Free State Observer

deep thoughts (by Friday, not Jack Handey)

I’ve been doing some heavy thinking lately. Actually, more than lately. Over the past 2 1/2 years I’ve moved much further from a belief in small/”limited” government towards anarchocapitalism, which makes it increasingly difficult to justify, either morally or rationally, the ways that I and most of my friends spend a lot of our time. Due to a number of reasons, I’ve kept these thoughts to myself for the most part. The reasons include the following:

• –my antisocial nature leaves me with few close confidantes against whom to bounce ideas
• –the fear that what I’m thinking about will not go over well with many members of my social circle, which is largely comprised of people struggling, to various degrees, to maintain or increase personal liberty in New Hampshire
• –the unwillingness of most people (myself included) to face hard truths, because it’s more emotionally satisfying to lie to ourselves. Moving the goal posts, revisionist history, and ignoring glaring numbers smacking you upside the head for years all fall into this category

What, pray tell, am I pussyfooting around here? Could it perhaps be something about the Free State Project? Libertarian Party? New Hampshire Liberty Alliance? Republican Liberty Caucus? The Ron Paul Revolution?

Yes.

I still don’t have the answers, but I have read two things recently (and one thing months ago that was so thought-provoking I’m still chewing on it) which encapsulate what I’m flailing about trying to say here quite well. So in the spirit of campaign season, allow me to plagiarize.

Subject: Reactive thinking vs. reflective thinking

Thousands of TV hours are devoted to elections, but issues are rarely discussed. We hear a few buzzwords like change, experience, or liberal and conservative, but these words mean so many different things to so many different people that they don’t really communicate anything at all.

Elections aren’t about issues. Elections are sporting events.

We gravitate to elections for the same reason we watch sports or movies. We like the competition. We like the drama. We like to keep score. We liked to see “good guys” pitted against “bad guys.” It’s all about the drama. It isn’t about philosophy.

So the question must be asked: can elections change minds? Can elections change America’s intellectual environment? We think the odds are so stacked against it as to make it almost metaphysically impossible.

Imagine a Yankees fan trying to convince a Red Sox fan that the Yankees aren’t evil. The effort would be pointless, because success would remove the drama of the competition. We don’t want to hear the other side’s case. We want to crush them, dramatically, or if we are crushed instead, then we also want to suffer dramatically, just like we do at a horror movie or a tear jerker.

We are hardwired to love dramatic emotions. Even negative ones. How else could human beings have survived for so long, when for most of our time on Earth life has been nasty, brutal, and short? We are built to endure, and even love, drama.

Sports and movies and electoral campaigns all push the same psychological buttons. They all work on the human mind in exactly the same way. Elections put us in a mode of reactive thinking and dramatic emotion, not sober, reflective consideration.

It doesn’t matter that your candidate has compelling reasons for the things he believes, his compelling reasons won’t be heard. Those who most need to listen will refuse to do so because your candidate is the “bad guy” in the drama, and plays for the wrong team in the sporting event.

But these psychological factors are hardly the only problem with using an “electoral strategy” to downsize the federal government. There is also the problem of perverse economic incentives. People like Milton Friedman taught us a long time ago that coercive government grows because . . .

• Those who receive government favors have a huge incentive to fight for their preservation, while . . .

• The cost of those favors is spread among all taxpayers, in small amounts, giving taxpayers little incentive to fight against them

These natural incentives create an environment that favors expansive, coercive government. These incentives permeate everything, influencing what people think, how politicians behave, what government schools teach, and even what the establishment media broadcasts.

The candidate who opposes expansive, coercive government must shout above this roar, but even if he can accomplish that feat, no one will listen, because he is prejudged to be the “bad guy” in the drama, playing for the wrong team in the sporting event.

But people still try. Then the votes come in, the results are low, and everyone, especially the media, cites them as evidence that the candidate’s ideas must be wrong, or even crazy, because no one supports them.

But the truth is . . .

The result was predetermined by the nature of the vehicle used to communicate the ideas. Ideas communicated by a candidate provoke reactive emotion, not reflective thought.

It really doesn’t matter if there are marginal exceptions to this. Of course there are exceptions. There are always exceptions. But marginal exceptions do not establish rules. Rules are established by the bulk of the evidence. And the verdict is clear . . .

The candidate you support will not convince others to accept your ideas. Rather, convincing people to accept your ideas will lead people to support the candidates you want. The ideas must be sold first, outside the context of an electoral contest, before candidates who favor those ideas will win elections.

Indeed, if you sell your ideas broadly, to everyone, everywhere, every day, in a less reactive setting, then the candidates you want will be everywhere too, eager to march in front of the parade you have created.

But this strategic vision is itself difficult to sell, because it too may provoke reactive emotion rather than reflective thought. No one wants to hear that the electoral contest/drama/sporting event, about which they care so much, has deep inherent flaws. You may even feel this way. So how do we counter this?

All we can do is make our strategic case, and ask that you not react emotionally. Instead . . .

Reflect upon what we are saying. And learn more, because many points relative to our case cannot be made in the space we have here.

Jim Babka & Perry Willis
President & Communications Director
DownsizeDC.org, Inc.

Also, these two pieces by Stefan Molyneux,

Ron Paul Post-mortem

My Son, Klan Reformer

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Editor’s note: the views expressed herein are those of the heathen blogger’s and do not represent the views of any organizations mentioned

A few months back, a young man contacted the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire looking for info on how to join the party. He mentioned that he lives in Greenland. I offered to help find a place for him to stay if he could make it to New Hampshire to attend the Free State Project’s Liberty Forum conference. He replied with laughter “No, I live in Greenland New Hampshire!” Well, blow me down.

Last weekend I had reason to visit Greenland (the town, not the country) for the first time, as my cousin’s baby was being “dedicated”. I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but I assumed it meant baptised. As it turns out, Greenland is only about an hour away, but apparently not big enough to warrant any road signs of its own; you have to be right on top of it before you find anything pointing to it. True to form, I missed a turn, but due to the Bermuda Trianglishness of NH accidentally wound up finding the very street I was looking for, just at the wrong end.

I was looking for Bethany Church. Here begins my introduction to a significant part of modern U.S. culture of which I am apparently quite ignorant: Christian evangelicalism. Now, I knew my cousin is quite religious; he won’t pop a piece of food in his mouth, or let anyone else do so, without a quick prayer first. And I kinda knew that his wife isn’t Catholic, which my cousin and approximately 1,603 of my closest relatives are/were/sought therapy for. But I never realized that what my cousin now believes/practices is not garden-variety child-molester-in-robes in front of dead-Jesus-on-wall Catholicism until I arrived for the aforementioned “dedication”.

My first clue that something was different was catching my first glimpse of the church. It was MAMMOTH. As in, the biggest church I have ever seen in my life this side of the Atlantic Ocean. Then, there were the parking attendants directing traffic… I did a doubletake to make sure I was, in fact, pulling into a church and not the Verizon Wireless Arena. Entering by what I guessed was the front door, although it was a bit hard to tell, a strange man smiled at me, held out his hand, and said “Welcome!” Um, OK… some places do ice-cold holy water in a tub by the door, and this place apparently does greeters. At this point, I was completely befuddled. I was standing in what looked like the lobby of a community college, with various doors and hallways leading off in different directions. Fortunately, there was a desk labelled “Visitors” or “Customer Service” or something else which was informative but which I had never, ever seen inside the door of a church before. I should mention that, despite being raised Catholic, I have been in a few other varieties of Christian church, but they all followed a fairly familiar architectural design. Church is like a McDonald’s burger, or so I thought; you can attend one anywhere in the world and know ahead of time exactly what it’s going to look and taste like. And they’re all really quiet as soon as you set foot inside, whereas this place had people scampering around in every direction and talking in non-whispers.

I told the nice lady at the Customer Service(?!) desk I was looking for a baby dedication. Her face fell and she said “oh, I’m afraid you missed it”. This didn’t particularly surprise me, seeing as how I’d experienced my usual pre-caffeine malaise and left the house late, then got lost en route. But since the typical Catholic Mass lasts 45-60 minutes, I figured something would still be going on; I was only 30 minutes late. I asked if everyone had left already, and the lady said no and pointed me to one of the numerous doors leading off the lobby.

Next order of disorientation came when I entered the “church” (although that is apparently not what they call it; they call it the “sanctuary”) and was met by ushers. And they were really needed, because there were actually people here… hundreds of them. Probably over a 1000, actually. The first floor, where I assumed my cousin and myriad relatives were down at the front, looked pretty full, so I slipped up the stairs and still needed to be directed to a vacant spot, because the top floor was full, too.

It wasn’t until I sat down and took a good look at the scene before me that I fully understood what was going on. This was one of THOSE churches. You know, the ones you see on TV!! In fact, this one *is* on TV (Channel 22 on Seacoast Public Television, Sundays at 2:00PM!). There was a huge stage, but no altar. There was a huge cross on the wall, but no Jesus on it. There was a man standing on the stage speaking, but he wasn’t Father such-and-such, he was “Dr. Bruce”. There were guitars (acoustic and electric), a full drum kit, a Korg keyboard and a baby grand on the stage. There were lots of Klieg lights pointed at the stage, and so help me, video displays projected on the walls, on either side of the cross.

At first I soaked it all in while racking my brain trying to guess which denomination of Christianity this church represented, as it was like nothing I’d ever seen outside a TV screen before. Dr. Bruce was talking about the parable of Jesus feeding the masses with the fishes and loaves. Hey, I know this one! At a certain point, the sermon morphed into a discussion of feeding the real, modern-day masses via soup kitchens. Dr. Bruce brought another man on stage who runs some sort of organization that negotiates deals with grocers to obtain large quantities of food at a discount to feed the poor. And then, Dr. Bruce asked the congregation for money. Lots of money. As in, $250,000 by Easter, if I recall correctly. And Dr. Bruce made a point of mentioning that this money was on top of the donations the church needs to cover normal operating costs, which is apparently $55,770 a week.

I felt vertigines. I don’t mean to imply that I doubt the sincerity of Dr. Bruce; I’m sure he does intend to try to feed some poor people by encouraging his congregation to donate money that will go to Seacoast-area soup kitchens. But the whole business of a man standing on stage, sweating like a pig (not with religious fervor but because those Klieg lights make it hot as hell (if you’ll pardon the expression)), pushing people to give until it hurts, with a video projection of the fundraising goal up on the wall right beside the cross-with-no-Jesus on it, just struck me as …. Let’s just say that, if forced to pick seafood-related moralistic one-liners, I prefer the one about “Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and (assuming he gets off the couch and goes down to the river), you have fed him for a lifetime.”

But hey… people obviously love this stuff. Evangelical Christianity is a global growth industry. Joel Osteen is a beloved, and wealthy, man. If it makes the people happy, what the hell (if you’ll pardon the expression)! And if you can’t make it to the service in person, no worries, you can catch it on the radio, on TV, on live webcast, on CD and DVD.

After the service ended (and it ended when Dr. Bruce said it ended; there were no prayers, no psalms), I caught up with my relatives. At what I hoped was a suitably discreet moment, I asked “I can’t figure out what kind of church this is?” My aunt and uncle shot sidewise looks at one another, and my uncle replied “I don’t think any of us can figure that out.”

By the way, you might want to check out this very interesting movie which is available for free viewing online: Zeitgeist.

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