Philosophizing by Kyle A. Lohmeier
As a dummy who spends far too much time in various political and philosophical discussion groups on Facebook, I notice a lot of trends. Some are mercifully fleeting – hopefully by this time next week we’ll be all done with “cash me ousside how bou dah?” Other trends are more enduring in certain groups. Made-up “facts” and utter cluelessness about economics will always be mainstays of anything posted by “Occupy Democrats,” for example.
In libertarian/anarcho-capitalist groups, there are also a handful of trends that seem to endure; and in many cases they’re no more healthy than lying about economic reality and no more intelligent sounding than mangling the English language while suggesting stepping outside for some fisticuffs.
Scrolling through posts in those groups will often reveal memes that deride members of the U.S. military as the “ultimate welfare whores,” and that assume every police officer in the country was a dumb kid who was bullied and now just wants to oppress the hell out of everyone, and enjoys doing so. In many ways, these sorts of sentiments are even worse than the broad-brush hatred espoused by groups like the alt-right toward all persons of color, or by snowflakes toward all cis-gendered white males. In fact, it is worse, because it’s also victim-blaming.
Snowflakes are simply insane – so there is no explaining their hatred of cis-gendered white males. The alt-right is nothing more than Nazism given a new name; that it is inherently unintelligent goes without saying – so, there isn’t going to be a logical explanation for how everything is the fault of blacks and Jews.
Anarcho-capitalists, the 16-million-scoville-pure-capsacian-extract-philosophy-if-libertarianism-were-a-hot-sauce folks, understand that the state is inherently evil and corrupt. As such, it’s easy to pick up that same broad brush those possessed of inferior “philosophies” use all day and slap with it every individual human whom we can make into an incarnation of the state. Uniforms make this process simpler, and so this blind, easy hatred tends to fall upon cops and the military. And, unfairly so.
In the same groups that post memes like those mentioned above, you’ll find ones that correctly point out that one of the gravest mistakes we’ve made as a country was letting the state educate the children. Yes, having the government write the curricula for school children for generations now has had the intended deleterious effect on what high school and college graduates actually know once they turn their tassels. Where did American soldiers and police officers get their “education?” In the United States, most likely from a public school. What were they taught? The same blind adoration of the state most of us anarcho-capitalists were taught in school. We, however, like to hold ourselves above that lot because we are “woke,” right? Well, just how did we all get so “woke AF?” By first realizing something is definitely amiss and then going out on our own to push past the “approved” noise of our indoctrination and discover the real truth from folks like Bastiat, Mises, Spooner, etc.
Those of us who, upon realizing there was actually a choice to be made and took the “red pill,” are a distinct minority living in a country filled mostly with people unaware there is such a choice, and those who happily took the “blue pill” without even listening to the rest of Morpheus’ pitch. It isn’t fair or helpful to deride the decisions made by people when they were likely 18 years old or not much older to join the military or the police after spending their entire lives living in a system where the propaganda ministers tell kids those are noble professions. Continuing my tortured “Matrix” analogy, most people are still plugged in to the system and unaware; they vastly outnumber “blue pilled” people. Is it fair or helpful to deride them for believing the messages their government has spent some sixty years and billions of dollars perfecting both the content and means of delivery of?
If you rescued a bunch of women who were taken into a sex cult when they were teenaged runaways, would you then berate them for being so “stupid” as to believe what the cult-leader who brainwashed and abused them for years told them? Not if you were attempting to be helpful, you wouldn’t.
Yes, there are bad cops in this country, there’s no doubt about it; I’ve reported on a few of them back in my paid journalism days. There are also cops who genuinely believe that law enforcement actually does good and beneficial work for society, and that’s why they joined up in the first place. They believe this because there’s been a concerted effort by the state and mainstream media for decades to instill this respect for law enforcement into them. Likewise for the military which also has the benefit of offering jobs to kids who might not function well in a less-structured, private-sector setting. Sometimes, kids get picked up by cops for things that shouldn’t be crimes to begin with, and a judge offers them military service as opposed to a cage – given such a choice, no one can blame a kid for joining the military.
Yes, the evils of American foreign policy are carried out by individual soldiers, but it is crucially important to keep in mind that none of those kids joined the military because they wanted to immorally occupy a foreign country to support the oligarchs’ business interests back home. The job description they signed up for was “defending freedom,” it doesn’t make much sense to blame a victim of fraud for falling for the most sophisticated scheme ever devised by human beings.
As anarcho-capitalists, we possess a philosophy that is objectively superior to every other philosophy ever dreamed up by human beings. As American AnCaps, we came to discover and accept this philosophy despite the massive concerted effort by the oligarchs to keep us ignorant cogs in their machine. We are exceptional, and that is the problem. Exceptions rarely get to make the rules. If we pick up the broad brush of easy hatred and use it to paint everyone who isn’t “woke AF” as somehow being inherently evil or stupid, we will carry on being exceptions forced to live under a government that is inherently evil and stupid.
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