2K10 Midterm Election Post Mortem
Plus a spiritual technique to win liberty forever
by Brian Wright
What we learned and what we did not. First of all, I'm coming at this electoral politics from the perspective of a backslid anarchist:
meaning I share the nonaggression purist's view of the
desirability of the zero-coercion society—and the premise of most elections are that the state has the power to coerce us—but I wouldn't mind if a few elections went toward liberty. What happened on Tuesday last?
Let me give some positive vibes from the Campaign for Liberty's mailing. It applies on the national and state level for the legislative function, and, yes, provides grounds for optimism:
Across the country, there’s plenty of good news to report.
Not only was C4L’s Honorary Chairman, Congressman Ron Paul, returned to office with almost 80% of the vote, but Dr. Paul will be joined in his next term by many who went on the record for liberty by answering our federal candidate survey 100%.
In the Senate, these are Dr. Paul’s son, Rand Paul, who won a significant victory over his opponent, and Mike Lee, who beat out Pro-TARP incumbent Bob Bennett in the primary season and cruised to victory in the national. In the House, the list includes John Duncan (TN-2) and Paul Broun (GA-10).
And joining Dr. Paul in the House for the first time will be Michigan’s Justin Amash and dozens of other anti-status quo Republicans who filled out Campaign for Liberty surveys and/or took strong, clear stands for less government and more liberty.
While the national results stole the spotlight, there was plenty of action going on at the state level, and C4L activists were right in the thick of it...
So you get the message. Even on the drug policy front, where the celebrated California Proposition 19 was narrowly defeated, one can make an argument legalization of marijuana is a matter of when not if. [The link points to Ethan Nadelmann's outstanding and rousing column in Huffington Post.] Like slavery 150 years ago, drug prohibition will soon be thrown on the funeral pyre of history. Yes, these are exciting times. We may think, talk, and act only joy and happiness, only love and passion, only progress and prosperity. Because the police state is going bye bye.
What I'd like to do now is step back for a moment and address my column to all those libertarians of passion who make their arguments, state their cases, present their facts to nonfreedom-oriented others in the attempt to persuade them to join us... or even simply to accept the obvious: to take a stand against Big Government on One Little Thing. From personal experience, it's too easy to "lose it," to come off like a desperate, angry lunatic... especially if alcohol is involved.
Balance = Accept, Turn, Affirm = Success
Believe it or not a combination of dreams and spiritual readings, within the previous two weeks, have presented this Big Winning Idea (BWI) to my consciousness. My ego takes no credit, yet somehow I feel my mind has stumbled upon a major technique for winning liberty imminently... in the United States and the rest of the world.
Basically, the BWI = Balance.[1]
First the acceptance part. The incident that brought it to mind happened a week ago last Thursday following a nine holes of cold late-autumn golf. Sitting there warming up with a double Maker's Mark bourbon and a beer, I'm hearing the subject of drug-testing come up in the context of corporate policy. I suggest universal mandatory testing, like the corporation itself, is an instance of state tyranny. It goes back and forth between me and these two guys, each of whom defends the practice, though if the whiskey wasn't hitting me, I might have picked up that they were truly in favor of large categories of exceptions.
But what I hear is, "Next morning, I'll be proud to march in and give blood samples to the company. Biochips are a good idea, too. God Bless America and whatever our heroic troops are a part of." [I had just reviewed Hearts and Minds, and I knew one of the guys had flown bombers in the Vietnam era.] I wind up raising my voice and essentially calling them fascist morons. One insults me. Basically I messed up an excellent buzz, and set back the awareness potential of these friends of mine... because of their tendency, now, to view my statements as irrationally angry, thus untrue.
I was off balance because I did not practice acceptance (of the reality of the moment and of them being in that moment). Further, through my fear and anger (of being wrong, thus 'dying') I lost awareness. What I then stated simply contributed to what Tolle and other spiritual teachers refer to as the law of opposites: negative action and reaction with no progress toward consciousness or truth. "Losing it," I could not see or turn their awareness toward the truth, nor make calm and reasonable—it can certainly be passionate—argument (affirm) based on common premises. I know many of my friends in the freedom movement have had such encounters.
Here is the Balance Method alternative that wins... from Eckhart Tolle:
When your partner[2] behaves unconsciously, relinquish all judgment. Judgment is either to confuse someone's unconscious behavior with who they are or to project your own unconsciousness onto another person and mistake that for who they are.
To relinquish judgment does not mean that you do not recognize dysfunction and unconsciousness when you see it. It means "being the knowing" rather than "being the reaction" and the judge. You will then either be totally free of reaction or you may react and still be the knowing, the space in which the reaction is watched and allowed to be. Instead of fighting the darkness, you bring in the light. Instead of reacting to delusion, you see the delusion yet at the same time look through it.
Being the knowing creates a clear space of loving presence that allows all things and all people to be as they are. No greater catalyst for transformation exists. If you practice this, your partner cannot stay with you and remain unconscious.
Believe it or not, if you remain calm and do not raise your voice, do not judge or condemn what may seem to be the blatant stupidity or immorality of your "partners," they will—most of the time—eventually come to see your way of thinking. Especially, if you clearly affirm even a small number of facts and conclusions from those facts. It works the same if you're engaged in written discussion.
But do not take my word for it. Put the Balance Method to the test. No need to hit your friends with all your arguments at once, for any proposition that is provable—say, the alternative conspiracy theory of the 9/11 attacks—the evidence for it is considerable. Often, too, the evidence against any false theory—say, the official conspiracy theory of 9/11—is mountainous. A day at a time, one fact after another. All you require is calm and patience. In the competition among theories, the direction of people's adherence is toward the truth and away from the false. The Balance Method optimizes the natural flow of belief.
That's my contribution for the week. I cannot say enough about the need for taking the calm spiritual approach, what I have understood from Tolle's The Power of Now and what I have advocated in The Sacred Nonaggression Principle (esp. Chapter 4: The Barrier Cloud).
Learn the way of Jesus and the way of Gandhi, take your time, study and learn, read and write, plant your seeds with peace and harvest the full abundance of life.
[1]
The balance idea came to me in a dream, as I saw a golfing friend of mine explaining I was moving off the ball creating imbalance and loss of power. This is in fact the fundamental reason I have not improved further in the sport.
[2] This passage was written to apply to close relationships; think of "partner," instead, as one's fellow human being engaged in a common desire for life and growth.
