-to-Editor.htm?EdNo=001&Info=0133151] doubted my Libertarian of Reason personality [which is an aggression to my person and belief (!)] and like the vicious tyrant he cuts down to pieces and masticates everyday, forced a name on my head as a "state-worshiping collectivis [s], of which of course I am not and has never been in my more than twenty-seven years of doctrinal life in the academe.
My critical message in this letter to you addressed to all Libertarians of different cry and hue … you can be a libertarian anyway you want by any name – anti-statist, anarcho-communist, a violent anarchist, a pacifist, a teleologist or deontologist or a leftist libertarian – but never compromise the fundamental principles of our Libertarian philosophy which is identified by our goal to promote and maximize the enjoyment of liberty and freedom to the hilt. To be contradictory, and to a certain extent nonsensical and even unreasonably violent in our advocacy of liberty and freedom diminishes the respect we deserved among our philosophical peers, if it has not in fact already made our cause a laughing stock in the eyes of the world.
For example, an anarcho-moral absolutist that hated the existence of the state deep down the marrow of his bones advocates the killing or murder of politicians – this terrifying libertarian advocacy is published here
eliminate the government or the state by any draconian means, i.e. by "killing all politicians" let alone murder and worse using the shingles of our libertarian principles as a launching pad for similar violent aggressions, is a forcible rape of liberty and freedom as we Libertarian of Reasons knew it since Adam and Eve.
Disquietedly alarmed, I called attention to these prevalent abusers of freedom of speech who peddle their philosophical wares blindly across the board [and they think FP.com is a very convenient venue to enjoy this privilege] – in fact as wild and as blind as the proverbial bat who see only Red as the color of Government. Red provokes them to attack like raging bulls in the arena of public opinion. And like muscled bulls that end up as a can of corn beef after the slaughter in the bullfight arena, they charge aggressively with their emotions and prejudices without using any semblance of their innate ability to think not as fighting bovine but as a rational human being.
What makes it worse is when radically inclined Libertarians move to the extreme left of their self-proclaimed crusade for liberty and freedom and fall on the edge of contradictions making not only a fool of themselves but also a joke of our Libertarian principles that have been carved in the pages of history’s leading ethical thinking among the world’s best known philosophical beliefs.
For example, when an anarcho-pacifist renounces any form of aggression and yet suggests a violent revolution as self-defense or makes a call to arms addressed to all the youths of the land so that like the 22-year-old psychopath of Tucson, Arizona they should kill all politicians to get rid of Congress and ultimately eliminate the state or government [see Killing Politicians …] is a an imprudent if not idiotic contradiction bereft of any legal and moral support whatsoever. When behind this anomaly is the strategic theory applied in war or in any conflict for survival that offense, i.e. preemptive strike, is the best self-defense, it is nothing else but raw aggression by any definition. And this threat and fraudulent advocacy of Libertarianism in the name of liberty and freedom is a perfect example of what is "aggression" that I referred to, which unfortunately has been bastardized and brutally scandalized.
The range of Libertarianism is far and wide. You move to the extreme right and you end up becoming a Rightist Libertarian almost akin to the believers of statism, to the far left and you become an Anti-Statist Leftist Libertarian or anarcho-socialist sharing an egalitarian-based view like Chomsky, Long, and Chartier in the Alliance of the Libertarian Left. They are all moving towards the creation of a Society of Anarchists at least here in the United States. There are no Libertarians that stand right on the middle, unless you invent it like what I did.
Libertarians of Reasons is a compromised terminology I culled in the theoretical clash of several concepts of the established Libertarian philosophy as regards the state in my dissertation on liberty and freedom in the academe many years back. It is not denied that Libertarians are anti-statist. But moral absolutism among the ranks of reasonable Libertarians has lost its real meaning in modern times. Realities of later life in modern society preclude moral absolutism and what remains is but the ghost of the libertarian principle that the "state is undesirable, unnecessary and harmful."
You probably are aware that we have tried to move towards a "stateless society" – no state and no government … just us, each one of us as an individual attempting to be our individual state … our own individual government, no specific rule to live by or traffic to obey, no outside interference to the kind of life each one of us want to live and to live only according to each of our own personal accord or personal choices. That’s all about the absolute enjoyment of the unbridled concept of liberty and freedom!
Empirically, the problem was in the olden days when a group of fully armed riders come to town and turn our lives upside down, it is long after we buried our dead before we can even gather ourselves together and talk … talk no longer as an individual but as a group and calibrate let alone mount an appropriate response to his painful tragedy. We pay the high price of an anarchist society which we thought then as mankind’s real utopia. Perhaps like the rest of ideologically committed Libertarians, it jolted my earlier fixation on the absolutes of Libertarianism as a way of life.
So in my absolute free-thinking days in the earlier part of my pre-academic life when to act with temerity instead of consecration was the rule of the house where we lived, I began to wonder that perhaps our illustrious forefathers have had a good reason for inventing the "state" and the "government" as part of the American way of life. Our nation’s patriarchs began to design a set of fundamental rules called the "Constitution" where they show us how to form a state and how to create and run a government. These laws, rules and regulations became the nation’s "protected values" to this day. Any person, Libertarian or otherwise, live by these "protected values" as a binding moral duty to society … you have no such duty if you are not morally bound to these rules. Those who think are free to disobey or reject these "protected values" live by the consequences of their action, either outside or behind bars if not underground or in fighting their way out tragically ends up six feet below the ground. That’s when our Libertarian concept of moral absolutism that the state and the government are "undesirable, unnecessary and harmful" began to accept a rewording of changes as a working compromise.
Those of us in the Libertarian fold who remained rigid … who rejected this philosophical compromise in real life and still alive today remained in the past, and whatever the say about their beliefs and predicaments is irrelevant.
Still it is one’s absolute choice if to remain irrelevant to the time, and even a nuisance to others, is a "pleasure" rather than a discomfort in today’s life realities. They can still claim to be Libertarians of their own choosing. For as long as their impertinence does not manifest in the violent rape of the Libertarian principles of liberty and freedom, I move out of their way, i.e. step aside, to give them a space to stand on straight and proud under the sun.
It does not matter if badly embarrassed we lost the struggle so long as in losing we did not forfeit our cause simply because of a few bad apples in the basket that we have neglected to pluck out and isolate from the rest. #
Bakadude/02/10/11
1 Comments in Response to Crisis Letter To FP.com: The Forcible Rape Of Libertarian Principles
This is a must read. Anarchists, Leftist Libertarians, Anarcho-Revolutionaries dream of life in a stateless United States ... without a government, no rules, no traffic lights to obstruct driving, no free market system with Adam Smith calling for regulatory intervention, no Central Bank, without Streets of Walls that socks and sucks, no taxes, only Ron Paul, the next president ... just be your own world as against mine or my own that we independently each create as we bask on a utopia of nothingness to enjoy to the fullest our own individual liberty and freedom!