2. Human Experience

Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.

George Washington, Of the Origin and Design of Government

All human experience is individual experience. The world is seen by our individual set of eyes, felt by our individual nervous system, and experienced by our individual lives. Regardless of what authorities tell us, the truth of the world is our own individual truth.

We may speak of nations having a “national experience,” but that is pure metaphor, generalizing about the individual experience of many of a nation’s individuals. Nations, societies, teams, and families can be referenced as units, but, essentially, these units are really just combinations of individuals who share a common interest. No nation really has eyes; no society has a set of ears; and no race of mankind has a conscience that makes it feel guilty. Only individuals actually experience an experience.

The individuality of our experience does not require that we justify our place in society with bottomless issues such as economic justice, good and bad, or some inherent right granted to us by nature. Stripping ourselves of all our fantasies of memberships that bestow upon us rights, obligations, and duties, we are left with the nakedness of our individual experience. As individuals we experience and as individuals we act. We need no justification or set of inherent rights to conduct ourselves as individuals – it is just something that we do as individuals.

The individual does not have to be a selfish one. Just as we experience sensual pleasures as individuals, we also experience love for our spouses and children and compassion for other people and animals. Both the sociopath and the saint are essentially individuals acting as individuals regardless of the direction their individualism direct them. Whether we experience our world as people serving ourselves or others, that experience is only experienced as individuals.

Man’s ability to experience and act as an individual is limited by the coercion of neighborhood bullies, governments, and other parties that use force against him. Liberty is the lack of these coercive forces. The more liberty man has from these coercive forces, the more he can act, for good or worse, as an experiencing individual – as a human being.

1. A Libertarian Philosophy

Mankind is at its best when it is most free. This will be clear if we grasp the principle of liberty. We must realize that the basic principle of our freedom is freedom to choose ...
Dante

Many of us have an intuition that there is something fundamentally correct about libertarianism but lack a solid philosophical grounding to support that sense of correctness. In addition to our intuition, there is the massive empirical evidence that the basic ideas of libertarianism promote an economic marketplace that is free, successful, and fairly just. Our willingness to accept a physically challenging universe as non-victims provides us with an appreciation for the importance of human liberty; however, we still long for an ultimate theoretical grounding to support what we know in our hearts is profoundly right.

It is the intention of this blog to provide the libertarian reader with an axiomatic grounding for his beliefs – one that is both solid in its principles and sufficiently simple in its logic to provide the besieged libertarian with a defense to those statist who claim some public right to his person and property.

Even the most carefully planned vessel of thought, however, can be wrecked upon the shoals that lie beneath the surface of such appealing terms as “rights,” “justice,” and “morality.” It is my hope that libertarianism can be anchored in a haven safer than that provided by those ideals that are so often resorted to by the entitled whiner demanding an end of his victimhood.

Rights are a favored ideal among the English-speaking world, having grounded our relatively libertarian idea of government upon the Magna Charta, common law, and the philosophies of John Locke, the Scottish Enlightenment, and the American founding fathers. Rights to our own persons and property, however, require a “giver of rights,” necessitating a religious faith in a world where faith is a libertarian’s individual choice. Belief in a giver of individual rights to our person requires an act of faith that can be countered by the secular statist’s faith in the giver of a society’s rights to our person. Rights, like justice and morality, require the leap of our individual faiths and therefore are not a sufficient grounding for our demands for liberty from other individuals.

In the following posts to this blog, I will assert a philosophical foundation of human liberty based not upon a deeper foundation of ideals that, themselves, require a still deeper foundation. The foundation that I will assert will be based upon the pragmatic but very radical idea that liberty is the only manner in which man can relate to his fellow man in peace and dignity. Every alternative to liberty is war.