Editor’s Note: This week we bring you a guest post from a good friend of ours, Glenn Horowitz. Glenn writes an opinion column over at The American Daily Herald and also maintains his own personal blog, Get Glenn Mobile. -CS

By Glenn Horowitz

I’ve been thinking about a fitting subject for a first submission to The Chaos Section and as usual, it came to me rather than me finding it. It came from one of the more articulate voices I know, Mat Larson’s, in the form of his recently published a YouTube video that got under my skin in a very positive way: The Liberty Movement Is DEAD – Here Is Why It’s A Good Thing!

Mat made some good points in it, but I’d like to go further and expand on them with my own take. Mat’s correct in saying that “Liberty Movement” is technically a misnomer at the very least, that those in the liberty community…a term I have no problem with…are not trying to create anything that didn’t exist before but are trying to revert to a freer state we Americans were born and lived in before the legion of sociopaths, psychopaths and other control freaks interfered with, co-opted, defrauded or otherwise distorted that freedom over many years into the monstrously convoluted Leviathan State we face today.
Academics, autodidacts like myself, agorists and so on know perfectly well what needs to be done to achieve the goal we seek. History affirms that violent revolution is almost certainly not the answer; given the somnolent state of the majority of Americans who are still deep in the Matrix it would likely be squashed quickly with their enthusiastic approval, not to mention that it violates the zero aggression principle we hold so dear. Even in the unlikely event that it was to succeed in overthrowing the sociopaths currently in power, we’d almost certainly see their regime replaced by something even worse, also if history is a guide.
No, somehow we have to persuade enough people to withdraw their consent to the oppressive system, just as one of my very favorite scholars, Étienne de La Boétie, explained 500 years ago in his The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude:
Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.
The New Media using the internet has given us a marvelous start in doing this by empowering us to simply bypass the barrier of mass communication the gatekeepers of the dissemination of knowledge have maintained for so long. That’s why the establishment so hates and fears the internet and is always scheming up new ways to co-opt, limit and hinder it, if anyone needs proof of its potential. In theory, it’s easy: we reach the masses, show them how badly they’ve been scammed, which will then persuade them to remove their consent. In turn this will expose the goons for what they are and strip them of the massive powers they’ve usurped from the American people. Clearly, it isn’t that simple. Accomplishing this will take constant and unrelenting pressure to allow the principles of liberty to spread throughout the consciousness of people, a dynamic process requiring time, patience, and effort by a lot of people. We’ll never see a majority of Americans willing to do this…we just need enough of them to reach and pass the event horizon. I have no idea what number constitutes ‘enough,’ we need to keep increasing the ranks of the awakened until it’s reached.
Why, then, do we disregard everything we’ve learned that’s effective, put all our eggs in one basket we call the Liberty Movement”, and expect it to do the job? A very static basket, I’ll add, in paradigm changing endeavors human beings have a tendency to delegate the actual doing to others. Too many in the community seem to think that by declaring themselves part of a Movement they’ve done all that’s needed. Fergodsake, this so-called Liberty Movement has become exactly like so many worthy efforts of the past, becoming like a club or coffee klatch where only a few do the heavy lifting, while most gather on Facebook or other venues, chattering away, posting cutesy pics or cartoons and/or dissecting the actions of the dynamic members who are actually out there doing something, often in tedious, querulous threads that degenerate into pointless name calling while arguing trivial non sequiturs. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? I really don’t care.
Cut to the chase, please. Get out there and do something, talk to people, be an example for others that doing something constructive is one hell of a lot more effective than this constant yattering. If you have the ability and drive, you might join Oathkeepers, Cop Block or the Peaceful Streets Project, or if you aren’t inclined to be so bold, at least make a habit of regularly engaging those in your life who are still stuck in the status quo in thought provoking conversations…anything but the same dreary, stagnant paradigm that have stalled so many other good ideas. Way too many of us so-called ‘liberty lovers’ have allowed ourselves to become complacent or even downright lazy, as our friend Caleb Leverett pointed out in his own YouTube video this week:

I think Caleb is spot on here. Reminds me, back in my healthy days as a civilian aircraft commander, of an expression we had…though often repeated, it never lost its validity, and helped those of us who kept it in mind to stay alive:
Complacency kills.
We all know that the real bad guys in the world really do have an anti-human agenda they’re patiently and inexorably pursuing to turn the world into one big plantation, envisioning themselves in their manors and castles with the rest of us mere human beings relegated to sharecropping field hands (or worse, livestock) to be used, abused and disposed of as they see fit. I might not think it’s as dramatic or far reaching (yet) as some do, but I definitely do believe it’s our reality. Don’t like it? Neither do I. But talk is cheap, and if we mean to reverse this unpleasant trend we need to knock off the yakking and actually do something about it…not just for the sake of taking action, but in taking focused peaceful, voluntary and effective action that’s already proven its ability to make a difference.
Dr. Ron Paul, a man many of us admire, said many a time that the ‘love-o-lution’ can’t depend on any one person if it’s to succeed. I suggest those of us who sincerely want this success to take his advice and each be his or her own leader. While you’re at it, please don’t get so wrapped up in the grim realities we face that you forget to live, love, and enjoy what you’re doing. Living well while practicing what we preach will be far more effective at being a dynamic example for persuading people that liberty isn’t just another philosophy in the marketplace of ideas, but a very real and viable alternative to the dull old debt-and-death ways so many Americans have become accustomed to.
I honestly believe a static, complacent “liberty movement” won’t succeed…a vibrant, loving liberty community will.

Author: Glenn Horowitz was born in 1961 and raised in New York City. He earned his commercial pilot and flight instructor certificates in Gaithersburg, Maryland where he worked as a flight instructor and air taxi pilot from 1986 through 1990. From 1990 until 1993 he worked in the Cincinnati, Ohio area as a civilian contract pilot for various branches of the U.S. military, predominantly the (USTRANSCOM) Defense Courier Service. When that company failed, he was hired as a line pilot flying mainly bank documents and canceled checks from Nashville until 2006 when disability due to multiple sclerosis ended his flying days. Glenn is currently living the disabled life in Nashville.

Copyright © Glenn Horowitz.