Libertarian Spirit Shared By Everyone

The democratic process (election campaigns) has become one of the ego's greatest excuses to choose denunciation, fear, anger and a hundred other mechanisms of unhappiness. In this year of intense campaigning for presidential nominations we do well to remember every ego mechanism is self-defeating. Every temptation we might have to fear, or feel anger, or hold a grievance, or attack an opposing party or candidate, is simply sabotaging our own happiness and therefore sabotaging our own cause. It must have been much easier to see from a non-ego viewpoint during the first two American Presidential elections when there was no campaigning . George Washington didn't really want to be President, but was willing to serve and was elected by the electoral college unanimously in both 1789 and 1792. Maybe if we didn't have presidential campaigns and the electoral college was required to find a man or woman who they could all unanimously feel right and good about ... everyone in al...

Benjamin Franklin is said to have declared: "They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security." The Early American sage was certainly seeing clearly when he recognized that security can only be fleeting if liberty is given up. He might better have said: "They who give up liberty for security end up losing both." But it is interesting that even in Benjamin Franklin's day a false political question must have been arising which during the 20th Century proved to be agonizingly hurtful as the world views hurt. The question was whether people should give up some degree of their liberty in order to enjoy a greater degree of security ... as if the two were contradictory experiences. Communist countries experimented: "We'll find out the answer! We'll attempt giving away all liberty in exchange for the hope of total security. We'll see what happens." Each such experiment became a disas...