Regardless of what you call it, mandatory, compulsory, or something else, discussion is already underway in the Obama administration about laws to ensure compliance with national service, i.e. threats of violence to discourage anyone from disobeying orders to serve. I’ve already discussed how we’re all slaves, but this is the most overt form of slavery in recent history.

Today’s comic was inspired by Sam A. Robrin over at the New Hampshire Underground Forums.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

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.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Our will is what defines us as living. It’s what makes us critically different from dead inanimate objects, e.g. a rock has no will of it’s own. To the extent that you take away or restrict a person’s will and expression of self, you’re killing that person. I’ve been talking about slavery in very cold and hard terms, and if I communicated my views well, then you probably find it rather depressing. Well I don’t mean to be. Unfortunately, there’s just no delicate way to tell someone a hard truth like that. Fortunately, knowledge is power and you have to know the truth before you can deal with it.

The gay rights movement was onto something with the slogan “Silence Equals Death”. To be threatened with punishment for fully living your life as your innate will would have you live it is akin to being suffocated. Perhaps that sense of suffocation is simply more overt amongst gay and lesbian people by virtue of having a non-typical internal will more at odds with societal standards. In that sense, it can be seen as a gift, in the same way that sensitivity to pain was likely a beneficial mutation for some of the earliest creatures to evolve nervous systems for reacting to dangers in their environment. It’s why the coming out process is such a relief and so empowering. It’s like being alive and gulping in deep breaths after feeling suffocated.

Most of us have become accustomed to that suffocation. At first thought, that might seem as if it should to make life easier, but I don’t believe it does. Instead it leaves this vague sense of stress and hopelessness, the source of which largely eludes us. Consider all the self-help books out there. To the extent that any of them are actually helpful, I would attribute that to the process of self-exploration that they encourage, and perhaps to whatever extent they encourage the readers to discover and listen to their true selves. On the other hand, I wouldn’t have high expectations of any self-help program that made the solution sound easy. We are, in fact, surrounded by threats of punishment for failing to conform to certain expectations. It takes a lot of courage to defy those external commands and listen to our own will.

We are all individuals with very different needs and desires. What one person needs to achieve fulfillment is likely not completely the same for any other person in the world. And yet there is this artificial collectivism, this societal role imposed on us. Go to school. Get good grades. Date someone of the opposite sex. Go to a good college. Get a career. Get married. Contribute to your 401k. Have a 5 year plan, a 10 year plan, and a 20 year plan for whatever career you’ve found yourself in. Get a 30 year loan on a home and hopefully have it paid off by retirement. Retire. Make sure you’ve found God and then die… in bed.

The average person, and by that I mean almost everyone, is spending most of his life jumping through hoops, sublimating himself to external pressures that have nothing to do with his true self and true motivations. Authoritarian governments are the primary culprits, but not the only ones. Did you make friends of people whom circumstances simply placed you amongst? Do you live where you live because it’s close to the job that circumstances presented to you or because it’s close to home? Do you call something home simply because it’s where you were raised?

We are meant to be willful creatures; not lifeless automatons that simply react to stimuli in our environments. Our complex mind and the associated will evolved over millions of years and has a purpose crucial to our survival. Love and nurture your will. Try to discover what you really want and take affirmative action to make it happen. It’s not easy and don’t pretend it will be. We’ve been conditioned all our lives to largely ignore our own will and respond to various external stimuli. There are a myriad of external forces working to mold your will into something unnatural and unhealthy; something very much not the real you.

Defy those forces. Disobey. Take action. Express yourself honestly. You may be overwhelmed at how alive you can feel.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites