Agony and Ecstasy
Claire Wolfe asks a couple great questions: “Why the hell would anybody want to be free? . . . What One Great Thing can make all the struggle worthwhile?” [Incidentally, Claire Wolfe wrote a 2001 book titled The State vs. The People, which I discovered after I named and started this blog.]
She gets some great answers in the comments. I second this one from Kevin Wilmeth:
I’m not sure it’s a choice.
To use a metaphor riddled with irony but nonetheless precisely illustrative: once you have turned your head to the side, you cannot un-see your neighbor for who he is, rather than the shadow you “knew” him to be before.
Once you turn around and see the fire and the cave entrance, you cannot simply un-see those things. They are neither good nor bad: they just are, and although many people seem to willfully delude themselves about this, it changes nothing. The lens through which you see the world is simply not what it was before.
Once you walk out of the cave–actually get up and walk out–I’m not sure you could go back if you tried.
I can’t speak for anyone but myself, ultimately, but for me at least, the One Great Thing is simply clarity.
You know, reality.
I concur with Thomas Aquinas that as a rational animal man’s highest purpose and happiness in this life and the “next” is in knowing and loving the truth. (As a matter of “faith” based on truths I know I believe that the Truth is ultimately Good and Beautiful.) And as social animals we have a natural calling to speak the truth to each other.
The simple truth is that the State is not the author but the usurper of the Law.
(How did I come by this truth? Like a true American, by reflecting upon the Declaration of Independence and the Bible. But it’s interesting to me that I never really knew this truth, would never have called myself a libertarian let alone an enemy of the State, until I became a lawyer and saw what lawyers see.)
Compare the “wise and dread spirit” of another famous fictional usurper:
They will marvel at us and look on us as gods, because we are ready to endure the freedom which they have found so dreadful and to rule over them- so awful it will seem to them to be free. But we shall tell them that we are Thy servants and rule them in Thy name. We shall deceive them again, for we will not let Thee come to us again. That deception will be our suffering, for we shall be forced to lie.
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