"We will hang together or we we will surely hang separately",
Do you believe you will have more success with those you hope to convince, than with me?
Who are those people, who will be counted on your side, with more interest in your cause, than those here, with whom you disagree most vehemently?
Do you believe those people you hope to convince, will be more agreeable in the the pursuit of liberty?.
Do you believe you will find elsewhere, a more solid foundation in intellectual rigor, yet still bent on the restoration of liberty?
Then show me these forces and I will leave and join them also.
But until then I will remain with those who are
already convinced of the value of liberty, no matter how "bad" they are or how "poor" their understanding of philosophy. We have the ambition to be free.
I don't disparage philosophy. It has been a lifetime pursuit of mine. Obviously I don't disparage the pursuit.
I disparage the results of the philosophical game. Objectivism is enjoying a resurgence of popularity from its heyday in the sixties. My older brother was at Berkeley at the time and brought the exciting news of its solutions to the world's problems. Ayn Rand was on Johnny Carson. Collectivism was on the run. The world would have a new philosophy to counter Marxism.
I've been through this before. And I learned that liberty is like surgery or aircraft. It requires a special technology, independent of humanistic philosophy. It requires the organization of power in such a way, the administration of government follows along its lines. In a curious paradox, a despot can administer liberty and a democracy can administer the worst tyranny imaginable. The difference is in the organization of power. Objectgivism is not liberty. Learning objectivism is not learning liberty, nor can it produce liberty.
Certain elements know this well and are kicking the bijeezus out of us, no matter what we think along philosophical lines. Any empirical examination of the facts will produce no other conclusion, even if said any other way.
Now, you could say that a fundamental shift in philosophy will reveal this reality: that not only are we getting our butts kicked, but that there is something we can do about it.
Here I would tend to agree. But here also, is the trap. Even with the revelation proceeding from the philosophical shift, there is an ontological shift needed to gain internal access to possibility of liberty. This process requires more than one lifetime and the ambition dies with the person. This is why liberty is so elusive and unique.
There is nothing new in the idea of liberty, any more than the idea of healing and flying.
But their realization eluded mankind for thousands of years. And we will lose both, if we believe they proceed from a philosophical understanding. So are we loosing our liberty.
But like surgery and aircraft, the conditions of liberty can be produced without any mass understanding of the engineering and technology. And the philosophical and ontological shifts can be reverse-engineered immediately from its conditions. Every "non-believer" is immediately convinced by the landing of an airplane and the emergence of its passengers.
This is what the Founders did. They discovered the conditions of liberty in a new world. From this, they knew an unknown and forbidden technology they then used to eject tyranny. Then they protected it against government they would form, with the Bill of Rights.
The Bill of Rights does not protect liberty, it protects the use of the technology to produce liberty. Said another way, the Bill of Rights is not the specifications of liberty, it is the protection of the mechanics of liberty. Check out the Soviet Constitution to see a glorious specification of "liberty", in the absence of its mechanics.
And said yet another way, the Bill of Rights is not what we have, it is what we do, to produce liberty. We are stuck at the first amendment, barely exercising its provisions. But marching forward to liberty, we will discover, step by step, amendment by amendment, the reason for each...even to the sovereignty of the free state we will have created and is protected by the tenth.
And so ultimately, it relies on the ambition to be free. We already have the road-map and unlike the Founders, our travel is protected. It is only a matter of whether we will undertake the journey before our protection is taken away. Our successors will not have-it as easy as we have it now. Even as I the write, the international effort to abolish our protection is underway.
This is why those with the ambition to be free are so important now and that we use what we have now to restore our liberty.
For our successors, it may be too late. How many thousand years again will liberty elude mankind?
John