Political Anabaptism

I always check James Leroy Wilson's blog first thing. Today, he has yet another post that I keep ruminating over http://independentcountry.blogspot.com/2005/08/pessimistic-confused-paranoid.html and that hits me intellectually and emotionally. James owns up to being "pessimistic, confused and paranoid" and sets out some of the reasons. I feel the same way, and sometimes it is frustrating to imagine that liberty lovers will never realize our dream of a free society or even come close. Perhaps the best we can hope for is to colonize the sea or space (assuming the statists don't hunt us down).

For my part, I cling, perhaps psychotically, to the hope of creating a free society right here in the midst of the statist world. Just as the Kingdom of God is all around us and we do not see it, let's try to realize the Kingdom of Liberty (could they be the same Kingdom?) right under the nose of the state. Let us live our ideology insofar as we can, ignore the state as much as possible, and create alternative institutions and networks to meet our needs and draw us to together. Let our lives be our testimony to freedom.

I have begun to think of myself as a kind of political Anabaptist, and I think that the central tenets of Anabaptism could be applied to libertarians trying to live out their libertarianism in an unfree world.

Simplicity- If we live simply, we are less dependent on the state and state-corporate interests. We are more mobile. We will tend to trade more locally with people we know and meet face to face. We will tend to engage in more countereconomic activity. We will be less likely to be implicated in fraud and coercion or to be tied up with the state.

Separation from the world- We must live "in" the statist world but we need not be "of" it. We can create and work within institutions and networks that compete with or are indifferent to the state. We must grant the state no legitimacy at all, recognizing that it is prudent to render unto Caesar what Caesar will take from us by force in any event. It is up to us to problematize the conventional wisdom and ideas that sustain the state.

Peacefulness- We must renounce force and fraud, except in defense. In that spirit, we will not willingly serve the state or take our neighbors before the courts. We will not support unjust war. We should strive to instill shame in anyone who delights in or promotes unjustified violence or fraud.

Adult baptism- The sense of this in the religious context is that each believer must choose for himself as an individual to follow Christ. Neither your family nor your community can make this choice for you. This is analogous to the libertarian position of individual sovereignty. We must recognize the right of our neighbors to make free choices and tolerate those choices whether we like them or not. This does not mean that we cannot be discriminating, but we must never let our distaste for individual choices to tempt us to use or advocate force against the choosers.

The Kingdom of Liberty will never be imposed and will be realized, if it ever will be, only through the transformation of the hearts and minds of men, one by one. It is not enough to talk and write about freedom in the abstract, we must try to live it and set an example to the world. This is hard work but not without its satisfactions, and I know that I fall way short of my ideals. Am I a lunatic dreamer? Probably. But like the main character in The Life of Pi, I think that a world where I can do something to work toward a free society makes a "better story" than the world where it is hopeless.