What’s this site all about?

By David McElroy · May 11, 2011

I don’t have any interest in starting a political movement. I just want to live life and be left alone as long as I’m peaceful with others. I’m trying to figure out how to do that. If you’re interested in doing the same — and if you want to do it without the shrill and angry confrontations of politics — I hope you’ll join me in a conversation that might lead to better lives for all of us.

My own political evolution is a long and twisting story. I grew up in a generally conservative household, but I was taught to be a political independent. I also learned — from school and from my own reading — to be an intensely patriotic kid. I believed in our political leaders. I believed in the political system. I believed in the morality of this country’s role in the world.

Over the years, I’ve lost faith in all of that, first for pragmatic reasons and later for moral reasons. At first, I thought the problems I saw could be solved by supporting one of the mainstream political parties, but I came to see that the mainstream parties are more alike than different, despite their rhetoric to the contrary. Next, I believed that supporting a libertarian approach to politics was the answer, but I came to see that it was impossible to talk people into doing the right thing. The more I thought about it, the more I saw that majoritarian systems can’t deliver what they claim, now or ever. Eventually, I discovered the basic moral truth that even if I could talk the majority into supporting my position, it’s immoral for me to impose it on others — and that is the central role of the state. Ultimately, the state is immoral.

If you’re still at a point where you believe in politics, I’m not here to talk you out of it. If you have an emotional attachment to the state, only you can decide you’re ready to give it up. If you believe in supporting a political party in order to avoid the chaos you believe would come about without the state, I’m not going to change your mind until you believe there are other alternatives to the chaos you envision.

But if you believe the state is both immoral and incompetent to protect the natural rights of individuals, maybe you’ve found the right place to connect with people who believe the same thing. I’m not interested in debating the state. I’m interested in finding ways to live peacefully without it.

I’d like to find a way to build a community of like-minded people who are also looking to find ways to live without the state. This is the beginning of my effort to do that. For now, I’ll be writing here and hoping the right people will find the site and get involved in commenting. In time, we might build a community through something like a message board. I’m not sure. I just know that the state isn’t going to come tumbling down until people believe they have an alternative to choose. This site is the beginning of my effort to find an alternative that works.

I don’t know what to tell you to expect. You’ll see a lot about the deficiencies of the state. There’ll certainly be some things about alternatives to the state. But you’ll see a lot that’s just “real life” from my point of view. You’ll see things that represent what’s important to me, such as animals and beauty and humor and my Christian faith.

I hope it will be entertaining. I hope it will be useful. Most of all, though, I hope it’s the beginning of meeting people who will become lifetime friends and partners in the effort to build better lives and a better world for everyone. We might not be able to change all of the world, but maybe we can change our corner of it.

I hope you’ll keep coming back.

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Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

Narcissists tend to turn their children into narcissists — and since a narcissist doesn’t realize he or she is a narcissist, there’s no bad intent. How does this happen? I watched a YouTube video over the weekend from an Australian psychologist who does a nice job of summarizing how it works. None of this is new to me, but I thought it was useful for those who haven’t spent years digging through books and articles about it. The same psychologist has an excellent summary of something which confuses a lot of people about narcissism. You’ve all seen examples of the loud, boisterous and overbearing narcissist, but what about the ones who are more introverted and vulnerable? This type is called a covert narcissist (or a vulnerable narcissist), and this is what my father was. In the first video, I strongly see myself in the ways my father treated me and in the second video, I see what my father was almost successful in making me become.

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