Video Summary: I was found guilty as I expected. I asked the officer if he had any evidence I had harmed anyone.

Answer: “No”.

“No further questions.”

It was very short. If you want them to stop using tickets as a source of revenue–

Challenge EVERY SINGLE TICKET in court!

A shepherd had a nice flock of sheep but he was endlessly frustrated because his neighbor had more sheep than him. One day he had just birthed a new lamb only to discover that his neighbor had birthed two and was even further ahead of him. He’d had it. That night and every night thereafter, he began to complain about it in his prayers.

“Lord, Manuel now has five more sheep than me. I work just as hard as him and take good care of my sheep and it’s just not fair!”

After many nights of prayers full of whining and complaining about what he perceived as a terrible injustice, he heard a clear voice in his head.

“Alright! Alright! Just stop complaining and I will help you, but only this once. Then you are on your own. I don’t want to hear another word about it!” answered the Lord.

“Oh, thank you Lord! You are truly just! So… you are going to kill five of Manuel’s sheep?”

I believe the story was meant as an analogy about far left politics and what seems like a desire to drag everyone down to an equal level of misery. It may not seem to relate to retribution, but it does address a flaw in our thinking that fuels what I see as a pointless desire for retribution.

We seem to have a barbaric and unquenchable thirst for justice. It’s barbaric because inflicting suffering an another does nothing to heal our own harm. It’s unquenchable because when others suffer, they often experience the same irrational desire for retribution, perhaps horribly misdirected, but they desire to lash out in some way. I think it’s because we feel rather small and insignificant in the big scheme of things, and we naturally don’t like that feeling of helplessness. Lashing out against someone or something gives one a brief rush. It makes you feel powerful for a short while. On some level, we know we’re becoming much like whomever we’re angry at, but we all have our justification systems, sometimes rather elaborate. We’re the good guys and we’re punishing the bad guys! This is what I think is at the core of the idea that violence begets violence. It’s something I believe now more than ever.

Doubtless there are some who take pride in being outright evil, people who commit acts with full awareness that what they’re doing is wrong, but it’s rare. Most act under the belief, often the delusion, that what they’re doing is right. In the end none of those justifications really matter. Every time someone lashes out like that, however justified they feel or even however justified they are, they hurt someone or destroy something. They increase the misery in the world and misery loves company. The relief one feels after obtaining the retribution they crave is fleeting at best. It won’t actually heal any harm that’s been done to that person. It won’t fill the hole inside them. What it will likely do is create a lot more holes in a lot of other people. It’s truly a vicious cycle.

I believe we are ready to evolve past what seems like a sort of evolutionary throwback to our most animalistic instincts. We evolve past that to our own personal benefit. When an individual is unable to let go of that unquenchable thirst for vengeance, he traps himself in his own Hell. There will never be perfect justice in the world. There will always be some people who seem to “get away with it”. You really only have power over yourself and how you decide to deal with this unavoidable imperfection about the world around you. You can either cope with it in a healthy manner in line with reality or you can engage in endless fantasies that will never come true wherein you have tremendous power to right all the wrongs in the world and make all the bad guys pay! Yes, it’s quite a common fantasy. Superhero stories milk this insatiable desire for justice. Watch a few Hollywood action movies and see how creative they get with the violent destruction of the villain whom they’ve carefully painted to be stereotypically evil. That villain is a place-holder for all the people who have ever pissed you off.

I’m done with the idea of trying to fix all the bad people in the world with punishment. I’m an anarchist. I don’t think there is a person on this Earth who has the authority over others to decide the appropriate amount of arbitrary suffering to inflict on a person who has committed some wrong. It’s that fallacy that keeps money funneling into more and bigger prisons, prisons that treat people worse than animals in a zoo and have horrible recidivism rates. I understand the notion of self-defense. If someone is about to harm an innocent person, I understand using violence to stop them. I understand the notion of humanely locking away someone who is extremely likely to continue to hurt people, but the motivation for these things ought to be preventing more harm; not punishment.

Restitution, on the other hand, is a quantifiable thing. The perpetrator and the victim and some reasonably unbiased third party or parties can attempt to come to some agreement about how much harm has been done and what it will take to rectify that harm. Restitution is a path toward getting back in the good graces of whatever community one wants to be a part of. Individuals in a community have the opportunity to decide for themselves whether to forgive, whether restitution has been satisfactorily applied, bearing in mind that a statement on record by the victim would be the most persuasive. Rehabilitation makes sense to me, but based on the psychology I described, I don’t think we’re going to rehabilitate criminals by inflicting arbitrary suffering.

So what does this mean for liberty movements? I know a fair number of liberty activists who are so angry at statists they seem about to pop a vein. They hate all those fucking statists, those politicians, those cops, those bureaucrats, every government worker with an easy job and good benefits that they can never get fired from. Well, you’re right. They’re all rat bastards. Your anger is justified. It’s also completely pointless.

They think you’re a kook because they’ve got their convoluted, inconsistent justification systems that convince them that what they’re doing is right. Maybe some little voice inside them is saying otherwise and they’ve tuned it out. Your anger means shit to them. It isn’t hurting them. And if you attack them, how far do you think you’ll get before your insurrection is crushed and all the people you kill become martyrs? How fast will all the deluded masses run to the state to get protection from “kooks like you”? What will you have accomplished for liberty?

It doesn’t matter how justified that violence may be. It’s not going to fix things. Given that, how then are you going to deal with that reality? Will you let your anger and your frustration at your own helplessness eat you up inside? Will you continue to enjoy pointless fantasies about having more power than the State to right all the wrongs? The only way you’re going to truly feel empowered is when you can evolve enough to control your own thinking, the thinking that is destroying you and not your enemies. It’s not an easy thing. A lot of it is conditioned into you from your immersion in such a violent world. It’s a process. It will take time. I suggest getting started as soon as possible.

I’m not going to yield to the enemy. I’m not surrendering, not by any far stretch of the imagination. I’m not attacking anyone but I’m not going quietly either. Their system requires near 100% compliance. We can disobey. We can peacefully resist and burden their so-called justice system. We can make their tyranny cumbersome to maintain. Our power for positive change will come from open confrontation and defiance against their irrational justification systems for violence. It will come from shining a light on the cockroaches, from new media accessible to the masses, from the rapid sharing of images of their fascism all over the Internet like the recent incidents in Pittsburgh and the G20 protests. It’s happening like it never could before even 10 years ago. There is plenty of hope, but that hope isn’t coming from the point of a gun. The State is quite well prepared for a straight-up violent confrontation. My weapons of choice are the ones they feel most powerless against– a pen, a camera, and the truth.