Libertarian National Socialist Green Party

When I was younger, and the world still new to me, I had a special place out by the lake, an old dock that if you stepped over the broken boards was a great place to lay back and watch the sun or stars, if you stayed late enough. Times when older people ("adults") told me things I did not understand I would go to it and think until I had some kind of answer.

It was there that I first thought about what it would be like to die, and how to think about what it would be like to not be, meaning not be able to think about not being. When those cold truths of life stole over my soul, I would go out to that dock and offer up what might be a boy's prayer, a hope for a truth that would wash them all away, an idea so universal it could be understood in all languages.

Adults listened the few times I talked of this wish and gave it a few names, God, or love, or satisfaction. I listened like a dutiful son or nephew but to me these terms never captured what I was really wanting, which was a voice that could make sense of these threatening things. Men died in wars, and everybody died eventually, but the reason for it eluded me. As I got older people started to express opinions on what was worth dying for, and I got more confused.

The idea of a universal truth, religious truth, haunted me like an unclear recollection. When I grew up, the first time I thought I had grown up, it seemed to me as if the great yawning emptiness had won, and all these little things like religion and things worth dying for were little fantasies we made up, like the white lies we told our children about where Grandma went when she stopped moving. It was not until the riots in Los Angeles that I found clarity on this issue.

As a young copywriter in the city, I had watched the news unfold with a sense of curiosity as to where it was going, but the first shots down the block cleared my head. Should I take a stand, rifle in hand? I looked over my wife and young baby and knew that was foolish. As we fled the city, I met an old priest who was calming people at a rest area. When I told him I was an atheist, he nodded, and said, "God is in the heart that believes, and his purpose is to help us by giving a name to the goal of our struggles."

At the time, I was not young in the sense of the word used earlier, but still young enough to think these odd words, in some sense poetic, to be balm in the same way aspirin is to a headache. Give a reason, they told us at the ad agencies, and people's minds rest and they can function again. It was no different than squirting oil in a machine and listening to the ragged rhythms smooth out. So on I went down the merry path of life.

When you survive past a certain age, there are no longer docks by the lake to serve as safe places; you must cultivate that space of peace in your mind, and have it on hand at all times. When the midnight phone call comes, or the car swerves out of control, or you see smoke on the horizon, you summon up that placid equilibrium and put it to use anaesthesizing emotions so that clear-minded wisdom and action can prevail. Having children daily enter a world where often the horrible, the violent, and the terminal happens suddenly and without reason disciplines this response even further.

Over the years, I have come to realize that the priest in Los Angeles gave me more than a reason for God: he gave me an explanation of all value in life. We live for certain things, founded like all of our knowledge on reasoned belief, and we give them names so that when the moments of terror have passed we can reorient ourselves with a quick utterance and then set to work fixing whatever it is. For me, the jury is still out on God, but I have found by watching myself in emergencies that above all else I believe in life.

Encountering politics, I saw at once that this belief in life was missing, having been replaced by any number of words made meaningless immediately by their aptitude as public justifications covering up for private, and less benevolent, motivations. There is nothing to stop a con man from using the name of God or even life, nor to ensure that when a politician speaks of "the greater good" he really means it or even knows what it means. Politics is the science of motivating other people, and we do it through words and gestures that are often only worth the effort required to form them.

It rapidly dawned on me that this situation could not be handled by using fire to fight fire. People lie, and trying to invent a larger lie would surely lead to an even greater insanity. Equally foolish was trying to blame a political group, or ideology, when all ideologies were susceptible to being twisted by manipulators. The average person listened and voted for whatever sounded most sane, and it turned out more often than not to be lies. The deceived were barely able to remember the last lie when they voted on the next.

This led me to consider politics in a new context, one that was outside of the words we use to put images into each other's minds. I have always been a liberal, and feel that in many ways, I am a liberal still, because I believe that human beings should not be obstructed by narrow categories and books of rules when life itself awaits and may require complex means of exploration. It has never been my goal to regulate others.

Nevertheless, as I learned more about life, I became enamored of what we might call "conservative" values. When you have a spouse and children, you realize the values of fidelity, moderation, discipline, hard work and belief in eternal values. These are the things that hold your family together, and enable you to trust one another, and keep away the bitterness that comes of either too much experience or too much cynicism. I believe traditional values are designed to hold off such cynicism by bringing out the best in people.

Gluttony makes us debase ourselves. Inchastity deadens our senses with repeated meaningless experience, numbing us to the end goal of the sexual/reproductive method, which is family (for heterosexuals). Lies teach us to regard others as cheaply manipulated, and prove to ourselves how little we know of truth. Laziness, excessive intoxication, and disposable values cheapen life and make us resent it for being empty in the shadow of omnipresent death. I have come to trust these values, although I believe in traditional values there is also a distrust of those who apply them categorically and with knee-jerk precision, as that is a form of laziness and dishonesty.

In these learnings, and in my liberal leanings, I found an incompatibility with modern society. I did not and do not believe that measuring wealth potential is a reliable means of finding the best person, the best leader, or the best solution. On the contrary, I think it leads us to lazy and dishonest solutions. The mass media with its pre-packaged emotions and homilies of overpowering, tawdry emotion seems oppressive to me. I do not trust the words of most leaders. In short, I find that modern society is for the most part something closer to "evil" than "good" in my hierarchy of values. From conversations with others, I know I am not alone in this.

Most people who are not broken or abused in some way have a similar although not necessarily exactly matching values system. They have no need to dictate the lives of others beyond where their lives intersect, and distrust strong governments, rigid categorical laws, and knee-jerk morality. They are open-minded but also aware that traditional values did not occur in a vacuum, but are a reasoned response to a world that is remarkably consistent. They are more than values; they are accumulated learning.

How could it be that truths of that nature could be in such dramatic contrast to the reality of our leadership and collective direction? First, they are difficult to communicate, because they do not fit into small numbers of direct words but require some study. Second, they are difficult to understand, because they require a certain degree of experience and prior thought on the questions they address. And finally, they are difficult to accept, because they offer a harder path than indulging pleasures and material wants and lust for power. To take these truths into oneself, one must think of something larger than the self, like those goals that make living worth overcoming struggle and suffering.

As these thoughts sunk in, I realized I was thinking outside of our modern political definition entirely. Manipulating others through words and images into voting a certain way requires a different kind of goal, one that is more tangible and immediate and centered only in the individual. With such a system it is not only easy but certain that we lose our way, and replace our goals with words symbolizing them but having a different meaning entirely. "The greater good" comes to mean that which is convenient to justify the desires, often irrational as comes before learning, of the individual.

I struggled with this. I had been raised like most in my generation to believe that democracy would deliver us from tyranny, and that personal freedom led to an enlightenment from which all future progress came. I even believed in progress, that we could find new answers to age-old problems and change the world so that the old rules no longer apply. It seemed to me that if we brough democracy, wealth, modern technology and good feelings to the world, it would usher in a new age of genius and kindness.

It took a return to my high school books to find out that I was not alone. I remembered the dusty, musty Greeks and their struggles, but had not touched Plato's "Republic" for many years. As I ruminated over my inner struggle caused by the conflict between the truth I had seen and the contrary beliefs with which I had been raised, I confronted another contrast: the gap between the ideals we express in public and reality as it was experienced. Plato, with all of his troubling indictments of beliefs I had been taught as a child, came alive on the page before me.

During his lifetime, Plato saw his native land fragment. First, he noted, long ships came and went across the ocean, bringing not only trade but the rise of a newly-important domestic merchant class who had previously been seen as glorified shopkeepers, and also introducing people from other lands with other values. Next, he saw, the democracy of Athens became splintered into two groups: the "democrats" who stood up for the right of the common working person to influence government, and "oligarchs" who believed power should be in the hands of an enlightened few. First the oligarchs were bought out by the purchasing power of merchants, and next, as horrified Plato, the democrats were, culminating in an orthodoxy which executed one of the nation's wisest men, Socrates.

From this experience, Plato came to regard democracy as the second-worst system of leadership he had seen (the worst, in his view, was autocratic rule by a single leader). If left up to the merchant oligarchy, society became a tool for making money; in the hands of "the people," however, demagoguery became the rule and the population was manipulating by promises, with power also falling into the hands of merchants. Plato recognized that in any case where power rested in the process of convincing people with words and images, those symbols would change meaning for the benefit of the wealth- and power-hungry. In his lifetime Plato saw democracy change Athens from a vital culture into a cultureless, divided, self-cannibalizing place devoted more toward pointless foreign wars to ensure trade than toward the well-being of its citizens.

It astounded me how little the situation had changed over the years, but when I thought about, the lack of change made sense. Humans, or indeed any thinking creature, will have a similar psychology in any age, and similar failings. It is not something we can educate out of ourselves, or even fix with magic pharmaceuticals, but something inherent to consciousness itself. All sentient, analytical beings will walk this path with the same triumphs and pitfalls waiting around each turn. And thus the same rules that applied in ancient Greece are valid for modern societies. If there are conscious, intelligent beings on other planets, they struggle with these issues as well.

According to the values I had been taught, democracy was a universal good, like the kind of truth I had sought on that dock in childhood. It was the kind of enlightenment that could drive away death and all of its harbingers, including power itself, which was represented in both death by predation in the forest and threat of war or tyranny in human societies. Was it possible, I asked, that the solution of which I had been told was based entirely upon a presumption that the solution was the only and correct one? If so, our "progress" was entirely illusory, and the solution existed for the benefit of one oligarchy or another, either the manipulated masses or the manipulative merchants.

Naturally, this was disappointing. I wanted to believe that if we treated each person as an equal, and moved toward "progress," we could make life a golden example that somehow outweighed death. But on thinking about it, I realized that "equality" was in most ways a sleight-of-hand redefinition of "conformity," and that such a system assumed we thought alike, acted alike, and had the same motivations. Experiences in life taught me that this was not the case, and that even further, what made us unique and valuable as people was the degree to which and ways we could assimilate and act upon eternal truths. Moral people, kind people, strong people were valued by all, where people completely lacking in moral truth, like criminals and pedophiles and manipulative politicians, were universally despised.

This was my first introduction into esoteric thinking. I realized that in our modern thought process, we compare people to the kind of idealized average suggested by equality. It is like giving each of us a number according to how well we measure up to a single ideal for all of us, and it crushes uniqueness and personality with conformity. It is possible, I mused, that we all follow different paths, and no single mould can contain us all. In that sense, not everyone should be part of the political process, just as not all people should participate in rocket design, agriculture, or philosophy.

I thought of all the things that were not "wrong" but were also not "right" with modern society. The pollution and the rapid expansion of colorless, utilitarian cities, and an explosion in population. The vigorous competition among jobs that amount to little more than re-arranging numbers and concepts to sell each other products. The rise in cancers, in child abuse, in divorce and in general existential misery, even as our profits and personal wealth rose. The lack of a culture to unify us, of values that keep us honest and living well. The replacement of eternal truth with disposable pleasures.

In these moments, I finally left that dock behind. I was no longer concerned solely with my own mortality, and finding a lifestyle to balance it, but with the direction we as a species - we, those who direct the future of this planet - were taking. Even more, I realized that my search for a single truth to be spoken in all languages could act to oppress all of us by imposing a single human ideal on a varied and different population. While looking for a single truth would make us each equal units in a large machine, the wisdom I had discovered sent me looking for multiple views approximating adaptations to the same world, or in other terms, humanity working in parallel.

It became clear to me, however, what truth is spoken in all languages, and is reality itself. We live in the same world and grapple with the same problems. We take different approaches to the details, and from it gain our rich diversity of cultures, but the most basic level of order is common to all peoples. Since this common sense order has been correct in every age, it existed before modern society and will exist after it, and we call it tradition for lack of a better term.

Tradition re-arranges schizoid modern politics. Conservative values free us from the wiles of democrats, and liberal economic policies - replacing economics with culture as our primary motivator - frees us from the oligarchs. Not coincidentally, these ideas correspond to our most basic shared values: living experience is more important than money, age and wisdom are respected, and we make sure that everyone has a place, unless they're drastically out of line (pedophiles, criminals). We want government and society to serve healthy ambitions and make the process of living better.

One of the best attributes of tradition is localization. Every local area has its own rulers, its own specific culture, and its own people, who live there from generation to generation and pass on its ways and its lands. In this view, we are custodians of our environment not only for future generations, but for its own sake - we, the people are bonded to our land because it is our place of origin and future. We become inseparable from it and the idea of overutilizing it, covering it in concrete, polluting it or strip mining it is seen to be as irresponsible and sociopathic as it is.

Another important attribute is the concept of position in a non-linear sense. We are each born to do what our abilities best qualify. Unlike the haphazard system of modernity, which shifts us between jobs through economic competition that too often rewards lower wages for more generalized tasks, traditional societies emphasize specialization. Those who have the skills to be good farmers should pursue it, much as some have aptitude for religious study and others for artisanship. Without the insane price-driven "competition" that makes cheaper but not necessarily better products, each person has a decent living without feeling the need to parasitize others for greater profit.

Traditional societies, unlike modern societies, prize a basic level of shared belief in what is right; these values tend to be "conservative" without being knee-jerk, and instead of a means of moral approval or disapproval, are common sense daily-living philosophy that is seen as making life better for all. If we all agree on the basic values, it leaves everything else up to us, while avoiding the constant internal bickering and debate and argumentation common to democratic societies. Do we need to reinvent the wheel, every election? It is better to get us all on the same page and to find our "freedom" in the important areas of life, such as creativity and bold adventures, than to try to derive "freedom" from a constant internal squabble that produces no clear direction after centuries of discourse.

Finally, in a traditional world, there is an attempt to create what Plato suggested for ancient Greece: a caste of philosopher kings. Unlike modern aristocrats, this caste of people is not defined by money but by hereditary ability to rule with intelligence, nobility, far-sightedness and fairness. These abilities occur rarely within our populations but are inherited if both parents have the traits required, thus we can save time and years of false "competition" by finding these people and allowing them to procreate. Rigorous education and testing by experience are required in traditional societies to move inexperienced philosopher-kings to be to leadership positions; it is not by birthright alone.

National socialism under Hitler was brought on by the first visions of what the modern world would be. Motorcars, radios, and intercontinental transit had just become commonplace, and the "writing was on the wall" as far as the future was concerned. Hitler saw his Reich as a transitional state to a traditional society. His knight-aristocracy, the SS, was destined to breed Germans of leadership potential. He socialized industry to place business and economic competition under the command of culture, and exiled foreigners and parasites so to strengthen native culture. He defended Europe not only against the invading force of Communism, which after him it was to spend fifty years fighting, but deposed a number of corrupt regimes within it. His goal was to prevent the kind of pointless carnage he saw in World War I by creating a more permanent society.

When I was younger, I never visualized myself as understanding the thoughts in common between thinkers as disparate at Plato and Hitler, or Aristotle and Nietzsche, or even Tolkien and Conrad, but after experience and meditation on these ideas I can see how all of them were gesturing, however unsteadily, at a different concept of society. Their basic statement is that intelligent values and modern civilization are incompatible, and it is time to replace it and move on from this sad chapter in human history to a more triumphant one. I believe this future begins with National Socialism, and we should not let our tired old fears keep us from a better way of life.