May the SNaP Be with You, Part 1 Shouting it from the rafters and
taking it to the streets...
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace. — John Lennon
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Note: Much of the following appears in Chapter 5 of my upcoming book, The Sacred Nonaggression Principle, and in its advance "field manual."
In the former installments we've proceeded from the general uneasiness that freedom-sensitive people feel, to who we (and they) are, to the spiritual calling toward liberty that comes from our kindergarten lessons, finally to the "sacred argument" that insofar as the nonaggression principle goes... there is none higher. In this chapter we come to the fueling of a grass roots movement dedicated to that proposition.
Benefits and Vision
The words of John Lennon come to mind... at least in terms of what he imagined a world of peace would look like. The music and lyric also reach deep into our hearts as human beings. In the standard method of selling something, the good salesman helps the customer realize how wonderful life will be with what he's getting; so putting my salesman's cap on, I'm going to run down the list:
Spiritual awakening
This is the best place to start discussing benefits of the SNaP... and too often advocates of liberty don't bother to mention it: a society based on the nonaggression principle promotes optimum spiritual health. My writing, mainly thru this column and the book and movie reviews over the previous two or three years, has led to an increased appreciation of the "whatever do you want liberty for?" sensibility.
Probably when I picked up and read, then reviewed, Eckhart Tolle's "neobuddhist" missive, The Power of Now, it dawned on me most strongly that what's most important in life is that we become 'the unique soul inhabiting the biological machinery known as <our name>:' recognize that we are not our minds, and that virtually everyone from whatever circumstance can achieve a presence and inner peace that, as Jesus says, "passes all understanding."
Here's the quote I'll leave you with because it captures my point succinctly: Tolle came to this transformation of consciousness in his 30s following what many would characterize as a mental breakdown. He "spent almost two years sitting on park benches in a state of the most intense joy," then:
"Later, people would occasionally come up to me and say: 'I want what you have. Can you give it to me, or show me how to get it?' And I would say: 'You have it already. You just can't feel it because your mind is making too much noise.'"
That answer then led to The Power of Now and to Eckhart's decision to embrace a new external identity: to become a spiritual teacher.
My own introduction to the Tolleian Way came by way of a libertarian-left alternative money guru, Thomas Greco... who had managed to pen an article on money for the Liberty Dollar Solution book that I received for becoming a Liberty Dollar associate. [which I gravitated toward thru becoming a Free State Project 'early mover,' as a consequence of rethinking the Libertarian Party, in which I had long been active as a consequence of the radical individualism of Ayn Rand, going back to the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign in junior high... and initially from Mom teaching me to read and Dad supporting me when I stuck up for Larry McKinney in kindergarten against the teacher and the whole class.]
The thread
to the understanding that ultimately leads to the ultimateunderstanding must remain unfettered. I am wholly convinced there is a one-to-one connection between spiritual fulfillment and the Sacred Nonaggression Principle. Each is the sine qua non of the other. If you've already achieved some degree of enlightenment, then by embracing the SNaP you assure that the light you share will be received by the maximum number of kindred souls. If you're beginning down the trail of freedom, then the SNaP will quickly answer "whatever do you want liberty for?".
Another look at the "human growth curve" view of the SNaPstrip:
Thus perhaps the greatest benefit of the Sacred Nonaggression Principle is a society in which the greatest number of individuals are free to "come alive," to reach their own constellation of understanding of themselves in the cosmos. Note: I don't want to rain on anyone's parade but, as pointed out by Sam Harris in The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, spiritual enlightenment is not obtainable through primitive, authoritarian methods or base concepts of the supernatural. Indeed, enlightenment is solely the handmaiden of natural reason and knowledge.
A world without war
Probably I should have made the connection earlier between SNaP-w/o-exception and the many benefits it can bring. Clearly, if the human species is united by the moral conviction that aggression is wholly unacceptable—not okay person to person, not okay government to person, and not okay government to government—then we can pretty much say a farewell to arms... at least to the extent any weapons are used as implements of war.
I mean, if you take away the aggression of central states and local governments, who's left to worry about? A handful of guys who insist on being different, who defy social convention and rob a party store or shoot up a post office. Quite seriously, the number of individuals in any society who choose to initiate force against others, thus becoming true criminals, is infinitesimal. Plus, if you take away the drug laws, who's going to want to steal to support a habit that costs pennies a day... especially in places like New Hampshire where large numbers of potential victims are armed and prepared to defend themselves?
So let's imagine a world without war. What are the international banksters going to do for beer money?[1]I don't know about you, but the thought of no more broken bodies, no more broken minds, no more torture chambers and napalm, no more aerial bombings, no more nonaerial bombings for god and country gives me goosebumps. The prospect of the end of nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, all the weapons of mass destruction gives me a megabuzz.
No more FEAR. No more HATRED. No more mindless, arbitrary DEATH and DESTRUCTION. "My family will not be torn apart because I pray to a different god, belong to a different ethnic group, or smoke pot in the privacy of my home." There will be chills... and chilled mugs raised across all the borders of the whole civilized world in a universal toast. Then the average citizen will start wondering, "Hey, what's with all these damned 'borders,' anyway?!"
Is peace really possible?
The reader may object that by assuming the end of aggression in society, especially the end of aggression by one society against another, I'm setting up an unrealistic premise. Even if one's own country saw the benefit for outlawing aggression, it's foolish to assume that other countries would lay down their swords.
But consider that once slavery was acceptable throughout the world, and now it's only practiced in a few barbarian backwaters. In the civilized world, slavery is no more, nor... I was going to say the evils of taxation and wholesale government/corporate-state aggression have ended, too. But, see, since slavery ended we haven't made a lot of progress on other kinds of aggression. We've been tricked by the "They1" elites into thinking governments must aggress. With the SNaP, that will change:
Two points: a) "there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come"[2] (just as slavery was swept away by moral enlightenment, so, too, shall the general legitimacy of aggression be overcome), and b)
the human race is growing in consciousness daily and is on the threshold of realizing how humanity has been deceived by the <central dominating power>—which I've given the name Kleptocons. The SNaP is the concept the Ks fear most, as the archetype of the "idea whose time has come."
I stated above, "...the number of individuals in any society who choose to initiate force against others, thus becoming true criminals, is infinitesimal. Plus, if you take away the drug laws, who's going to want to steal to support a habit that costs pennies a day... especially in places like New Hampshire where most victims are armed and prepared to defend themselves—not to mention their neighbors?"
We don't need a lot of protection from the few individuals who might be inclined to aggress.
When you come at the problem this way, the fact that America has turned into a total police state hits you like a ton of bricks. We're literally being buried in cops and prisons, like some medieval fiefdom. Worse: we hold more documented inmates in state and federal prisons than any other country in the world.[3] I'm not going to bore the reader with details here, because everyone can Google 'em. It's not rocket science; a slow five-year-old can tell you the big reason: the War on Drugs (WOD).
My freedom associate, anti-WOD activist extraordinaire, and Washington lobbyist for Law Enforcement against Prohibition (LEAP), Howard Wooldridge, recently testified to a George Mason University forum on crime policy:
‘As a Michigan police detective, a solid 70% of my felony case load touched crimes related to modern prohibition/war on drugs. Have any of you ever done any research or know of any research that shows how much felony crime would be reduced, if we repealed modern prohibition and these illegal drugs were sold like alcohol and cigarettes?’
As someone who has had his own issues with the WOD, I
second Howard's statement. And I would offer the wholistic libertarian perspective that if you throw out all the other consensual crimes in the prosecutorial soup—and crimes that occur because of the distorted economics of government prohibition and government compulsion—then the only prison-worthy individuals remaining are the dumbest of the dumb (crime really doesn't pay when everything you want to commit a crime for is cheap) and the sickest of the sick (whack jobs will always be with us, but they won't whack so many when cops aren't out busting stoners). QED.
The overwhelming percentage of crime we see today, 95-99% (and a corresponding percentage
of the prison population), is caused by the state's violation of the SNaP: by the government's creation of a class of actions that it calls crime but which are not aggression, and then again by violating the SNaP thru initiating force against those who disobey its noncrime crimes. We discussed in an earlier column some of the framework behind why the state violates the SNaP in such a wholesale manner, and there are signs that the WOD is going to come to an end fairly soon.[4]
But the point of this section is the SNaP will basically put an end to street crime and to every other form of crime we're right to be concerned about. As a consequence, the streets will be safe. The Popsicle Index—which is Catherine Fitts' measure of how confident a community is that its children can walk to a store alone several blocks away, buy a popsicle, and return safely home—will approach 100% for every community worldwide.
Imagine living in a city or a country town with absolutely no expectation of crime, no thought of aggression. Remember, we've convinced everyone, but particularly government officials, that the nonaggression principle is sacred and inviolate. Not only can you enjoy walking, shopping, dining, but your children can play without the slightest fear. Indeed, where I grew up in the 1950s that's the way it was, so I know the SNaP society can be achieved on the level where people actually live.
And what do we have to do to receive this immense benefit of public confidence and peaceful communities: Simple, spread and inculcate the SNaP. "There is none higher."
Note: Let me point out that when our communities become aggression-free, especially when the governments of our communities become aggression-free, then our countries—and our countries' governments—become aggression free. When our countries become aggression-free, the world achieves peace. Further, it works the other way around: a world without aggression fosters communities without aggression.
The connection between safe streets and world peace needs to be made repeatedly. The connection only occurs through the SNaP. The same sacred principle is the foundation of both.
Abundance
We can look at the prospect of material wealth from two different angles:
From the standpoint of the amount of wealth transferred to the "They" side of the SNaPstrip (particularly to the money power represented as They1) from the remainder of humanity represented in the other domains. Please refer to the figure below.
Considering America only, looking at a few key areas of obvious wealth transfer from the productive class of Americans to the political classes—money that is relatively easy to identify currently and assess how much it is.
First, let's imagine an abundant world, let's say where your real income rises an order of magnitude—which colloquially we usually mean 10 to 1. So if you're making $10,000 a year (in today's rapidly declining-value dollars) you would be making $100,000 a year; or if making $100K the amount would go to $1 million. If you read the futurist literature[5] and other works on hopeful technology, you'll realize that such prospects of a 10:1 improvement in wealth are probably on the low side. But let's use it for imagination purposes. Imagine then that your major financial issues are gone: you can educate your kids, take care of your mother-in-law, buy the latest Taylor-Made golf clubs, and get that hair transplant.
Seriously, though, if you experienced a 1000% increase in your wealth, wouldn't that take a big load off your mind and put a sweet song in your heart? Well, according to some pretty good estimates from people who have been close to the subject, if you end the federal government's three largest wealth-killer programs (which violate the SNaP outrageously)—the WOD, the (real) wars and associated unconstitutional military empire, and the prohibition on nonpsychoactive agricultural hemp—the net benefit to the American public is $1 trillion/year per program or $3 trillion/year total.
Okay, so the average benefit of the savings from the Big 3 is only $10,000 per year ($3 trillion ÷ 300 million) per man, woman, and child, but you can see where I'm going with this. The bennie is available practically immediately, and if you do want to tap into the extraordinary wealth fraudulently transferred to the elites over the years—estimated in the $100s of trillions—with a vigorous citizens' wealth-recovery program, each American stands to recover hundreds of thousand of dollars.
QED.
And what do we have to do to receive this immense benefit of abundance that should always have been ours: Simple, spread and inculcate the SNaP. "There is none higher."
Spreading and Inculcating the SNaP
Let me start with my "We1" friends in the freedom community. We know that the controlled media and the controlled corporate-state centralized powers are going to continue to work against us. We know they hate everything about this SNaP thing, because it's a virus for which they have no vaccine... nor any prospect of an antidote should the virus spread throughout humanity quickly. Fortunately, we can count on the mind-control machinery within the security-state establishment to ignore us for these critical initial months—probably even a year—while the SNaP program moves like a wildfire through the body politic.
By the time the agents of "the Matrix" figure out what the SNaP is and how dangerous it is to their <central dominating entity>, it will be too late for that entity. The nuts will be off the buggy. Indeed, I sort of feel that it will be too late for them at the point this SNaP book is published (in about two weeks) or posted on my site: even with an economic meltdown, martial law, imprisonment of libertarian leaders, 24/7 MSM propaganda (well, we already have that), and the other tools at the Matrix's disposal... the Matrix seems doomed by the simple SNaP.
But we must spread the word quickly in a focused, professional manner.
Activists who are reading these lines are the first
wave of "attack,"[6] and I'd like to see our approach incorporate the "indirect strategy" as much as possible. I.e., instead of first bringing the book and its central ideas to the attention of the general public by means of a conventional publishing and promotion process, let us instead approach initially, mainly units of local government and the public servants thereof. These are the people who have occasion to be violating the SNaP without full knowledge or intention, and whom we can best convince to consider a better way.
Step 1: Launch
The first step occurs
with the SNaP presentation coming at the Free State Liberty Forum in Nashua, New Hampshire. I will be presenting at the AltExpo area, which will be open admission. Unless something goes wrong, the SNaP field manual book will be available in paperback there. It will be a good opportunity, for everyone who is interested, to meet, and I will definitely look forward to getting feedback to inform the next steps.
Step 2: Approaching local public officials
Individuals who wish to participate in the program buy a small number of books—don't worry, I expect we'll get some decent bulk-rate publishers to hopefully bring the price down to ~$1 or $2 apiece—and spread them intelligently to your neighbors and to your town and city officials at the next town or city meeting.
The next column in this series will contain more detail on the strategy of developing relationships with people in local government... from the perspective of turning them toward the SNaP.
Step 3: Approaching teachers and law enforcement
Most of my thinking on strategy is conveyed in the next column. Within that column I particularly draw attention to the SNaP for the teaching and law enforcement areas. Additional materials for promotion of the SNaP will need to be developed beyond this field manual, but I'm going to include (in the final column) the following items:
Answers to common fallacies and questions about the SNaP
A general list of SNaP priorities
A SNaP pledge for public officials
I feel that the priority list and questionnaire are educational tools that can be made even more effective by liberty activists and teachers with libertarian inclinations. And a "public-official nonaggression pledge" is addressed, particularly for those who are charged with wielding force in our society. The pledge, in particular, can be a powerful tool for eliciting pro-liberty sympathy during political campaigns.
Step 4: Rolling out the broad-based movement
I envision extension of the grassroots' movement, enhanced and directed via Web presence. As the initial local-community SNaP trials come to fruition, additional communities will climb on board. [One clever idea I think is to set up a 'SNaP certification process,' whereby communities that make changes can advertise, "We are proud to be a SNaP-certified community."] Then, I expect to launch a well-funded-and-promoted mass-distribution of the SNaP book(s) and training materials thru conventional publication-media channels.
Oprah, here we come.
... to be continued in part 2.
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[1] You can go a considerable length toward understanding the roots of warfare in the context of modern states by reading G. Edward Griffin's masterpiece on The Creature from Jekyll Island. He explains the "Rothschild Formula," which is a tool created by the Rothschild banking dynasty to finance both sides in any military conflict and make fortunes regardless of the war's result. When Randolph Bourne penned, "War is the health of the state," he should have had the machinations of Rothschild and his finance-capitalist functionaries in mind.
[2] Courtesy Victor Hugo, and a here's a pertinent continuation of his line of thinking: "A day will come when there will be no battlefields, but markets opening to commerce and minds opening to ideas. A day will come when the bullets and bombs are replaced by votes, by universal suffrage..."
[3] As of year-end 2007, a record 7.2 million people were behind bars, on probation or on parole, at least according to this Wikipedia piece. This chart is interesting, showing data thru 2006.
[4] California is setting up to release close to 60,000 prisoners, almost 30% of its prison population (according to Howard's instincts, they could easily double that number of release of 'noncriminal' criminals). This article from MSNBC is full of all the standard misconceptions and propaganda from the state's attempt to scare us, but the point is the prison system can't support so many inmates, and the WOD which put them there is on its last legs.
So let's imagine a world without war. What are the international banksters going to do for beer money?[
The overwhelming percentage of crime we see today, 95-99% (and a corresponding percentage 
