Peace in Our Times

[mishochu]

I've heard it said that it takes around six months for a libertarian to become an anarchist. I'm right on schedule (minus about 22 days).

 

I have one thing I've been struggling with though. If you'll forgive my assumption into the inner workings of your mind I have a question to ask. How do you stay at peace within yourself when you know that more than a few people in your country (mine's the US but I'm sure the premise applies globally) are asking for "official" agents to affect your life in increasingly more intrusive ways?

 

I'm new to this and blundering around, it appears that there are stages to realizing what liberty really means. I'm in that stage where unfruitful proselytizing is leaving me jaded. People more seasoned to this appear to have a peace within themselves and tolerate modern liberalism and neoconservatism in people who are loud, popular, and numerous.

 

Perhaps I'm just impatient, while I'm grateful for Mises, Locke, Bastiat et al...how do you stay at peace when you know that, like them, full freedom in your lifetime is unlikely?

[algernon]

 

I've heard it said that it takes around six months for a libertarian to become an anarchist. I'm right on schedule (minus about 22 days).

 

I have one thing I've been struggling with though. If you'll forgive my assumption into the inner workings of your mind I have a question to ask. How do you stay at peace within yourself when you know that more than a few people in your country (mine's the US but I'm sure the premise applies globally) are asking for "official" agents to affect your life in increasingly more intrusive ways?

 

 

Congratulations on reaching the logical conclusion. You would be surprised, or perhaps maybe not, how many people never do.

 

I'm not real sure about the staying at peace question, maybe it's the same type of peace many people make when they realize they are dying (sooner rather than later) and it's something they just accept. The initial shock is learning you are about to die, just like learning everyone you are surrounded by wants to kill you and steal your possessions, the shock is learning the truth, the peace comes from the understanding.

 

 

 

I'm new to this and blundering around, it appears that there are stages to realizing what liberty really means. I'm in that stage where unfruitful proselytizing is leaving me jaded. People more seasoned to this appear to have a peace within themselves and tolerate modern liberalism and neoconservatism in people who are loud, popular, and numerous.

 

Perhaps I'm just impatient, while I'm grateful for Mises, Locke, Bastiat et al...how do you stay at peace when you know that, like them, full freedom in your lifetime is unlikely?

 

Oh the proselytizing, I remember those days. What a rude awakening it is when you learn most people are zombies. Those that will debate are simply repeating the party lines, refusing to think for them self and it does get very tiring, how many times can you argue against "But who would build the roads!?!?".

 

Full freedom anytime soon is unlikely, but you can help the cause of freedom through peaceful parenting if nothing else, if a small percentage of people peacefully raised their children, I think freedom would be close at hand.

 

I rarely hear this mentioned, but I do believe there is some usefulness in studying basic law and applying it to your adversaries. The system is designed to control stupid and initiated people, if you put up a meager fight you can succeed in far more freedom than most. I hear many statements as definitives when it comes to government control, that is rarely the case. 

[vahleeb]

Hi there, mishochu. I can't claim to be an expert about this but I have been going through this transformation for about 16 months now, so I am a little past the stage you're in and I can tell you that it does get easier with time.

I think that algernon is right, and some of the restlessness and despair that you're feeling is that you're going though some pretty traumatic psychological events (realising you own mortality, your own futility when it comes to the world at large, the nature of the zombie fest that we walk through every day) and you need to spend some time looking within yourself and coming to terms with all of that. Basically, I'd say that if you feel unease it's because something in your internal make up is still incompatible with the information that your new perspective of the world is feeding you. What it was for me that opened up the way to "inner peace" was the realization that all the expectations I had for myself, for my own life, for the world at large, were not built from first principles but rather induced into me by the same world that I was now calling corrupt so I had to let them go.

This is much trickier than you might think, because inherently we all start out believing that we're somehow "entitled" to the good life, to the happy ending, to "our place under the sun" but that's all just external propaganda that has been seeded into our brain far before we were capabale to defend against it. The truth is that what is just is and wishing for it to be different not only isn't worth a damn, but it ends up costing you.