You are the Smallest Thing

Every day, if we are not wary, we can be overwhelmed by the inhuman torrent of information that blasts our consciousnesses.  It's a riot-hose of data, knocking us back, making us angry and anxious as events utterly beyond our control consume our attention.

It's all at such a scale that it can seem beyond our ability to do anything.  Wars and storms, murders and corruption, our knowledge ecosystem bludgeons us into sputtering helplessness.  How can we hope to change such a vast and catastrophically borked system?  How can we bring justice to a world that is so utterly unjust, and hope to a world where every moment serves up moral horror and outrage?

We can't.  You can't.  I can't.

I can't change geopolitics, because I am so small.  I cannot change the great blind injustices of our economic systems, our our species-wide eagerness to inflict suffering on one another in the pursuit of power.  Even community tensions and family conflicts seem to at times become so complex and intractable that no amount of my effort can bring them to resolution.  The activist's mantra...that injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere...becomes a recipe for despair and dysfunction.  We stress and we rage, and Lord have mercy, does it seem futile.

Where, then, can change occur?  Where can we make things better?

It occurs first and foremost at the very smallest level, meaning it's a quantum thing.

We tend to think of "quantum" as a word that shimmers with futuristic promise and cutting edge resonances.  Quantum computing!  The insights of quantum physics!  Brands slap that label on themselves if they want us to imagine they are Very Forward Thinking.  

"Oooh!  Quantum.  It must be good!"

But "quantum" just means "the smallest possible thing."  

The term replaced "atom," which Greek philosopher Democritus used to describe the invisible and indivisible particles that he believed made up the whole world.  Science once used the term "atom" to describe the atomic elements, but eventually realized that "atoms" were in fact not the smallest possible thing.  There was a "subatomic" realm, a philosophical oxymoron that would have given Democritus conniptions.  Rather than science saying, "Oops, our bad, those elements aren't actually atomic,"  we called the things smaller than atoms quanta, teeny tiny spooky indivisible units upon which all other things are somehow made.

What does that have to do with making things better?

That's you, morally speaking.  

You, in your unique personhood, are the smallest possible thing.  Your soul, your personhood, your agency?  That's the fundamental unit of analysis, the Cogito that Ergo Sums.  You have agency over you, assuming you are a sentient being, which you hopefully are.  You are the place where change happens, and where you are empowered to make change happen.  The place where hate ends.  The place where compassion begins.  Where grace reigns.

Unless it doesn't.  

All you have to do, again, is allow yourself to be changed.  Which is just super duper easy, as y'all know.

But it can be done.

Always start small.  Small is plenty hard enough.

Of Masks and American Sovereignty

There are rules, new rules for a new era of human exchange. Like, say that you can’t open an email enclosure or click on an embedded link unless you’re 100% sure you know who sent it and why.

You can’t make a phone call without texting first to make sure it’s ok, which still strikes me as kind of a significant step backwards. I mean, I used to call people to see if it would be ok if I came over to talk, but now we need to text people to see if it’s ok to call them to see if it would be ok if we came over to talk.

And no matter what, you should never, ever read the comments. Comments are the place where our shared humanity goes to die.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.

Back in the naive first few years of internet culture, the idea was that the comments section was a new and exciting place for human discourse, a place where we’d dialogue about issues and concepts and come to a new and enlightened understanding of one another.

It’d be funny, if it wasn’t so sad.

I used to have a comments section on this little blog, for example. For a while, it was a place where I actually talked to people. Then the trolls came, those souls who were just there to yell and cast aspersions. I never actually knew who they were, because there was no way to know who they were. There’d never be evidence of an actual “person” there, just a picture of a Rottweiler or a wolf or a hawk, or some other strong wild animal that let the troll imagine they were powerful and not simply cruel and inhuman.

All of that toxicity comes from one place: anonymity. 

If we allow ourselves to hide away ourselves from another, it does something strange to the human soul. It frees us from a sense of connection, from a sense of engagement and relationship. By not being ourselves with another person, we are given permission to not act as if that relationship matters.

Hiding our personhood is dehumanizing.  It's why I was so very grateful to finally unmask when the pandemic ended, so blessed to finally see the faces in my little community, one on one, real and human and there. 

Which is why the rise of masked and militarized secret police in the United States is so remarkably dangerous.  There are rationalizations made to justify this, involving safety and protecting identity, but those rationalizations for masking are the same ones made by the violent masked Black Block on the far left.  The far left is and has always been a disjointed, inchoate, fractious rabble.  The far right is fascist and authoritarian, and has the full coercive power of the state behind it.  Both want to hide who they are, but one is far more effective at projecting force to suppress liberty.  When an authoritarian state masks up, things are going very, very wrong indeed.

But there are other forms of power that have masked up, too.

Just as dangerous are the rising voices of masked propagandists, as clandestine organizations spend millions upon millions to manipulate public opinion, while at the same time doing everything in their power to hide their identity.

Take, for example, the organization "American Sovereignty," which ran pro-ICE ads prior to and during the last Superbowl.  Look them up, and you find a website.  But what does that website look like?  It's one page of boilerplate right-wing language about "safety" and "security" and a contact form.  No one responds to that email address.

No human beings are in evidence, no staff, no funders, no faces, nothing at all to tell you who they actually are.  This is intentional.

Even tiny little churches with thirty members all over the age of seventy have more detailed websites.  A family run restaurant has a more sophisticated online presence.  This, for an organization that has the money to produce and drop a Superbowl Ad, which y'all know ain't cheap.  If you're making a political statement in our republic, but your identity is a mystery, Ты лжец, товарищ.

Journalists dug deep, into Federal Communications Commission filings, and found just one name associated with American Sovereignty. He was a Republican operative, located in Arizona.  He wouldn't, of course, return any calls.

Reading this, you know who I am.  I make my case, and argue for that case, as a citizen in our frayed but precious republic.  Meaning, I don't pretend I'm anyone else, or prevent you from knowing me.  

Sure, on occasion I've written things pseudonymously.  Like my last novel, written in the name of the narrator.  Or a sharp-tongued work of theopolitical satire, written in the name of the Devil Himself.  But there, I've gone out of my way to be sure a reader can trace the text back to me, the real live human person who made it.  One quick Google, and I'm revealed.  That, and I've said: this is made by me, and this is why.

That's what you do, when you have integrity.

We're going to be seeing more and more masks and secrets, as our political system is flooded with money from corporations and billionaires eager to do everything they can to hold as much power as they possibly can.  

We'll see more propaganda, more lies masquerading as truth, as this year progresses and the hundreds of millions in dark money sitting in political war chests is tapped.  

How much of it will be from groups that operate behind the veil?

Personal Liberties and Free Markets

American "libertarianism" has, at the heart of it, one single catastrophic flaw.  That flaw is this: the assumption that personal liberty and free markets are not in tension with one another.

Completely free markets...meaning societies in which there are no boundaries imposed on capital or the marketplace...are conducive only to the concentration of capital.  Capital, as a social proxy for power, acts precisely the same way all social power operates.  It is drawn to itself, as those with power are empowered to amass more power.  This is true politically, and it is also true economically. 

The two spheres are and have always been interwoven, as wealth supports the state, and the state protects wealth.  

What neither inherently protects is your personal liberty.  Without the clear boundaries established by disciplined adherence to constitutional law, the state can easily become a monster.  Without a constitutionally ordered state to counterbalance its unfettered venality and avarice, the market is no less dangerous.  Slavery and indenture are both, after all, the state of being owned, and that's economic.

In a market unresponsive to any purpose higher than itself, there is no motivation other than profit maximization, and profit maximization ultimately enslaves us all.  This is particularly true as the marketplace seizes control of information ecosystems, because then capital can create not just products and services, but our desire for those products and services.  

"Marketing," after all, is no different from propaganda.  Both seek to shape the minds of a malleable populace, because it's often easier to make people want your product than to make a product people want.

And Lord, do we now "want" some strange things.

Like, say, thousand dollar phones.  Or sixty thousand dollar SUVs.  Or health care that is cripplingly, overwhelmingly, inhumanly expensive.  We placidly accept the expectation that life must be spent forever in debt, that debt is the norm, that paying interest to a corporation for the privilege of buying groceries is just the way things work.

These assumptions are imposed because they are a profitable imposition.  They are also markers of a disordered market, where enlightened self-interest has been intentionally blinded.  

An unregulated and disordered market is the collective equivalent of an unregulated and disordered mind.  If driven by solipsistic self-interest alone, it is no more free than a soul trapped in megalomania or paranoid delusion.  

And we are trapped in that cage with it.

Libertarians, Fossil Fuels, and Energy Self-Sufficiency

After the bumptious ruckus of the recent Libertarian convention, which I'll assume is the norm for every single Libertarian gathering ever, I found myself delving a bit more into the dominant school of thought amongst the "freedom loving" Mises Caucus, which has in recent memory controlled the direction of that movement.  

The devotees of Austrian economist Bubba Jo Mises have come to define American libertarianism, and...what?  

No, wait.  That's not his name.  Got that wrong.   

It's "Ludvig Van" Mises, which of course makes me think of Alex Delarge's obsession from A Clockwork Orange.  The depth of libertarian passion for Mises and his theories runs pretty much as deep, but it's...peculiar.  I have no beef with Mises, but his acolytes seem to have become something rather peculiar.

Like, say, in the absolute and fervent assertions of the Mises Institute on the subject of fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels, they argue in a series of essays apparently written for gullible children, are the very bulwark and foundation of all human freedom, and without fossil fuels, life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness are well nigh impossible.  Woe, woe to us should we ever forget this fundamental truth about the nature of human personhood.

Those who deign to suggest otherwise are "Green Tyrants," who are looking to place you and your loved ones in the authoritarian hellhole of renewable energies.  Wind is slavery!  Solar is serfdom!  The purpose of the environmental movement is nothing more nor less than domination, and globalism, and sadness.

This is all more than a little faintly insane, a bizarro world inversion of the self-evident truth.

Let's say you value your independence, that you desire to be as vigorously self-sufficient as humanly possible.  Which serves the cause of your freedom more: solar and wind, or fossil fuels?  Which makes you dependent on outside systems and interests, and which allows maximal self-reliance?

Wind and solar are infinitely renewable natural resources.  They are easily and freely accessible to anyone with even a modest plot of land.  My own home, for instance, would produce sufficient energy from a solar array to meet all of my energy needs.  That would include 90% of my transportation. 

Is that energy as cheap and energy dense as gasoline?  No.  It's not.  But through thrift and prudence, it'd do.

Fossil fuels provide only the illusion of individual liberty.  They rely upon sprawling and complex systems of production infrastructure and profit-seeking corporate bureaucracies, all of which work hand-in-hand with government.  They are also, as often as not, a resource produced directly and in the service of state power.  In some instances, like Norway, those states are respectful of individual liberties.  In most instances, they are not.  Even a fool knows this.  Only the delusional deny it.

What we also know is that these systems are the very farthest thing from resilient.  If even one element of a vast global supply and production chain fails, fossil fuels become scarce or vanish entirely.  In a crisis, when those systems are compromised, they cannot be trusted.  I mean, all you have to do is hack the billing system of a provider, and Americans panic, and every gas station on the East Coast is suddenly without fuel.  Lord, that was dumb...but illustrative.  Or when, after a Category 1 Hurricane, the very center of the entire American oil industry was suddenly a sweaty mess of argumentative Texans sitting in their SUVs and pickups, waiting in lines for gas so long they'd have embarrassed the Soviets.

For homesteaders and preppers and others who value their freedom, the choice is obvious.  Panels and windmills and water turbines, people.  C'mon.

Beyond this, there's the impact of fossil fuel use on climate.  This is a libertarian concern, because our planetary weather systems impact local ability to produce food.  If you destabilize that system, you take away the freedom to reliably grow crops and provide for yourself and your family.  Saying: we wish to be locally resilient, we wish grow and produce food, and do not want the greed of the elite to destroy our right to freely enjoy the fruits of creation?  

This ain't oppressive, unless by "oppressive" you mean "repressing the right of the powerful to take the freedoms of the average human being."

For any libertarian who is actually libertarian, rather than a patsy for oligarchs, state powers, and corporate interests, this is all rather obvious.  

Fossil fuel provides a form of freedom, true.  But it is one that comes at a cost, a cost that must be acknowledged and carefully considered.

Anarcholibertarian and Anarchocapitalist

Anarcholibertarianism is a peculiar thing, I'll admit.  

It is not the same thing as anarchocapitalism, because anarchocapitalism is a raging oxymoron and conceptually self-annihilating.  

Corporations and corporate power structures are no less a threat to liberty than political power structures.  Because capital is social power, eh?  Capital exhibits all of the gravitic tendencies of human power to concentrate itself, creates all of the same wild imbalances and injustices, and is ultimately as much threat to freedom and human dignity as any other form of collective power.

Wealth has always worked this way, which is why my moral teacher spent a remarkably large amount of time challenging the ethics of capital in his day.  Profit maximization and the relentless focus on the accrual of capital were, for him, fundamentally suspect and dangerous to our integrity as persons.  

At best, wealth represented a system that needed to be subverted and used slyly against itself.  

At worst, Mammon was the heart of our failure.  It is the system that enslaves us.

Which, again, is why it is so peculiar seeing those who are nominally libertarian so enthralled by the power dynamics of capital.  It is no less a danger to liberty than concentrations of political power.  Assuming that the accrual of socially mediated proxies for ownership and control somehow makes one more "free" is absurd.

Freedom, for the libertarian, is an essential state of being, a fundamental aspect of sentience and personhood.  It is an inalienable right.  It will always stand independent from imagined structural frameworks, be they legal or economic.

Of Trump and My Anarcholibertarian Predilections

Last year, I sat in front of a class of undergraduates and talked about my postapocalyptic Amish novel.  At one point, in response to a question from one of them about separatist/quietist movements, I described myself as having "anarcholibertarian predilections," which got a laugh from a couple of bearded young men at the back of the class.  

It's such a silly, self-absorbed, overwrought way to think of yourself, which makes anarcholibertarianism a perfect match for silly, self-absorbed, overwrought me.

I've dabbled with the idea that I might politically self-identify as libertarian over the years, but if I am, I'd have to be of that peculiar variety.  Every time I think I'm there, when my frustration with the rigidities of bureaucratic folderol and the clucking propaganda of twitter pharisees and apparatchiks have me considering going full Ron Swanson, libertarians disabuse me of the notion that I could ever possibly fit within that "movement."  

Not that it's a movement, not really.  It's as incoherent as the language on the AI generated image I prompted for this post.

The news about Libertarianism recently, insofar as there is ever any meaningful news about libertarianism in America, is that the Libertarian Party has invited Donald J. Trump to speak at their convention.

It's yet another reason why any libertarian worthy of the name would steer away from the American party, and a reminder of how neofascist, corporatist, and "strong man" ideologies have devoured the concept of libertarianism in America.  If your libertarianism ends up justifying the power of a despot, an oligarch, or a charlatan, it ain't libertarianism.  

It's monarchism, and honeychild, there is a difference.

My libertarianism doesn't bend the knee to anyone, including myself.  Perhaps that's because it's less a political philosophy and more a question of my theology, which seems a better place for libertarianism to hang its hat.  That is, let it be clear, not me saying it is less relevant.  It's me saying it's more central to my identity as a person, my understanding of how human beings are to live together, and our relationship with our Creator.

There's probably some pre-existing definition of the word anarcholibertarian, one that was argued and fretted over by earnest folks with Germanic surnames a century ago.  I mean, surely there is.  I don't care.  I mean, being anarcholibertarian, why would I?

My libertarianism is "anarcho" because I don't trust human beings with power.  Put the prefix "an" in front of "arch," and that's really all you're saying:  "no power."  Whatever the power structure may be, there is within it moral hazard.  The concentrations of power that manifest in political systems become self-perpetuating, as power seeks to reinforce itself.   There is no form of political system that is immune to this, because political systems are human social constructs, and humans love love love power over one another.  

Which means...because no human community can function without power...that I prefer systems that check and balance the powerful.  Oligarchies and despotisms, being the self-serving things that they are, are the enemy.  Social democracies and liberal republics are invariably frustrating, but they do a far better job of preserving the average soul's liberty than any other system.  This is precisely because they put the brakes on power, because they make the concentration of authority in a single person or group more difficult.  We've forgotten this, we Americans, as we posture and bellow at one another from our position of privilege.

Preserving the liberty of the powerful is and has always been unnecessary.  The wealthy and the social elite have their armies of lawyers...or their actual armies...to ensure that they are free to do as they please.  Rules, like the covenant of marriage or the Constitutional process for the peaceful transfer of power?  These things do not apply to them.

The more someone loves power, revels in it, glories in it?  The less one should trust them with it.

Yet so many of us, once again, howl for a king.