The River of No Return
by L. Neil Smith
lneil@netzero.com
Attribute to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise
The Age of Authority, now drawing to a close after ten thousand
blood-stained years, has also largely been an age of witlessness and
fraud. Stripping history of all of its excuses and rationalizations,
it is surpassingly difficult to find a single ruler or leader who was
capable of finding his own fundament with both hands and a six-cell
Maglite.
Examples would (and do) fill encyclopedias, but one sample will
suffice: the way that wise, bewhiskered, august politicians in their
distinguished frock coats and top hats insisted on sending their sons
and grandsons off to savagely murder one another from 1914 to 1918—for
no good reason anyone, from Barbara Tuchman to Bob Dylan has ever
been able to discover—and thereby set the tone for the next hundred
years, an unbroken century of total war and mass slaughter, through
their stupid, hypocritical treatment of Germany following that initial
conflict.
The victorious allies of World War I gave birth to Adolf Hitler.
We are all in a boat—the "same boat" you often hear of—swept
along by a mighty River of Time, our course set by idiots, maniacs,
and looters. By "we", I mean the hapless, hopeless, helpless members
of the species Homo sapiens, once the proud pinnacle of four and a
half billion years of evolution, whose supremacy ended on the day that
Authority was invented—and assumed a higher position on the food
chain.
With the exception of an occasional great white shark, crocodile,
lion, or leopard, the only natural enemy and predator of humankind is
government.
The boat I'm talking about is not the "Ship of State" we all heard
about in grade school. Captain Nemo knew exactly how to deal with
that, and he was my first boyhood hero (there haven't been that many
since).
There was a time when our boat cruised easily and freely up and
down the River, crossing from one bank to the other without the
slightest difficulty. That was because our boat—the boat of
American civilization—had a rudder and an engine. The boat that we
all find ourselves in now, this sad, leaky, broken-down derelict, has
neither.
There was a time when our rudder consisted of our principles—as
manifested in the Bill of Rights—which let us turn in any direction
except against the legitimate interests of the people comprising that
civilization. This was a set of ideas that almost everyone could agree
on, without reference to their religious beliefs or any other such
consideration.
But the Bill of Rights—that masterpiece of secular philosophy
which guaranteed to the people the right to own and operate their own
lives—had enemies, dark entities who wanted control over the
people's lives for themselves. Those entities have spent nearly two
and a half centuries whittling the Bill of Rights—our rudder—down
to nothing. We the people have lost control over where the boat
goes.
But, then, so have our enemies.
Some insist that our founding principle, American civilization's
lost rudder, consisted of a single religion, something any student of
Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, or Chaim Salomon
knows is untrue. The founding principle of a free society must be
something that everybody agrees with and takes for granted. While I
respect the right of others to believe whatever they desire, I will
not exchange my powers of reason for the willful irrationality of
faith.
For all that conservatives attempt to anchor themselves in a two
thousand year old belief system, they have no observable defining
principle. They drift, ideologically, and usually wind up defending
the very things their fathers and grandfathers fought passionately
against.
Two words: "Social Security"
But a rudder is useless unless the boat it's attached to has sails
or an engine, some means of propulsion. For American civilization, the
boat we're all in together, the means of propulsion consisted of the
incentives offered by unlimited individual liberty. A boy who sold
refreshments to passengers on railroad trains could grow up to invent
the lightbulb, the phonograph, and 1198 other things. A humble teacher
of the deaf could invent the telephone. And they could get rich doing
it.
With the exception of cybernetics, this is now almost impossible.
Even if you make a fortune, it can be taken from you in a heartbeat.
The great engine of America is stopped, and the boat drifts, unpowered
and rudderless down the dark, murky, frighteningly powerful River of
Time.
Hundreds of idiots, charlatans, and lunatics all claim to have the
helm, but they lie. The boat keeps turning end-for-end, drifting,
filling with water no one bothers to bail out, heading down the river
to rapids that can capsize it, or a great falls that will smash it to
splinters.
Killing everyone aboard.
So much for life.
So much for liberty.
So much for property.
And so much for the pursuit of happiness, which, in the absence of
anything resembling real freedom, has degenerated into nothing more
than watching oversized men being paid outrageous amounts of money to
play children's games on television, rioting in the streets and
beating up innocent passers-by, or reeling from one drug-saturated,
alcohol-soaked sensation to the next, usually in a fast, expensive
car.
Meanwhile, in the background you can hear the roar of the falls.
Who put us here? Not just Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Franklin
Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton, but vile creatures like
Prescott Bush, whose Union Banking Corporation, accused of holding
gold and laundering money for the Nazis, was seized in 1942 under the
Trading with the Enemy Act. Now his nasty sons and grandsons want to
establish an entire dynasty of Bushian clumsiness, irrationality, and
cupidity.
Men like George Soros, who collaborated with the Nazis as a
teenager and now makes obscene amounts of money by destroying whole
nations.
Men like the Duke of New York ("He's A Number One!"), Michael
Bloomberg who, in whatever sickness of the soul he suffers, would make
all of the "little people" under his thumb do whatever he decides is
good for them, even if he has to have them killed in the process—which
is why he is afraid to let them own guns. A Puritan in the
Menckenesqe sense that he almost certainly wakes up, trembling and
sweating in the night in the secret fear that somewhere, someone is
happy, Bloomberg clearly wishes to take away anything and everything
that gives people pleasure. The proper word for such a creature is
"Notsie".
Don't forget women like Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Dianne
Feinstein.
And it is tragically ironic that the once-beloved symbol for a new
hope—which quickly turned into a resurgence of the old disease of
Nazism—should be black, reportedly gay, and with a Semitic
background.
And what about the soft, shrinking, fearful, cowardly, gutless,
craven, dastardly, timorous, weak-kneed, yellow-bellied, lily-livered,
pigeon-hearted, jelly-spined, base, pusillanimous Republicans who will
do anything, abrogate any principle, betray any constituency, for a
glass of white wine at the right cocktail party, and a slice of runny
cheese?
Including Rand Paul, who has endorsed Mitch McConnell.
The question sort of answers itself, doesn't it?
Who keeps us here, drifting toward the chasm?
Before I answer that question, allow me to let you in on a little
secret: some Americans (beginning with Thomas Jefferson, in whose
writings you will find this Great Idea) have discovered a formulation
that can sum up the Bill of Rights in a single sentence, a principle
well suited (never abandoning the Bill of Rights) to become America's
new rudder, without offending anyone—except for self-announced
villains.
The Great Idea is the Zero Aggression Principle, which holds that
nobody—and this most especially includes government—has a right
to initiate physical force against another human being under any
circumstances; nor will an adherent to the "ZAP" (as it's abbreviated)
advocate or delegate such an initiation of physical force for any
reason.
Or, in the words of Will Smith's fighter pilot character in
Independence Day, as he makes "first contact" with an aggressive
alien species, "Like my mama says, don't start nothin', won't be
nothin'!"
None of this has anything to do with pacifism. Libertarians are
among the strongest advocates of private weapons ownership on the
planet, and have largely driven the current trend toward armed
self-defense.
The ZAP is practically all there is to political libertarianism.
(The central tenet of ethical libertarianism is that each of us is
the owner and sole proprietor of his own life and all the products of
that life.) These ideas are the only things that make libertarians any
different from conservatives, or liberals, or even communists and
Nazis.
As a tacit philosophical foundation, these ideas are also what has
made America different from and better than, any other civilization in
history.
So who keeps us here, irrevocably drifting toward disaster? How
about the lunatics, halfwits, and outright monsters who reject the
ZAP, the very definition of libertarianism, and the basis for American
civilization?
Why do they do it? My guess: because they reckon they just might
want to injure, kill, or steal from me someday, so they keep this
"right" they imagine they have—to initiate force—in their hip
pocket.
Sort of handy—like I keep my .45.
Because of them, nothing is safe, not life, not liberty, and
especially not property. And so the giant engine of American peace,
progress, and prosperity grinds to a halt as the deadly falls draw
nearer.
Only the Zero Aggression Principle, and the freedom it generates,
can save us from the same oblivion that swallowed the Sumerians, the
Babylonians, the Egyptians, the ancient Greeks, the Romans, and the
British.
We have a way to stop all that from happening.
Do we have the will?
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