Jesus was an anarchist May 12, 2010

The following is an article I wrote in 2005 for the now-dead University of Washington campus publication “Right Turn”.

Christian Compassion vs. The State

Why Jesus was an anarchist

Let me tell you about my favorite bible story.  It’s the one in the book of John where Jesus is presented with a prostitute.  Upon learning that someone in his society was living in such sin, he immediately launched a letter-writing campaign, started gathering signatures, and marched down to the capitol to let the Roman governors know that he and his constituents would not endure loose women in their midst.  I like this part of the New Testament almost as much as the part where Jesus petitions for a progressive income tax to help out the poor and downtrodden Israelites.

We don’t need to read the Bible to know that this is how Jesus lived — we can infer it from the work that modern-day followers of Jesus have carried on in his name.  We have the Christian Coalition, which works hard to lock up flag-burners everywhere, ensure all school children pray to God daily, and keep the rights of homosexuals in check.  And then there is the large Christian left who demand state handouts in the name of Altruism.  It’s not hard to see what political implications Christianity has for a large majority of Americans.

Time out.  For those of you who’ve spotted my errors in the preceding paragraphs, good for you.  Anyone who has actually read the New Testament knows (or should know) that Jesus never gave his followers a mandate for government of any kind.  Jesus had a spiritual message for his people, and it was one he traveled the land to teach to all.  If someone denied his word, did Jesus hire thugs to force it down their throat?  Did he get laws passed that required everyone to display the ten commandments in their home and go to church every Sabbath?  Of course not.  Forcing the idea of salvation on anyone would not only be fruitless, it would be preposterously contrary to the entire concept.  It is essential that we have free will, to be able to choose whether to accept God’s law or not.  Someone who is forced to pray, to go through superficial motions of worship, is not a Christian.  Similarly, someone who is forced, by other men, to follow the commandments of God is no more saved than someone who violates them freely.

So is it a valid Christian act to outlaw something, such as prostitution, that God has decreed a sin?  Absolutely not.  In fact, it would be an expressly anti-Christian act.  Initiating force against a sinner is not something that would ever have been done or condoned by the man who insisted that we “turn the other cheek.”  What really happened with Jesus and the prostitute?  In John 8:1-7, a crowd of Jews brings Jesus an “adulteress” and asks for his blessing in stoning her to death.  Jesus says, “He that is without sin among you, let him cast a first stone at her.”  The message was clearly this: “Live, let live, and love.”

Jesus’ position on welfare was identical.  He blessed those with charitable hearts and encouraged his followers to give freely, especially to the church.  But would Jesus ever have condoned someone forcibly taking wealth from its rightful owner and giving it to someone “needier”?  What would he think of the massive wealth redistribution schemes we have all over the world now?  He would have condemned them roundly.  II Corinthians 9:7 clearly states, “Each man should give what he has decided in his heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.”  Theft is forbidden by the eighth commandment, and God doesn’t care what kind of noble justifications the thief gives.  All kinds of theft, including taxation, are profoundly unchristian.

Jesus disapproved of the welfare state for another reason, too.  The very first commandment forbids Christians from having idols before god.  Yet hundreds of millions of Americans belong a cult — The Cult of the Omnipotent State.  The followers of this cult turn to government as the first and only solution to virtually every problem that might beset them in life.  A government of man is Godless, disregarding the bible in its mission to redistribute wealth and pursue a secular kind of justice.  Jesus said in Matthew 6:31-33, “So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’  For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them.  But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”  Pursuit of partisan political ends is a violent and materialistic activity that denies God’s role in providing for his people.

The picture I have painted actually shows that Jesus was beyond being a libertarian.  He was a political anarchist, an ideological enemy of the state.  To recognize any earthly authority would be to deny God’s.  Do Christians have a mandate to prosecute such crimes as murder and theft?  Judging by Jesus’ words and actions, they may not.  Here it is up to individual to decide what extent to which they will follow their faith.  In fact, the conflict we have come to is one of reason versus faith.  Will you eschew this world in hopes of salvation in the next, or will you protect your interests by resorting to individual or collective self-defense in the form of a libertarian rule of secular law?  This is a dilemma for the individual that I’m not prepared to answer.  But what I can say, and have shown, is that if one is to ask, “What would Jesus do?” the answer, no matter what the circumstances, can never involve the institutionalized violence that is government.

If you like what you’ve read, visit the Libertarians at the UW web site:

www.uwlibertarians.org

My Rightist Youth May 3, 2010

Administrator’s Note:  The following is the first in a series of guest columns by a good friend of mine.  I will be providing a counterpoint to his commentary.

By the tender age of 14, I was existing in a full-blown bigoted world of the “uber” far right fascism / corporatist capitalist movement.  The faceless bureaucrats of 1984 became my role models, idols and pinnacles of sexual desire.

My Road to Anarchism October 16, 2009

By my late teens, I had become a nihilist.  There was, as far as I could see, no point to life, no morality, no reason for continuing on.  I became a sensation-seeking drone, deciding to simply accumulate as many extreme experiences as possible, and hold out to see if the Meaning of Life would present itself to me.  This is why I decided to join the Marine Corps.  My friends and family were uniformly shocked and saddened at this decision, but to me it was the obvious choice.

My experiences in the Marine Corps were as instructive as I anticipated.  At first, it was sheer glee, kind of like playing a particularly good video game.  As time went on, however, boredom set in.  I began to realize that most other members of the Marine Corps, particularly those who were senior to me, had interests diametrically opposed to my own.  They were not there to be badasses, or to see the world, or to challenge themselves, or even to serve their country.  They were there for security.  My disgust grew as began to see men twice my age acting almost entirely out of cowardice.  To watch them, one would conclude that their job description was “cover your ass”.  There was universal disdain for taking on extra duties, refining techniques, or going on deployment to exotic locations.  The negativity around me was astounding.  Marines my age were concerned only with the arrival of their next paycheck so they could go out clubbing, and those who were older were inevitably married with children and just wanted to go home.  I saw young Marines like myself start out incredibly motivated, only to be slowly crushed under the weight of bureaucracy, apathy, and organizational inertia.

So I started tuning out.  I began reading in my free time, which was considerable.  I had always been interested in world affairs, and I soon progressed from the news to op-eds, and began discovering the many intense political opinions available in the marketplace of ideas.  Before long, I was progressively staggered by discoveries of how wrong so many people are about so many things.  I read the book Atlas Shrugged, which, in its depictions of statist hell, perfectly conformed to my daily experiences as a government employee.  It also provided me with a new moral impetus and framework around which my life is still structured.  Before long, I discovered and joined the Libertarian Party, a romance which lasted the next six years.

A formative experience during this time was my decision to marry a Japanese woman I was dating.  Her student visa had expired, and the only way she could stay in the USA with me was for us to get married.  This involved an endless amount of paperwork, fees, bureaucratic snafus, and several years.  Part of the process involves proving to the feds that your marriage is “real”, and to this day people still accuse me of a “fraudulent” marriage.  I was face-to-face with a nexus of political and cultural tyranny that I simply cannot describe with any word other than “evil”.  Governments dictating to people where they can go, and who they can associate with, and under what terms, is so incredible an injustice that I’m still amazed that anyone can find it within themselves to defend such a system.

By the time I left the Marine Corps and entered the UW, my first-hand experiences with the government, and my studies of political theory, had turned me into a radical, pissed-off libertarian.  I immediately found some other like-minded students and formed a group, “Libertarians at the UW”.  LUW was extremely active, fed off the political momentum of the 2004 presidential election, and quickly became an affiliate of the Washington State Libertarian Party.  Before long, I was asked to run for office as a Libertarian candidate, for the office of King County Council.  I made it on the ballot, and ran a serious campaign, putting up signs, building a website, filing out questionnaires, making appearances, giving speeches, and even debating my incumbent opponent on NPR.  I won 4% of the vote, to the Republican challenger’s 16%.  Immediately after the election, I organized a large, fairly successful event on campus on the Patriot Act, featuring Norm Stamper as the keynote speaker.

When that all ended, I realized that I was broke, my grades in school were hosed, and I had accomplished nothing.  It was a bit like driving a car off a cliff at top speed — it’s spectacular for a second, and then you plunge.  I became very depressed, for most of the next year.  A major part of this depression, I now realize, was the way that I had divided up my political and social life as I had become increasingly radical.  Most of the people who I called my “friends” were apathetic or hostile to my brand of politics.  Even while I was pouring huge amounts of time and energy into changing the world, I was still acting cordially toward people who, in some cases, were acting against me.  I was trapped in a hellish limbo of being slave to the opinions of those around me while attempting to do what I saw as right.

For a while I swore off politics.  It became a game of “don’t ask, don’t tell”, where I would pour energy into relationships, only to discover, inevitably, they supported the use of state force against me.  This progression lead to me associating only with people too apathetic, uninformed, or just plain unintelligent to have strong political opinions.  I could only avoid thinking about politics by submerging myself in mindless, distracting activities.  Intellectually, this period is mostly lost time for me.

But no more.  I finally came back to politics with a vengeance earlier this year, and began re-educating myself.  I sat back down at the drawing board of ideas and quickly discovered Stefan Molyneux’s freedomainradio.org, a site devoted to rational morality and anarchism.  Listening to Stefan’s podcasts, I realized that I had let my intellectual development end when I became heavily involved in Libertarian politics.  I had always paid service to the Non-Aggression Principle — the idea that it is morally wrong to initiate force against another human being.  When people challenged me on the incompatibility of this principle with libertarian minarchism, I typically referred them to Robert Nozick’s “Anarchy, State, and Utopia”.  This book, while excellent, essentially amounts to a rationalization of state power that is both unnecessary and immoral.  My reluctance to move past the label “libertarian”, I must admit, had more to do with my fears of social consequence than my own intellectual integrity.

I am now a proud anarchist, and will defend anarchist principles to anyone who attacks them.  The status quo is such that most people feel comfortable disparaging freedom with impunity, and cannot tolerate challenges to their statist beliefs.  These people are not my friends.  They are my sworn enemies.  I will not steer clear of politics in order to maintain social harmony — this is exactly what statists want.  The status quo always benefits from lack of critical engagement, therefore I see it as my solemn right and duty to fight against the state and its supporters whenever the opportunity presents itself.  I will still choose my battles, but I will not be complicit in this system of oppression, and will not tolerate people in my life who have so little respect for me that they wish to use the power of the state against me.

My Leftist Youth October 5, 2009

Those who have read Theodore Kaczynski’s treatise, “Industrial Society and Its Future”, are familiar with his psychoanalysis of the modern American leftist movement.  If you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend you do.  I first read this paper sometime in my late teens, and was shocked at how aptly described my emotional problems growing up, and how accurately it described my political attitudes.  He focuses on the feelings of inferiority among leftists, and their tendency to be what he called “over-socialized”.  His language is refreshingly straightforward for an academic paper, and the unerring truth of his words certainly explains why universities consistently denied him publication:

Words like “self-confidence,” “self-reliance,” “initiative,” “enterprise,” “optimism,” etc., play little role in the liberal and leftist vocabulary. The leftist is anti-individualistic, pro-collectivist. He wants society to solve everyone’s problems for them, satisfy everyone’s needs for them, take care of them. He is not the sort of person who has an inner sense of confidence in his ability to solve his own problems and satisfy his own needs. The leftist is antagonistic to the concept of competition because, deep inside, he feels like a loser.

He goes on to discuss oversocialized individuals — people who have internalized the moral principles that society pays lip service to, but few actually follow:

The leftist of the oversocialized type tries to get off his psychological leash and assert his autonomy by rebelling. But usually he is not strong enough to rebel against the most basic values of society. Generally speaking, the goals of today’s leftists are not in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle. Examples: racial equality, equality of the sexes, helping poor people, peace as opposed to war, nonviolence generally, freedom of expression, kindness to animals. More fundamentally, the duty of the individual to serve society and the duty of society to take care of the individual. All these have been deeply rooted values of our society (or at least of its middle and upper classes^[4]) for a long time. These values are explicitly or implicitly expressed or presupposed in most of the material presented to us by the mainstream communications media and the educational system. Leftists, especially those of the oversocialized type, usually do not rebel against these principles but justify their hostility to society by claiming (with some degree of truth) that society is not living up to these principles.

Kaczynski perfectly sums up my motivations for being a leftist when I was younger, and I believe these arguments apply to the majority of modern leftists.

It is nearly impossible for me to identify the ideological influences of my early life, but I think I can guess at them.  One is the Christian church, which emphasises forgiveness, unconditional love, and selflessness.  Taken seriously, these values are devestating to the achievement of real value and joy in one’s life.  To forgive is to trivialize good behavior.  To love unconditionally is to make love cheap and meaningless.  And to be selfless is, literally, to negate one’s own self and one’s own desires.  Selflessness is essentially mental suicide.

The second is the fact that I grew up relatively poor, and was aware that some of my peers were materially richer than I.  I understood this inequality, but not the causes of it, which were largely hidden from me, and couched in fatalistic terms like, “That’s just the way it is.”  My father almost completely eschewed his parental responsibilities as I was growing up, choosing instead to live his life as he saw fit, earning little more than he needed to survive, refusing to make child care payments, etc.  I don’t blame my mother (who is incredibly hard working and struggled for much of her life to lift us out of poverty) for avoiding open disparagement of him in front of us.  However, I believe this avoidance of the root cause of our condition led to my early sense of injustice and powerlessness in our economic system.

Third, I believe that as a child I was subjected to endless propaganda about the goodness of the state and its ability to provide for the citizenry, as well as the civic virtues of fairness, being selfless, and working for the good of the group.  This propaganda came from no place in specific, but was embedded in the programs I watched on television, the curriculum I was exposed to in public schools, and the general dialogue among the adults in my life (which I realize in retrospect was highly hypocritical).

All of these influences lead me to, though I had no previous exposure to formal political theory, invent communism when I was six years old.  My approach was essentially the same as that of Karl Marx — “to each according to his need, from each according to his ability”.  In my childish mind, I imagined people producing goods and dropping them off in giant bins, which others could come along at their leisure to take.  I didn’t do much political thinking again until my adolescence, when I learned to hate PCs and Microsoft.  It was the height of cool in middle school to be a nonconformist Apple user, and it turns out that one of the prime tools in a Mac advocate’s reportoire is leftist rhetoric.  At that time I was also beginning to be aware of the virulent anti-capitalist sentiment in pop culture, which blamed everything bad in the world on “greed”.  Environmentalism was really taking off in those days, with propagandistic cartoons like “Captain Planet” and “Fern Gully” pitting industry vs. all that is moral and beautiful.  All this leftist rhetoric would have left me unaffected if it had ever been critically challenged, even slightly, by any of the adults in my life.  Instead, the most incisive moral messages being presented to me went unopposed, and in the vaccuum of political knowledge and values that was my environment, these ideas rushed in and filled my mind.

By age sixteen I was a militant, Stalinist communist.  This, I found, was the only logically consistent position given the assumptions of collectivism — that selfishness and private property are evil.  I was also a militant vegan and atheist.  I firmly believed that my positions were irreducable, fundamentally “logical”.  I was so steeped in the implicitly leftist values of my society, “oversocialized”, in Kaczynski’s analysis, that I was incapable of recognizing my premises as arbitrary.  Everyone I debated these issues with was powerless to oppose my logic, because they, too, were unwilling or unable to check their premises, which matched mine.  The only special thing about me was that I had extrapolated these moral assumptions to their logical consequences.

I had one teacher in high school, an American Literature teacher, who, to her credit, tried to explain to me that logic alone could not lead one to moral conclusions.  However, her intervention came as too little, too late.  Public schools don’t teach logic, philosophy, or critical thinking.  Moreover, I had by that point lost all respect for the adults in my life, who seemed hopelessly hypocritical, compromising, soulless.  It wasn’t until a friend of mine who had come to grasp the fundamentals of reasoning finally challenged me, and threw down with me, that things changed.  For this I owe him endless credit.  He won the debate, and I left speechless, grasping for the right rebuttal.  I spent the next few weeks searching for a resolution to this, but never found one.  I was forced to adjust to a new, amoral, existence.  It took several years before I was able to find a new, objective, morality.

What is Rational Idealism? September 28, 2009

Hello, everyone, and welcome to my new blog!  I am someone who has watched friends and associates over the years set up blogs, and ask me why I don’t start one too.   I always resisted, primarily because I am an extreme skeptic by nature and never felt confident enough in my ideas to go on record with them.  However, I have now reached a point in my life where I feel my ideas and thinking methodologies are well-founded enough, and original enough, to start sharing with the world.

First, let me explain the title.  In modern American culture, the word “idealist” has become something of an insult.    Idealism is seen as equivalent to impracticality, wishfulness,  irrationality, childishness, etc.  The “adult” and “well-adjusted” person is thought to have reconciled themselves with the world as it is, and gotten down to the “serious” business of developing a career, getting married, buying a house, having kids, paying taxes, etc.  In this view, responsible people don’t waste their time thinking about how the world could, or ought to, be different.  I understand this attitude intimately, because I’ve been smeared by the label “idealist” many times, with all of the implicated shortcomings listed above.

The case I intend to make is that not only is idealism *not* irresponsible, but that anyone who fails to hold in their mind an image of how the world should be, and to work toward it, is shirking their first, most basic duty as a rational human being, and is working against their long-term self-interest.  I believe that is fully rational and necessary to be an idealist, and that anyone who is not idealistic to some degree is, more or less, human livestock.

This brings us to what will be my prime thesis in this blog, a conclusion that I have come to after a lifetime of devoting myself to rational idealism.  This conclusion is that governments, being founded on the violent use of force, are fundamentally immoral, and must be abolished for humanity to achieve its true potential.  The situation we have now is one where the general population has been utterly propagandized into believing in the necessity of the state, and are committed to being good and loyal taxpayers.  This is why idealism is frowned upon, and smeared at every opportunity — statist propaganda designed to convince people that their highest moral cause is to generate as much taxable income as possible, and breed future loyal taxpayers.  Hence the ever-increasing size and scope of the US government, and other governments worldwide.  To me, it is both rational and idealistic to work toward an end to this system.

I sincerely hope you enjoy the thoughts that I’ll be developing in this blog.  I intend to comment on current events and culture, as well as general political and moral philosophy.  I welcome criticism and constructive debate, and am always open to changing my views in light of overwhelming evidence.   So please, comment away!