David McElroy

I kept thinking this week about the scenario I mentioned a few days ago about slaves wanting to escape. It occurs to me that this metaphor works for many of the situations in our lives. What lessons can we draw from it?

My mind keeps going back to those plantation slaves a couple of centuries ago. There were many of them. There were few people guarding them. Why didn’t more of them escape? Or at least make serious attempts?

The answer I keep coming to disturbs me, because it condemns me for things I’ve done at various points in my own life — maybe even including the present — because it suggests that the reason is fear and a cowardly need to be certain. Escaping doesn’t come through fear or chasing certainty. It comes from exercising openness and faith. Most of us are naturally afraid of the uncertainty in the distance, so we cling to whatever kind of bondage we’ve gotten ourselves into.

There are a lot of things I’m not certain about. In fact, “I don’t know,” is something I say frequently — and I’m comfortable with that. I know that if I insist on certainty before I take a risk, I’m dooming myself to a kind of misery stuck with what I have. I say that because I’ve done it before.

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In his 1925 book, “Mein Kampf,” Adolph Hitler explained what he famously called “the big lie.” He said that if you tell a lie that’s big enough, people will believe it, because they have trouble believing someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” Even though he wrote 86 years ago, that’s the heart of the playbook of modern politics.

The latest example is an attack launched by some progressive left liberal sites on Rick Perry. Nobody could accuse me of being a Perry sympathizer, but I’m a big fan of the truth. The accusation from PoliticusUSA and DailyKos is nothing but the Big Lie. Here’s the lede on the DailyKos story:

“It seems that the GOP’s present white savior, Rick Perry, has a BIG porno problem. Back in 1995, when his bouffant hairdo was barely all the rage, Rick Perry invested thousands of dollars into Movie Gallery, Inc, a porn distributor company. It was the largest distributor of porn movies, and was even opposed by the conservative American Family Association….”

That sounds pretty dramatic and clear-cut. It would be pretty hypocritical of conservative Christian-talking Perry, wouldn’t it? The problem is that it’s misleading at best. Movie Gallery wasn’t a “porn distributor company.” It was a huge Alabama-based company that became the second largest movie rental chain in the country. It was Blockbuster‘s biggest competitor, back when movie rental chains still mattered.

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What’s the difference between a libertarian and an anarchist? About 10 years.

It’s an old joke — and there are variations of it — but there’s some truth to it, because it’s a story that I’ve heard a number of times. In fact, it’s my story, too.

Most of us who’ve completely give up on the state started out in one of the mainstream political parties and then converted to the Libertarian Party, because we concluded that smaller government made sense and that there should be no distinction between economic and personal liberty. Republicans talk a good game about economic freedom, but they want to control your personal life. Democrats mostly talk a good game about personal (social) freedom, but they want to control your economic life. We see the contradiction of either of those positions, so we begin advocating the libertarian ideal of small government and freedom in all areas. For many of us, though, there’s a further step.

If you oppose government control on philosophical grounds, you soon run up against the issue of whether any form of the state can be morally justified. For many of us, we’ve reluctantly had to come to the conclusion that the state is immoral. Not just a “big state.” It applies to any state that claims the power to rule over the people and property that happens to fall within a certain geographical area — unless those people are there by their own choice and if they have other realistic choices.

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