Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Like most things in my life, I can trace my problems with beliefs back to Robert Heinlein. Y’see, when I was just an impressionable kid I started reading RAH’s books, beginning with Starship Troopers. It was, is, and in all likelihood will forever be my favorite book (unless one of my kids writes something, dedicates it to Dear Ol’ Dad, [sorry Bob], and becomes instantly the greatest book ever written).

I remember ripping my way through it the first time in a sitting, falling into the narrative in a way that I’d never have thought possible. True there was a lot in there that I was just too young to fully grasp, and things that on later readings burned my butt but good. Heck, I was nearly an adult before I could go through it without gritting my teeth every few pages. It entertained me. Confronted me. But, most importantly, it made me question.

I was forced to ask myself why I felt the way that I did about things. And this is something that I ask every person who ever had a thought in their head. Why do you feel the way that you do? What is the foundation of your most strongly held beliefs? Do they hold up under scrutiny?

You see, it has come to me that most people that I know feel the way that they do about things because their parents, or friends, or mentors, have told them that they should, and they just never question it. Their opinions may as well have been handed down by God. The only problem with that, is that most of what they feel wasn’t handed down by God, but by man, and man is synonymous with failable.

I am an opinionated person. Anyone who knows me can readily attest that I feel things. In most cases not very strongly. If I’m not ready to fight over something, I generally couldn’t care about it. In other cases I feel with a fanaticism that can be publicly embarrassing. Religion, politics, and red-headed women, right?

What Heinlein did for me, and which I could never repay no matter that I should live to be 1,000, was make me question.

As a teenager I was an atheist. An angry one at that. I hated God (which is kinda funny: hating something that I didn’t even believe existed, but I digress), religion, religious people regardless of faith. It wasn’t until much later that I asked myself why, and started looking heavily into faith, belief, higher powers, and saw that my hate was misplaced. Heck, my arguments lost their footing upon closer inspection, eventually crumbling away when I saw so many overlapping theories between Creation and evolutionary sciences. On the one hand we have “Let there be light;” on the other the Big Bang. In another case we have Eve made from Adam’s rib; on the other we have single-celled organisms asexually reproducing. The list goes on and on, but you get my point.

Likewise I was forced to ask myself why I was the way I was politically. I was raised a conservative, with a strong distrust, if not outright dislike, of left-leaning persons (this last never left, as life has shown me more times than I can count that the further left-leaning the ideology, the most the holder of said ideology wants to own the lives, liberties, and persist of those surfs they deem beneath them). I never questioned why. Until I was about sixteen or so, and was given copies of L. Neil Smith’s The Probability Broach, and Dr. Victor Koman’s The Jehovah Contract. After that I was screwed. And any hope of peaceful nights were abandoned by family and friends who just wanted me to shut up and stop seeing political arguments everywhere.

The problem was that I wasn’t just seeing them everywhere. They were there. Like they’ve always been there. I was just too young to handle the information in a mature way. So the smallest things could set me off on rants that would leave me red-faced and raw. It didn’t matter where I was, if there was a fight to be had I had it. No matter who with. For those difficult years between when politics was discovered and rationality was embraced, I’d like to offer a blanket apology to anyone who stumbled across me. My bad.

So now I ask you: why do you feel the way you do? Whatever your loves and hates, why are they there? Are the words coming out of your mouth your own, or are you acting as the voice box by proxy of someone who knew you in your formative years? Are you really what you think you are, or is the real you waiting in the wings, afraid to show their face for fear of confrontation?

My advice? Look at yourself, at what you know to be true, and ask yourself why? Are you a liberal, conservative, Libertarian, Communist? Are you anti-gun, or were you just never given the choice? Are you a Socialist because someone told you that you were owed something earned by someone else, or because you don’t want to earn your own keep? Don’t be an extension of someone else, because they might not be worth it. Be yourself, know who you are, and embrace it, but never forget to ask why?