I think I’m beginning to understand the whole notion behind voluntary relationships. I may even be close to breaking the hold the myth of family has over my own life.

The following quote is from a podcast by Stefan Molyneux in a series called FreeDomain Radio. In it, he discusses many topics, but the central theme is that of personal freedom. I’ve been catching up on the podcasts from the beginning of the series, of which there are almost 850 at the time of this writing, and each one averages about 40 minutes in length. While there certainly are developments along the way, this podcast series is the result of decades of study and introspection on Stefan’s part. While that doesn’t mean that what he says is true, the theories he puts forward seem to be empirically verifiable.

I can have a beautiful relationship with my wonderful wife and be perfectly happy while paying taxes. I cannot have a beautiful relationship with my wonderful wife if I am in touch and see and allow to infiltrate into my life my corrupt family. Paying taxes doesn’t destroy my capacity to love and to be loved and to experience joy and to experience real freedom. Paying taxes doesn’t do that! Having corrupt people in your life does that. Kills your capacity to love. Kills you capacity for self-respect, for self-esteem. For honor. For dignity. For looking in the mirror and feeling proud about who you are. Paying taxes doesn’t diminish that! See, that’s coercion! I don’t surrender a shred of my self esteem to people who point guns at me! Yeah, fuck, take the money. I don’t care. I don’t care! Take the fucking money and leave me alone. Right? But family stuff is voluntary, so you’re morally culpable for surrendering your moral integrity to your family. You have a choice! Your family’s not going to shoot you! Ah, government will shoot you, so pay the goddamn taxes, who gives a shit? You still get love, you still get freedom; you still get podcasting; you still get reading books; you still get great debates; you get everything that you want. You just gotta pay off some assholes with guns.”

- FDR450: Libertopia (51:56-53:27)

The way that this speaks to me is that I used to be very irritated with the predation of the government. It’s not that I don’t think that it is evil any longer, but there’s absolutely nothing I can do to control it. What I do have control over, however, are the relationships that I maintain in my life.

I might talk about how I got to where I am at some point, but I think that I should take a little more time in thinking and discussing these issues in private/semi-private environs (which is perhaps in contrast with what I’ve done in some of my more recent livejournal posts). It’s not that I don’t want to share this with the world… but I think that if I’m going to talk about it, perhaps I had better be living it.

There are things that I should have done years ago–things that I knew I needed to do–but I didn’t have the ego strength or the philosophical tools to do them. I am much closer now, but this sort of thing takes time. It’s not a race, except for the realization that every day I spend not having had it done is another day of my life that is gone. However, this is so important that I ought to make sure that, when I do it, I know I’m doing it right and for the right reasons. I do think that I am very close.

What is reality?

Reality is not what can be imagined. Reality is what is.
Reality is not what can be possible. Reality is what is.

Reality is what we can see, hear, taste, smell, touch… it is what anybody can identify.

Reality is represented in our dreams.

Reality is our emotions.
Reality is our love, hate, joy, anger.

Reality is not Family.
Reality is not Government.
Reality is not God.

Reality is not arbitrary.

I don’t pretend to be comprehensive, but I do, of course, wish for everybody to recognize reality for what it is… and would accept and appreciate any cogent challenges.

My breakfast order was screwed up (again) by Dunkin Donuts. They put my egg sammich on a croissant (I don’t like their croissants) and they gave me a large instead of an XL tea. I just won’t visit that location anymore as this isn’t the first time they’ve screwed up my order.

The sad part, however, is that their coffee tastes better than the Ashland version’s coffee.

It’s so hard to get a good cup of coffee up here.

… but this is the first time I’ve ever been cited! It’s kind of exciting and a little unnerving. I mean, somebody took something I did seriously enough to use it as support for their work. For further details, check out http://james.pyrich.com/projects/coins.shtml

For the past few days, I had the desire to watch “The Incredibles,” so last night I sat down and plunked it in the DVD player. I’ve seen it a number of times prior, each time impressed with the art, the writing, and the acting. This time around, however, I noticed something else in the movie. The way the parents–especially Helen Parr/Elastigirl–acted towards the children was rather depressing.

I know, part of the movie was to show how the “supers” were really just like everybody else, how they had exactly the same sort of lives we do except for the minor fact that they’ve got, well, superpowers. Helen lashed out at her children in anger, made ridiculous threats (“calm down or you’re grounded for a month!” in a life-or-death situation), spun lies to her children (“everybody’s special, Dash”). She was the driving force in suppressing her children’s natural abilities, and Violet’s depression and Dash’s “unruly” behavior are to be expected. The argument goes that it would be “unwise” to display one’s powers in public, which is essentially used as a club to beat her children into submission. The premise that “society” as a whole would rise up against the “supers” is pretty shaky, and I’m not sure that, outside of a movie, such a situation would take place.

There’s probably more to say on the topic, but I’d actually have to go back and take notes, I think, and I’m not interested enough in the topic to do that right now. One final note, however: Bob Parr has a confessional, and I’m sure that it was appropriate to a degree, especially considering that he was not making his family his highest priority (though I wouldn’t go so far as to say that his own passions must take an absolute back seat; surely there’s enough room in life to accomodate family and passion, but I’m still a bit unsure on this one). However, Helen never had anything remotely similar. Shouldn’t Helen have had a similar confessional, apologizing profusely for using false pretenses to hold everybody back from realizing their full potential? Shouldn’t she have apologized for meekly bowing to the demands of society instead of standing up for what is right? Even near the end, right before the final battle, she was running roughshod over Bob, who was struggling to find the words to express himself. I’m just not sure that Helen has very many redeeming characteristics at that point, and I never get the sense that she feels she needs to apologize for her behavior.

Don’t get me wrong–I really do like “The Incredibles.” The interaction between the parents and the children isn’t something that’s specific to this movie, so I’m not sure if it’s worth much more analysis. I just feel that, looking back on it, it would have been outstanding if Helen had also shown some growth.

I’ve been hearing the term “de-normalizing” with regards to childhood events lately, but it never really clicked what exactly it meant. This occurred to me (though it is probably a synthesis of what I’ve heard thus far): “De-normalizing” is the process of realizing “the way things were” is not “the way things are.”

Pithy, isn’t it? What I mean by that is that the horrible things that happened to us when we were children obviously did happen–it’s “the way things were.” However, simply because they happened is not reason to believe that it’s “the way things are.”

So, if your father hit you, yelled at you, lied to you, criticized you, neglected you, and had no respect for you, that doesn’t mean that you should make excuses for his behavior. An individual who treats a child like that is not a good person. Any such individual has refused to face the pain in their own lives and has, instead, inflicted it upon his child. In so doing, he damages his child and hampers his child’s ability to break the chain.

By way of analogy, our bodies are generally healthy. When we get sick, that’s a deviation from “the way things are.” There are chronic ailments, of course, but we are aware of these primarily because we can compare them to “the way things are.”

We don’t really have any way to compare our childhoods to healthy ones, so it’s kind of like being a plague victim in a society where nearly everybody else is afflicted with the plague. Some people have it far worse, for sure, but nearly everybody is tainted in one way or another. Since nearly everybody you meet is sick with this plague, coming across somebody who has managed to beat the plague is startling, even frightening. “You mean you don’t have open sores all over your body? What is wrong with you???” Sure, the few who aren’t sick with the plague have scars, but they’re able to do so much more than those who are sick with the plague, their potential seems almost limitless.

The biggest difference between the plague and how we raise our children is that we determine whether or not our children will grow up infected or not.

I confess that I do not know how this will play out… if and when I become a father, will I be able to refrain from the negatives I listed above (all of which happened to me, by the way) and provide a loving home for my child, treating them as I would have wanted to be treated, not as I was treated? Will I be able to act automatically not from the basis of pain, but from the basis of strength and personal power? I certainly hope so; more than that, I fully intend to do so, and when I make mistakes (especially then) be open and honest about it, because it is a secret to nobody.

Rejoice! For I have located independent financial gainfulness!

I’ve probably got quite the nice set of buttons on display for other people to press. Some of them I am aware of, others I suppose I choose to ignore. One such button that’s been getting pressed is the accusation that I am supporting violence.

Now, life isn’t, like, a court of law or something. One need not back up everything one claims with proof beyond a reasonable doubt. However, if I’m in a philosophy forum, I need to give a little more “oomph” to my claims than mere repetition. In this particular case, I asked a question regarding voluntary government. Basically, if taxation were voluntary, then what would stop a competing agency from setting up shop? Some guy interpreted that as supporting violence.

Now, that bothered me somewhat, because, well, that’s a pretty serious charge. The guy is saying that I want to go around maiming and killing people based on what I said. Instead of hauling off or anything, I asked him to clarify while offering a clarification of my statement and question. He refused to clarify and repeated his question. I wanted to see something very specific: I wanted to see how he got “initiation of force” from my statement about “voluntary” actions. I did not want to guess at it, because I think that, given that we are all (presumably) adults here, he ought to be able to speak for himself. So, I asked him directly what I was looking for. He refused again, taking yet another sophistic pose while reiterating his accusation.

There really wasn’t anywhere else to go in the discussion. I thought I had made reasonable requests for further information, and I did not attack him at all. I expressed displeasure at his words, but that’s not the same thing as comparing me to a murderous thug. Perhaps I should have expressed my offense more, but I’m not sure how that would have made a difference. It would have most probably served as some sort of twisted “confirmation” that because I got offended, he was right in what he was saying. (You know that old canard from the Life of Brian where Brian denies that he’s the messiah, and the people say, “Only the Messiah would say that!” and then he says that he is the messiah wherein the crowd bursts into rejoicing because he’s admitted that he’s the Messiah. Same sort of thing.)

I mean, it’s pretty clear that the guy is, for whatever reason, just trying to push my buttons… it’s just pretty difficult to take such an accusation with absolute equanimity. When I requested his reasoning for said accusation, he refused to let me in on his little secret. I mean, what else is there to do but to say, effectively, that the conversation is over? He’s clearly not interested in actually having a discussion–he just wants to throw accusations around.

I mean… really. I want to have discussions. I want to have conversations. If I can’t have those, I will just find other things to do with my time (which, at the moment, seems to be complaining about how I was unable to have a discussion or a conversation today ).

What came first — the atheist or the childless home?

Part of me doesn’t even think this article deserves any comment, but the other part of me is nudging me, saying, “c’mon, you know you want to.”

The hypothesis put forward is: the decline in fertility is the cause of secularization. Apparently, this is some sort of reversal, but I don’t know anybody that is claiming the opposite (it seems to be one of those “common sense” things that, when you think about it, really doesn’t make any sense).

I would posit that the two trends–declining religiosity and declining birthrates (among whites, anyway)–are related, but not causally related. If there is a causal link between them, I would say that it’s a relatively weak influence in comparison to what I’m going to propose.

Obviously, the reasons why people decide to identify themselves with atheism are varied. For me, it was about intellectual honesty and consistency, but I might be in the minority. However, the general trend of being very religious has a fairly strong inverse correlation with individual happiness. The best system so far for producing individual happiness is the free market (this has a very specific definition and does not include corporatism nor mercantilism, also known as fascism). Basically, if your needs are provided for and you are generally happy, you do not need to spend your time being religious as there is nothing for you to escape.

The overall decline of birthrate is related to the rise of the free market as well. Prior to industrialization, if you wanted to have children support you in your old age, you needed to have quite a lot of them, especially since many of them died in infancy and childhood. As medicine improved and the free market began to open up more opportunities for people (less grueling work and higher-paying jobs), people did not need to have as many children in order to survive. There are, of course, other reasons to have children, but this is definitely a factor.

However, as time went on and state power grew (that is, the level of taxation increased), it became that much more difficult for people to have more children than they might have had otherwise. At the very bottom of the rung, of course, we are aware of the welfare-mom stereotype, which is another effect of state power and would most likely not survive very long if the welfare system was not around.

The biggest blow came when the workforce was opened to women. Instead of increasing overall household income, the state was able to raise taxes to the point where both parents in many homes had to work. The option of staying home was severely curtailed for a large number of workers, and so, one may well decide to not have children at all in order to spare them the latchkey child scenario.

If there is a causal link between religiosity and fertility, it pales in comparison to the forces of the free market, which provide positive incentives to have fewer children (reduced necessity for elderly care, better quality of life overall for all concerned), and to the forces of the state, which provide negative incentives to have fewer children (increased taxation, forcing both parents to work just to get by), unless, of course, you are on welfare, in which case your children will almost certainly live their adult lives in the same situation and will almost certainly not escape from it.

It would be one thing if these people came to that forum to discuss and debate the issues, but they don’t. Instead, they come to yell, scream, and spit their statements all over the place, and if you dare point out their inconsistencies, they get incredibly upset and repeat themselves ad nauseum.

I know; pot, kettle, black, right? Hah. I don’t think so.

I like this one forum I’ve found, and there are a lot of intelligent people there… I just hope that the people who are currently suspending their intelligence begin using it or start their own forums where they can hear themselves talk all they want… hey, like a blog, yeah!!!

I know, I know… I don’t have to read or respond to their posts… but it’s challenging to resist when one of them says something so asinine…

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