the red pill
You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. — Morpheus in “The Matrix”
As I mentioned in my recent blog entry deep thoughts, I have been slowly and painfully transitioning from little- and big-l libertarian to full-blown anarchocapitalist. No one is more surprised by this turn of events than me.
I was first turned on to libertarianism by reading “Atlas Shrugged” in my mid-twenties. By odd coincidence, at the same time I was reading it, I moved into an apartment that was a mere 100 yards from a very busy train track used by both an Amtrak station directly across the street, and the Port of Oakland half a mile away. Trains went rumbling by 24 hours a day, and would blast their horns as a warning when approaching my driveway. Somehow, the noise never bothered me; I guess it became romanticized in my mind thanks to the synchronous misadventures of Miss Dagny Taggart.
I can remember quite clearly attending a local Free State Project meetup in northern California a mere… 4 years ago?… and being shocked and mildly disgusted to discover that one of the people in attendance was an anarchist. I not only didn’t believe that anarchy was feasible, it somehow repelled me.
Fast forward a couple of years: I had moved to New Hampshire, or the Free State as a few hundred of us hopefully/desperately/idiotically (depending on your perspective) refer to it. I was carpooling to the wedding of a fellow Free Stater, and recall being outraged when the guy whom I was giving a ride mentioned that he doesn’t vote, for philosophical reasons. Considering that I had just moved across the country in order to “work within the political system to minimize the size and scope of government”, I took it as some sort of personal affront. (Oh, the universe revolves around me, in case you didn’t get the memo.) I am now *most* of the way to understanding his perspective.
Fast forward to a year ago, when a fellow Libertarian loaned me a copy of Murray Rothbard’s “For a New Liberty”. I read it, and agreed with the vast majority of it. Afterwards, I was left with a strange feeling of unease. Didn’t the philosophy described in the book indicate that what we, as big L Libertarians, were doing was wrong? If slavery is wrong, you don’t campaign for better working conditions for the slaves; you campaign for ABOLITION. Something was off.
I recall 14 months ago, when Ron Paul announced the launch of his exploratory committee regarding a run for President, as a Republican… and almost everyone I know appeared to go stark, raving mad. All Free Stater activity became Ron Paul-focused. The FSP broke its long-standing policy of not associating itself with any political party or candidate and repeatedly placed Ron Paul (not an FSP participant, or a resident of New Hampshire, or a candidate for any office in New Hampshire) on its home page. I felt oddly detached from this whole phenomenon. Aside from what seemed to me to be the glaringly obvious fact that Ron Paul was never going to be POTUS, it seemed equally obvious that, even if by some miracle he were elected… so what? He is one man. He can’t change the direction of this country. He can’t control the legislature. He can’t undo decades of brainwashing of the masses via public schools and television [comical aside: earlier today I read an email from my Congressman happily letting me know that our government is subsidizing citizen's purchases of digital televisions in preparation for the coming broadcast format change]. If his campaign proved anything, it proved that things are much, much worse than we thought. He went on national television and told people he would abolish the income tax, and they DIDN’T CARE!?! Kill me now.
Fast forward to 4 months ago, when the owners of NHFree, an online discussion forum very popular amongst the Free Stater community, politely but firmly announced that they no longer wanted their forum used for the discussion and planning of political activity and to kindly take it elsewhere. Oh, the wailing and gnashing of teeth, from myself and dozens of others! It seemed so insulting. Just because they’re anarchists who don’t believe in the political system, why were they banishing the discussions of those of us who chose to work within it? Weren’t we all working towards the same goal? Weren’t we all on the same side? My answers to these questions now aren’t the same as they were then.
Fast forward to a mere 3 weeks ago, when I started listening to podcasts on FreeDomainRadio. This was a first for me; I have never liked talk radio, and had never listened to a podcast, IIRC. I own an iPod but literally had never removed it from the box it came in. I found myself agreeing with the large majority of what Stefan Molyneux was saying. And what he was saying, in his rather humorous and wacky but inexorably logical way, was that everything I thought I knew was wrong.
At the moment I’m feeling a bit like Cypher in the Matrix, whinily wishing I had taken the blue pill and could continue to enjoy my blissful ignorance. But this will pass. I took a great deal of emotional and spiritual comfort throughout my childhood in religious beliefs that I rejected in my late teens, and although I’ve had some good times and met a lot of great people via political activism over the past several years, I can’t reinsert myself into the matrix of within-the-system political activism now that the scales have fallen from my eyes (or the tubes have been unscrewed from my skull sockets, to keep the Matrix analogy going). When I read the various email lists to which I’ve been subscribing for the past few years, that used to inspire me to action through hope or anger, now I just see the unfiltered code.
SO… now that I’ve just alienated the vast majority of my legions of readers 
, where do I, and this blog, go from here? Fuck if I know. Not quite sure how I’m going to spend my free time now; granted, Molyneux’s verbosity is staggering and I could conceivably spend every night and weekend for the next two years sitting in this chair listening to podcasts. But somehow, I don’t think that’s going to happen. I could go live in a shack in the woods and commune with nature; but then the Starbucks drive-through would be too far away! I hold no pretensions of being Neo or Morpheus or John Galt or any other legendary leader of the anarchists. But maybe, like Frodo the hobbit, I can find just a few stout-hearted comrades and together, we can find a way to destroy the Ring of Power… or at least muck up Dagny’s railroad tracks a bit.
‘I will take the Ring’, he said, ‘though I do not know the way’. — J.R.R. Tolkien
I must say that you have written a totally honest and massively admirable post - congratulations!
I did a video series on RP that might be of interest - http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=9B883EE065DC5B8C
Drop by the Board and say ‘hi’ if you get a chance - and congrats again.
(PS best description of my speaking style to date btw!)
Best wishes!
Seems that I’m on the same road you are on, just a few miles behind you at a crossroads. Listening to Free Talk Live, reading countless opinions and books on the matter and of course digesting it all has been a great ride. One article that really made me question my philosophy was by Rothbard “Are Libertarians ‘Anarchists’?”.
Regardless, where I stand today is at the crossroads with the label of minarchist attached to me. If I where to fully adopt the philosophy, how does one change the code within the matrix? I cannot, at the moment, just unplug and let my freedoms be stripped away from a fascist regime which seems to me the track that a anarchist would follow.
I’ve been an anarcocapitalist for about 2 years now. I never thought that would happen, but here I am.
Molyneux’s insights as a philosopher are powerful and may be used to great effect in the battle for hearts and minds.
The problem with Stephen, and so much of the “NH Underground crowd” is their total Lack of Plan. They seem to want to educate everybody about how evil the State is, but they reach out only to people like you and I used to be: “radical” libertarians to start with, who needed only a fairly small nudge to get to our present anarchist beliefs. Other than “showing the inherent violence of the state” and praying for hundreds of thousands to come around to their line of thinking, what’s the plan?
Blank-out: there isn’t one. And aside from Free Talk Live’s Ian, and *maybe* the Kannings’ KFP, they’re not even doing a decent job of getting their beliefs out into the community.
I have a term for Molyneux’s plan. I call it “masturbating for freedom”. People willing to bitch and moan about the violence of the State, but feel that it would somehow be immoral to call up the actual clueless people perpetrating the problem — the Statist Reps — and talk to them about it.
The shortest path to Liberty does not involve a magical cloud on the blackboard that reads, “and here a miracle happens”, followed by a box that reads “nonviolent noncooperation on a massive scale”. Surely a much shorter path is the election of 2-3 dozen pro-liberty people, who want to use the legislature to limit the power of the State.
Note that this is not exclusive: a massive public education campaign must be undertaken in tandem. Which is why I heavily promote FTL and host a local-access TV program. But those are longer-term investments. I want less State power, and I want it *now*. Not when tens of thousands of people finally become ancaps like us.
Welcome home. By the way, thanks again for the ride…
Now, just watch that first step down the rabbit hole