Hidden Places

This thread contains a valuable and informative conversation regarding the future of the Liberty movement and how to restore freedom, justice, and love into our society. These initial posts are included to start the discussion on this vital topic and to preserve the ideas and philosophies they contain.

What you are talking about here is very similar to what Fox News did in the beginning: they created a "conservative" news station that spoke the truth and confronted the evils in liberalism. They lulled people into a complacency by building trust and then slowly evolved into the evil neoconservative station of last year leading millions astray. Now they are doing it again -- this time targeting libertarians. While it may crack some eggs in the short term (by revealing the conspiracies they want to have heard), they know that eventually they can turn it again and lead the faithful watchers astray. Judge Napolitano has his own show, but it is online only and plagued with technical difficulties. They threw the libertarians a bone, but they won't ever let the Judge run free.

So you bring up a good point, but then you talk about voting and elections. Personally, I think that is a dead end. The political process has been completely hijacked by the powers-that-be, and they will stop at nothing to keep us out. There was a massive verbal backlash against congress when they passed the first bailout, but they refused to listen to us. They obviously knew what they were doing because nearly all of them were re-elected just one month later. Public outrage seems to have little to no effect on the overall strategy of the regime. We need a completely different strategy.

How did they get to where they are now? They started long, long ago, but I will focus for now on the effort that began in the fifties and sixties when they took over higher education. First they reprogrammed the teachers and through them reprogrammed the children in public schools. After decades of work, they finally have a brain-washed and sufficiently uneducated populace to hatch their plans. There are two keys here: they worked with children and it took decades.

I think we need to focus on our families and education. We need to raise up a new generation of smart, educated men and women who understand the concepts of liberty, justice, and morality inherently. We need to focus on our personal lives to live out the ideals of liberty without hypocrisy. We need to become a moral people. We need to create a society around us in our homes and communities that promote liberty in action. We need to turn our focus inward and local.

Consider a counter-example in the Moral Majority movement of the early eighties. Concerned Christians dove head first into politics to try to right the wrongs they saw in society but influencing and directing national policy. In the process, they neglected the church and their families, and now they are paying the consequences. The youth in the church today are leaving the church in record numbers. Either they saw hypocrisy in their parent's lives, or the parents failed to teach and explain the doctrines accurately to their children. In either case, the end result is the same -- they lost the war at home and are now threatened with virtual extinction as the church's population dies out. And the saddest part of all is that they didn't even succeed in their political ambitions: abortion is still legal, homosexual marriages are becoming legal, and now even religious freedoms are starting to erode.

Politics -- especially national and even state politics -- is a trap. We will waste our time and effort in a hopeless battle. They are entrenched and well armed, and we are coming at them with pointed sticks. I believe that this is simply a battle we cannot win. We must fight the battles that we can win. Our goal is not to win all of the battles but to win the war.

Raise a garden. Become more self sufficient. Pour time and energy into your families, neighbors, and friends. Survive the coming economic tsunami so we can be the first to rise on the other side and set the example for others to follow. It is not as glamorous and it will take a long time, but if we do it, we can win this war.

[A separate thread was created by GabrielPage on DailyPaul in which he made the following comments. (emphasis was in the original post)]

Reading a recent post warning DPers against being lulled into the sweet sounding message of Fox, Beck, et al., and offering suggestions concerning how effectively to implement our agenda, I again realized the extent to which the DP has become dominate by ancillary messages (many of which I find interesting and informative).

The point is this: I'm a little afraid that the momentum may be slipping away from US. Instead of actively organizing and pursuing a grassroots, bottom-up renovation of our political system, are we receding back into the comfort of arm-chairing? If you are all still frequenting the Daily Paul, a website dedicated to a presidential candidate nearly a year after his bid failed, it's because you have made it your mission to some extent. That, to me, is the real danger of the Glenn Beck phenomenon: that we begin to allow him to fight our battle for us, only to become despondent when he fails or falls short.

WHAT DO WE DO?

If anyone responds to this post at all, I'd love to have some suggestions, to engender a "strategy" room that would serve to foment, direct, inspire action on our part.

A few general ideas:

1) Education - Without disseminating the truth and winning new converts or activating the latent believers, we cannot reach the critical mass of people required to change the system.

- Media - working on the development of our own liberty media (has been considered and even attempted, but effectively?)

- Schooling - Formulating ways in which to reclaim our youth's education and to counteract the stultifying indoctrination into state-dependency

- Rhetoric - While a delicate subject by nature, given its proximity to propaganda, we need to think seriously about how people are won over.

Hint: it isn't by sheer force of reason alone. If this is couched in an aggressive or inimical tone, it serves only to foster resentment and fortify the objections of our interlocutor. Since we're humans, and all have egos (plenty of those on this sight), conversions must be won by seduction almost. This doesn't imply a vitiation of our message, doesn't require us to sacrifice our principles, only to employ a more congenial, Socratic method of bringing others to understand them. We know our philosophy is right, and the reasoning compelling, so we need to consider ways to circumvent the defensive posturing that inevitably ensues when people feel like they're being attacked. In short, be KIND.

2) Political organization - I have received a lot of encouragement from those reports posted here about the successful efforts to take over local Republican political organizations. It seems to me that efforts to elect a presidential, or even congressional candidate are desperate if not entirely futile without the establishment first of such a base of support.

- Local organizing - the necessary first step.

- Galvanizing, inspiring, directing, and marshaling the support. We need those generals among you who will get on the horn and keep the troops from flagging (sorry for the mixed metaphor).

What do you all think?

WHAT DO WE DO? HOW DO WE TURN THIS NODE OF CONTEMPLATION INTO A HUB OF ACTION? HOW DO WE MAKE THIS GO VIRAL?

[Originally posted by ZoomerzMom on DailyPaul]

Gabriel, both you and Khomar make good points: we need to do SOMETHING, and we’re WAAAY behind. The long-term, purposeful mis-education of children actually goes back to the early 1800s and beyond, as John Taylor Gatto (former NY State and NY City "teacher of the year) points out in detail.

To your point: Consider educating yourself about organizational techniques employed by non-profit entities that successfully perform fundraising on a vast scale, without government assistance. Some organizations to look at include St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, TN; The Orange County Performing Arts Center in Orange County, CA; National Public Radio; any nationally-known religious organization; and, sadly, Obama’s Presidential Campaign. They all use a hierarchical structure that funnels the funds up to the top level.

Consider the patience exhibited by these groups as they move through time; setting goals, communicating those goals to a wide variety of individuals, performing fundraising activities, comparing results to goals, making adjustments in tactics, reaping rewards, repeating the process. Why, they almost look and feel like they are modeled after corporations!

The difference is: the non-profits are working with disparate individuals who voluntarily come to them because they are attracted to their cause and are only bound by a common desire to achieve the organization’s goal. There are no employment contracts, no stock options, no paychecks (except possibly at the very top of the administration)—only recognition in the form of photographs and column inches in news publications and on websites, adulation at community events, and occasional token mementos; essentially, free-market voluntaryism: trading skills, time and influence for that wonderful feeling of satisfaction that makes one beam with pride when a job’s well-done.

This is all about creating social capital; encouraging people to like and respect you so that when you express a political opinion they at least consider your viewpoint and, hopefully, decide to join you. Picking apart arguments and other fault-finding activities are for petulant inside-the-box thinkers and control freaks. Expansive, outside-the-box thinking works to include everyone; individuals are free to walk away if they are unwilling or unable to fully commit to your cause. You might check out Joel Spolsky’s Smart & Gets Things Done and Eric Chester’s Getting Them To Give A Damn for fresh ideas on motivating people.

As for getting the public excited enough about a return to liberty, consider the following commentary (including an excerpt from my husband’s recent article):

The biggest reason people are not responding in huge numbers to the message of liberty is that the message has become damaged, and is thus no longer as attractive as it might be. The Founders and much of the American public of the 1700s and 1800s were, by and large, classical liberals – which is to say, they understood the connection between love and freedom; between compassion and liberty. Love and freedom are a duality, and neither works well without the other. Would a politically-free society peopled by sociopaths remain free for long? No, because the widespread sense of brotherhood and connection with others is the lubricant and anti-corrosive for the market, and for social interaction generally. (This—the high level of neurosis in early America, not to mention institutionalized slavery and genocide against the Indians—is one of several reasons the nation has slowly degraded into the tyranny it is now).

Conversely, would a compassionate society run (or even simply funded) by government coercion remain a warm and healthy place or long? Of course not. Every Communist nation is a blatant, screaming example, and even the more enlightened European socialist nations, such as Sweden, are degenerating into outright tyranny while also seeing their wealth constantly erode.

A modern version of classical liberalism—a version that specifically asserts the need for love as well as for freedom, while acknowledging both that love cannot be imposed by force and that even funding programs aimed at "compassion" with coercively-obtained tax money corrupts them (e.g., Child Protective Services, the FDA, the USDA, and—well, just about every nice-idea government agency you can think of).

Really: how do you command someone to love? Coercion harms and eventually destroys love, so how can you use coercion, defensively or otherwise, to make someone love you or to show compassion to others? You can't. While love and compassion must be widely supported and explicitly acknowledged as human needs, in order to effectively foster that love (or compassion or universal brotherhood or whatever you prefer to call it) the support must be voluntary. Otherwise, you end up destroying love and the foundations for love in the long term.

I repeat that support for compassionate behavior and for a compassionate viewpoint must be explicit (i.e., spoken of in direct, unambiguous language), frequently voiced, widespread in the culture, and effective enough to create and sustain reasonable levels of individual and societal health, but none of that requires government edicts or laws, and indeed none of it can long survive the levels of coercion involved in large, intrusive governments.

As a practical matter, the young in particular must be treated with respect and compassion because early experience creates later character and guides later behavior. The foundation for a compassionate sense of connection with others is developed early in life or not at all.

Voluntaryism (a.k.a., "civil society") is the necessary framework for all this – for both compassion and freedom. Coercion is the polar opposite of freedom. Coercion is the enemy and corruptor of love.

My husband writes often on these topics; for more detail, see his website and his archive at Strike The Root.