Drugs, Homosexuals, and Pornography

Libertarians, minarchists, anarchists, and all other varieties of anti-state individual liberty promoters are accused of just wanting to be free to take drugs, or to promote, “same-sex marriage,” or to use and make pornography. I do not think any of these accusations are correct, but I do agree that too much liberty-promoting literature dwells on such non-issues. They have nothing to do with individual freedom.

All state oppression is wrong. It is immoral to use force to prevent anyone from living as they choose so long as they are not themselves using force against anyone else. How someone chooses to ruin their life, if they do, is their own business. Why those who understand that individual freedom is a necessity for human beings to live happily and successfully in this world are concerned about those whose own practices preclude achieving the highest possible levels of human life, for whom, “freedom,” can only mean “freedom to fail,” bewilders me. I have no interest in precluding those who choose to ruin their bodies with drugs, or ruin their lives pursuing hedonistic passions, or ruin their minds with intellectual poison, from doing so, and I’m sorry we live in a world where so many desire to control other people’s lives, but my interest in freedom is not in freeing others, especially not freeing them so they can enslave themselves to their own irrational desires; my interest in freedom is for all those who choose to be free and rational in every aspect of their lives seeking to achieve and be the highest and best that is possible to them.

Now the Alliance of the Libertarian Left says they are united with other such groups, “by an opposition to statism and militarism, to cultural intolerance (including sexism, racism, and homophobia) ….” [Emphasis mine.]

To be truly free includes being free to be intolerant. There are many “cultural” things to which any civilized individual will be intolerant, in the sense, they will chose not to tolerate such things to interfere with their own life or consciousness.

Freedom will never be realized by a perpetual struggle against every possible threat to it. Being in opposition to every wrong one sees in the world is a negative approach to freedom. Freedom is a positive value to be achieved. The difference is analogous to the difference between those who see life as the negative struggle to avoid pain and suffering versus those who see life as the positive pursuit of joy and happiness.

There is confusion in this whole so-called “libertarian” approach. When someone wants to put over something wrong, one method is to offer a mixed bag of disparities, some of which any moral individual must embrace and some any moral individual must oppose, such as the moral reprehensible concept of racism mixed with the pseudo-concept of “homophobia” made up solely to repudiate those who have objective grounds for considering homosexuality as abnormal and self-destructive; or the worse mixture of “statism and militarism,” collective concepts which have no meaning outside the concept of government mixed with, “cultural intolerance,” which is a totally private and personal matter.

Stick To The Plot

If what you want is to be part of some movement or program regarded as important in the “struggle against the state and the establishment of a free society,” then join and support any one of the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of such movements and programs. Do not confuse that, however, with a pursuit of individual freedom, for yourself or anyone else.

The pursuit of freedom is not a collective enterprise, it is, like freedom itself, only for individuals and only by individuals, or as Ayn Rand put it:

“While men are still pondering upon the causes of the rise and fall of civilizations, every page of history cries to us that there is but one source of progress [or freedom]: Individual Man in independent action.” [For the New Intellectual, “The Fountainhead, The Soul Of An Individualist.”]

If it is freedom you want, do not squander your time and your effort pursuing collective programs which will never make you or anyone else free. Seek your own freedom, and you can be free, as an independent individual. Most of the articles in Daily Freedom will provide you with principles and practical means for establishing your own freedom. The first step is to stop saying or thinking it cannot be done. Others have done it, and so can you, if you stick to the plot and let nothing get in your way.