Society and Apathy

VII. SOCIETY AND APATHY

Warning: This chapter is boring, because the subject is boring.

1. Anyone who is gainfully employed, self-sustaining, and living in accordance with Libertarian principals is a credit to his country and to the world and should be respected. Nobody should never look down upon another for doing so called "unskilled" work. Most so-called simple jobs require a good deal more knowledge than those in more prestigious positions will ever realize.

2. Why is it that certain very "educated" individuals are so frantic to "elevate the lower classes"? Why make a sad silk purse out of a happy sow's ear? If you change one thing about a person, you will change other things. Teach a simple man the ideas of a genius, and he will want to occupy himself as does a genius. There is only so much room at the top. Interference with natural hierarchy produces distortions. One distortion leads to another, and another. When you bring all of the lower classes into the middle class, who then will do the work of the lower classes? Will you train monkeys to do this? (23).

3. On the average, differences in intelligence only partially account for the great disparity in individual manifestation among human beings. The rest is primarily a function of belief. Marx called religion the "opiate of the masses." Freud said that the practitioners of popular religions need psychoanalytic "help." In the larger view however, we see that fantasy religion is perfectly normal for many people. The freedom to worship is absolutely necessary for a workable society. A proper division of labor depends upon it.

4. Unthinking individuals will make synonymous things that are not. Country, government, and "the people" are not the same thing. Country is a geographically defined area within which exists the potential for absolute individual liberty. Government is that group of subverted collectivist functionaries in the service of international finance who prevent this liberty from occurring. The "people" are that majority of naive, brainwashed, and diluded individuals who aid and abet government in doing this.

5. Among so called "moderate" and "stable" elements in society (cowardly and apathetic) anyone advocating truly constructive social change will usually be labeled a "radical" or "extremist." Conservatives are usually just people who happen to be doing fairly well under the existing system. Usually they will perceive almost any change, for good or for evil, as a very great risk to their investment portfolios.

6. The naturally apathetic individual is easily conditioned by collectivist government. He has no sense of any inner power to change his own destiny or that of society. He will refuse to believe that anything past, present, or future, is or ever could be, better. Doing so would require him to think or to act. To such an individual, any questioning is seen as "complaining." He would rather be "thankful that things aren't worse." Indeed, there is a certain primitive wisdom in a swaggering and bellicose defense of clearly unworkable policies, if one hasn't the character, the will, or the courage to work for constructive change. Since the natural laziness of apathetic individuals will allow only a slavish rationalization of the present, motivating them quickly to action usually requires emphasizing any obvious short term threat to their precious status quo.

7. A person who is made weak and prone to non-self-blaming by cowardly religion will usually gravitate to collectivist government ideology. The irony here is that natural order depends as much as anything upon the freedom of individuals to manifest spiritually at their own level. The task then is to educate the general populace that ultimately they can have more for themselves as individuals, not by having to better themselves, but simply by supporting a system which in the longer term will make them more prosperous even though it will not allow them to victimize others. They have to be shown that simply ridding ourselves of the wastefulness of welfare, war-based, fiat-monetary economies will result in a higher standard of living for everybody without having either to work harder or to steal.

8. The collectivist has a slave mentality and yearns to throw away his natural right to liberty with both hands. He will try to justify throwing away yours by speaking to you about your so called obligation to do your "fair share" to help.

9. Minimal human decency is simply the unwillingness to advance oneself unjustly at the expense of another. Minimal patriotic effort is simply this principle applied in the larger arena of one's country. This is absolutely all that is necessary from a small majority of individuals to have a continuing prosperity based upon natural order.

10. Most people "believe" themselves to be patriotic in some degree. We must however, distinguish between the patriotism of "intent" and the patriotism of effect. Patriotism manifests itself tangibly only through activity oriented to making the country a better place, not through blind obedience to leaders or merely singing the country's praises. The only true patriotism is the heroic defense of individual liberty, no matter how many of your countrymen this may put you against. The unpatriotic individual is one who will relentlessly support that which is detrimental to evolutionary destiny and to his country despite reasonably discernible evidence of this detriment.

11. The collectivist will think only of himself, and then only in the very short term. He will rarely think of his country, although any serious questioning of government policy will almost always be angrily regarded as "running down our country" and will often elicit a self-righteous, belligerent exhibition of flag-waving. In this way flags are used as a weapon against any intrusive insights which might inspire the flag-waver to give up unjust advantages given him by government. It also allows him the illusion of great legitimacy, because he recognizes the "duly constituted authority" in his country as an ally with whom he can more easily intimidate the "eggheads." Don't ever let these cowards take your flag away from you. If, as a caring individual, you can assert that your country has at any time in history ever upheld the ideal of individual liberty, then in the name of that ideal, fly your country's flag proudly over all your proceedings, challenge the cowards' patriotism, and meet their onslaught with an iron fist.

12. The apathetic collectivist will gladly surrender his own liberty and that of his neighbor to anyone promising to relieve him of the need to reason, to plan his future, to assume responsibility for his actions, or in many cases even to earn his own livelihood. Rhetoric in this connection is used by unproductive individuals to justify stealing through government, but even more effectively by the very capable "champion of the underdogs" who rides to power on their backs. It is astounding how openly politicians will represent themselves as the candidate of some special interest group, speaking only about how he will further the "interests" of his supporters, and how seldom they will address simple moral principles like right and wrong.

13. The lower classes oppose Libertarian social policy in the short term because they want giveaway programs. The upper classes in turn, want to finance giveaway programs or at least not to alienate wealthy friends who do. It is mainly middle class people who want to earn what they get and to keep it in a free society. The struggle is not one of the rich exploiting the poor as is popularly believed, but of the rich exploiting sympathy for the poor and throwing them a few crumbs while using taxation to rob the middle class, thus keeping them from competing as they would in a truly free society.

14. A good balance between labor and management exists when the number in the labor force is relatively small enough so that the laws of market will allow them individually, or in small groups, to command a decent wage. When such a balance is achieved however, there usually follows a large influx of immigrants seeking the "good life." This in turn changes the supply of labor relative to demand. Management starts paying lower wages. Labor starts organizing unions and screaming for Socialist government benefits. If we can get most countries Libertarian all at one time, then every nation will begin to prosper simultaneously. People will not want to immigrate, and a natural balance between labor and management will prevail everywhere because it will be determined smoothly by the laws of stable market instead of erratically by influx.

15. Any individual who believes that he has the right to ask government to coerce from his employer the wage which he dictates as being fair, simply does not believe in a free enterprise system. A fair wage is the highest wage which a worker can negotiate, and the lowest which an employer can get away with paying, in a totally free society.

16. Keeping in mind that there is only so much room at the top, those of us who work for natural order simply want to see upward mobility occur because of natural ability and personal effort rather than because of institutionalized plunder.

17. Immoral individuals with ambition seek crude power over or through others because they haven't the depth or character to seek and find power within themselves. Those with enough capability to act as effective crusaders for unproductive people against the producing elements in society are adept at appealing to men's lowest motives and are usually not above making use of popular prejudices as part of their strategy. This can be done in many ways, but in today's more "enlightened" atmosphere, can be done by subtly imputing "prejudice" to one's adversaries, especially among naive young "revolutionaries" advocating "justice." This type of attack is strangely one of the most widely used, but little recognized, tricks employed by collectivist governments against individual liberty.

18. Liberty, in it's true sense, subconsciously scares the collectivist because it threatens him with facing up to the long term consequences of his own decisions. Being subconsciously aware that he has no personal integrity, he is also unable to trust his own judgment. His ideas frighten him and he will seek to validate perceptions almost exclusively by consensus rather than logically with facts. Add to this the fact that mass opinion is mainly created by individuals seeking low worldly power through the flattery, manipulation, and harnessing of the collectivist tendency towards short term, dishonest, and acquisitive thinking, and we have a mass of people who will "believe" almost anything their masters tell them. These are simply the dynamics of carefully manipulated mob rule.

19. Relative to "greed," humanity is normal as it is, even though it does not conform to latter day ideas of "perfection" which are usually held as a defense against one's own weaknesses, as a way of masking one's own motives, or as a means to instilling guilt in others so that they can be more easily exploited.

20. Perfect unity and uniformity of will are not characteristics of human societies, but of beehives and ant colonies. Society is not a single organism, will prosper only if individuals prosper individually, and must be based on the way that people really are, not on the way that fools think people should be.

21. To rob a person of the quality of his life is very little different from robbing him of life itself. The only incentive for hard work that any normal individual will have is the confident expectation that he and his loved ones will be able to enjoy the full fruits of his labor. Any society which slowly kills this natural expectation of just reward in the individual by always sacrificing him for the group is inevitably doomed to failure. Ultimately the group is nothing more than an aggregation of individuals. If you hurt either one, you hurt both.

22. It is perfectly natural for individuals to be motivated exclusively in their own interest. This is the way of things in the world of actualities. Governments not structured on this premise will never prosper. Entrepreneurs must not be seen as "criminals" for operating their businesses on the profit principle rather than the philanthropic. Capitalism is the only system which has ever worked, ever can work, or ever will work because it is the only system which is based upon going with natural laws instead of against them.

Tools for Those Not Apathetic