Coffee Company Protects Customers from Trump

"City Brew" is a small chain of coffee shops, headquartered in Billings, Montana. I was having a latte in one of their shops in Missoula, Montana, wearing a ball cap that read "Trump 2016." The manager of the store informed me that my cap was offending other customers. I was sitting quietly, reading, and was doing nothing else to get anyone's attention. I was just quietly wearing my ball cap.

I have worn election year ball caps for every presidential election since the 1980's, and prior to this incident, have never been told by a retail store that my attire was offensive. The idea that supporting one of the candidates is "offensive" speaks to the irrationality of the the people who advocate having a known criminal in the White House.

However, what shocked me was the unprofessional attitude of the staff of City Brew.

5. Government is Conflict

The essence of government is conflict. While trade is an activity that occurs between two or more parties that are acting voluntarily, government is an activity that depends upon force to coerce parties who are not acting voluntarily. Government, as necessary as it might be as a limited entity, is based upon the principle that it is in a state of conflict with its citizens and will use force or the threat of force to repress their voluntary behavior. Regardless of their proclaimed good intentions, people who support the expansion of government authority want to increase the amount of coercion and force against their fellow citizens.

The ultimate problem of government is man’s drive to repress his fellowman. Why does a man want to increase the amount of conflict that his neighbors must endure in a world already beset by strife? Why does a person want to limit the amount of voluntary cooperation that occurs in the marketplace and increase the amount of involuntary coercion that characterizes the police state?

Man represses his fellowman because he has already repressed himself. Facing an unknowable future and guilt-ridden past, the statist (the man who believes in the all-powerful state) is essentially someone who is running from his own nature. He is a narcissist who has produced an illusion of grandeur about himself and now needs to use the outside world to convince himself that he is that grand illusion.

While externally the authoritarian personally is confident, swaggering, and perhaps even an elitist, within himself there is a self-loathing that must be kept at bay by the force and power that he is able to project on an external world.

The statist is essentially a guilt-ridden and fearful person who hides his own private nightmare by projecting a fictional image of himself onto the world. That fictional image that he projects is, of course, in conflict with truth and all of the other fictions projected by all of the other statists in the world – it is the little conflict that leads to all of the big conflicts that statists and liberals inflict upon mankind.

“Anyone who thinks himself the master of others is no less a slave than they.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

4. Systems Man

The American liberal is, more than anything else, a deeply religious person. His faith may be of a strictly secular nature, but it is a faith nonetheless. Like many fundamental faiths, liberalism is accepted without rational analysis, offers the promise of an eventual paradise, and is resistant to any facts contrary to its basic tenets.

American liberalism, at its basic core, is a religious reverence of the state. Once the people have surrendered enough of their power to the state, all social ills will be cured and a utopia will be achieved under the benevolent rule of those enlightened enough to share the liberal vision.

The religion of the state is, for the liberal, a substitute for the fundamentalism that he so desperately needs to cope with life that intimidates him. He is essentially a “system person,” a man who needs to go through life knowing the ultimate answers to the challenges of daily living. A system, whether it is called communism, fascism, socialism, or just liberalism, provides the true believer with a certainty that cannot be found by rational analysis of an uncertain world.

The deification of systems began with the birth of modern philosophy when Rene Descartes pronounced that “I think, therefore I am.” The thinking mind became the creator of new worlds, future paradises, and final answers. Descartes became known as the “father of modern philosophy” and man found a god that could replace the dying one – man came to believe that his thinking mind could settle the wilderness of the uncertain universe with systems of ideas.

Prior to Descartes, man killed other men for the sake of gods that were spiritual in nature. His politics was even an extension of the will of these gods who selected the political leaders by divine appointment. Man was intellectually passive as the gods and their earthly agents decided when war was justified and when murder would become a duty. After Descartes, wars and persecution would become increasingly a service to be paid to the newfound deities – the systems that were the product of man’s thinking mind.

As kingdoms became states, royalty was replaced by systems people – people who had a divine right to rule others. While kings were selected by old gods, the systems man selected himself by his new god – his ego. See p. 189, Being and the End of History.

We think that we will be able to live happily, creatively, if we learn a method, a technique, a style, but creative happiness comes only when there is inward richness, it can never be attained through any system.
J. Krishnamurti

3. The Sadomasochistic Personality

To Freud, the sadistic personality was someone who, regardless of his sexual proclivities, needed to feel in control of others, often demeaning them and making them feel dependent upon his strength and power. The masochist, in turn, was not just a person with a sexual perversion, but one who felt safe and secure under the control of a stronger person who told him what to do and how to live.

The sadist is the active man of history. As a man alienated from his own nature, the sadist is in an overt war with the enemy – himself. The power that he gains over others is a confirmation of the indestructibility of his eternal ego. His willing subjects look on him as their savior and as the person who protects them from the terrifying sword of constant change and therefore holds their fate, as well as his own, in his hands. Although their obedience is often gained by force, the sadistic man prefers those followers that enjoy his bullying and allow him unrestricted power over themselves to the point of becoming extensions of his will.

The sadistic person, like his masochistic subjects, is afraid to love his own life and is dependent upon his sycophants to produce for him an illusion of his own invulnerability. Sadism is a form of repression. By controlling his environment, the sadistic man perceives himself as able to stem the tide of constant change that threatens him with vulnerability and mortality. The sadistic man creates and maintains an all-powerful identity through the weak and submissive eyes of his followers.

Masochistic man is naturally obedient to authority figures, whether they are religious leaders, military commanders, or baseball heroes endorsing a product that he chooses to buy. Masochistic man is also alienated from himself, but because he is not strong enough to resist the threats of his mortal enemy, he seeks reunification through another object of alienation – the sadistic man. While sharing the masochist’s feelings of alienation, the sadistic man offers the weak man the strength to resist the very flow of nature.

The following of authority is the denial of intelligence. To accept authority is to submit to domination, to subjugate oneself to an individual, to a group, or an ideology, whether religious or political; and this subjugation of oneself to authority is the denial, not only of intelligence, but also of individual freedom.

J. Krishnamurti

1. Introduction

Mankind is at its best when it is most free. This will be clear if we grasp the principle of liberty. We must realize that the basic principle of our freedom is freedom to choose, which saying many have on their lips but few in their minds.

Dante

There will never be a really free and enlightened state until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all of its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.

Henry David Thoreau

Liberalism, as the term is used in American politics, encompasses a number of labeled ideologies, including socialism, statism, communism, fascism, Maoism, Marxism, and even welfare-statism. As the term is used in this blog, as well as how it is used throughout America, liberalism refers generally to the advance of the power of the state over the individual and is often juxtaposed to American conservatism, which, while advocating the preservation of many social traditional values, has generally come to represent the preservation of individual liberty from the violent authority of the state.

Liberalism itself is not just an ideology; it is, in fact, an ideology of ideologies; a “meta-ideology,” referring to the more general notion that men should be ruled by ideas of one form or another as opposed to by their own free will (within the bounds of laws whose non-ideological purposes are to prevent the savagery that arises from mankind’s natural covetousness, of course). Liberals in America, while belonging to many specific ideological faiths, generally believe that the lives of men should be ruled by ideas that may or may not be their own. In this regard, they stand in direct opposition to the founding fathers in the American political tradition who believed, and implemented in their constitutional laws, that each individual should, as much as possible, have the liberty to pursue his own happiness.

This blog is an inquiry into the reasons why people continue to be liberals in the face of an overwhelming amount of evidence that it simply does not work. The history of the last four-hundred years clearly demonstrates that ruling ideas eventually reduce society’s members to abject poverty and tyrannical cruelty. The efficacy of liberalism is not an issue here, it being assumed that any well-informed readers have already seen the evidence that it, in all of its forms, is simply a recipe for social disaster. The idea that governments (as opposed to customers) are always right has consistently led to bankruptcy and starvation wherever it was tried in the twentieth century, the three centuries previous to that, and the current young century that we live in now.

In addition to its economic unfeasibility, the idea that one man’s ideas should rule another man has consistently led to the natural violence of determining which man’s ideas should be the ruling ones. In turn, this competition of ideas has consistently lead to the rule of one man whose sociopathic personality has allowed him to most easily eliminate competing ideas and the men who spawn them.

That only leaves us with the question of why does liberalism persist as a bad idea – a bad idea of bad ideas. Liberalism flourishes in the face of failure because it is a part of man’s nature. Liberalism will always exist for the same reason that rape will always exist – because fear, guilt, and envy reside in the heart of man. External violence over others will always be an appetizing alternative to men who suffer the internal violence of their own alienation from themselves.

2. Society versus the State

Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one;

Thomas Paine, Of the Origin and Design of Government

Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.

George Washington, Of the Origin and Design of Government

Social cooperation under the division of labor is the ultimate and sole source of man’s success in his struggle for survival and his endeavors to improve as much as possible the material conditions of his well-being.

Ludwig von Mises, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality

Society and the governing body that we know as the state are two different things. In fact, they exist as contradictions to each other. One is a voluntary organization wherein people have come together to cooperate to their own mutual benefit; the other is involuntary, its members being held together by a force that threatens them with violence and imprisonment should they stray from its rules and boundaries.

An example of a society is the relationship between a man and a woman in love. Two people, bonded to each other by physical attraction, the pleasure of each other’s company, and the compassion that is natural between people who have learned the meaning of sharing things, their relationship is essentially voluntary and neither would think of using force on the other for his or her personal benefit. The inherent characteristics of this society, like all societies, is the voluntary cooperation that occurs to the benefit all of members thereof.

A state can also be modeled as having a membership of one man and one woman. However, in this case, the relationship is one wherein the stronger of the two takes whatever he wants, whenever he wants, from the weaker member. In a state made of up of only two such members, the physical part of their relationship is called “rape,” wherein the weaker submits to the stronger, either directly from violence itself or from the mere threat of violence that the stronger holds over her. The fact that the state is a democracy does not alone justify the force that the majority can use to abuse the minority. If the state is made up of two men and a woman, the majority, made up of men, can vote on rape almost as easily as a single tyrant can.

This, of course, does not mean that we can live without a state. The mere existence of a hostile foreign state requires us to band together into a state of our own. However, we can follow the guidance of people like George Washington, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and the other wise leaders who founded our American state and assure ourselves that we, as individuals, are sufficiently protected from the state’s limited power.

In also means that we need to be introspective of ourselves and look inside to find out what dark shadows reside in our souls that make us want to give even more power to that violent body, the state.