Demand More

Freedom, at its heart, is about having choices, about possessing the ability to do whatever one wants. It is based in consent — someone who is made to do something is not really given a choice. The liberty to reject that which is being offered is thus a fundamental part of freedom. When a person cannot reject something, then she is forced to participate, and thus unfree.

Today, there appears to be a consensus amongst many Americans that people in the United States exist in a state of freedom. So it is remarkably odd that the most fundamental choice a person ought to be able to make in a supposedly free society — the choice to reject this freedom and live without said society and government — is strangely absent. I have no meaningful ability to opt out of the system, to not pay my taxes or not worry about money or a job or a career or the trivialness of modern consumerism. I have no choice but to work so that I can earn money so that I can eat, and in doing so, give my allegience and tax money to a government which I consider tremendously unjust.

I am not suggesting that I want to freeload off of society; quite the opposite. I am not saying that I should be allowed to eat the products of someone else’s labor or commit myself to sloth and indolence. I do not want a handout. What I want is to have some type of ability to feed and nurture myself as I see fit, without the need for other people or the government to take my resources for foreign wars and corporate profit. Give me the most unproductive piece of land on the continent, the driest desert or the most forbidding mountain-top; but let me live my life without the burden of oppressive social interference. To those who would take from me for their own nefarious ends: leave me alone!

This lack of choice is not unique to America. No government lets their people leave their societies in the manner I describe; if they did, many free-thinking people would immediately find some open space and do things for themselves, away from the tentacles of greed, power lust, and domination that have come to define life in supposedly civilized nations. So the choice is not offered; the prison-doors remain locked. We must all labor whether we like it or not.

Government is a ruse. It is designed to keep things the way they are — unequal, unjust, enslaved, and unhappy. All governments, be it a dictatorship or one of the so-called democracies, are run by the few at the expense of the many. The few use the government as a way of living off the labor of the many. Pharoah did not lay one stone in the Great Pyramid, nor did Mr. Rockefeller hammer one nail in the tower that bears his name. Despite millenia of time and infinite cultural differences, the powerful were able to marshall the people to build these testaments to power.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. The great evil of unequal access to social resources that has plagued humanity since the dawn of civilization remains rampant and unfettered. Humans have progressed in their technological capabilities, but morally the species remains in its infancy. Control, power, and warfare are still the primary goals of organized society, and not cooperation, justice, and freedom.

What is different about the world of today is that this reality must be hidden. We are made to feel as we have some sort of say in how the government is run, but it is all a farce. Elections are held, but real defenders of liberty are never elected. Instead, we are made to choose between two parties, both wed to different powerful interests. A slave who is given the opportunity to choose his master remains a slave, no matter how just the master he might select. This is the crude facade of choice heaped on the American people, their supposed liberty and freedom.

People who talk about the rejection of modern governments are labelled curious at best, treasonous at worst. The idea is not common. But the truth in a person’s position is not measured in its popularity. It is measured by its ability to explain the way things are. It is no coincidence that the richest and most powerful countries in the world today are the ones that built massive empires and colonized other people. They have all taken much from others, and today they defend that theft in the name of democracy. Any thinking person has a duty to reject these governments in the same way they would reject the actions of any other murderer or thief.

Someone says, if you don’t like it here, then get out. Move to another country. This, to me, is as ridiculous as suggesting to a slave that she choose a different master. Her master is not the problem — it is her slavery. The people and interests who control Mexico, France, or Saudi Arabia are no better and often worse in their techniques of domination. It is not just the American government I would call tyrannical, but all centralized government that seeks the oppression of the many for the benefit of the few.

We must all learn to separate our needs as a nation from the needs of the government. They are totally distinct and separate. The more the nation does for itself, the less need it has for government. The more compassion and generosity that can be cultivated for friends and neighbors and even enemies means that we do not have to rely on any central authority to govern our lives for us. The more a people can do for itself and be responsible for itself, the more liberty and freedom it will eventually have.

I realize this logic might be difficult for many people to accept. We are so brainwashed that we have come to accept the abominable as ordinary. We cloak ourselves in a flag to hide the damage our leaders inflict on other people. There is not one place on this Earth that is not under surveillance by the United States government in some form another. Giant aircraft carriers patrol the oceans, satellites monitor every square inch from space, the marines stand ready to land on any beach, and thousands of nuclear missiles lay dormant, ready like the lightening of Zeus to strike down any challenger of American power. Hundreds of billions of dollars, of society’s wealth, has been used to build up this enormous fleet of steel and technology, all so that it can be destroyed to shreds at a moment’s notice! I cannot think of anything more wasteful in the entire annals of history. Do people not see how much less we would all have to work if we didn’t have to pay for this imperial guard? Are people this blind to the suffering inflicted by this military apparatus all over the world, or how much freedom must be sacrificed for the goal of empire? Empires conduct wars; wars increase the power of the government; a more powerful government taxes the people and oppresses their freedoms; and, over time, that powerful government becomes tyrannical. This is the historical reality.

It seems so basic to me that a fundamental facet of liberty is the ability to say no, to refuse to consent to something. What if, at the end of the day, the tax-man comes and wants me to contribute to the cause of aggression? I know what would happen if I were to say no — I would go to jail. I would have even more of my liberty taken away. How obviously punitive and mafia-like this system is in its nature: give us your money or we will make you suffer.

If I were allowed to opt out and exercise my basic liberty to say no to the immoral requests made on me by this government — or any government — I would have stopped participating in this rat race a long time ago. I have no doubt that others, too, would drop what they were doing at a moment’s notice to stop participating in this giant machinery of exploitation and seek their destinies on their own. Over time, there would no doubt be many more who would see the communities being built by these pioneers of genuine democracies and eagerly follow suit.

Let me live with my friends, neighbors, and family, laboring for my own benefit and sharing the bounty of my harvest, and I know I will have finally found freedom. A nation or a planet, united by such communities, would be a glorious fortress of emancipation indeed.

In America, we have forgotten that people lived on this land without formal government for many thousands of years, without any armies or police force. There is a reason we have forgotten. Aside from the obvious need to repress the capacity for genocide that lurks in the dark subconscious of American culture, to remember the indigenous people who populated this land before the arrival of Western colonists would be to remember an alternative to modern society. It would stimulate in our brains the novel idea that there might be better ways to live our lives, or more just ways to distribute the wealth and bounty of the nation.

No, the memories of these indigenous peoples must be wiped from history, because it would unravel the myth of freedom so entrenched in the American psyche. A slave who thinks he is free is the most docile type of slave. He will die for his master without any hesitation, for the lie that is fed to him and to which he clings to. What exactly are we free to do? To pay taxes? To support the deaths of millions of people overseas? To watch TV? To go shopping? Who would have thought that you could buy off a population of hundreds of millions of people by giving them just enough social resources for them to buy things at the mall? How easy, and how disgraceful.

America holds itself out as free — and I will hold America to that standard. Having been raised on the myth, I would now demand that reality. I have heard good things about the pleasures of liberty and democracy — give them to me then.

The powerful have been clever in hiding their empire, but the disguise is wearing old. They proclaim the power of liberty, but insist that liberty requires a gun to defend it; they state that they honor democracy, but argue that the president has unlimited authority in a time of war; they gush with the benefits of freedom, but deprive the people of that standard of living necessary for a life filled with genuine choice and potential.

They say that I am free. Then why will they not let me reject their freedom?

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