My friend Richard Nikoley runs a very popular paleo-living blog, FreeTheAnimal.com. His main focus is diet and fitness, but he is also an anarcho-capitalist, his thought falling in the same general neighborhood as mine or Jim Klein’s, and this influences his writing in salutary ways. Human life is a gestalt, and all the healthy food in the world won’t save you if you fuel your mind with poisonous philosophy.
I encourage you to see Richard pushing that envelope in a post called “If You Want Someone Dead, Then Kill Them Yourself.” It’s not Murder by Numbers, very much the contrary:
There will always be killing and murder. Those who propose solutions that involve eradication are deluded, or worse, scamming you. Have you paid them anything or donated?
I have a modest proposal and it’s already in the title: if you want someone dead, then just kill them yourself.
You see, it’s very difficult for me to assume that many people don’t want one whole fuck of a lot of people dead. Isn’t that part of the reason why so many agitate, then stand in line at a voting booth, to vote death by proxy, “support the troops,” and all thayt? Do they go home and wash their hands?
If you want someone dead — and I’m certainly not saying there’s not valid reasons for that — then kill them yourself.
Just kill them yourself.
Imagine a world where that was the creed, and you had to live with, or got to enjoy, the real consequences of your deed. Might you be a little careful?
I saw people today in the latest go-round over an execution being impotent as always; pathetic, some admonishing that it’s better for 100, 1,000, 10,000 guilty men to go free than for one to be executed unjustly.
That’s a sucker’s hope. People will always be killed. Some unjustly. It happens. It will happen. But how much more likely is it when real culpability for error is nowhere to be found?
So just do it yourself when you think it’s warranted, and face the consequences if you’re deemed wrong.
Of course, there is an alternative, which would be simply to stop killing people because they think and act differently from you, or are in the way, or whatever. But yea, that would never work.
Richard credits me for the sentiment, citing this post on the murder of Terri Schiavo from my old PresenceOfMind.net blog:
I am stoutly opposed to “sanctioned” violence in any form, with the only exception being where to fail to act with immediate force will result in even greater injury. I think Ayn Rand and much of the (broadly-drawn) libertarian movement has made a huge mistake in their endorsement of abortion. Abortion is the wedge issue by which Communism seeks to introduce the idea of a “sanctioned” murder into the minds of otherwise decent people. Geriatricide and “merciful” infanticide are other emotion-laden tines in the same rhetorical fork. If we ever come to the day when we as a culture proceed to killing Jews or Kulaks or genetic defectives or other “useless eaters,” it will be because we have unthinkingly adopted these specious arguments of a “sanctioned” homicide.
(Members of AARP could stop to consider that Terri Schiavo is the left’s final solution to the Socialist inSecurity mess.)
First, in the world as libertarians idealize it, there would be no circumstance under which a state could “justly” harm an innocent homo sapiens.
Second, in the world as it exists now, if Terri Schiavo’s husband sought to kill her with his own hands, he would certainly be prosecuted for murder by the State of Florida.
This establishes the proper libertarian political position in this matter: It’s none of the state’s damn business, not on either side, not at any level of government.
Another bogus argument being propagated by seemingly thoughtful people, an advanced symptom of the Communist ploy cited above, is this claim:
No one would want to live in that state.
Why is this specious? Because the words are a canard, a decoy intended to disguise the true claim:
No one who actually is alive in that state would want to live.
This is clearly false to fact, both in the instant case and universally. If you poke Terri Schiavo with a knitting needle — which, unlike giving her water, is probably lawful — she will demonstrate that, to the extent that she is capable of expressing wants, she wants to live. The invalid move in “no one would want to live” is the substitution of a claimed hypothetical desire now, without any risks or consequences, for an actual expressed desire later, in the actual imagined future circumstances. Libertarians will thunder, “I would never choose to live as a slave!” but the evidence of history is that many, many people have preferred slavery to death. Armchair expostulations — or even living wills — are fine sentiments, but people in Terri Schiavo’s circumstances very clearly do want to live, and it is twice obscene to claim that the allegedly “sanctioned” murder of an innocent homo sapiens is allegedly “justified” by the victim’s alleged past desires.
If you want Terri Schiavo — or your ailing Grandma — dead, then kill her yourself. But call things by their right names. The act is murder. The actor is a murderer. And the victim is not ever a volunteer.
Sometime soon I plan to take allegedly “sanctioned” after-the-fact retaliation away from you. Second only to the most amazingly horrific imaginary rapes, blood-drenched imaginary murders are the statist’s best pet mannequins. Alas, no matter how gruesome the shaggy-dog stories, there is no defensible doctrine of domination of one person by another person or group of people — no magical philosopher’s stone to turn undoubted crime into “sanctioned” justice.
That all sounds bad, as though I were taking something good away from you. That’s false. In fact, what I am offering instead is a net positive, this by large orders of magnitude. As soon as you stop operating on your self and other people as you and they are not, choosing instead to act upon all human beings, including your own self, as you actually are — as soon as you acknowledge in your thoughts, your words and your deeds that you and all other individual people are indomitable as a matter of inalterable ontology — at that juncture, the riches of the uniquely-human life will begin to rain down upon you. Every wealth of the universe is to be found between your ears. Learn to love your one real life — learn to love living it the only way it can be lived — and every treasure of a completely-treasured life will be yours.
