Ask a 'statist' to define terms and it is okay to point out their inability, or blatant refusal, to do so. The crowd of government dissenters goes wild in patting themselves on their backs. A job well done for an echo chamber of diverse thought when compared to the crowd they just intellectually destroyed, so they say.
Ask a government dissenter to define terms and they spit in your face. "Go read a damned book, you fucktarded cuck!" They will continue on, "I don't have time to teach your lame ass. You're your own master and I can't teach you. I don’t have the time to babysit you and spoon feed you information you should be capable of looking up yourself. If you don’t have critical thinking skills, that’s not my problem and you probably deserve to die of starvation or a government bullet."
Now why is this? Why do these proclaimed advocates of liberty do this? I ask government dissenters why government supporters are sociopaths and the dissenters say, "Because they desire power over others."
I ask why they want this power and the common, average dissenter says, "Because they are government supporters."
What kind of critical thinking is that? The answer is in two parts. Often it is a combination of both, but sometimes one or the other.
-They don't understand what they are advocating in whole.
-They do understand what they are advocating in whole.
What does that mean? It means that advocates of government don't understand how to clearly define their positions and make them universally applicable. It means that they often understand in sentiment an idea, why it is more preferable and conducive to an environment that encouraged the production of real wealth* and freedom than coercive government. It means that such minds are still not entirely certain of how to explain their position in such a way that it is simple and shows a clear path of thought progression.
So what does this really mean of dissenters of government? It means they are too busy being part of a slightly more evolved thinking group for collective acceptance than the government supporters are in their thinking. Defining terms, understanding context, and recognizing the importance of making the time to communicate is the path of critical thinking.
Immediately assuming someone is trying to pick holes in an argument to simply break it and offer nothing else in return is 'bollocks.' However, if you are a government dissenter or supporter and you have created your own material explaining your position, share it!
It is one thing to tell another to read and educate themselves based on work others did and you read. It is another to help educate others with your own work or making the time to answer questions you understand now because of the work others did.
Either way, if you are serious about your philosophy you need to make the time if you are going to put it out there. All flash and show is what most people are when explaining their philosophies, pointing out books people should read, and not making the time for follow up. This is never truer than in situations where any advocate goes to demeaning the inquirer because they have questions.
This is why making time to understand beyond sentiment is so important. Feeling something is right is not the same as being able to show a clear path of thought progression from a feeling or hypothesis to a conclusion or final answer. Comprehensively breaking down an idea to show how each thought connects to each previous thought is more than showing your work on a mathematics test for linear equations.
On such tests it is paramount to show each step. It is collectively understood in the class what each step means and why it works. This is how many, but not most I argue, in the liberty movements teach others. But to an outsider never exposed to mathematics, it will all be a jumbled mess.
The outsider will need to know how to count, how to add and subtract, how to multiple and divide, and everything else including the PEMDAS to make sense of a simple linear equation involving all of the aforementioned concepts. This is why so many advocates of liberty, the dissenters of government, get in such a twist. They don’t recognize this necessity. They think they are being tricked somehow. And if they do, they don’t want to admit it for a variety of reason, often including the fact that being shown as nescient or needing further refinement in their arguments or teachings is taken as an attack, a sign of weakness in themselves.
However, that’s often times not even enough. Why? Because there will inevitably be the questions of infinite occurrence by those trying to troll or otherwise. These often involve ‘but what if ‘x’ happens in a special scenario?’ This is why understanding something else is of vital importance.
Teaching how to count is important. But teaching why we count or why we have morality, freedom, economics, etc. is far more important. This is the difference between teaching memorization of multiplication charts and teaching why the numbers multiplied together are really just groups of the numbers in the equation.
For example, three times five means that there are either three groups of five or there are five groups of three. If we break this down we can count all the single pieces in these groupings and arrive at the same answer as those who correctly memorized the multiplication chart or used a calculator.
Are you starting to see the hypocrisy in the popular liberty movements? They chastise and berate their targets for not being able to do something and then are found out through simple questioning to be guilty of the same problem. This is ‘inherent’, ‘axiomatic’, and ‘self evident’ in their usage of the three aforementioned words in this sentence when defining concepts such as self ownership, Natural Law, and freedom.
The cure to all of this is to stop worrying about memorizing what John Lock, Stefan Molyneux, Larken Rose, Murray Rothbard, Chris Cantwell, Julie Burowski, Mises, and others said or wrote. The cure is to learn how to break down concepts to their core foundations. Quoting to an advocate of government, a ‘statist’, what someone else said all day long when you are not willing to make the time to try to answer questions about the material you shared, let alone can’t fully define the concept well enough to explain it in your own words, only to mock and ridicule these people does far more damage than doing nothing at all.
I truly understand the anger and frustration behind waking up and seeing what government does for the first time. Often that unpleasantness lingers for months and years. And what is there to do about it?
Fully define your own philosophy. I did that in my eBooks, Liberty Defined and Morality Defined. Links below.) Continue to refine your philosophy. Learn it backwards and forwards. Then write about it! Talk about it! Share it! Find ways to control your mind. Learn patience and realize that such lessons are daily occurrences. They repeatable quests for you to conquer everyday in order to level up your intellectual integrity, fortitude, and control over the only thing that you can ever be totally free in, your mind!
This doesn’t mean stop interacting with others and discussing such topics. It simply means if we want to invest in making the world a more peaceful place, such things begin with ourselves.
-JLD
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