Addicted to Outrage

  Man’s idealized state is one of individual liberty and voluntary cooperation.

  Ever wonder why socialism/statism keeps failing and America keeps crushing everyone all the time? Well, now you don’t have to wonder anymore. Those systems of government are designed around a goal of “equality,” not around a goal of “freedom,” so they don’t incentivize invention or reward achievement. Since man needs to invent to thrive and needs achievement to feed his ego, those systems of government are anathema to human beings. They don’t fit us.

  Now you know. Congrats. No more shade for you. No more excuses. Sorry you spent all that money going to college and nobody ever thought to mention this stuff. Could have saved you a boatload!

  Ours was the first system of government that was perfectly attuned to man’s nature. The Founders saw this as self-evident, very much like what Bret Weinstein says about human genders.

  Look at the thing for what it is! Aristotle kindly pointed this out for us 350 years before Christ: A is A. Study the creature, use the scientific method, logic, reason, physics . . . identify the facts of reality and then apply them. For Professor Weinstein, that means that we have genders and they matter when it comes to human biology and reproduction. That is self-evident; it’s obvious. It’s scientifically demonstrable. Sure, the PC crowd says that he is racist, sexist, and doesn’t take into account everyone’s feelings, but scientists tend to be pretty A-is-A types.

  As our Founders studied the creature, they saw a self-aware, thinking, sentient being with free will. And they said, Well, heck, we’re forming a new government here, and it’s for these people to have a good, productive life and a good, productive country, so since we’re making a new government, why not implement one that fits what human beings are and protects their natural state of being?

  And poof! There it is, black and white, clear as crystal! We are the entities that we are. The secret of our success is not geography or geology, it is a government that fits our BIOLOGY! Those things that make us human are immovable, unalienable from us, because they are part of us, just like our DNA. Wishing and feelings won’t make you fly, won’t give you gills, and won’t remove your gender. That is not natural. It is also unnatural for man to be man without freedom and liberty.

  America, that is our unum. The self-evident truth that unites us. That is the thing that makes the many of us one. One people. One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. These are the principles that we must again rally behind, that made us great. The very elements that gave our forefathers a mutual identity, a shared set of values that held us together and transformed us into the most powerful nation the world has ever seen. It’s scientifically demonstrable, because we’ve been kicking ass for 250 years. The formula works, and turns out it’s also the antidote to Outrage Addiction.

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  Our Self-Evident Rights and Seemingly Invisible Responsibility

  “We hold these truths to be self-evident” is something all of us know—what follows is what our Founders, those who wanted to break free from the tyranny of the king, all knew. For many years, I thought that all men are created equal and endowed by a Creator with certain unchangeable rights such as a right to life, personal liberty and freedom, and the right to produce and to keep that property as theirs was universally self-evident.

  But it is not. Most in China would tell you that being able to have as many children as you wish and not having to ask for state approval to conceive would be a luxury. Some might even feel uncomfortable for a time in that world. It would not be “self-evident” for many around the world that you could do, speak, and work as you wished, to do as you chose and to keep the fruits of your labor. In fact, our self-evident rights are so polar opposite in some places in the world that choosing to do nothing, being what we used to call a “freeloader,” would be against the highest law of the land, and an unforgivable sin or insult to the state and citizens. Many of the world’s constitutions state what each citizen must do to be “in compliance.”

  Many people are comfortable with a system like that. In a way, I understand. There is something to the idea that I can just drop my kids off at a bus stop and pick them up later that day, and they receive a “free” education.

  We are all busy, so we assign a personal responsibility to someone else who can do that job while we are away doing another job so our families can have food to eat, shelter, and, if we are fortunate enough to pursue it, our “happiness.” Another perfectly reasonable and essential way we prosper together is that long ago we figured out that we can’t all watch our stores all night after we finish our work or close for the day. We need sleep, so we assign or hire someone else to take on our personal responsibility of being a night watchman to keep us, and our property, safe. If we were all independently wealthy, we all would have hired our own personal security, but the cost is beyond the reach of the average store owner and certainly beyond the run-of-the-mill citizen. At first we all took turns watching over each other, as we see in every military or “on the lam” movie. “It’s my turn to take the first watch. I will wake you at three.” But as we became able, we all decided that the idea of staying up all night once a week sucked. So we came up with the idea of pooling our money and assigning our right of protection to what we called the police force.

  It is why we as people began to gather in the first place. If we can all help share the load, we can accomplish much more. At first, it would have had to be strange, and a bit unnerving. To hire a stranger, not one of our friends or neighbors but someone new and perhaps unknown to us personally, to enforce the rules or laws of the community. Up until the last fifty or so years, it didn’t take us long to get to know those people. As the new cops moved into to our neighborhoods, we quickly got to know them, and they knew us and became part of our community. No one was an outsider.

  This is not the book to go into the problems this change has made just in those two examples, teaching and policing. Just those two roles gaining real distance from each of us and our neighborhoods has caused many of the problems we now face, but I want to discuss the other inherent issue when we assign our rights to another.

  Put yourself back into the local township days when you were first discussing how to build a police force and the idea of hiring an “outsider.” You can bet that one of the things you would ask is, “Who is going to watch over the watcher?” You wouldn’t want them to be able to come and use the power of that badge to take control of your community. Yes, you would need to write down the things they needed to look out for and to stop people from doing—to make laws—but you would also need to make sure that they never felt above those same laws.

  It would have to be made clear that they work for us—not in a controlling way but simply to ensure that power never became an issue. After all, in the worst-case scenario, we would all be asleep, they could do anything they wanted, and we might not know.

  Two things happened. The laws were written down, simply I am sure in the beginning. “Look, here is what we want to make sure happens: nobody steals my cow or shoots a neighbor, and when we get sidewalks, we don’t want anyone to spit on them.” The laws were not really for the neighbors, they were for the policemen to know what to look out for. As we grew, and people in the town saw things elsewhere that they didn’t want coming into their neighborhood, they added to that list. Eventually, laws became both a warning to bad guys or to out-of-towners and lists for the cops. But something else had to have taken place.

  Early on, the citizens had to make it clear that the police officer had no more power than the neighbors had when they were watching over each other. In fact, since they were now assigning this right to another, they wanted to make sure that the laws were even more limiting than those they had lived under. For instance, I know my uncle Dave could have gone into his neighbor’s barn, or even house, if he felt something was amiss and the neighbor was away. Because they trusted each other and one had said to the other, Listen,
while I am away, keep an eye on things. But that would not give my uncle Dave permission to go into the house and start going through the drawers and reading the neighbor’s mail or papers, no matter how close they were.

  Things really were different on this little street back in the 1970s, but let’s just suppose there was no police force and they were still on the “I’ll take the first watch” system when my uncle began to piece a few things together and came to the logical and reasonable conclusion that somehow the vacationing neighbor was responsible for the string of terrifying garden-gnome thefts in the neighborhood. What would he do? My uncle would have called everyone together to discuss his claim and what he thought might be found in the house that would prove the criminal case and ask for the rest of the neighbors’ permission go in and look. If the neighbors agreed that his theory seemed not just plausible but very possible, after sincere conversation and deliberation they would act, knowing that if they did this, they might catch a thief, but they could also destroy the trust of the neighbor upon his return, and they would set a precedent that would allow for this same thing to possibly be done to them the next time they were away. They agreed, and surely someone would have said, Dave, you have made a good case, but this is a real violation of our trust in the neighborhood. We are letting you go in, but you are only allowed to look for gnomes and gnomes alone.

  If he came out with nothing but did find that the neighbor had a secret collection of clown paintings that maybe they should be concerned about, everyone in the neighborhood would have lost all respect and trust for my uncle Dave. In fact, they would begin to suspect that he was untrustworthy and just had it in for the neighbor and clowns.

  We cannot assign a right to someone that we ourselves do not have. We have no right to listen in to someone’s phone calls or to go through their papers or search for missing gnomes, so we cannot hire someone to do those things for us. It’s the same with protecting ourselves and our families with deadly force.

  It wasn’t until the 1970s that we called police officers or firemen “first responders.” They were backup. If our home caught on fire, it was our responsibility to put it out. We as townsfolk, early on, did require everyone to have a large leather bucket of water sitting next to every fireplace or stove in case a fire broke out. Our neighbors would come to help, but we acted first.

  The same with self-defense. In fact, in some towns the laws stated that if you had the chance to stop someone on your property and did not stop them, you could be held responsible for your failure to act. Many towns issued a gun to those moving in who did not own one.

  However, in no town, at any time, was it lawful to simply string people up. Those who did were called lynch mobs and were not part of any decent society. No citizen had the right to take the law into their own hands unless it was in self-defense. So when they finally hired a sheriff because all of the cats were being rustled—though I am not sure what that is or if cats can even be rustled, but let’s just assume they can and that this is bad. Even if the sheriff knew the defendant was the cat-rustling type, he could not play judge, jury, and executioner or he would be held for trial. He only had the right to do what the average citizen had the right to do as well.

  This is important, because in both cases—gnomic cat rustling and education—we are now being told that our police or teachers are the only ones with the right to do certain things. This is not entirely true with police and certainly not true with teachers, but the mere suggestion is corrosive to our liberties.

  Yes, I cannot arrest someone and put them in my homemade jail in the basement. However, if I catch someone hurting a child or animal, stealing, or breaking into my home, I can take action and call for backup. I can hold them in a locked room until police arrive if I feel my life or the lives of others are at stake. And for that same reason, I can shoot them. But only if I fear for my life. It’s the exact same standard for police.

  Too many times, I hear “experts” tell us that they know what is best for children. That may or may not be true. But the right and responsibility to care for and teach those children has merely been assigned to you by me and my neighbors. You do not have more authority over my children as a teacher than I have over your children as a neighbor. This is the way human rights work.

  The trouble with the necessity of distributing our responsibilities is that it tends to make us apathetic about the job and blind to our role in the first place. The cop is only stopping us because we voted for people to help us design the town, and the laws that they came up with in our name state that the speed limit should be set at a certain mph on this street. The cop isn’t the bad guy. When we are all seeing our roles properly, he is only acting on the authority we gave him, with the laws that we set, at our request. However, on the other side, it is easy for those to whom we have assigned the cop role to grow arrogant and overstep their role as our agent, especially since we no longer know each other.

  It will not be enough to just stop being outraged, quitting cold turkey. In fact, that will be impossible. After all, we were outraged for a reason. Our lives are unmanageable. Something is deeply wrong, but our outrage wasn’t helping to fix it—it was, rather, just what we did to be able to make it through the day. It made the problems into something we felt we were doing something about or had some control over. If we just stop being outraged, we will quickly fall off that wagon and perhaps be worse than we were before.

  We need a plan to help reduce the chaos in our lives, to understand the difference between the things we can affect and those we cannot, and to let go of the latter.

  We certainly need at least a refresher on our rights and more so on our responsibility if we are going to hold to our “sobriety,” as these are the keys to restoring balance and reducing chaos.

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  The Cages of Our Addiction

  All experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

  —The Declaration of Independence

  I am not what I ought to be, I am not what I want to be, I am not what I hope to be in another world; but still I am not what I once used to be.

  —John Newton

  I never understood how rules could make you more free until my anger, outrage, and lies had built a cage so tight that I had no option other than to remain locked up. Until you have experienced the bars that you live behind that your actions and choices built, you cannot truly understand how sweet freedom really is. I was never in jail or prison. When I was a kid, I think I was sent to detention once. But I spent many years trapped in a place of my own design that I never thought I could escape. In the end, just before my self-appointed release, there were many days that I feared release. My cage had become the place I knew best.

  Our anger, fear, victimhood, and outrage can become a warm blanket. It begins to define us and shape our entire world view. We actually can convince ourselves that this prison, this hell, is better than what lies beyond. We indeed will suffer while evils are sufferable rather than right ourselves by abolishing the forms, cages, lies, abusers, and so on that we are accustomed to. There is a sense of comfort in those things that we know, strangely, even if they are our jailers. It is why chaos is such a powerful tool, as men will cry out for a semblance of normalcy again, even if it involves prison bars or totalitarian rule.

  What our jailers do not want us to know is that adherence to the Bill of Rights, especially when it is difficult, is the key that unlocks the cell.

  DO WE ACTUALLY BELIEVE IN A “FREE PRESS”?

  In the summer of 2018, the media began to feel the effects of an immoral, ignorant, and tribal society. It was that summer, to me, that signaled that without constitutional protection and reunification, the press as we now know it will be obsolete by the mid 2020s.

  For a few years “fake news,” which I first saw in 2008 come from the left as “faux news,” signaling to America that Fox
could not be trusted, had been the charge leveled against any news source or opinion on the right. However, this was quickly turned around and used even more effectively by a media opponent who refused to play by the rules: Donald Trump. He took “fake news” and made it his secondary campaign slogan. I’m surprised we didn’t see it show up on red hats. Soon, both sides were claiming fake news. Facts were less important than conclusions, news less important than opinions, and principles important only if they could be used to crucify your “enemy.”

  Even principles were forever fluid. There have been times since the Trump election that the average citizen honestly didn’t know what side they should be on, if the topic was given without the political figures or parties disclosed, because just the day before you and your political party may have had the exact opposite opinion. Those opinions were not minor. Both parties switched sides on principles on issues that were long held to be core tenets that defined, in many cases, what they stood for as a party. Each party betrayed itself, literally overnight in some cases, without explanation or discussion. You went to bed KNOWING that your side had always been on the right side of an issue and you and your party would never surrender that hill because the price you paid for it was too high. The next morning you found out that you not only abandoned that hill but were now shelling the hill. The other side, which had called that hill immoral or whatever, had now taken the hill and declared it all that you had claimed it to be, and you were now expected to fall into line and shout all of the slogans they had used.

  It is hard to believe, and our children will not understand it when we once again regain our senses and admit the truth of these times, but there were days when many Americans on both sides had to turn on their cable news channel to see what side they were supposed to be on and why. Yet even more disturbing was the fact that so many did it and never vocalized how bizarre it was. Perhaps because those who did were called out by the party police as traitors.