Thursday, March 10, 2011

Finding Common Ground -- Liberty vs. Power

I had an interesting response to the last post from an old friend who describes herself as "progressive" politically. Although we've recently been Facebooking, my comments had not been directed at her. She's been open and honest, as opposed to some of the smirking, snide, high school-like comments I've encountered elsewhere. But since I am finding this description adopted more and more by seemingly apostate Democrats, it may be helpful to examine her response, as well as mine.

She: "From my progressive seat, I'd say the thing I've liked most about your posts is seeing the common ground we have - namely, both worried about the U.S. jumping solo into another war! Both thinking that the "drug war" should end. I think finding and building on common ground is a way to move forward."
 ‎Me: "Progressive" is an elusive term to me. Just like "conservative." My general impression is this self-descriptor is someone who is socialist-communist, but doesn't want to use these "harder" terms. "Progressive" leads a certain amount of fuzziness, while not opening up to the charges that one is an old-style socialist or communist.

I've been perusing Danny Goble's book about Oklahoma's progressive roots. What I see could more accurately be called libertarian roots. There was certainly a reaction against the robber barons and the unfairness of what we would today call "corporatism," or more succinctly still, fascism.
America has been on a continual morph into fascism since the founding of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913. Each supposed failure of capitalism brought more government control, with the attendant corruption and collusion that control breeds.

Fascism seems to have accelerated with FDR's response to the Fed-caused Depression; then the establishment of the CIA after WWII; LBJ's Great Society after the CIA's coup to get rid of JFK; the Vietnam War; and certainly with the vast expansion of US imperialism and total surveillance grid after the false flag 9-11 event.

I still wait for the Progressive-Left to call Obama out for being Bush on steroids. But they seem to be as neutered by Obama as the conservatives were by Bush. It seems that party still is more important than principle.
I should have added that I really agree with her point about finding common points of agreement. That is essential for our conversation. So much of the pervasive mind control in the MainStreamMedia is designed to drive us apart. Divide and conquer is an age-old strategy. The false left-right paradigm, which I've written about many times, is essential to the PTB strategy. Left-right, liberal-conservative, are components of a dualistic paradigm whose poles are self-contradictory in terms of the issue of liberty and power.

It's a form of Orwellian Doublespeak designed to obscure reality and inhibit any clear thinking about the issues. So many people I meet try to establish their "independent" credentials by saying they are economically conservative but socially liberal. The term they are searching for is "libertarian." That political philosophy was called "liberal" in the 1700's. It is fundamental to the American idea of limited, representative government bound by a Constitution. They just haven't studied the philosophy to see how to derive a consistent, non-contradictory political philosophy that will help them analyze our situation more clearly. (You might want to explore this further by taking the Nolan Chart Quiz here.)

In that vein, it is clear to me that when the Libertarians and the Christian Right come to see that the most consistent political position with Christianity is libertarianism, then we will have the makings of the powerful political force required to restore America. Far too many Christians let others do their political thinking for them and become easily manipulated by the NeoConservatives or the Progressive Left.

There is a legalistic, moralistic streak in too many Christians that wants to force areas of personal morality into their own mold. They want to deprive others of the freedom of choice that Jesus clearly gives in Rev. 3:20. He forces Himself on no one. Nor should we. As long as a person is not violating the inalienable rights of another by force or fraud, he should be free to make his own choices and live with the consequences. I don't have time to expound on this further in this post, but I've given you enough to think it through.

Here are a couple of examples of sound libertarian thinking that progressives and conservatives who don't put party above principle can surely agree on:
What do you think? I have open comments, so please use them. Thanks!

It's Getting Very Strange Out There

The title seemed natural to me, until I thought about it. "Out There"? As opposed to "In Here" where I live my daily life. I just reflected on the implications about spending so much of my time "out there," where I try to stay somewhat abreast of our rapidly unfolding crisis. I spend so much time "there," that I tend to forget that most people don't. (The irony, of course, is that my way "out there" is mostly through the portal of an internet connection.)

Even though we're in a great awakening, most of the people I run into outside of my activist circles aren't talking about it. That has to change. We really need a national conversation about how we got here, where we need to go, and how to get there.

We need to shift people's attention enough to get them actively engaged in the conversation. To be sure, we're distracted by a smorgasbord of bread, circuses, continual wars and fears of terror. So it is imperative that those of us who are sociopolitical entrepreneurs to become intentional about the idea that we are, indeed, about shifting attention.

We're not just presenting facts. We need to shift attention. We need to challenge, break and shift old cognitive structures. We need to help them start some creative thinking about solving our situation.

To some degree, certainly more than we would like to believe, we're living in a trance. The more reflective a person is, and the more he understands the power of the social structures that inform our daily lives, the more freedom he can exercise. The decision to do so is the "red pill" that begins one's liberation from the "matrix."

So I've been experimenting on Facebook. I've taken several webinars recently that point out that Facebook is now the "hot" place to market, that it gets more usage per day than Google. The movie about its founding, The Social Network, won the Academy Award, generating even more interest. Moreover, and more importantly, the instigators of many of the social movements in the Middle East extensively used Facebook and Twitter. So I started Facebooking several weeks ago.

While I do a little bit of purely socially "nice" things, for the most part I try to inject ideas into the conversation. Sometimes I share important news stories or articles, along with a sentence of two of commentary or a provocative question. Often I will leap into someone else's posting and do the same. A little bit of instigation here, some subversion there.

One of the first things you learn when running for office, or for just plain old marketing, is to hunt where the ducks are. Focus your attention and efforts where you want to get results. Simple enough. If your goal is to help make things better, it makes sense to go where you can have a conversation with many people, and do it efficiently.

If oil goes to $200 a barrel as Lindsey Williams is predicting, people will probably be staying home more. And maybe dumping the TV for a national conversation. No doubt, we need it.

I've had some adventures. Being a Liberty person, I don't spend a lot of time around Progressives. Most seem to be rather nice, but their worldview doesn't seem to hold individual liberty, property rights, and free enterprise as important values. When I ventured into a few conversations that largely included people I presumed are "progressive," I was astounded at their lack of intellectual acumen and honesty. I heard many of the same kinds of pithy, sarcastic, ill-informed remarks I had come to expect from many NeoConservatives.

Any way, I've posted a number of good things on Facebook that would actually be nice to include on a blog. That might be a more congenial format, giving me the ability to share what I find, without the pressure to produce some kind of essay. So that's what I'm going to try for awhile and see if that works. If I can get in the habit of it, I might post several times a week, as time permits.

There is no end of important things to share. We have so many life-changing possibilities it seems to take increasing amounts of courage to even look at them. So many factors could produce doomsday scenarios that it is often hard to keep the optimism that we can turn this thing around. The Hundredth Monkey phenomenon indicates that we can quickly hit a tipping point of consciousness. We never know what will provide the impetus for the final push, or when it will happen. Indeed, in a larger historical scale of things, it could well be that the tipping point was crossed last November.

I was going to share some of those links and comments, but I've been told people might like shorter postings. So I'll start with the next one!

In the meantime, consider doing your part to shift the national, world, and certainly local, conversation toward acknowledging our crisis and searching for solutions. We are already in the mess. The blades of the fan are chopping up our old state of affairs at breath-taking speed. We have to go through the ordeal. It won't be painless, and we can't do it alone.

Our refuge from this storm will be our families, friends and neighbors. We need to build our relationships in all those areas, because the artificial substitutes for community provided by the Feral and State Governments are collapsing. Governments are broke, and the Dollar will die, probably much sooner and more quickly that we can imagine. We will hit the re-set button. We'll need to work together to re-establish America on the principles of Freedom envisioned by the Founders.

The PTB Globalists and their minions have different ends for us in mind that we would want. So we need to engage in this conversation in self-defense. If you haven't started Facebooking, or if you've only been doing it for purely social reasons, try going a little deeper. You'll be surprised who starts responding.

And if you want to see what I'm posting as I pick it up, be sure to friend me!