Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Posted on March 5, 2018

I’ve often been accused of being incredibly optimistic.  And yes, it’s an accusation.  I find this very funny (in a dark way) since, as a chronic depressive I fight depression and despondence ALL the time.

But maybe it is because of that that I’ve grown used to giving myself reality checks.  If I trust my own internal clock, then I assume everything is going to rack and ruin and become too despondent to move or work, or really do anything.  Sometime in my mid-thirties, I learned to look at facts and test reality against facts.  Just like in my mid-forties I learned to check incipient paranoia born of having social anxiety and being forced into a public role by my profession.  (It runs like this, “No, Sarah, not everyone in that room hates you.  Most of them don’t know you yet.”)

So listen to me now as I repeat old words of wisdom: If you have a cloak, it is time to sell it and buy a sword.

No, I’m not calling for you to buy literal weapons.  That’s your business.  If you feel you need weapons get weapons.

No, I’m not saying we’re headed for a civil war, though I’ll admit that I was once more sure this time would pass without physical violence.  I still think physical violence will be regionalized, temporary, and not the norm.  This is a very large country.  Yes, violence will happen (has already happened) in pockets, but given the lack of clearly divided territories to go with the cold civil war, it can’t go hot in the conventional way.  It will go hot in spots, as the cold war did, and nasty in spots, too.

But it will go ideological and crazy all over.  It’s already doing so.  Those of us who hoped — not thought, but hoped — the left would find some sort of rationality when their great prophecy — the future is socialist/communist — was disproven, have been disappointed in stages.

Mostly we had hope after the fall of the soviet union, but it’s amazing how fast the left regrouped to claiming that the Soviet Union too, their paragon of “progressivism” for so many decades, was an example of “not real communism” and we would do it right next time.

Or perhaps it’s not amazing when you think about it.  After all, by the time the Soviet Union fell, the left had taken the heights of culture, from arts to social sciences, to academia, to opinion, to news, to even entertainment, including most genre writing (they were still rare in Romance, and that onslaught didn’t come till the late nineties, but mystery had had it — and plunged from the most widely read popular category to almost irrelevant — and science fiction was theirs except for a few, rare holdouts.)

People past middle age, as most boomers (most of the wave that crested into the heights of culture were boomers, for various demographic and cultural reasons) were then do not adapt quickly, and certainly they weren’t about to give up the leftist privilege that carried them to the heights sometimes in the absence of talent or even native intelligence.

So they reformed and proclaimed the gospel of Marx with twice as much fervor.  They worked on the image of “cool” more than anything.  The kids under their influence in the educational industrial complex never got to see the squalor, the sheer stupidity of the centrally controlled economy, only the icons of revolution.  And no one enlightened them on the true opinions of that photogenic mass murderer, Che Guevara.

But the kids aren’t as dedicated as you think.  Sure they parrot what they have to to get through, but those that remain true-believers into their thirties aren’t the brightest bulbs in the field (any field, and look at mine, will you?) and are usually either quite clearly “mean girls” and/or privileged into imbecilic incompetence.  Their vision isn’t going to set any field on fire.  It’s not going to reach the general public.  All they’re doing is attacking each other for the position of highest “virtue” and going down with the industries they’ve infested, as their model proves more and wrong in modelling reality.  (I keep thinking of the line in Independence Day, “They’re like locusts” because it’s true.  Because their philosophy can only stay intact by denying reality across the board, they destroy what they take, and as the divergence with reality becomes wider and wider, they’re destroying them faster and faster.)

But as it’s becoming more and more clear, the more they fail, the more they reach out to destroy us.  All they have are war tactics, and they’re going to play them to the end. Not against the enemies of the nation, not against those who truly threaten them, but against free men and women, and people who actually make things work.

Part of this is their philosophy of envy and the belief anyone successful is evil (because they know they’re not evil — ah! — and they can’t make anything work, so we must be using the power of evil for competence.)

Part of it is that if their philosophy is proven wrong, then everything they’ve been doing in the service of it — and some of it is like a demon’s resume — is obviously wrong.  They must look in the mirror and see the monster.  They’ll do anything to avoid that.

So the crazy is going to amp up.  The evil is going to amp up.  The wilful destruction of anything that works is going to amp up.  If free individuals can’t function, the collectivists don’t have to admit they;re wrong.

Sell your cloak and buy a sword.  Mere deflection will stop working.  I know I told all of you if you’re not comfortable coming out as conservative/libertarian, don’t do so, because I don’t want to jeopardize your livelihood, or your ability to make a difference.

But I predict you won’t long be left alone.  The left has lost the plot and become a rabid beast with no sense or proportion.  See the snow flakes calling for the death of “climate deniers.”  (You stupid shits, we know there is climate.  We know climate changed a lot over the history of the Earth, long before the existence of man.  And we know that regardless of whether there’s warming and/or it’s human-caused (and no, it’s not proven.) socialism is not the answer.  Educating yourself on the environmental disasters in Russia, China and now Venezuela would help.)

Be ready for when you have to join the fight.  Buy a sword.  Study history, study philosophy, study civics and the constitution.  Be ready to defend yourselves. Start a side business if you can so your livelihood is not something the left can take away.

Most of the reconquering of society is and will be ideological, a war of ideas.  Moving out of places where the cold civil war will go hot, if you can, is also not a bad idea.

Get ready to stand your ground.  Get ready decloak.

In the end we win they lose, or civilization is done for.

And some of us will not go gently into the progressive night.

 

Reprinted with permission from https://accordingtohoyt.com/2018/03/05/buying-a-sword/