Oh, please God, no. LOL
But seriously, I am interested in the idea of starting some kind of holistic “liberty communities”.
Clayton -
shaman could be good at promoting liberty. liberty of the mind could come before more material liberty.
The two are circularly related. The Eastern wisdom in, say, Tibetan Buddhism as taught by the Dalai Lama, for example, tends to focus almost exclusively on the freedom of the mind and soul and trivializes the freedom of the body. Western classical liberalism, by contrast, tends to focus almost exclusively on the freedom of the body (material freedom) and trivializes the freedom of the mind and soul. I think we need to have a holistic approach. Material wealth and health is the greatest facilitator of the conditions for mental and spiritual freedom, and vice-versa.
You can have all the material wealth you ever dreamed of but fail to attain satisfaction because you’ve never disciplined your appetites - the lust for “more” can expand without limit. Always feeding your ego more and more at each new step of material success in life will only result in treading water or even going backwards in terms of real happiness. So many people in America and other developed countries fall into this trap. Just watch any episode of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. They have plenty of money. But are they actually happy? They have been relieved of almost every conceivable pain or annoyance which can afflict a person in life but have they attained a deep and lasting satisfaction with the wonderful gift of life which they are experiencing?
In the West, we worship ego. In fact, Western culture is little else but the cult of ego. Ego is not “selfishness”, it is not “arrogance”… it is more subtle than that. Ego is an all-consuming concern with identity, with selfness, with differentiation. With this concern comes the yearning after immortality, a feeling that we are somehow being “cheated” by death out of what we really deserve, like a spoiled child in a candy shop throwing a fit that he can’t have the whole candy shop and must content himself with the bag of candies his parents have purchased him. The yearning after immortality will not extend life by a single nanosecond but it robs the life we do have of its lustre. The world drains of color and becomes nothing more than a depressing soap opera.
The wise man makes peace with his mortality and understands that the finitude of life cannot detract from its pleasantness. Epicurus says in his Letter to Menoecus:
This form of thinking is utterly foreign to the Western mind. We live in a dichotomy of the glory of self-sacrifice to “the greater good”, on the one hand, and a miserable obsession with length-of-life, on the other hand. Look at the attitudes regarding assisted suicide, ending life-support, and so on. No greater tragedy can be conceived than to lose a minute of pulse and breathing. Everyone dreads death as a matter of self-preservation instinct but there can be no benefit to whetting this fear beyond its natural level and, in fact, great benefit is to be had from dulling it.
These are the aspects of right-living and how they factor into being truly free across-the-board that I think get overlooked by the more materialistic approach of classical liberalism.
Clayton -
You mean like free state or gated community style?
Not necessarily. I mean more like churches or other social organizations like Elks or Rotary. A church is a network of people in a general geographic region. It is administered by the officers of the church organization which may hold property and so on for the use of the church members. It provides benefits to its members and receives dues (or donations) in return. And while it is local, it is not territorial like a gated community.
But I could imagine how you could have a mix of both - an association that fosters like-minded people moving within proximity of one another in order to build “oases” of liberty-mindedness and, in addition, maintains a non-territorial network of people who may not be interested in pulling up roots but still want to be connected in other ways (ideologically, economically) with other liberty-minded people.
Clayton -
Why hasn’t anyone suggested university professor?
@ Clayton
I used the term “religious” in it’s commonly-utilized application.
public servant
journalist
writer
news reporter
rich person
economist
professor
politician
celebrity
parent
social entrepreneur/anything dealing with charity
Climatologist/Environmentalist
Banker
Health Care Professional
Film
The purpose is to find a profession that has great social implications that has the ability to change things across the board (of a small spectrum of life or a whole philosophy of life) of a city, region, country, or even the world. WIth that being said:
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I dont see how any public servant has this kind of potential. For sure a judge, but what really what else? A single cop cant, but the sheriff of a county yes. A county clerk cant do anything remotely close what the district attorney could do. “Anything but a soldier” - i was actually thinking about adding someone in the military to the list. I dont think there is many professions that come close to the respect military personnel get. Look at what a single private did with the wikileaks thing, good or bad, it it started a mini revolution of freedom of information. Think also what would happen if the Commandant of the Marine Corps, gets a few generals on his side to back him up, and declare these wars unlawful and therefore he is going to withdrawl all his troops from the fight. He also will not step down because the President would have been declared a war criminal and then he charges the president in a court maritial. MAN, do you have any idea the shit storm that will rise from this? if you think succession is popular now, just wait if someone like that takes a stand.
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i thought about this, but if you look at the make up of our media you really have no choice of what to report and what gets aired. You would have to either own the media outlet or at least be in charge of what gets aired or what you want your employees to report for it to matter. Though I think doing something along the lines of the “drudge report” that goes outside the stereotypical lines of media. Even drudge report got lucky with breaking the lewinsky thing for him to become famous (i think this is why).
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I was thinking this was a good idea too from a previous suggestion in this thread, but really how many books in the past 50 years had the social implications we are looking for? (id really like to know i cant think of anything outside of the Atkin’s diet book.)
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see number 2.
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agreed, falls in line with my billionaire
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agreed
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Professor, this falls in line with economist for me, i would include people like tom woods who is a historian, but uses economics to make his point. Though there is a separation of other professors that can achieve something so i think you are right in including this.
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agreed
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celebrity isnt a job! haha, but you are right, sports athletes, actors, and even biebers! could have amazing influence.
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parent - how do you figure outside of raising a child who changes the world.
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this falls in line of the billionaire or the CEO for me. like the CEO of the Red Cross or someone like any of the billionaires that give massive amounts of wealth away.
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no clue, why?
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Ya i really wanted to include banker, but i thought it would fall in line with CEO. I personally think a banker could change the whole world and nothing anyone can do about it. Maybe, its because i want to own a bank one day.
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how so?
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see number 9.
@SM: Then the answer is, essentially, no. However, I would not describe myself as a “skeptic” or “rationalist” as these words are commonly understood, either (entailing a Dawkinsian anti-religiosity). I believe that religion plays an integral role in a healthy social order but I believe it has been a very long time since Western culture has anything resembling a healthy social order and religion has long been corrupted.
Religion or spirituality or mysticism is an ineradicable component of the human condition, IMO. We have no contact with the Absolute and however much we understand about the world, what we don’t understand dwarfs what we do. It is only modern hubris that has upended this common sense and trumpets that we are nearly closing the book of knowledge on every front, from mathematics to physics to you-name-it. So, I am not religious in the common usage of that word but I am religious in the sense that I place a big huge question mark over the vast majority of existence.
Clayton -
I always viewed atheism/agnosticism as something that was completely compatible with libertarianism, not just in how it would obviously permit it, but also because religion (speaking of Christianity and the other monotheistic and polytheistic religions) promotes a personality cult around a world dictator. I would never try to force my irreligious views on somebody else, but all I’m saying is that if we are going to quit worshipping the state, looking into worshipping a concealed monarchy/dictator wouldn’t be a bad idea.
And yes, I do recognize that many religious people have made wonderful contributions to the libertarian movement.