Tell Me How To Be Free

This is more random thoughts than anything profound. “Free thinking,” perhaps. The title is based on what I think is a common mistake. I’ve noticed over time more WEB sites like this:

Claire Wolfe’s “Living Freedom, Musing About Personal Freedom—And Finding It Within Ourselves,” [emphasis mine], an idea I very much like, of course, and I’ve already mentioned Richard Rieben’s “Take Liberty, Don’t Ask Permission - Just Take It.” Then there is Sunni Maravillosa’s Sunni and the Conspirators, Individualism & Freedom, which also appeals since individualism and freedom are inseparable co-dependent concepts. Then there is the “Free Individual” of course, and all of these share something in their names that may be deceptive.

With the exception of this one, the other sites are not really about making yourself free now, with the exception of Claire Wolfe’s site which frequently has practical ideas on living freely, but no site, not even this site can tell you how to be free. The best I can do, is to warn you about possible traps and pitfalls you might encounter on your journey to freedom, and tell you about come different methods and possibilities for you to explore and think about, and provide the basic philosophical principles about what freedom is and which must be observed if you are to be free.

The reason no one else can tell you how to be free is because you are a unique human being, and being free essentially means being who you are, living your life as you choose, independently of any other individual’s interference or threat thereof. The details of what constitutes freedom for any individual will be different for every indivdiual—only the principles are universal and absolute.

What The Potentially Free Do Not Need

I have briefly pointed out elsewhere that the only individuals who truly want or can be free are independent individualists. It is a case I need to address separately, and will; but the short proof is this: 1. freedom pertains only to individuals because freedom means, freedom to choose and act on one’s own choices and only individuals have the capacity to choose, and 2. one cannot be both dependent and free, whatever one is dependent on they are a slave to. Freedom is independence.

Libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, voluntaryists, and all other liberty promoting types make much of what is called the non-agression principle, also called “non-initiation of force principle,” or “non-agression axiom,” and it means that the use, or threat, of force must be excluded from all human social relationships, except self-defense.

The reason that principle is never mentioned in the Independent Individualist or here, except in relationship to those who emphasize it, is because it is irrelevant to the independent individualist. I’ve explained this before, in my article, “What Is Freedom:““People who have no idea what individualism is or what I am about, which is most people, ask me why I seldom mention that freedom excludes the initiation of force against others or their property? My answer is because I am not writing to them, I’m writing to and for independent individualists. “Individualists not only have no interest in initiating force against anyone, they have no interested at all in the affairs of others or how they live their lives, so long as they do not interfere in the individualists’ lives. Individualists are no threat to anyone except those who make the mistake of threatening them. I do not need to remind them of a principle which is already fundamental to the kind of people they are.”

For the only kind of people in the world for whom freedom is truly possible, the so-called “non-aggression” principle is actually an insult. It is an insult in the same way all laws are insults to any decent man of integrity who would never dream of doing the kind of thing that are outlawed. The independent individualist does not need to be told not to steal, not to use force against anyone else, or not to murder. The individualist could not bring himself to act in any of those self-demoting, dependent, self-destructive ways. The most important thing to know for the individualist is that he is totally competent to live his life successfully and happily entirely by his own ability and efforts. Nothing would crush the life out of the individualist more quickly than the thought he was dependent on any another human being for his life, his welfare, or his happiness.

Of course the use of force by one human being against another is wrong. But so is taking poison wrong if one intends to remain healthy and live. The, “non- agression principle,” has no more meaning to an independent individualist than a “non-taking-of-poison principle,” would have. Both are banalities.