After writing several blog posts about how we live in a slave society, sometimes I wonder if I’d be personally better off if I could somehow return to that blissful ignorance of the inherent violence of statism. Maybe this struggle for freedom is a losing battle and we’d all be better off if we could just accept it and get on with our lives, just live the best slave lives possible. I was just chatting with the guy who inspired the Angry Josh character and he was expressing how he can’t believe most people aren’t as angry as he is. I think they are actually. They just don’t really understand what exactly they’re angry at.

I’ve watched my mom when she’s baby-sitting little children and they bump their noggin on something. My mom will smack the table and say “Bad table! Why’d you do that?” and then encourage the kid to do the same. The kid would slap the table angrily and quickly stop crying as if the pain has been relieved. Of course being the extremely rational type, I’m tempted to tell the kid “Watch where you’re going and you’ll have a lot less bumps on your head, dumbass,” but my mom realizes that toddlers aren’t ready for that level of logic. They’re just mad because they hurt.

People are stressed all the time. We curse about traffic or long lines. We curse about bills, about taxes, about an old lady slowly writing a check in the cashier line at the grocery store, or any little interruption to our routines. After a long day at work and a long drive in traffic, it seems like any little thing will set us off. Our patience is being pushed to the limit. We lash out at a thousand things that have little or nothing to do with the real sources of our problems just like the toddler being encouraged to smack an inanimate object. I see people diagnosing the symptoms of problems while being clueless about what the real source of the problem is. Liberals and conservatives both will curse at government while proposing government solutions to the very same problems.

We’re told that the stresses of modern society are normal and that there’s something wrong with you if you can’t go along and get along. They diagnoze anxiety disorders and attention deficit disorder and prescibe medication so we can continue to slave away at our tedious lives. Meanwhile, that long day at work could perhaps be half as long if a significant chunk of our productivity wasn’t going to support our government masters. Maybe traffic would be a lot less if we only had to work 4 days a week on average, or even 3, or if many could work for themselves at home absent barriers to entry for small business, and if we had better roads because they weren’t slave roads built by government to get us to our slave jobs so we can hand over our slave taxes, or better vehicles, or entirely different and innovative transportation systems because massive funding wasn’t being funneled into the same old roads we’ve had for decades. Who knows what innovations we could be enjoying right now without government stifling them?

That’s the nature of slavery. Our time is not our own. Any time we have to ourselves is only what we’re allowed by the grace of our masters who could raise our taxes at any time or demand new obligations of us like more registrations we have to apply for every year or more paper work to file to show that we’re obeying. We’re constantly under various different pressures to fulfill obligations that we did not choose, but most people don’t see it that way. Most have been so thoroughly indoctrinated into statism that they don’t see our society as a slave society. They’ve been sold on the illusion of freedom. The rhetoric of freedom is constantly pounded into our ears even as our chains are made thicker and heavier. We’re becoming so accustomed to our slave status that the bureaucrats aren’t even subtle about it anymore. Already a commission is being formed to consider compulsory service.

The bipartisan commission will be tasked with exploring a number of topics, including “whether a workable, fair and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people could be developed and how such a requirement could be implemented in a manner that would strengthen the social fabric of the nation.”

My rose-colored glasses have been off for quite some time now. Like many libertarians, I’m almost constantly troubled by the decline of liberty everywhere. As Patri Friedman of the Seasteading Institute described, the wild frontier used to act as a sort of relief valve for tyranny, a place to go when civilized societies fell deeper under the control of tyranny. There is no frontier left. People love to say if you don’t like it you should leave, but there is nowhere to go. Tyranny has enveloped the globe. Those who love liberty are between a rock and a hard place. And yet, as troubled as I am by the state of things, I’m more optimistic than ever. I’m less stressed than ever. I’ve certainly not achieved a serene state of mind, but I’m better off than ever. How can that be?

I think it’s because ignorance isn’t really blissful at all. There is some manner of knowing that we all have. On some level, people realize they’re enslaved. The child knows that he bumped his own head on the table but he readily accepts the illusion that has been handed to him. It’s preferable to reality so he readily participates in his own deception. We’ve been convinced that government is a necessary evil. We’re convinced that if we can just get it right, it will address all of our problems. We want it to do that. It keeps failing miserably, but we’re told that all of our problems are because we don’t have enough of it, that it needs more funding, or the false dichotomy serves as a convenient scapegoat. Conservatives blame the liberals and liberals blame the conservatives. This conveniently avoids ever having to address the real problem which is government itself.

Once you open your eyes wide and see it all for what it really is, then you get a sense of empowerment. We may never stop the evil machine, but we can start living our lives better right away. We know not to trust FIAT currency, bailouts, the blue light gang, or just about anything the government and the mass media are feeding to the sheeple. We can take steps, even if they’re just little ones, to stop living as slaves for someone else and live as freer people. We can do something, even if it’s just to shout the truth, and that’s how we vent instead of lashing out aimlessly which just promotes yet more violence.

The path to liberty appears to be a one-way road. There is no turning back. That’s okay. I’ll find peace in the truth.