Time to face facts: Most people don’t really want individual liberty

By David McElroy · September 28, 2011

A new poll from Zogby is going to get plenty of attention in the next day or so, because it shows Herman Cain is the top presidential choice of 28 percent of GOP voters. My view is that it’s irrelevant and won’t hold any water, but I’ve been wrong many times before.

Rick Perry is at 18 percent and Mitt Romney at 17 percent. In fourth place is Ron Paul with 11 percent, and then there’s a host of others who really aren’t worth mentioning at the moment.

Writing at Human Events, a writer commented on Paul’s steady poll performance: “Paul’s the most solid performer in Zogby’s polling history for the 2012 GOP race — his 11% might as well be chiseled in stone.” While this sounds like a compliment, it’s more evidence of what I’ve been saying for some time. As much as I like Ron Paul — and would be quite happy if he won — he has no chance of winning.

It’s very simple. There is a very solid core of support for individual freedom. It’s right around 10 percent. It’s not going to get much bigger than that anytime soon. You can bemoan the fact. You can be angry. You can deny it. It’s not going to change. People just don’t want what you and I want. Period.

What do most people want? Well, they want politicians who will lie to them and tell them contradictory things and mess everything up even more. They want Rick Perry. Or Mitt Romney. Or Herman Cain. Or Barack Obama. Or whatever their particular flavor of the moment it. They want someone who will promise to do things that can’t be done, despite the fact that the previous people who’ve made the same promises couldn’t keep them, either.

The bulk of people out there want something for nothing. They want things and they want someone else to pay for them — usually “the rich.” They don’t like to see themselves that way, so they tell themselves that it’s “fair” for other people to pay for what they want. People who think like that are never going to vote for individual liberty, no matter how long or how hard you campaign. And this is why — in addition to the other reasons I’ve outlined before — Ron Paul can’t win. People don’t want what we want.

A rare candidate such as Ron Paul sounds to most people as though he’s from outer space. They don’t understand his reasoning. They don’t understand his positions. All they know is that he doesn’t say what they want to hear. The rest of the candidates are almost interchangeable. The will swap supporters as they shine and make gaffes, but for the most part, Paul will be the oddball. His supporters want him and nobody else. Everybody else wants pretty much anybody other than Ron Paul.

If you want to remain part of the majoritarian political system — and you want individual liberty — get used to losing. That’s what our ideas are going to keep doing when they’re presented for a majority vote. This isn’t cynicism. This isn’t defeatism. This is just reality.

If you want to be free, you have to find that freedom somewhere else. In the long run, it’s not going to come from election results.

Share on Social Networks

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.

Related Posts