Reminisce by Kyle A. Lohmeier
It recently came to my attention that it is now the month of April in the 2019th year of the Common Era. It then occurred to me that it was on an April day in the 1999th year CE that I began my newspaper career. After the calculator app on my old iPhone 6 finally fired up, my suspicions were confirmed: April 1999 was exactly twenty years ago.
That means I have been a mostly-amateur philosopher for two decades now. I say “mostly-amateur” because of those twenty years there were only seven during which there was any relationship between my paycheck and me putting my philosophy out there for the world to consume. My very first newspaper job was at a small, weekly paper that covered part of the coastal thumb region of Michigan. I had previously written columns for my high school and collegiate newspapers and so was eager to contribute my not-fully-formed libertarian philosophy to the editorial page of a paper that circulated beyond a school’s campus. My editor eventually relented, and so began what’s now been a more than twenty-year foray into philosophy.
I have no way of knowing whether or not I’d have devoted so much of my life to pondering philosophical matters had I not been allowed a semi-regular newspaper column. I do know that I first realized it was important to boil down exactly what it is I believed and why to its very essence because of the fact I was writing columns for a much wider audience now, and the members thereof often wrote – and called – back. Usually angrily. As such, I’d better know why it is I believe the things I do. So, instead of delving deep into the still-as-yet-unread tomes of Locke, Rand, Spooner, etc., I just spent an awful lot of time thinking and writing until I arrived at the one universal truth all my related opinions on individual issues were pointing to all along: that every human being owns his or her own body outright. And, from that fact there flows a handful of other universal truths (see my first “Succinctly” treatise for more).
That realization and the truths that go along with it covers all aspects of the realm of human action that can be thought of as “politics and government.” And, as I continued to distill my beliefs down further, what supposed good government and politics do, or could theoretically ever do, continued to evaporate until the last of those impurities were cooked off the mash and all that was left was pure, 100%, 200-proof, pure grain human liberty. It took me a number of years, untold thousands in taxes paid, witnessing the hell of nearly of non-stop war, being made a felon for ten years (1994-2004) by the Clinton Crime Bill’s Brady Bill component and countless other abuses but, it finally dawned on me that the amount of government that it’s good to have is the same as the amount of cancer that it’s good to have: none at all.
Human action upon this wet rock orbiting an unremarkable yellow dwarf star that we apex predator apes have dubbed “Earth,” and “Sol,” respectively, doesn’t just stop at those activities that could be filed under “politics and government,” of course. Humans have, throughout their long history, mistaken themselves for being “spiritual creatures”. This is likely an unfortunate side-effect of the same massive intellectual capacity that made humans the apex predators of this planet to begin with. We figured out atlatls, bows and arrows and how to effectively hunt, kill prepare, preserve and eat animals many times our size and power. And, we also figured out that we too will die. I suspect that this came with a batch of neuroses that we’re still sorting out today in the form of “ghost hunting” shows on basic cable and religion.
During the twenty years I’ve devoted to studying the things I believe, I have gone from skeptical nominal believer in the very basic aspects of the Lutheran religion I was raised in, to atheist. Neither this piece nor its author has the gravity to move any current believer reading this from their position, so I won’t devote a pile of 0s and 1s to laying out the hows and whys of my arrival at atheism. Suffice to say that it was a long and arduous journey made long and arduous by my own failings of reason; and, once I’d corrected those, the path immediately became clear, and the distance short.
Human beings clearly don’t just concern themselves with things related to politics and government and with things concerning spirituality and the divine. Hell, most American humans don’t spend much time thinking or talking about either. Most of our waking time, in fact, is consumed with just about everything else but religion and politics. As such, it occurred to me that I also have some strong beliefs as to how humans ought comport themselves in all those other matters, and I’d better figure out what it is that guides those beliefs too.
Partly, the root of my beliefs concerning general interpersonal conduct comes back to my realizing that every human owns themselves, their labor and the fruits thereof. This realization underlies both my understanding that capitalism is the only logical, fair and just economic system, and also the principle of non-aggression that is itself the cornerstone of fair and just human interaction.
Obviously, we live upon a planet where humans routinely initiate violence against one another. We live in a world where groups of humans calling themselves “government” use systematic violence to violate the principle of self-ownership on a pandemic scale.
Worse yet, we live in a world where having a government rob and oppress us isn’t enough. American humans have taken to actively wishing that oppression and violence upon this or that group of “the other.” Some want the government to further rob the productive and give the looted plunder to the non-productive. Some want the government to cage women and doctors for seeking/providing medical procedures that don’t concern anyone other than the woman and the doctor. We’re lied to, stolen from and repressed; and, instead of chafing under the injustice of such an existence, we instead seek to have just a tad more of the misery shifted to those we have been told that we don’t like.
We, as American humans, have totally lost whatever way it was we thought we once had.
Over the last twenty years I have identified the root cause of this problem of general busybodiedness. American humans have completely lost sight of the line that separates what is their legitimate concern – their “business,” colloquially – from the entire rest of the world. I suspect that this is because each and every American human is looking way, way, way too far from the tips of their own toes for that line, and therefore can’t see that it is right under their nose. If what some other human is doing doesn’t directly harm the person or property of another against their will, then that activity is no one else’s business. Period. For whatever reason, we American humans just can’t live that way. We just have to be able to impose whatever our group’s narrow set of beliefs happens to be upon the whole rest of the nation. Because, Jesus. Or, because “progress.” Or, because of the children. Or, because two dudes kissing is icky. Whatever.
Of course, not even the massively busybodied groups like the anti-choice movement can actually stop women aborting unwanted pregnancies. So, they petition and rally and bribe and lobby the armed gang with a monopoly on the legal initiation of violence that is government to carry out their will for them. Same as those who want to make it harder for gay couples to get on in the world legally. Same as those who want to shut down all the coal-fired power plants.
Recognizing this lack of ability among American humans to effectively mind their own business was just the start, however. I have, over the years, discovered that a sort of pervasive societal ignorance – likely deliberately engineered – is to blame for the underlying mindset that causes people to wholesale lose sight of what is their business and what isn’t any part of their legitimate concern. It is simply this: Most American persons have no idea what or who the following words/phrases/people mean or are: Stoicism, Late Stoics, Stoa, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus, or Cato the Younger.
So much so, in fact, that “Stoicism” is often identified as a trait of “Toxic Masculinity.”
In reality, Stoicism is a personal philosophy that, if was adopted and followed by even a good plurality of American humans, would lead to a world that is exponentially more just, fair and rational.
One of the major takeaways I got from studying the aforementioned Late Stoics struck me at the time as something of an epiphany. I was putzing in my kitchen one evening when the phrase: “happiness is only possible if one is in control of their emotions,” leaped fully-formed into my skull unbidden. It was as if my subconscious mind was working in the background on distilling down the lessons of the Stoics I’d been reading and then sent me a push notification when the results came in.
One of the recurring lessons all of the Late Stoics touch upon is that nothing external causes us pain. All the pain we feel from an external event is actually conjured up within ourselves by the value and weight we ourselves assign to the “meaning” of whatever that external event was. A people mindful of this fact would not have found themselves wailing in the streets because the “wrong” one of the two figurehead candidates for president won the election. People mindful of this fact do not find themselves hurling hateful vitriol at frightened young women walking into an abortion clinic. People mindful of this fact neither want guns banned nor want to misuse them to hurt a bunch of people who’ve done them no wrong in an effort to bring about some irrationally greedy desire: be it a race war, or the end of one entire group of people, the murder of another, or whatever. One of the foundations of Stoicism is possessing a very real and honest knowledge of what is within one’s ability to control and what isn’t, and then learning to disregard the latter.
Related to knowing what is within one’s ability to control and what isn’t is another realization I’ve had over the last two decades: that there is such a thing as evil. “They” like to say that “evil is subjective,” that there “is no such thing as good and evil.” They are wrong.
Evil is, very simply, irrational greed. All it takes to prove this is to look at the motivation behind every act throughout history that has been weighed and defined by humanity as having been objectively evil. At the root, each and every motive was the same: irrational greed. The Holocaust, Stalin’s purges, Pol-Pot’s killing fields, Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” the CIA 1953 coup in Iran, all the proxy conflicts of The Cold War – all motivated by an irrationally greedy desire to see the world rid of a group of humans, or to stay in power indefinitely, or to remake the nation in his own mad vision, or to catch up to the West, or to retain Western ownership of Iranian oil fields, or the USA and USSR to use third-party nations and their conflicts to wave their pricks at each other militarily (thanks, George), respectively. All of those are irrationally greedy desires, and they resulted in the evil actions mentioned above.
At the individual level, the desire to see someone wealthier than you fleeced by an armed gang; or to stop all women having abortions because Jesus; or to have guys who do “icky” things with other dudes in the privacy of their own homes locked up, or to have people who own certain scary black rifles have their property taken away, etc., are all examples of greedy desires that are irrational, and therefore to act upon those desires in any way would be an objectively evil act; even if you’re just trying to outsource the actual evil activities to the aforementioned armed gang that is government.
And, only once one has learned to temper their irrationally greedy desires by recognizing what is within their ability to control and what isn’t can one then begin to assert control over their emotions, which is the only way to get a firm and lasting grip on that most fleeting of all emotions: happiness. The way to assert control over one’s emotions is to refuse to hand that control over to anyone else.
I wish there was a way to bring Marcus Aurelius back for a day and then watch someone try to explain the concept of “emotional triggers” and their resultant “trigger warnings” to him. I think he’d simply ask to be made dead again.
Currently, it has become acceptable for American humans to hand control over their emotions to every passerby, classmate or Game Stop store clerk. For all the attention their plaintive cries get from the sympathetic – and enabling – media, I can assure you that not one of the people you read about or watch video of pitching a fit over this “microaggression” or that “mis-pronouning” are happy. At all. How can they be? They’ve handed control over their emotional state to someone else. I don’t like other people driving my car and loathe the very idea of autonomous vehicles; I cannot understand how people can go through life being an emotional passenger in their own bodies, allowing this or that news item or other external event to whip their emotions into a towering froth. And then they expect to reach into that maelstrom and somehow pluck out a thread of happiness to cling to? Not bloody likely.
Instead it compounds; these are the same people given to support irrationally greedy laws and punishments against these external actions that they’ve assigned so much weight to. As if it makes sense to cage or rob a human for using the “wrong” pronoun when addressing another human, as if the very desire to do so isn’t irrationally greedy and therefore evil. And yet, there exists a movement of unhappy humans advancing laws that would rob and/or cage another human for just that. Madness.
And so, dear readers, those two brave souls that have endured this windy tirade to this point; that’s where I stand after twenty years of really thinking things through. My cheat-sheet, my Cliff’s Notes version of what I’ve figured out thus far would be basically: By design and nature there can be no such thing as a good government; there is no god; and by and large, humans have lost sight of how to even begin to control their emotions and this has led to a fundamental breakdown in reason that has come to imperil the entire world at this point.
Or, to boil it down to the very essentials: Individually, be a Stoic; spiritually, be an atheist; politically, be a Voluntarist.
Of course, I could be wrong; plenty of people have spent many, many years thinking and writing about all things philosophical and economic only to get it all comprehensively wrong.
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