We often confuse expediency with pragmatism. You can make a choice that provides immediate return and seems the pragmatic choice only to pay a higher price later. A person who commits a crime is getting some immediate reward but has an ever-increasing risk of being caught each time. He’s gambling. He’s also shitting where he eats by destroying the sense of trust in his community. Lying is similar. When you get caught in a lie, which is likely just a matter of time depending on how often you attempt it, you seriously undermine your reputation. Worse yet, if you lie now expecting some immediate gain from it, even if you correct yourself in the future, anything you say thereafter will be suspect. Even when you get away with it, every lie you tell for some immediate benefit undermines your veracity because you know you’re a liar. Conversely, knowing in your heart that you are consistently honest and sincere shows through in the power of your convictions. It’s a rare talent to be able to lie convincingly.

If you claim I’m hiding behind my principles, I wonder if you have a completely different notion of what principles even mean. It makes me wonder how in the world you derive your own so-called principles if you see being principled and being pragmatic as opposing paths. In fact, I think this is at the core of the failure of liberty movements. More importantly, it’s at the core of my views of why politics and statism are such dismal failures and have created the destructive beasts of governments that spread misery to this day. If you frequently sacrifice principles for expediency, then you’re constantly taking one step forward and three steps back, and I say it that way only because that’s the familiar expression. It’s probably conservative compared to the reality, a much more discouraging ratio.

I’ve also been referred to as a purist which I’ve denied. I do make some concessions to tyrants like paying taxes and registering my car. Am I being unprincipled then? Aren’t these things a crucial part of what keep tyrants in power? Of course they are! If everyone stopped doing these at once, the tyrannical State would wither almost immediately. But the reality is I, like all liberty activists, have two different goals. I have a longer-term goal of advancing liberty by reducing the violence in my community. The other goal is my own personal liberty. They’re both good goals. I pick my battles because I have to balance the two. Both goals are actually selfish. I want to live in a peaceful and prosperous community and so I work for that and decide what risks and sacrifices I’m willing to make. But when I do make those concessions to tyrants out of a totally selfish and yet reasonable desire to remain out of jail, I would never make the ridiculous claim that they advance the long-term goal of reducing the violence of governments! And of course, I would never try to decide for someone else what personal risks they should take or sacrifices they should make for the long-term goal of shrinking violent governments. We all have to maintain our own balance. How could I call myself a lover of liberty if I said otherwise?

Examples of large political goals achieved through incremental progress are often referenced as examples of the counter-intuitive notion that expediency at the cost of principle is ultimately pragmatic, but that’s a case of severe tunnel vision. I’ve seen plenty of special interest groups getting government attention for their pet projects by making deals with politicians, at the cost of the liberty of many others. Always, government expands. Occasionally one bubble is pushed down and several others bulge. Yes, you can tediously grind away devoting tremendous time, money, and effort, lobbying for a specific special interest, but at what price? What other liberties are being sacrificed to their power lust while you wheel and deal with politicians, criminals who see nothing wrong with controlling others with threats of violence, who stay in office by selling violence to their constituents in exchange for campaign help and contributions. Their job is violence and they don’t stay in office by offering to do less. Imagine going to a job interview and telling your potential employer that you promise not to do very much. When multiple special interest groups are all pulling in different directions, government expands in all directions, according to its nature, and no one seems to understand how they each played a part in that expansion, or they simply don’t care. To be clear, I don’t doubt that progress toward liberty will be gradual, but I don’t see incremental progress in pet projects as evidence that it will happen by making deals with the devil.

If I’ve failed to persuade you to my point of view, I can accept that. What I find hard to believe is the idea that you could be paying any attention and still doubt my sincerity. If you continue to say I’m hiding behind my principles, that’s intellectually dishonest. If you still believe you can use politics to achieve liberty, I will not doubt that your intentions are good. You obviously have faith in it. I encourage you to follow your own heart and do what you feel is right. All I ask is that you extend to me the same courtesy. I have no faith in that game. Don’t drag me into it.

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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.

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Souls as Patterns

Souls are often depicted as energy in literature and movies, points of flickering light or human-shaped shimmering luminescence. A lot of people have embraced this depiction, but it doesn’t really conclude from human experience. If you look at the world around us, energy is used up in the process of things fulfilling some function or by creatures to survive and act. Energy is just a resource. If there is a soul that exists beyond our bodies, then perhaps this soul requires some sort of energy source, but it makes no sense to think of the soul itself as energy, something that gets used and converted into a different form in the process, approaching entropy.

I’ve heard said that our bodies are composed of a few dollars worth of common chemicals, as if to trivialize a human being, but it’s how we’re put together that makes up our value. That’s like valuing a sculpture based on how much cheap clay it’s composed of and ignoring that it perhaps took hundreds of person-hours to shape. Meanwhile the human body took millions of years to become the many forms it takes on today. What’s meaningful about us is our patterns– our DNA, our memories, our personalities, the many decisions we have made throughout our lives. So whether our souls exist separately or strictly as one with our bodies or parts thereof, such as in our memories via the patterns of our brain’s neuron pathways, they are still patterns. Our bodies merely use energy to function.

If you actually make the effort to think about these things, then you may find it has an impact on whatever other views you have about the nature of yourself and the universe around you. If the soul is a pattern, what does that mean about the persistence of said soul? Are our patterns not ever-changing? Is that not the nature of life and all of existence? The pattern that described your personality and memories a year ago no longer matches the pattern that describes you now. For that matter, neither does the pattern of five minutes ago before you started reading this post. Are those specific patterns lost forever and “dead”? In that particular sense, our souls cannot be eternal, for if we were not constantly interacting with our environment, learning new things, making decisions that changed our souls, we would be no different from inanimate objects. We’d be dead.

The nature of the soul affects how you view things like choices, and the choices we make have an impact on who we become and the choices we make in the future. What did you choose to eat tonight for dinner? If you were stranded on an island, your choices for food would be limited. You may be able to go left, right, forward, or backward, but you likely cannot go up because you are at the moment incapable of flight. The choice to kill someone might never occur to a person without someone committing an act severe enough to anger them to the point of considering murder. Your pattern has been altered by incorporating these thoughts I’m now conveying to you. My pattern has encroached upon yours whether you agree with anything I’m saying or not. Your choice to agree or disagree was made possible by reading my words. If I hadn’t written this article, you would be a slightly different person than you are now. The choice to read my article would not exist for you. The world around you seems to some extent a type of container, shaping your soul the way a vase shapes the water within it, by presenting only so many choices to us. What choices were you exposed to while growing up? Were you raised by farmers? Industrialists? Programmers? Christians? Muslims? Jews? Alcoholics? Hippies?

A problem with that is it raises another important question. Where does “you” end and the rest of the universe begin? Where do you draw the boundary?

Do you believe there is an eternal version of you, a soul, that exists on another plane of existence? Is your body just a shell for that ever-evolving pattern? Does your body describe any part of what is your soul? If your body is male, does that affect the choices you make about who you might spend your life with? Does your soul really have a true choice for your mate or mates or did your body do some of the deciding? How much of you continues on when your body dies? It seems obvious to me that my memories are part of my brain and therefore probably decay after my death, but I admit to speculating occasionally and reluctantly whether or not some other part of what defines me might continue into some form of afterlife or reincarnation. It might carry something of me on, wisdom perhaps or the capacity to empathize, but certainly absent memories of this life. Do your memories exist in your brain or in your soul? Have you considered that at least some of what you now think of as “you” might end with your body even as another part, your soul, moves on?

If you’re a strict materialist, what parts of your body would you consider “you”? Is it just your brain? Maybe it’s not even your whole brain. Much of the brain just runs autonomic systems like your heart and digestion. Do you include the subconscious? What part of your brain is deciding what you dream? Is that part of you or not? Do you count the body? Your hormonal processes affect your choices and actions. Your reflexes and athletic ability surely have an impact on your recreational choices and whether you become a professional athlete, for instance. If your hand is chopped off, you probably don’t consider it part of you anymore. The detached and decaying limb no longer has much affect on your choices. For that matter, if the nerves to your legs are damaged beyond use making you a paraplegic, are they still part of you? Is “you” defined by the extent of your senses? Does that mean “you” extends out to your fingertips and toes, essentially as far as you can feel? If we’re basing it on your senses, why consider only sense of touch? What about as far out as you can see or hear? Watch on television? Read about?

You might say none of that is “you” because, while you can sense it, you can’t control it. You can only control your body. But you’re only doing that by sending electric signals out from your brain. Considering that, can you not relay signals further out through other mediums? You can throw a ball and knock something over. You can blow out a candle. If you kindly ask someone standing next to a light switch to flip on the light, they’re fairly likely to comply.

And recall that your pattern and your choices were affected by me deciding to write this article. The lines get really blurry the more you think about it. The thoughts that inspired this article are certainly a small but important part of what I think defines me. I’m sharing my pattern with you right now. I’m impressing upon you a small part of who I am. You are tainted by the essence of me! You can choose to repeat these thoughts and propagate them to other living things, keeping part of my soul alive, or you can stifle them within your brain, which will one day decay, and let them die. Better yet, you can keep parts or even elaborate on those and discard others, or even refute parts in hopes of stifling those thoughts in others as well. Our mortal lives are a sort of selection process. However, if you believe that all of what exists in your mind now will continue after your death in an eternal soul, then you will carry my tainted thoughts with you into the afterlife, including all the parts that you firmly disagree with.

That’s all I’ll say for now. I just want to ask questions that some may not have given much thought to. I just ask that you think about the merit of the notion of souls as patterns, and if it makes sense to you, begin to pay attention to other places where you sense ever-shifting patterns that also seem to grow in complexity, but that deserves its own article.

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