Anna Świderkówna opowiadała kiedyś o rozmowie ze znajomym komunistą: „W czasie rozmowy rzucił: – Jestem ateistą. – Aha – mówię – czyli pan wierzy, że Boga nie ma. – Nie, nie. Ja w nic nie wierzę – zaoponował zaskoczony. – A mógłby pan dowieść, że Boga nie ma? – zapytałam. Usłyszałam, że go zatkało. Bo on nigdy nie pomyślał, że jego światopogląd też jest formą wiary”. W każdym światopoglądzie, w każdej filozofii istnieją pewne zdania, które przyjmuje się na wiarę. Ich prawdziwość zakłada się po prostu jako rzecz oczywistą. Każdy człowiek ma jakiś zasób nienaruszalnych podstawowych tez, pewnych punktów odniesienia, które stanowią rodzaju filtru w jego patrzeniu na świat, na siebie, na życie.
Dogmatyzm kojarzy się z postawą bezkrytyczną, utożsamia się go wręcz z zakazem myślenia. Myślenie naukowe, dojrzałe, nowoczesne powinno być za myśleniem bez dogmatu. To mit. Punktem wyjścia wszystkich nauk ścisłych są aksjomaty, czyli tezy, których się nie dowodzi. Z tych „dogmatycznie” przyjętych aksjomatów wyprowadza się drogą wnioskowania kolejne twierdzenia. Nasuwa się jeszcze jeden przykład, nieco lżejszy. Czy można uznać grę w szachy za coś, co nie wymaga myślenia? A przecież szachy mają swoje nienaruszalne, niezmienne zasady. Gracze muszą je respektować, zgodzić się na nie. Inaczej nie będzie żadnej sensownej, intelektualnej rozrywki. Dogmaty są właśnie jak te niezmienne reguły gry. Nie są szlabanami zamykającymi drogę do refleksji, ale są raczej punktami wyjścia wyznaczającymi kierunek myślenia. Zapraszają do myślenia, ale we „wnętrzu” gry. Nie jest więc tak, że mamy wybór: albo myślenie, albo dogmat. Wybieramy raczej między takim czy innym zestawem dogmatów.
ks. Tomasz Jaklewicz, Dogmat w czasach niepewności, http://goscniedzielny.wiara.pl/?grupa=6&art=1219950754&dzi=1104764436&idnumeru=1219928104
Pytanie o powołanie jest pytaniem, które ma sens w kontekście wiary, czyli relacji, jaka łączy człowieka z Bogiem. To przecież Bóg powołuje człowieka. Zrozumienie zatem pytania o powołanie zależy od rozumienia relacji z Bogiem, od rozumienia kim jest Bóg i jak On postępuje z człowiekiem.
Rozeznając powołanie bardzo często zakładamy, bardziej lub mniej świadomie, że Bóg ma już gotowy, szczegółowy plan wobec nas i że oczekuje od nas byśmy go zrealizowali.
[T]akie rozumienie powołania, powodowane nawet najlepszymi intencjami, kryje w sobie zupełnie niechrześcijański obraz Boga. Przedstawiając go nieco karykaturalnie, Pan Bóg, gdzieś w swojej tajnej kartotece, posiada ukryte akta każdego człowieka z zapisanym projektem jego życia. Do człowieka należy odgadywanie zawartości tej kartoteki. Jest to zadanie niezmiernie trudne, jeśli w ogóle możliwe, nie wspominając już o tym, że właściwie nie ma tu mowy o wolności człowieka, tak bardzo podkreślanej w chrześcijaństwie.
[T]akie wyobrażenie Boga i powołania otwiera furtkę dla niekończących się rewizji podjętych decyzji i stawia pod znakiem zapytania wierność wszelkim wyborom: bo zawsze można stwierdzić, że wcześniej nastąpiła pomyłka i dopiero teraz udało się nam rozpoznać wolę Boga. Paradoksalnie pod pozorem wiary można przemycać niewierność.
[W]olą Boga jest byśmy przez Chrystusa byli Jego dziećmi. Trudno wyobrazić sobie relację bardziej podkreślającą wolność niż ta jaka panuje pomiędzy Ojcem i dziećmi. Jedyną rzeczą do jakiej ona wzywa jest podobieństwo do Ojca i odzwierciedlanie Jego świętości. Natomiast konkretny sposób w jaki odpowiemy na to wezwanie, pozostawiony jest twórczej wolności człowieka. Właśnie odpowiedzialność i twórczość w budowaniu własnego życia jest najdoskonalszą formą realizacji podobieństwa do Stwórcy. Oczywiście w przypadku człowieka nie jest to tworzenie z niczego. Odbywa się ono na podstawie tego, kim jesteśmy, naszego temperamentu, naszych pragnień i uzdolnień, naszej wrażliwości na otaczający nas świat i wydarzenia, w których uczestniczymy. Wszystko to jest naszym udziałem w tworzeniu własnego powołania w dialogu ze Słowem Boga, które uzdalnia nas do stawania się Jego dziećmi (por. J 1,12). Wola Boga nie jest z góry szczegółowo zapisanym planem określającym kształt naszego życia.
[P]owołanie jest przede wszystkim obietnicą spełnienia głębokiego pragnienia ludzkiego serca: pragnienia życia spełnionego. To sam Bóg stwarzając człowieka składa w jego sercu pragnienie życia, jest jego Autorem, ale jednocześnie człowiekowi powierza określenie konkretnego kształtu tego życia. Abraham związał je z ojcostwem i potomstwem. Gdy ono pozostaje niespełnione, Bóg wskazuje Abrahamowi warunki jego spełnienia: wyjdź... i idź... Plan, jaki Bóg przedstawia, sięga o wiele dalej i obejmuje wszystkie ludy ziemi, ale w żaden sposób nie każe Abrahamowi rezygnować z własnego pragnienia. Przeciwnie, obiecuje jego spełnienie. W jaki sposób realizacja planu zbawienia ludzkości i spełnienie pragnienia konkretnego człowieka mogą wzajemnie się uzupełniać pozostaje tajemnicą wielkości Boga. Jedno jest jednak pewne. Nie znając własnego pragnienia, Abraham nie mógłby ani usłyszeć, ani zawierzyć wezwaniu Boga. Rozpoznanie woli Boga względem siebie, rozpoznanie własnego powołania zaczyna się od poznania i określenia własnego pragnienia życia.
Jeśli Bogu tak bardzo zależy na wolności człowieka, jedynym słusznym powodem kwestionowania dokonanego wyboru może być brak wolności w momencie jego dokonywania. Kościół w swojej mądrości uznaje za nigdy nie ważne małżeństwa zawarte pod przymusem, święcenia przyjęte bez wolnej woli. Oczywiście wolność człowieka jest niezmiernie delikatną dziedziną. Czasem bardzo trudno udokumentować rzeczywisty brak wolności, czasem bardzo łatwo postulować brak wolności, gdy tak naprawdę chodzi o trudność dochowania wierności. Nie są to łatwe kwestie i każdy przypadek musi być rozważany osobno z całą powagą i uczciwością. Jednak także ogólne rozważanie może pomóc uniknąć wielu nieporozumień.
Pewnie większość prób ponownego rozeznawania powołania nie różni się niczym od kryzysów wiary, których doświadczył Abraham. Zamiast wyobrażać sobie, że nastąpiła pomyłka, że nie tędy droga, że może nieopatrznie zrozumiałem, czego Bóg ode mnie chciał, potrzeba bardziej przypomnienia (anamnezy) własnego, pierwszego pragnienia. Bo to właśnie na nim zaczęło się budować powołanie. Bo Bóg je potraktował na poważnie i zaangażował się, by je spełnić. To nic, jeśli nie było do końca dojrzałe i czyste. Cały czas długiego oczekiwania Abrahama nie jest niczym innym jak jednym procesem dojrzewania jego pragnienia. Ale nie zostało ono zawiedzione.
[P]onowne rozeznawanie powołania mające na celu zmianę drogi życia na pewno nie jest postawą wiary. Ponieważ Bóg nie oczekuje od nas odgadywania ukrytych Swoich planów wobec naszego życia, w sytuacji kryzysu chodzi raczej o powrót do własnego pierwotnego pragnienia. Bo to na nim zaczęło się budować nasze powołanie.
Tomasz Kot SJ, Zrozumieć swoje powołanie..., http://mateusz.pl/mt/10lat/tk-zsp.htm
[O]ur surroundings determine not just what we think, but what we can think. We live in cities urban but not urbane, among screaming sirens, in air grayed by exhaust and wracked by the blattings of buses. The complaint is not invalid for being trite. I cannot imagine a Whitman composing in a shopping mall.
The rush and complexity of everything take their toll. As a people we might well be called The Unrelaxed. And, therefore, the Uncontemplative.
Other lives are possible, or were possible. Years ago I passed a summer in Hampden-Sydney, my small college on a huge wooded campus in then-rural Virginia. The students were blessedly gone.
Along the Via Sacra, as the only road on campus was called, under blue skies going on forever and forever there was silence, absolute silence, unless you count the twittering of birds and the keening of bugs in ancient oaks. These may be sounds, but they are not noise. They are not even music, but something before, older, earlier, better. . . . [I]t was quiet and warm and you were with your thoughts.
It was terribly unmodern. At night the stars shone in the black infinite and there was no noise. No noise. There a Thoreau could have written or Corot painted. I do not think this possible in clangorous suburban ugliness.
Scientists take things apart but, except for the greats, do not notice the whole.
People rush to Europe in search of the old, the quiet, and the pretty. Peddlers of real estate understand the urge, and hawk tranquil rural life while building the malls that will make it impossible. And so hurry comes to Arcadia. People then think of escape to the next small town. We spend a remarkable amount of time fleeing ourselves. Maybe instead we should build a place we like.
We cannot, because the nature of things is determined remotely, at corporate. We have little choice in where we live, not because we cannot move but because everywhere becomes the same.
So little remains of the local. Time was when two-lane highways wound through misty valleys in the Smokies with little towns scrunched onto the slopes of a wrinkled land and mom-and-pop restaurants, no two alike. Barstow was a desert town of desert people, and New Orleans was a city, not a theme park.
Now, no. Things are both uniform and ugly. Corporates everywhere have learned to stamp out stores, houses, developments, cheap because identical, because of the wonders of mass production, and who can tell them no? You can’t stop progress, boosters say, though I can’t see that we have had any.
And of course people want, or think they want, the noise and sprawl and franchisees. Construction does briefly provide jobs, Wal-Mart does sell power saws at low prices, and the food at Ruby Tuesday’s is good. The young like noise, and surely a store selling thirty brands of running shoes for people who don’t run cannot be a bad thing. It is only later that the boredom and emptiness set in for kids who have only the malls, never the woods. Hamsters have exercise wheels. We buy things.
Few precisely like what we have, I suppose, but how does one escape it? Perhaps they don’t sense exactly what it is they want to escape, and anyway there is nowhere else to go. In noise-ridden cities smelling of exhaust, crowded, where the stars languish obscured by smoke, the rivers run semi-poisonous and much of the populace can barely read, how can anyone think beyond the stock market and the next empty copulation? The Milnes and Donnes and Marlowes don’t exist because they can’t, and we don’t want them because we can’t want them.
Fred Reed, Other Times and Ways: Shoveling Sand Against the Tide, http://www.fredoneverything.net/Walden%20III.shtml
Until quite recently, I had assumed that the extreme ugliness of the city in which I live was attributable to the Luftwaffe.
I discovered how wrong I was not long ago when I entered a store whose walls were decorated with large photographs of the city as it had been before the war. It was then a fine place, in a grandiloquent, Victorian kind of way. Every building had spoken of a bulging, no doubt slightly pompous and ridiculous, municipal pride. Industry and Labor were glorified in statuary, and a leavening of Greek temples and Italian Renaissance palaces lightened the prevailing mock-Venetian Gothic architecture.
The City Council—the people's elected representatives it transpired, had done far more damage to the fabric of the city in the 1950s and 1960s than had Goering's air force.
First among the reasons for this large-scale architectural vandalism was the prolonged revulsion against all things Victorian.
I witnessed a striking example of this revulsion in my own household. My father, a communist and therefore predisposed to view the past in a lurid light, especially by comparison with the inevitable post-revolutionary glories to come, had bought several Victorian paintings at Sotheby's during the war for ten shillings each. (Communists are not necessarily opposed to taking advantage of a temporary depression in prices.) He kept them in the loft of the house. Then, one day in 1960, quite arbitrarily, he decided that they were taking up too much space—unlike the tins of fruit he had stockpiled during the Korean War in the expectation that it would escalate into the Third World War, and which were now beginning to explode, but which he kept forever. He took all the paintings except one and put them on a bonfire, an act which I knew even at the age of ten to be one of terrible barbarism. I begged him not to do it, to give the paintings away if he didn't like them—but no, they had to be destroyed.
Then there was the modernist arrogance about not only the Victorian past but all the centuries that had gone before—my city swept away many eighteenth-century buildings along with Victorian and Edwardian ones.
The architects thought that modernity was a value that transcended all other virtues; they thought they could wake the country from its nostalgic slumber, dragging it into the twentieth century by pouring what seemed to them the most modern of building materials—reinforced concrete—all over it.
[W]hat was decent housing? A civil servant, Parker Morris, provided the answer: a certain number of cubic yards of living space per inhabitant. The Ministry of Housing adopted the Parker Morris standards for all public housing; they governed the size and number of rooms—and that was all.
Even allowing for the roseate glow that the passage of time lends to experience, what my patients tell me of the streets where they grew up does not vindicate the reformers.
[A] sense of community did exist in these streets of little red houses, to such an extent that people who came from more than a few streets away were regarded as strangers, almost as foreigners. No doubt the community feeling resulted in a certain small-mindedness, but it also meant that life was not then the war of permanently inflamed egos to be found in Corbusian housing projects—egos inflamed by the fact that the inhabitants have been, and continue to be, treated so transparently by social policy makers as faceless, interchangeable, passive ciphers that the only way to assert their individuality is to behave antisocially.
The idea that happiness and well-being consist of the satisfaction of a few simple physical needs, and can therefore be planned on behalf of society by benevolent administrators, is . . . bleakly mocked.
[T]he buildings themselves . . . are, with a vengeance, Le Corbusier's "machines for living in"—though perhaps "existing in" would be more accurate. The straight line and the right angle reign supreme: no curves, no frivolous decorative touches, no softening materials add warmth to the steel, glass, and concrete.
The people who inhabit these apartments are utterly isolated. All that connects them is the noise they make, often considerable, which permeates the flimsy walls, ceilings, and floors. They are likely to be unemployed and poorly educated, socialized neither by work nor by pastimes. Single mothers are housed here, guaranteeing the impoverishment of their children's social environment: and in Britain we are now into the second generation of children who know no other environment.
No civic or collective life is possible in such conditions, and so there are no standards of conduct: every man's whim is law, and the most physically powerful and ruthless is the one who sets the tone and makes the rules. When a patient of mine was suspended by her ankles from the window of her 11th-floor apartment by her jealous boyfriend, no one noticed or considered it his duty to intervene. She herself was unaware that there was anything morally reprehensible (as against merely unpleasant) about her boyfriend's conduct.
[N]o desert hermit was ever more alone than the inhabitant of an English housing project.
When I aired my thoughts about public housing to a British architect—to whom, in my heart, I ascribed some of the collective blame for the calamitous situation he at once shot back, "Yes, but do sties make pigs, or do pigs make sties?"
I suspect that there is, as my father used to say, a dialectical relationship.
Theodore Dalrymple, Do Sties Make Pigs, http://www.city-journal.org/html/5_3_a4.html
Sacred architecture, like the faith it seeks to represent in three-dimensional form, should reflect its own tradition. Each church should be a work of art in which one finds references to and acknowledgment of previous greatness. The Church remembers the Council of Nicea and the Last Supper every time she celebrates the liturgy. Likewise, every time she builds a church she remembers the holy places of her tradition. The church building is an anamnesis, or a participation, in the representation of the holy mountain, of the tent of meeting, of the Temple in Jerusalem, of Golgotha, of the upper room, and of sacred buildings throughout the centuries.
[T.S. Eliot wrote:] "Tradition ... cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense ... the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. ... No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone: you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead."
This "historical sense" requires the architect to immerse himself in great architecture. He studies buildings the way the theologian studies texts: through careful analysis and interpretation. Like the disciple, the Classicist looks to treatises and paradigms that draw him into the architectural tradition and shed light on the present. Today the architect can cut his teeth on a wealth of information on great works of the past. He himself must be willing to investigate the deep and broad architectural stream, and relearn tradition before seeking to innovate. Poetry comes only after competence in prose. And architectural innovation comes only after competence in the language of architecture.
Classical architecture is a large extended family of buildings that bear a visual resemblance to one another. The classical architect, then, has it "in his blood" to design within a proven tradition, and he has excellent advisors. The great works of the past are his forbears and advisors. He bounces new ideas off these masterpieces and tries to learn from them how they solved similar problems. When he designs, it is not just for himself or for today; he designs for and in conversation with the Classical architects who have gone before him. He designs for the future, aware that others will come and continue the conversation.
Catholicism is an Incarnational religion and in its architecture there should be an appreciation of the human body. As people created in His image, aware of Christ's willingness to clothe Himself in flesh and blood, we recognize the goodness of the body.
The traditional church building is anthropomorphic: modeled on Christ's body in its general form, embodying the saints and martyrs in its elements, and expressing the Church and its beliefs through iconography. The analogy of the body in the church is an accessible and profound way to understand the meaning of the Universal Church. The analogy grows out of the early Christian tradition of building churches over the graves of saints or on holy ground where a saint lived or was martyred.
Figurative painting and sculpture are central tools for the aims of Classical architecture. The Hebrew and Christian saints are witnesses worshipping with us, and the church's iconography makes us aware of their presence. The traditions of placing images of the four evangelists at the crossing, or sculptures of the saints on the facade or retable of the material church, remind us of the true construction of the spiritual Church. Paintings and statues of saints remind us we are part of the mystical body of Christ. The church as body is a beautiful way to conceptualize the building in which people are baptized into Christ's body, partake of His body and blood, become one body with another, and finally have their body delivered by the Church into its eternal home.
The Roman Catholic Church is timeless, enduring and permanent. So the church building is a prolepsis, or anticipation of the future; a three-dimensional introduction into the heavenly kingdom. It promises us future glory, and is a place which should make us desire to "dwell in the house of the Lord forever." In expressing the inexpressible, the mysterious, the beatific vision, the church is a place of eternity amidst the suffering and temporality of life. In liturgy and private devotion we partake of the heavenly liturgy in which we will worship eternally, the heavenly banquet in which we shall feast forever. Surrounded pictorially by the heavenly banquet, with saints and angels painted on the ceiling, in the decoration of the walls, or as icons in the side chapels we come in contact with the eternal. The building is an act of eternal worship, which participates in the worship of heaven. As a prolepsis of eternity it must be timeless, transcendent, beautiful and durable.
The Christian life is a journey towards the heavenly home. Our architecture is eschatological; it looks forward to the new heaven and the new earth. An architecture of journey should transport us out of ourselves and into God's presence. The church can articulate this journey beginning with the siting and design of the exterior, which should call out to us. The facade is a heavenly ladder, or a gate of heaven through which we must pass. The colonnades of the nave line our procession towards the eternal. The dome of the crossing, the generous apse and the reredos draw us up into heaven and are decorated as such. The triumphal arch separating the sanctuary from the nave is a threshold towards the eternal. Our journey towards Christ is like our procession to the altar, the place where heaven breaks into our world. From the sanctuary we receive eternity in the Eucharist and in his word.
The church is eschatological. A place designed for the future, timeless and universal rather than stylish. A car assembly line must be retooled to stay competitive, but church architecture must speak to its time and beyond its time. It should seek to be undatable, the same yesterday, today and forever.
All cultures have sought to capture beauty in their art and architecture. While the concept of beauty is debased today, the Church continues to uphold the beauty of God's house as the ideal. Beautiful things go beyond mere fashion or superficial interest. Architectural beauty should reflect God's creation, particularly man created in his image. Classical theory defines beauty as the correspondence of the parts with the whole, from which nothing can be added or taken away.
Catholicism and Classicism are discriminating, with high standards of excellence. These standards are the perfection of the eternal. The architect is called to be perfect as his heavenly Father is perfect.
The church, a building for the eternal, seeks durability, so as to be used by future generations. It is an investment in the faith of our children and so should be built with great care. . . . The church building is an offering to the eternal, so we employ the best materials and the finest construction techniques. The House of God should, always and everywhere, be fashioned in a way superior to the best public buildings or houses. It should be a model building for the neighborhood or the town, and as it endures it will continually speak of eternity and transcendence. [John Cardinal Newman said:] "[T]hey remain, those holy places, where they were: for the Church abides for evermore, and her Temples, in their deep foundations, and their arching heights, are her image and manifestation."
Duncan G. Stroik, The Classical Moment, http://www.stroik.com/pubs/pdf/TheClassicalMoment.pdf
Political power – the capacity and legal sanction to aggress against others – is integral to political office. A State official, libertarian or not, has considerable power over defenseless citizens. It is disingenuous to claim that one aspires to political office but does not seek power. Power is a defining characteristic of political office.
A politician can get together with his neighbors (other politicians) and vote to rob people, and he can bring the force of law to back up this vote.
I don't want anyone to have political power, regardless of his supposed good intentions. I object to the political office itself and to its legitimized power.
Should the wise maxim often quoted by libertarians, "Power corrupts," now be amended to read, "Power corrupts – unless you are a libertarian?" It is not clear to me why libertarians are any less susceptible to the temptations of power than the ordinary mortal.
We should seek to abolish the mechanism whereby one individual, in virtue of political office, can employ legitimized aggression against other individuals.
"Elect me to office," proclaims the libertarian politician, "give me enormous power over you and your property, but rest assured that I shall abstain from using this power unjustly." I reply: You have no right to such power in the first place – and as a libertarian you should know this. You should be denouncing the very office to which you aspire.
[L]ibertarians must stand firm against all Senators, all Presidents, and so forth, because these offices and the legal power they embody are indispensable features of the State apparatus. After all, what can it possibly mean to oppose the State unless one opposes particular offices and institutions in which State power manifests itself?
The fight against the State is not merely a fight against naked power – the battle would be much easier if that were so. The essence of the State is not aggression per se, but legitimized aggression. The State uses the sanction of law to legitimize its criminal acts. This is what distinguishes it from the average criminal in the street.
We must strip the State of its legitimacy in the public eye. We must persuade people to apply the same moral standards to the State as they apply to anyone else. We need not convince people that theft is wrong; we need to convince them that theft, when committed by the State in the name of taxation, does not differ from theft when committed by an individual. We need not persuade people that murder is wrong; we need to persuade them that murder, when committed by the State in the name of war or national defense, does not differ from murder when committed by an individual.
To run for or support candidates for political office is to grant legitimacy to the very thing we are attempting to strip of legitimacy.
The vote sanctifies injustice. If the libertarian message is to be truly radical – if libertarians are to lead the fight, not only against this or that injustice, but against the political system that perpetuates and legitimizes injustice – then we must condemn voting altogether. A libertarian cannot use the vote for his own end, as if the vote were morally neutral. The vote is the method by which the State maintains its illusion of legitimacy.
I maintain, therefore, that no person has the moral right to vote. To vote a person into office is to give that person unjust authority over others. To vote for a presidential candidate is to grant to that person the legal sanction for injustice.
Hasn't it ever struck you as paradoxical how libertarians who are innovative when it comes to free-market alternatives, can be so pedestrian and orthodox in the area of political strategy. I mean, libertarians never tire of outlining plans for free-market roads, sewers, utilities, charities, schools, police forces, and even courts of law. When our critics ridicule free-market education, for instance, we encourage them to expand their thinking and to reject the notion that just because government has provided something in the past, it must continue to provide it in the future. Fresh, imaginative thinking is the key here.
[I]t's not true that laws have to be repealed in order to be rendered ineffective. There are thousands of laws on the books today which are virtually dead, because the public would not tolerate their enforcement.
[L]ibertarians should breed a thorough and uncompromising disrespect for the government and its laws. We should tell people, in no uncertain terms, that decrees of the government have no moral legitimacy whatever – that they are on par with decrees of the mafia. We must work to minimize and demystify the State. Of course, there is the practical problem of avoiding penalties, and individuals may choose to obey particular laws in order to escape punishment. But a government that must rely entirely on fear cannot long survive. All governments must cloak themselves in legitimacy in order to win the passive acquiescence of their subjects. Libertarians must seek to dissolve this aura of legitimacy. We must tell people: you have certain rights, period; and what the government does cannot change that. The government is a thug and a thief; be on your guard, watch it with caution, for it is powerful. But do not be awed by it. Do not grant it respect or moral sanction. Treat it as you would any villain.
George H. Smith, Party Dialogue, http://www.voluntaryist.com/nbnb/party_dialogue.php
[The Lord of the Rings] is about the evils of power. More precisely, the book aligns itself against power – not "economic power" or "social power", but specifically political power.
[J.R.R. Tolkien wrote:] "You can make the Ring into an allegory of our own time, if you like: and allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power."
The Lord of the Rings is the epic journey to destroy the One Ring, which symbolizes power – and this is very clear when you understand that the Ring not only confers power but also imposes serfdom on the wearer. The man who wears the Ring becomes a slave at the same time as he is made supremely powerful.
This is an allegory for what actually happens in our world every day: rulers, even well intentioned and idealistic ones, are ruled themselves at the same time. They are ruled by consensus and by the spasmodic hunger to acquire yet more power than they already have. This is why the state has never been limited, as the classical liberal thinkers had hoped it would be – because the people in charge of keeping the power of the state limited never do so.
It does not matter what stirring words a politician uses to legitimize his actions; he is inside a vicious circle he can't escape.
[J.R.R. Tolkien wrote:] "My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) – or to 'unconstitutional' Monarchy."
In Tolkien's vision, the power is always evil – a good power cannot even exist. Since the very beginning, the good guys own the Ring. Since it is the most powerful weapon in the world, many of them ask why it can't be used against Sauron, the Dark Lord. Even though the Ring was forged by him and undoubtedly it is evil, yet it could help to pursue a good end, they suspect. This is an extraordinary way to ask the question: could the means be subordinated to the ends? Can a good end be pursued by evil means? Tolkien answers that no, evil means can only bring to an evil end – no matter if the original intentions are good.
[J.R.R. Tolkien wrote:] "If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and the process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people. If people were in the habit of referring to 'King George's council, Winston and his gang', it would do a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy."
Alberto Mingardi, Tolkien v. Power, http://mises.org/story/899
Dogmatyzm kojarzy się z postawą bezkrytyczną, utożsamia się go wręcz z zakazem myślenia. Myślenie naukowe, dojrzałe, nowoczesne powinno być za myśleniem bez dogmatu. To mit. Punktem wyjścia wszystkich nauk ścisłych są aksjomaty, czyli tezy, których się nie dowodzi. Z tych „dogmatycznie” przyjętych aksjomatów wyprowadza się drogą wnioskowania kolejne twierdzenia. Nasuwa się jeszcze jeden przykład, nieco lżejszy. Czy można uznać grę w szachy za coś, co nie wymaga myślenia? A przecież szachy mają swoje nienaruszalne, niezmienne zasady. Gracze muszą je respektować, zgodzić się na nie. Inaczej nie będzie żadnej sensownej, intelektualnej rozrywki. Dogmaty są właśnie jak te niezmienne reguły gry. Nie są szlabanami zamykającymi drogę do refleksji, ale są raczej punktami wyjścia wyznaczającymi kierunek myślenia. Zapraszają do myślenia, ale we „wnętrzu” gry. Nie jest więc tak, że mamy wybór: albo myślenie, albo dogmat. Wybieramy raczej między takim czy innym zestawem dogmatów.
ks. Tomasz Jaklewicz, Dogmat w czasach niepewności, http://goscniedzielny.wiara.pl/?grupa=6&art=1219950754&dzi=1104764436&idnumeru=1219928104
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Pytanie o powołanie jest pytaniem, które ma sens w kontekście wiary, czyli relacji, jaka łączy człowieka z Bogiem. To przecież Bóg powołuje człowieka. Zrozumienie zatem pytania o powołanie zależy od rozumienia relacji z Bogiem, od rozumienia kim jest Bóg i jak On postępuje z człowiekiem.
Rozeznając powołanie bardzo często zakładamy, bardziej lub mniej świadomie, że Bóg ma już gotowy, szczegółowy plan wobec nas i że oczekuje od nas byśmy go zrealizowali.
[T]akie rozumienie powołania, powodowane nawet najlepszymi intencjami, kryje w sobie zupełnie niechrześcijański obraz Boga. Przedstawiając go nieco karykaturalnie, Pan Bóg, gdzieś w swojej tajnej kartotece, posiada ukryte akta każdego człowieka z zapisanym projektem jego życia. Do człowieka należy odgadywanie zawartości tej kartoteki. Jest to zadanie niezmiernie trudne, jeśli w ogóle możliwe, nie wspominając już o tym, że właściwie nie ma tu mowy o wolności człowieka, tak bardzo podkreślanej w chrześcijaństwie.
[T]akie wyobrażenie Boga i powołania otwiera furtkę dla niekończących się rewizji podjętych decyzji i stawia pod znakiem zapytania wierność wszelkim wyborom: bo zawsze można stwierdzić, że wcześniej nastąpiła pomyłka i dopiero teraz udało się nam rozpoznać wolę Boga. Paradoksalnie pod pozorem wiary można przemycać niewierność.
[W]olą Boga jest byśmy przez Chrystusa byli Jego dziećmi. Trudno wyobrazić sobie relację bardziej podkreślającą wolność niż ta jaka panuje pomiędzy Ojcem i dziećmi. Jedyną rzeczą do jakiej ona wzywa jest podobieństwo do Ojca i odzwierciedlanie Jego świętości. Natomiast konkretny sposób w jaki odpowiemy na to wezwanie, pozostawiony jest twórczej wolności człowieka. Właśnie odpowiedzialność i twórczość w budowaniu własnego życia jest najdoskonalszą formą realizacji podobieństwa do Stwórcy. Oczywiście w przypadku człowieka nie jest to tworzenie z niczego. Odbywa się ono na podstawie tego, kim jesteśmy, naszego temperamentu, naszych pragnień i uzdolnień, naszej wrażliwości na otaczający nas świat i wydarzenia, w których uczestniczymy. Wszystko to jest naszym udziałem w tworzeniu własnego powołania w dialogu ze Słowem Boga, które uzdalnia nas do stawania się Jego dziećmi (por. J 1,12). Wola Boga nie jest z góry szczegółowo zapisanym planem określającym kształt naszego życia.
[P]owołanie jest przede wszystkim obietnicą spełnienia głębokiego pragnienia ludzkiego serca: pragnienia życia spełnionego. To sam Bóg stwarzając człowieka składa w jego sercu pragnienie życia, jest jego Autorem, ale jednocześnie człowiekowi powierza określenie konkretnego kształtu tego życia. Abraham związał je z ojcostwem i potomstwem. Gdy ono pozostaje niespełnione, Bóg wskazuje Abrahamowi warunki jego spełnienia: wyjdź... i idź... Plan, jaki Bóg przedstawia, sięga o wiele dalej i obejmuje wszystkie ludy ziemi, ale w żaden sposób nie każe Abrahamowi rezygnować z własnego pragnienia. Przeciwnie, obiecuje jego spełnienie. W jaki sposób realizacja planu zbawienia ludzkości i spełnienie pragnienia konkretnego człowieka mogą wzajemnie się uzupełniać pozostaje tajemnicą wielkości Boga. Jedno jest jednak pewne. Nie znając własnego pragnienia, Abraham nie mógłby ani usłyszeć, ani zawierzyć wezwaniu Boga. Rozpoznanie woli Boga względem siebie, rozpoznanie własnego powołania zaczyna się od poznania i określenia własnego pragnienia życia.
Jeśli Bogu tak bardzo zależy na wolności człowieka, jedynym słusznym powodem kwestionowania dokonanego wyboru może być brak wolności w momencie jego dokonywania. Kościół w swojej mądrości uznaje za nigdy nie ważne małżeństwa zawarte pod przymusem, święcenia przyjęte bez wolnej woli. Oczywiście wolność człowieka jest niezmiernie delikatną dziedziną. Czasem bardzo trudno udokumentować rzeczywisty brak wolności, czasem bardzo łatwo postulować brak wolności, gdy tak naprawdę chodzi o trudność dochowania wierności. Nie są to łatwe kwestie i każdy przypadek musi być rozważany osobno z całą powagą i uczciwością. Jednak także ogólne rozważanie może pomóc uniknąć wielu nieporozumień.
Pewnie większość prób ponownego rozeznawania powołania nie różni się niczym od kryzysów wiary, których doświadczył Abraham. Zamiast wyobrażać sobie, że nastąpiła pomyłka, że nie tędy droga, że może nieopatrznie zrozumiałem, czego Bóg ode mnie chciał, potrzeba bardziej przypomnienia (anamnezy) własnego, pierwszego pragnienia. Bo to właśnie na nim zaczęło się budować powołanie. Bo Bóg je potraktował na poważnie i zaangażował się, by je spełnić. To nic, jeśli nie było do końca dojrzałe i czyste. Cały czas długiego oczekiwania Abrahama nie jest niczym innym jak jednym procesem dojrzewania jego pragnienia. Ale nie zostało ono zawiedzione.
[P]onowne rozeznawanie powołania mające na celu zmianę drogi życia na pewno nie jest postawą wiary. Ponieważ Bóg nie oczekuje od nas odgadywania ukrytych Swoich planów wobec naszego życia, w sytuacji kryzysu chodzi raczej o powrót do własnego pierwotnego pragnienia. Bo to na nim zaczęło się budować nasze powołanie.
Tomasz Kot SJ, Zrozumieć swoje powołanie..., http://mateusz.pl/mt/10lat/tk-zsp.htm
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[O]ur surroundings determine not just what we think, but what we can think. We live in cities urban but not urbane, among screaming sirens, in air grayed by exhaust and wracked by the blattings of buses. The complaint is not invalid for being trite. I cannot imagine a Whitman composing in a shopping mall.
The rush and complexity of everything take their toll. As a people we might well be called The Unrelaxed. And, therefore, the Uncontemplative.
Other lives are possible, or were possible. Years ago I passed a summer in Hampden-Sydney, my small college on a huge wooded campus in then-rural Virginia. The students were blessedly gone.
Along the Via Sacra, as the only road on campus was called, under blue skies going on forever and forever there was silence, absolute silence, unless you count the twittering of birds and the keening of bugs in ancient oaks. These may be sounds, but they are not noise. They are not even music, but something before, older, earlier, better. . . . [I]t was quiet and warm and you were with your thoughts.
It was terribly unmodern. At night the stars shone in the black infinite and there was no noise. No noise. There a Thoreau could have written or Corot painted. I do not think this possible in clangorous suburban ugliness.
Scientists take things apart but, except for the greats, do not notice the whole.
People rush to Europe in search of the old, the quiet, and the pretty. Peddlers of real estate understand the urge, and hawk tranquil rural life while building the malls that will make it impossible. And so hurry comes to Arcadia. People then think of escape to the next small town. We spend a remarkable amount of time fleeing ourselves. Maybe instead we should build a place we like.
We cannot, because the nature of things is determined remotely, at corporate. We have little choice in where we live, not because we cannot move but because everywhere becomes the same.
So little remains of the local. Time was when two-lane highways wound through misty valleys in the Smokies with little towns scrunched onto the slopes of a wrinkled land and mom-and-pop restaurants, no two alike. Barstow was a desert town of desert people, and New Orleans was a city, not a theme park.
Now, no. Things are both uniform and ugly. Corporates everywhere have learned to stamp out stores, houses, developments, cheap because identical, because of the wonders of mass production, and who can tell them no? You can’t stop progress, boosters say, though I can’t see that we have had any.
And of course people want, or think they want, the noise and sprawl and franchisees. Construction does briefly provide jobs, Wal-Mart does sell power saws at low prices, and the food at Ruby Tuesday’s is good. The young like noise, and surely a store selling thirty brands of running shoes for people who don’t run cannot be a bad thing. It is only later that the boredom and emptiness set in for kids who have only the malls, never the woods. Hamsters have exercise wheels. We buy things.
Few precisely like what we have, I suppose, but how does one escape it? Perhaps they don’t sense exactly what it is they want to escape, and anyway there is nowhere else to go. In noise-ridden cities smelling of exhaust, crowded, where the stars languish obscured by smoke, the rivers run semi-poisonous and much of the populace can barely read, how can anyone think beyond the stock market and the next empty copulation? The Milnes and Donnes and Marlowes don’t exist because they can’t, and we don’t want them because we can’t want them.
Fred Reed, Other Times and Ways: Shoveling Sand Against the Tide, http://www.fredoneverything.net/Walden%20III.shtml
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Until quite recently, I had assumed that the extreme ugliness of the city in which I live was attributable to the Luftwaffe.
I discovered how wrong I was not long ago when I entered a store whose walls were decorated with large photographs of the city as it had been before the war. It was then a fine place, in a grandiloquent, Victorian kind of way. Every building had spoken of a bulging, no doubt slightly pompous and ridiculous, municipal pride. Industry and Labor were glorified in statuary, and a leavening of Greek temples and Italian Renaissance palaces lightened the prevailing mock-Venetian Gothic architecture.
The City Council—the people's elected representatives it transpired, had done far more damage to the fabric of the city in the 1950s and 1960s than had Goering's air force.
First among the reasons for this large-scale architectural vandalism was the prolonged revulsion against all things Victorian.
I witnessed a striking example of this revulsion in my own household. My father, a communist and therefore predisposed to view the past in a lurid light, especially by comparison with the inevitable post-revolutionary glories to come, had bought several Victorian paintings at Sotheby's during the war for ten shillings each. (Communists are not necessarily opposed to taking advantage of a temporary depression in prices.) He kept them in the loft of the house. Then, one day in 1960, quite arbitrarily, he decided that they were taking up too much space—unlike the tins of fruit he had stockpiled during the Korean War in the expectation that it would escalate into the Third World War, and which were now beginning to explode, but which he kept forever. He took all the paintings except one and put them on a bonfire, an act which I knew even at the age of ten to be one of terrible barbarism. I begged him not to do it, to give the paintings away if he didn't like them—but no, they had to be destroyed.
Then there was the modernist arrogance about not only the Victorian past but all the centuries that had gone before—my city swept away many eighteenth-century buildings along with Victorian and Edwardian ones.
The architects thought that modernity was a value that transcended all other virtues; they thought they could wake the country from its nostalgic slumber, dragging it into the twentieth century by pouring what seemed to them the most modern of building materials—reinforced concrete—all over it.
[W]hat was decent housing? A civil servant, Parker Morris, provided the answer: a certain number of cubic yards of living space per inhabitant. The Ministry of Housing adopted the Parker Morris standards for all public housing; they governed the size and number of rooms—and that was all.
Even allowing for the roseate glow that the passage of time lends to experience, what my patients tell me of the streets where they grew up does not vindicate the reformers.
[A] sense of community did exist in these streets of little red houses, to such an extent that people who came from more than a few streets away were regarded as strangers, almost as foreigners. No doubt the community feeling resulted in a certain small-mindedness, but it also meant that life was not then the war of permanently inflamed egos to be found in Corbusian housing projects—egos inflamed by the fact that the inhabitants have been, and continue to be, treated so transparently by social policy makers as faceless, interchangeable, passive ciphers that the only way to assert their individuality is to behave antisocially.
The idea that happiness and well-being consist of the satisfaction of a few simple physical needs, and can therefore be planned on behalf of society by benevolent administrators, is . . . bleakly mocked.
[T]he buildings themselves . . . are, with a vengeance, Le Corbusier's "machines for living in"—though perhaps "existing in" would be more accurate. The straight line and the right angle reign supreme: no curves, no frivolous decorative touches, no softening materials add warmth to the steel, glass, and concrete.
The people who inhabit these apartments are utterly isolated. All that connects them is the noise they make, often considerable, which permeates the flimsy walls, ceilings, and floors. They are likely to be unemployed and poorly educated, socialized neither by work nor by pastimes. Single mothers are housed here, guaranteeing the impoverishment of their children's social environment: and in Britain we are now into the second generation of children who know no other environment.
No civic or collective life is possible in such conditions, and so there are no standards of conduct: every man's whim is law, and the most physically powerful and ruthless is the one who sets the tone and makes the rules. When a patient of mine was suspended by her ankles from the window of her 11th-floor apartment by her jealous boyfriend, no one noticed or considered it his duty to intervene. She herself was unaware that there was anything morally reprehensible (as against merely unpleasant) about her boyfriend's conduct.
[N]o desert hermit was ever more alone than the inhabitant of an English housing project.
When I aired my thoughts about public housing to a British architect—to whom, in my heart, I ascribed some of the collective blame for the calamitous situation he at once shot back, "Yes, but do sties make pigs, or do pigs make sties?"
I suspect that there is, as my father used to say, a dialectical relationship.
Theodore Dalrymple, Do Sties Make Pigs, http://www.city-journal.org/html/5_3_a4.html
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Sacred architecture, like the faith it seeks to represent in three-dimensional form, should reflect its own tradition. Each church should be a work of art in which one finds references to and acknowledgment of previous greatness. The Church remembers the Council of Nicea and the Last Supper every time she celebrates the liturgy. Likewise, every time she builds a church she remembers the holy places of her tradition. The church building is an anamnesis, or a participation, in the representation of the holy mountain, of the tent of meeting, of the Temple in Jerusalem, of Golgotha, of the upper room, and of sacred buildings throughout the centuries.
[T.S. Eliot wrote:] "Tradition ... cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense ... the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. ... No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone: you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead."
This "historical sense" requires the architect to immerse himself in great architecture. He studies buildings the way the theologian studies texts: through careful analysis and interpretation. Like the disciple, the Classicist looks to treatises and paradigms that draw him into the architectural tradition and shed light on the present. Today the architect can cut his teeth on a wealth of information on great works of the past. He himself must be willing to investigate the deep and broad architectural stream, and relearn tradition before seeking to innovate. Poetry comes only after competence in prose. And architectural innovation comes only after competence in the language of architecture.
Classical architecture is a large extended family of buildings that bear a visual resemblance to one another. The classical architect, then, has it "in his blood" to design within a proven tradition, and he has excellent advisors. The great works of the past are his forbears and advisors. He bounces new ideas off these masterpieces and tries to learn from them how they solved similar problems. When he designs, it is not just for himself or for today; he designs for and in conversation with the Classical architects who have gone before him. He designs for the future, aware that others will come and continue the conversation.
Catholicism is an Incarnational religion and in its architecture there should be an appreciation of the human body. As people created in His image, aware of Christ's willingness to clothe Himself in flesh and blood, we recognize the goodness of the body.
The traditional church building is anthropomorphic: modeled on Christ's body in its general form, embodying the saints and martyrs in its elements, and expressing the Church and its beliefs through iconography. The analogy of the body in the church is an accessible and profound way to understand the meaning of the Universal Church. The analogy grows out of the early Christian tradition of building churches over the graves of saints or on holy ground where a saint lived or was martyred.
Figurative painting and sculpture are central tools for the aims of Classical architecture. The Hebrew and Christian saints are witnesses worshipping with us, and the church's iconography makes us aware of their presence. The traditions of placing images of the four evangelists at the crossing, or sculptures of the saints on the facade or retable of the material church, remind us of the true construction of the spiritual Church. Paintings and statues of saints remind us we are part of the mystical body of Christ. The church as body is a beautiful way to conceptualize the building in which people are baptized into Christ's body, partake of His body and blood, become one body with another, and finally have their body delivered by the Church into its eternal home.
The Roman Catholic Church is timeless, enduring and permanent. So the church building is a prolepsis, or anticipation of the future; a three-dimensional introduction into the heavenly kingdom. It promises us future glory, and is a place which should make us desire to "dwell in the house of the Lord forever." In expressing the inexpressible, the mysterious, the beatific vision, the church is a place of eternity amidst the suffering and temporality of life. In liturgy and private devotion we partake of the heavenly liturgy in which we will worship eternally, the heavenly banquet in which we shall feast forever. Surrounded pictorially by the heavenly banquet, with saints and angels painted on the ceiling, in the decoration of the walls, or as icons in the side chapels we come in contact with the eternal. The building is an act of eternal worship, which participates in the worship of heaven. As a prolepsis of eternity it must be timeless, transcendent, beautiful and durable.
The Christian life is a journey towards the heavenly home. Our architecture is eschatological; it looks forward to the new heaven and the new earth. An architecture of journey should transport us out of ourselves and into God's presence. The church can articulate this journey beginning with the siting and design of the exterior, which should call out to us. The facade is a heavenly ladder, or a gate of heaven through which we must pass. The colonnades of the nave line our procession towards the eternal. The dome of the crossing, the generous apse and the reredos draw us up into heaven and are decorated as such. The triumphal arch separating the sanctuary from the nave is a threshold towards the eternal. Our journey towards Christ is like our procession to the altar, the place where heaven breaks into our world. From the sanctuary we receive eternity in the Eucharist and in his word.
The church is eschatological. A place designed for the future, timeless and universal rather than stylish. A car assembly line must be retooled to stay competitive, but church architecture must speak to its time and beyond its time. It should seek to be undatable, the same yesterday, today and forever.
All cultures have sought to capture beauty in their art and architecture. While the concept of beauty is debased today, the Church continues to uphold the beauty of God's house as the ideal. Beautiful things go beyond mere fashion or superficial interest. Architectural beauty should reflect God's creation, particularly man created in his image. Classical theory defines beauty as the correspondence of the parts with the whole, from which nothing can be added or taken away.
Catholicism and Classicism are discriminating, with high standards of excellence. These standards are the perfection of the eternal. The architect is called to be perfect as his heavenly Father is perfect.
The church, a building for the eternal, seeks durability, so as to be used by future generations. It is an investment in the faith of our children and so should be built with great care. . . . The church building is an offering to the eternal, so we employ the best materials and the finest construction techniques. The House of God should, always and everywhere, be fashioned in a way superior to the best public buildings or houses. It should be a model building for the neighborhood or the town, and as it endures it will continually speak of eternity and transcendence. [John Cardinal Newman said:] "[T]hey remain, those holy places, where they were: for the Church abides for evermore, and her Temples, in their deep foundations, and their arching heights, are her image and manifestation."
Duncan G. Stroik, The Classical Moment, http://www.stroik.com/pubs/pdf/TheClassicalMoment.pdf
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Political power – the capacity and legal sanction to aggress against others – is integral to political office. A State official, libertarian or not, has considerable power over defenseless citizens. It is disingenuous to claim that one aspires to political office but does not seek power. Power is a defining characteristic of political office.
A politician can get together with his neighbors (other politicians) and vote to rob people, and he can bring the force of law to back up this vote.
I don't want anyone to have political power, regardless of his supposed good intentions. I object to the political office itself and to its legitimized power.
Should the wise maxim often quoted by libertarians, "Power corrupts," now be amended to read, "Power corrupts – unless you are a libertarian?" It is not clear to me why libertarians are any less susceptible to the temptations of power than the ordinary mortal.
We should seek to abolish the mechanism whereby one individual, in virtue of political office, can employ legitimized aggression against other individuals.
"Elect me to office," proclaims the libertarian politician, "give me enormous power over you and your property, but rest assured that I shall abstain from using this power unjustly." I reply: You have no right to such power in the first place – and as a libertarian you should know this. You should be denouncing the very office to which you aspire.
[L]ibertarians must stand firm against all Senators, all Presidents, and so forth, because these offices and the legal power they embody are indispensable features of the State apparatus. After all, what can it possibly mean to oppose the State unless one opposes particular offices and institutions in which State power manifests itself?
The fight against the State is not merely a fight against naked power – the battle would be much easier if that were so. The essence of the State is not aggression per se, but legitimized aggression. The State uses the sanction of law to legitimize its criminal acts. This is what distinguishes it from the average criminal in the street.
We must strip the State of its legitimacy in the public eye. We must persuade people to apply the same moral standards to the State as they apply to anyone else. We need not convince people that theft is wrong; we need to convince them that theft, when committed by the State in the name of taxation, does not differ from theft when committed by an individual. We need not persuade people that murder is wrong; we need to persuade them that murder, when committed by the State in the name of war or national defense, does not differ from murder when committed by an individual.
To run for or support candidates for political office is to grant legitimacy to the very thing we are attempting to strip of legitimacy.
The vote sanctifies injustice. If the libertarian message is to be truly radical – if libertarians are to lead the fight, not only against this or that injustice, but against the political system that perpetuates and legitimizes injustice – then we must condemn voting altogether. A libertarian cannot use the vote for his own end, as if the vote were morally neutral. The vote is the method by which the State maintains its illusion of legitimacy.
I maintain, therefore, that no person has the moral right to vote. To vote a person into office is to give that person unjust authority over others. To vote for a presidential candidate is to grant to that person the legal sanction for injustice.
Hasn't it ever struck you as paradoxical how libertarians who are innovative when it comes to free-market alternatives, can be so pedestrian and orthodox in the area of political strategy. I mean, libertarians never tire of outlining plans for free-market roads, sewers, utilities, charities, schools, police forces, and even courts of law. When our critics ridicule free-market education, for instance, we encourage them to expand their thinking and to reject the notion that just because government has provided something in the past, it must continue to provide it in the future. Fresh, imaginative thinking is the key here.
[I]t's not true that laws have to be repealed in order to be rendered ineffective. There are thousands of laws on the books today which are virtually dead, because the public would not tolerate their enforcement.
[L]ibertarians should breed a thorough and uncompromising disrespect for the government and its laws. We should tell people, in no uncertain terms, that decrees of the government have no moral legitimacy whatever – that they are on par with decrees of the mafia. We must work to minimize and demystify the State. Of course, there is the practical problem of avoiding penalties, and individuals may choose to obey particular laws in order to escape punishment. But a government that must rely entirely on fear cannot long survive. All governments must cloak themselves in legitimacy in order to win the passive acquiescence of their subjects. Libertarians must seek to dissolve this aura of legitimacy. We must tell people: you have certain rights, period; and what the government does cannot change that. The government is a thug and a thief; be on your guard, watch it with caution, for it is powerful. But do not be awed by it. Do not grant it respect or moral sanction. Treat it as you would any villain.
George H. Smith, Party Dialogue, http://www.voluntaryist.com/nbnb/party_dialogue.php
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[The Lord of the Rings] is about the evils of power. More precisely, the book aligns itself against power – not "economic power" or "social power", but specifically political power.
[J.R.R. Tolkien wrote:] "You can make the Ring into an allegory of our own time, if you like: and allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power."
The Lord of the Rings is the epic journey to destroy the One Ring, which symbolizes power – and this is very clear when you understand that the Ring not only confers power but also imposes serfdom on the wearer. The man who wears the Ring becomes a slave at the same time as he is made supremely powerful.
This is an allegory for what actually happens in our world every day: rulers, even well intentioned and idealistic ones, are ruled themselves at the same time. They are ruled by consensus and by the spasmodic hunger to acquire yet more power than they already have. This is why the state has never been limited, as the classical liberal thinkers had hoped it would be – because the people in charge of keeping the power of the state limited never do so.
It does not matter what stirring words a politician uses to legitimize his actions; he is inside a vicious circle he can't escape.
[J.R.R. Tolkien wrote:] "My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) – or to 'unconstitutional' Monarchy."
In Tolkien's vision, the power is always evil – a good power cannot even exist. Since the very beginning, the good guys own the Ring. Since it is the most powerful weapon in the world, many of them ask why it can't be used against Sauron, the Dark Lord. Even though the Ring was forged by him and undoubtedly it is evil, yet it could help to pursue a good end, they suspect. This is an extraordinary way to ask the question: could the means be subordinated to the ends? Can a good end be pursued by evil means? Tolkien answers that no, evil means can only bring to an evil end – no matter if the original intentions are good.
[J.R.R. Tolkien wrote:] "If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and the process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people. If people were in the habit of referring to 'King George's council, Winston and his gang', it would do a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy."
Alberto Mingardi, Tolkien v. Power, http://mises.org/story/899
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