Looking Forward To Liberty
Posted by Darian Worden on Feb 18, 2010 in Commentary • 3 commentsWhen people focus too much on icons of the past – like a famous Tea Party – the lessons that history contains become obscured. People who believe they are against government power can be led into supporting more power if they don’t look for alternatives to rulers.
George Santayana warned “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I don’t think there is a warning that goes “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to innovate.” If there is, it would be a silly use of language.
The more we understand the past, the better our actions are informed. But we go wrong when we confuse the conditions of the present with the conditions of the past, when we try to copy people who acted without the knowledge of the years between their times and ours, or when we simplify multifaceted historic groups into convenient homogeneous blocks of unity.
When people entrust their grassroots work for freedom to those who want to govern, they end up with rulers. This is true of Daniel Shays, the Whiskey Rebels, the French revolutionaries, the Russians, and the 1960s counter-culture. Even the abolition of chattel slavery in the United States, by its connection to government action, resulted in a reduction but not the abolition of racist social, economic, and political domination.
Government is not established to protect individuals; it is established to protect power. People don’t establish governments to secure themselves; some people establish governments to formalize or strengthen their rule over others.
Rather than looking for establishment figures to throw their weight behind, America’s Tea Partiers would do better using their grassroots energy and connections to help each other build a free world. Building economic autonomy and social solidarity would increase freedom at the expense of would-be rulers. When a person engages in mutual aid, underground trade, and community production, she helps herself and her associates live apart from authority. Social solidarity works with consensual economic arrangements to strengthen the free communities that are created in opposition to authority.
Solidarity and libertarian ideas can ensure that the world built from the bottom up is a free world and not a world of small authoritarians. Libertarian ideas focus on maximizing individual liberty. Solidarity is as simple as people helping those with a common interest in freedom.
Herbert Spencer, whom Roderick Long calls a “much-maligned but seldom studied philosopher”, defined the limits of freedom in terms of a Law of Equal Liberty: “Every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of every other man.” Freedom is not to be rationed nor partitioned according to rank. Though politicians try to restrict freedom to put themselves in charge, libertarians recognize that the only just limit on freedom is the equal freedom of other individuals. The state holds freedom as something to be dispensed or restricted according to the convenience of control, while anarchists hold the freedom of the individual as the purpose of any consensual organization.
Liberty starts with yourself and how you interact with others. Respect people as autonomous individuals instead of viewing them as identities that have been made by power.
The political system works for those who control it – and that probably isn’t you. And if you do gain control of the system, you put yourself in the position of attempting to control the lives of other people – crippling their liberty and crushing resistance.
If you want to live in a free world, build one! Take stock of your resources and connections and ask: What can I do, with what I have, to build liberty without taking unjustly from others? Stop looking backwards toward government solutions – look forwards toward liberty!
Individualist anarchist great Lysander Spooner's classic critique of the U.S. Constitution: "No Treason No.6: The Constitution of No Authority" in the new and handy Pocket Subversion Edition. Also featuring Roderick T. Long's "Libertarian Anarchism: Responses to Ten Objections". 
You make an interesting argument, but don’t seem to bother to examine the Boston Tea Party of December 1773. This event was direct action by a community of friends and neighbors, the Sons of Liberty. It was the culminating event of the non-violent tea tax protest movement. It was the watershed moment in revolutionary America, leading the British to “crack down” with the coercive acts, responded to by Americans protesting more vigorously still.
The result was one of the few periods in history when an entire community was removed from externally imposed and coercive government. The city of Boston had no overlords for most of the year 1774. Its inhabitants continued to cooperate with each other and remain peaceful, while outsiders described the situation as anarchy. It was a very early success in forming a stateless society.
Moreover, the actions of the Boston Tea Party protesters in throwing the tea overboard while harming only the property of a chartered monopoly were inspiring to a great many. When Gandhi led others to burn their registration cards in South Africa in 1908, the event was compared to the Boston Tea Party in British newspapers. When Gandhi led the march to the sea, and held up some duty-free salt, he said it was “to remind us of the Boston Tea Party.” In December 1973, protesters met at Faneuil Hall in Boston to call for the impeachment of Richard Nixon on the 200th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. In October 1774, to protest the invasion of Boston by 8,000 British troops, the people of Annapolis, Maryland set fire to the Peggy Stewart with the Annapolis tea party.
Your own Thomas Knapp is so closely identified with founding the Boston Tea Party in 2006 that his name link in Wikipedia brings up that party’s page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_L._Knapp
Yes, the largest one day fund raising for any politician, ever, took place on the 234th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, regrettably for an arch statist and Lamar Smith enthusiast named Ron Paul. And, yes, there were tea parties all over America in 2009, including one on Boston Common on 15 April. Statistician Nate Silver, manager of fivethirtyeight.com, has stated that the largest protests were in capitals and large cities while many others had little or no reliable media coverage and were thus not included in his estimate. He reported cumulative crowd size from credible sources to be an estimated 311,460 for 346 cities. With slogans like “Stop Big Government” and “Taxation is Piracy” on display, and a Rasmussen poll indicating that 51% of the country viewed the protests favorably, with one in four Americans knowing someone who attended one, I’m not entirely sure what you have against the tea party protests.
Or is it that you would rather not work with people who aren’t already committed to a stateless society? That makes some sense, but seems a bit odd. After all, a healthy dose of the essays and commentaries on this site are about politics, the state, and what’s wrong with it.
Is it that you don’t have anything to say to hundreds of thousands of people? Or that you are miffed because 600 of them went to hear Sarah Palin spew platitudes? Didja know that the libertarian Boston Tea Party of bostontea.us claims 1,656 members, now? No doubt you have nothing to say to any of them, either.
Which is a shame, because your chip in says you need to raise more than a thousand dollars in the next seven days. And there are all those members of bostontea.us who have never heard your message, because you’ve never gone there and said so much as “boo” to them.
If you want a stateless society, instead of having an echo chamber where some of your well-heeled sycophants pay you to spout off about tea party goers, why aren’t you engaging some of these hundreds of thousands of tax protesting, down with big government people? If they are going to avoid being “led into supporting more power if they don’t look for alternatives to rulers” how is that to take place if you don’t talk to them, look for them, and engage them?
I want to live in a stateless society, but I don’t find this site to be about building a free world to live in. You aren’t inspiring.
I’m sorry you see things that way. I’m not trying to say that historical events shouldn’t be commemorated or looked to for inspiration. Just that they should be kept in perspective with the situation of their time and applying their lessons should be adapted to the situation of today.
I have attended two Tea Party rallies. At the April 15 event in New York City, it was obvious the Republican Party was trying to put itself in charge of the movement. I passed out a number of Freedom in Chains flyers and other pamphlets there. At a later Tea Party in Morristown, NJ, I handed out flyers for my live podcast on patriotradio.com. In both cases I was not impressed with signs I saw, but figured it was worth exposing the crowd to more libertarian ideas. This website is not the only place I spout off.
Amendall wrote ‘…the Boston Tea Party of December 1773. This event was direct action by a community of friends and neighbors, the Sons of Liberty. It was the culminating event of the non-violent tea tax protest movement. It was the watershed moment in revolutionary America, leading the British to “crack down” with the coercive acts, responded to by Americans protesting more vigorously still. The result was one of the few periods in history when an entire community was removed from externally imposed and coercive government. The city of Boston had no overlords for most of the year 1774. Its inhabitants continued to cooperate with each other and remain peaceful, while outsiders described the situation as anarchy. It was a very early success in forming a stateless society… throwing the tea overboard while harming only the property of a chartered monopoly…’
There was absolutely nothing non-violent about the Boston Tea Party and the events around it. The perpetrators forced their way onto the ships; the inhabitants of Boston did not “cooperate with each other and remain peaceful” but took the opportunity to oppress those of their neighbours who did not stand with them, e.g. Thomas Hutchison had his house and library destroyed in 1765 and was driven into exile by threats during that “peaceful” period – all that co-operation was among a group of oppressors, and harmed the oppressed while intimidating those on the fence. And the tea in question was not “only the property of a chartered monopoly”, but was the property of the merchants ashore who had accepted the Bills of Lading – Hancock was actually trying to damage his competition.