Libertarians From The United States

"Without chaos there would be no creation, no structure and no existence. After all, order is merely the repetition of patterns; chaos is the process that establishes those patterns. Without this creative self-organizing force, the universe would be devoid of biological life, the birth of stars and galaxies—everything we have come to know."

"The problem of complexity is at the heart of mankind’s inability to predict future events with any accuracy. Complexity science has demonstrated that the more factors found within a complex system, the more chances of unpredictable behavior. And without predictability, any meaningful control is nearly impossible. Obviously, this means that you cannot control what you cannot predict. The ability ever to predict long-term events is a pipedream. Mankind has little to do with changing climate; complexity does."

"To accept the legitimacy of the state is to embrace the necessity for war."

"Why do the Progressive Big Media, Democrats, elites, and Democratic Socialists feel duty-bound to create false realities? Why must they silence, obstruct or distort any truthful voice before it can ever be heard? And why do they rush to judgement before the facts can be sorted out? The answer is rather simple; socialists and collectivists have no other choice. By hard experience, they learned over 100 years ago that their ideology was devoid of facts and reality. They had to sacrifice truth in order to hide the inevitable failures of socialism."

"Things evolve to evolve. Evolutionary processes are the linchpin of change. These processes of discovery represent a complexity of simple systems that flux in perpetual tension as they teeter at the edge of chaos. This whirlwind of emergence is responsible for the spontaneous order and higher, organized complexity so noticeable in biological evolution—one–celled critters beefing up to become multicellular organisms."

"Political structures are excessively paternalistic, and to maintain them requires a high level of energy. The massive amounts of energy they consume are unsustainable and invite political meltdowns, bailouts, and fallout. On the other hand, proponents of complexity theory take the paradigm–shattering view that less is more. They understand that, paradoxically enough, the complexity of simplicity is the key to the emergence of systems, repeatable patterns and the social glue that holds community together and creates order. Anyone can make simplicity complicated; it takes a true genius to make the complicated simple."

"Complexity scientists concluded that there are just too many factors—both concordant and contrarian—to understand. And with so many potential gaps in information, almost nobody can see the whole picture. Complex systems have severe limits, not only to predictability but also to measurability. Some complexity theorists argue that modelling, while useful for thinking and for studying the complexities of the world, is a particularly poor tool for predicting what will happen."

"When it comes right down to physical war and bloodshed, governments don’t protect people; people protect governments."

"Complexity has always been difficult to resolve and to understand. Evolutionary biologists were among the first scientists to recognize this problem, when they dug their way toward new theories about evolution. They discovered that matter does not lack purpose."

"Disorder is more exacting, arising when coercion is substituted for coordination—preventing members in a system from determining their own destiny. History is littered with examples of excluded parts rising up to confront those exclusive few who claim they are representing the whole."

"Chaos provides order. Chaotic agitation and motion are needed to create overall, repetitive order. This ‘order through fluctuations’ keeps dynamic markets stable and evolutionary processes robust. In essence, chaos is a phase transition that gives spontaneous energy the means to achieve repetitive and structural order."

"To the political elite, statecraft is predicated on the notion that society is theirs to put into some type of hegemonic order. It is immaterial whether this institutionalized order actually helps society or instead puts it into a chokehold that slowly squeezes the air out of life. To the authorities, supremacy is always the primary objective."

"Various sociopolitical movements are oriented to the nostrums of ‘social justice,’ favoring entitlements for all those with economic disparity. They struggle for what is scientifically impossible: equality of outcome. They want everyone to end up with the same amount of wealth—billions of people all possessing the same numerical affluence."

"If an emerging system is born complex, there is neither leeway to abandon it when it fails, nor the means to join another, successful one. Such a system would be caught in an immovable grip, congested at the top, and prevented, by a set of confusing but locked–in precepts, from changing."

"What can go wrong will go wrong, because political objectives are so narrowly defined. Without a great breadth of elasticity, a system has countless ways in which to crash and burn, since only one pathway has been designated, by legislated or dictated law, as the correct flight plan. It takes no great statistician to figure out the low probability of an errant political objective landing successfully in one precise landing spot. With so many possible routes in which to fail, government programs seem to boomerang every which way."

"Despite the absence of physical equality in nature, political systems engage in grand endeavors to dictate perfection and equality in a universe devoid of both. In their egalitarian and quixotic quest to redistribute wealth, they rob Peter to pay Paul, which only creates a state of dependency, not of equality. Any attempt to impose equality can only bring about more inequality. Rev. William J. H. Boetcker expressed this same insight in 1916, writing, 'You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.'"

"Every system that has existed emerged somehow, from somewhere, at some point. Complexity science emphasizes the study of how systems evolve through their disorganized parts into an organized whole."

"Because information is often biased, outdated, or inadequate, command-based systems rely on obtuse information to produce blunt solutions. Wielding force like drunken revelers, political systems gamble on the singularity of direction to fix a multiplicity of problems, woefully ignorant that one size does not fit all. Blinded by political ideologies, they rarely act to solve underlying problems. Karl Hess (1923-1994), a former presidential speech writer, noted this condition, observing, ‘Politicians occasionally do the right thing—but only after they’ve exhausted all the alternatives.’"

"Complexity has the propensity to overload systems, making the relevance of a particular piece of information not statistically significant. And when an array of mind-numbing factors is added into the equation, theory and models rarely conform to reality."

"The revelation that systems organize on their own sat poorly with the apostles of social sciences—especially political scientists who base their theories on imposing external controls to achieve selected political goals. They are accustomed to thinking about government-produced certainties, not ambiguous probabilities. In their linear calculations, humanity must be physically forced to follow the guiding light of political leaders or flavor-of-the-month ideologies. The economy and human actions must march in step with legislative or dictated law, no matter what the outcome. Yet natural systems do not operate this way."

"Governments are terrorists, but they hide their actions behind the label of nationalism and patriotism: war becomes defense; theft becomes “taxation”; slavery becomes 'conscription'; terrorism becomes 'defense.' Few people question the violations; rather, if they do protest, it is because the government is oppressing the 'wrong' group of people, and not because they regard coercion itself as wrong."

"'How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand? How do you keep a wave upon the sand?' These words from The Sound of Music bring out the elusive nature of chaos. In life, most things cannot be captured for long. It is like trying to encapsulate time itself."

"In sharp contrast to the modus operandi of swarm dynamics, political bodies are ill-equipped to protect the integrity of their components and lack the collective wisdom for synchronization. Instead, highly layered command-based systems invade, institutionalize, and indoctrinate society with centralized directives, straitjacket bureaucracies, and self-serving officialdom. These systems hungrily feast on what others have created, cannibalizing other people’s resources like a tribe of pragmatic headhunters."

"Order is not universal. In fact, many chaologists and physicists posit that universal laws are more flexible than first realized, and less rigid—operating in spurts, jumps, and leaps, instead of like clockwork. Chaos prevails over rules and systems because it has the freedom of infinite complexity over the known, unknown, and the unknowable."

"Decentralized systems are the quintessential patrons of simplicity. They allow complexity to rise to a level at which it is sustainable, and no higher."

"The field of economics is not exempt from the consequences of chaos and complexity. Marketplaces are indeterminate; value is subjective; and outcomes are subject to interpretation. Economic forecasting is just as nebulous, being based on the probability of statistical information that may or may not be accurate."

"The National Socialists, like the Marxian Frankfurt School leaders, dedicated themselves to fighting racial oppression imposed by other advantaged races. But in the case of the Nazis, they identified the ‘oppressed race’ as the Aryan and German people and the ‘oppressor race’ as the Jews. They believed that the Jews controlled the world as members of a wealthy and privileged race that supposedly mistreated the so-called Aryan races. To demean the so-called ‘Jewish oppressors,’ the National Socialists taught German children that the Jews, Jewish-run banks, and capitalists were persecuting the German nation and its people. This ‘oppressor versus oppressed’ narrative is pure classical Marxism, which had devastating effects across the annals of modern history. Such racist nonsense divides society, creating hostile tribalism and unending ethnic violence. Of course, this racial struggle was exactly what the Nazi propagandists intended in their effort to purge certain “oppressor” races. They wanted only one race to exist in German-controlled lands. That is why Critical Race Theory is so poisonous. Its endgame almost always results in horrific final solutions to punish so-called privileged and oppressor races."

"Freedom does not guarantee wealth or success; it guarantees only the individual’s right to pursue them. Despite political promises of personal security from hunger and poverty, government cannot lessen the plight of the poor. Rather, the welfare state prolongs poverty and nurtures people’s dependence on handouts. This is no accident. There is no better way to control members of society than to make them insecure and eager to accept any type of legislation in exchange for a so-called free lunch."

"Under complexity science, the more interacting factors, the more unpredictable and irregular the outcome. To be succinct, the greater the complexity, the greater the unpredictability."

"Libertarians say: what about individual rights? The question boils down to this: how many robbers must there be before robbery is no longer a crime? How many rapists must there be before it is no longer rape? We all know logic. A crime is a crime, no matter how many people are involved. If the majority of a town goes out and lynches someone, it is still murder. Majority rule often leads to mob rule, which tramples on individual rights and self–ownership."

"A self–organizing system acts autonomously, as if the interconnecting components had a single mind. And as these components spontaneously march to the beat of their own drummer, they organize, adapt, and evolve toward a greater complexity than one would ever expect by just looking at the parts by themselves."

"The politics of control and manipulation can only have a degenerative effect on civilization and stability. When larger systems dominate smaller ones, society and its members must face a host of bad choices, debilitating harm, and dicey outcomes. Once the leviathan has been released, few can really control its movements. So once the damage has become visible, historians can point to the inevitable source of the criminality: the ‘structured order’ of politics, rather than an ‘unstructured order’ of the people. To the gullible, this is a shocking revelation. How could any system entrusted with maintaining order destroy the very thing it had sworn to uphold?"

"Simplicity in a system tends to increase that system’s efficiency. Because less can go wrong with fewer parts, less will. Complexity in a system tends to increase that system’s inefficiency; the greater the number of variables, the greater the probability of those variables clashing, and in turn, the greater the potential for conflict and disarray. Because more can go wrong, more will. That is why centralized systems are inclined to break down quickly and become enmeshed in greater unintended consequences."

"Eastman was a brilliant polemicist, but he too could not long preserve the innocence of The Masses-no one could have. He found that he had to start asking questions of himself, and once you begin doing that you can never be sure the answers will please you. Thus Eastman began his astonishing political career, for a time dropping into the dogmatism of early American communism, then moving, in the late twenties, to the honor and courage of being the first left-wing anti-Stalinist intellectual in this country, and finally becoming a convert to the conservatism of The Readers Digest."

"behind them (The Masses staff) still throbbed the tradition of nineteenth-century American radicalism, the un-ambiguous nay-saying of Thoreau and the Abolitionists. This tradition implied that the individual person was still able to square off against the authority of the state; it signified a stance-one could not quite speak of it as a politics-of individual defiance and rectitude, little concerned because little involved with the complexities of society. The radicalism of nineteenth-century New England had been a radicalism of individual declaration far more than of collective action; and while Max Eastman and his friends were indeed connected with a movement, the Socialist party of Debs, in essential spirit they were intellectual freebooters, more concerned with speaking out than speaking to. They swore by Marx, but behind them could still be heard the voices of Thoreau and Wendell Phillips-and it was a good thing."

"war means recruiting propaganda, conscription, military discipline, the death penalty, the whole damnable business of organized dying and killing. Max Eastman said in Madison Square Garden two years ago, "When our own war comes you'll know it, because it won't be necessary to conscript the workers to fight in it." I thought he spoke a profound truth. I do not think so now. When we heard about those democratic regiments formed in Russia after the first revolution, I thought, "This is a real workers' army." Now I know there can be no such thing as a democratic army. People don't want to die, and except for a few glorious fanatics they are not going to vote themselves into the front line trenches."

"During her junior year at Vassar in 1902 Crystal wrote in her journal that men were typically "clever, powerful, selfish and animal"-except for her brother Max. And, she wrote, should she ever marry a man he would have to have Max's qualities: "I don't believe there is a feeling in the world too refined and imagined for him to appreciate." Crystal thought her brother might not like it, but she thought it was "the highest compliment you can pay a man to say that he has the fineness of feeling and sympathy of a woman... All mothers ought to cultivate it in their boys.""

"This freedom from dogma enabled us to join independently in the struggle for racial equality and woman's rights, for intelligent sex relations, above all (and beneath all) for birth and population control. Socialist dogma declared that all these problems would be solved when the economy of capitalism was replaced by a cooperative commonwealth. I was convinced to the contrary."

"So far, at any rate, as I shaped its policy, the guiding ideal of the magazine was that every individual should be made free to live and grow in his own chosen way. That was what I hoped might be achieved with all this distasteful palaver about politics and economics. Even if it cannot be achieved, I would say to myself, the good life consists in striving towards it. As my notebook of those days declares: "I can bear the prospect that the world may never be free, but I can not bear the prospect of my living in it and not taking part in the fight for freedom.""

"Two editors of the Masses, Crystal Eastman's brother Max and Floyd Dell, used that journal for vigorous advocacy of feminist issues. In it Eastman attacked American socialist men for their indifference to women's rights. "The members of the Socialist Party in America, on the whole, have been like every other group of sexually selfish men. None of them got up and actively went into the suffrage propaganda until after they saw that suffrage was coming and they would soon have to be asking for women's votes." He demanded of the socialists: "Sex Equality is a question by itself. Answer it.""

"By May 1916, Eastman and his sister, Crystal Eastman, the leading spirit of the American Union Against Militarism, were working hard to combat the mounting drive toward American participation in the war. With such people as Paul V. Kellogg, Amos Pinchot, Winthrop D. Lane, and Randolph Bourne, Eastman spoke at mass meetings in various parts of the country, telling his audiences that nothing was to be gained by joining in on the kill, that all chance of appealing to Germany's liberal elements would be lost with America's entrance against it. After April 1917, Eastman's tone hardened. He knew now that the brief interlude of fun and freedom had ended, that the New Freedom was finished and the New Intolerance had begun. "You can't even collect your thoughts," he told an audience on July 18, 1917, "without getting arrested for unlawful assemblage. They give you ninety days for quoting the Declaration of Independence, six months for quoting the Bible, and pretty soon somebody is going to get a life sentence for quoting Woodrow Wilson in the wrong connection.""

"An honest, bold, loyal, and within its limits extremely highbrow attempt to produce through common ownership a society of the Free and Equal, produced a tyrant and a totalitarian state;…"

"The Masses marked, I have been told, the first appearance of "realism" in an American magazine. But I was ignorant of, and indifferent to, schools of art and literature. Of the new movement in art represented by John Sloan, George Bellows, and the other pupils of Robert Henri, I had never heard."

"It is this catholicity of The Masses, its freedom from the one-track mental habit of the rabid devotee of a cause, for which I as editor was most responsible. I never could see why people with a zeal for improving life should be indifferent to the living of it. Why cannot one be young-hearted, gay, laughing, audacious, full of animal spirits, and yet also use his brains? The everlasting cerebral attitude of such papers as The Nation and The New Republic, the steady, unbillowy, unjoy-disturbed throbbing of grey matter in their pages, makes me, after some months, a little dogsick. And yet on the other hand I hate and always did hate smart-alecky and irresponsible leftism. This posture of mind was, I think, my chief contribution to The Masses."

"The backers of Hitler in Germany made the same mistake about the Nazi party that the workers and soldiers in Petrograd made about the Bolshevik party. Each group believed that this new brutal, rabid, monolithic fighting gang, on achieving power, would promote, as had been promised, its enlightened interests."

"The Masses was the only male-edited socialist journal that consistently affirmed the importance of equality as essential for the full development of the lives of both men and women. In a satiric piece, Floyd Dell took up the arguments of the antifeminists. "I thought, you see, that [women] were persons like myself. Well, they aren't. I know better now." Eastman took the same line. Under an egalitarian political and social system, girls "will grow up to be interested and living individuals, and satisfy their ambitions only with the highest prizes of adventure and achievement that life offers. And the benefit of that will fall upon us all-but chiefly upon the children of these women when they are mothers. ... Only a developed and fully constituted individual is fit to be the mother of a child. Only one who has herself made the most of the present, is fit to hold in her arms the hope of the future.""

"More goods and fewer people is the slogan I should like to see carried at the head of humanity's march into the future."

"I still think the worst enemy of human hope is not brute facts, but men of brains who will not face them."

"Art Young drew a picture of a complacent cherub carrying a tiny pail of water dipped from the "Ocean of Truth." The pail was marked "Dogma," and my editorial read: "I publish this little picture in answer to numberless correspondents who want to know just what this magazine is trying to do.' It is trying not to try to empty the ocean, for one thing. And in a propaganda paper that alone is a task.""

"Stalinism, as we have seen, contains all of the evils of Nazism and Fascism, most of them in extremer form."