If you are busy addressing the evil in the world, who is addressing the good?
– Russell Means
The truth is that libertarians spend a huge number of brain-cycles on the concept of justice, and especially on all the ways they’ve been done wrong. These things should not occupy us as they do.
This is not to say that we don’t have reason to complain; after all, we’ve been born into a situation where one group of well-armed men tells everyone else, “Do what we say or we’ll hurt you.” Once you break through the brainwashing of your childhood and understand this, being pissed-off is entirely normal and entirely justifiable. It is not, however, something upon which to build a life, or even a philosophy.
Understand this: The things we complain about are legitimate and we should be mad, but they are surface issues; they are not the real deal. We need to see beyond injustice and our preoccupation with it. Being pissed-off is not nearly enough.
WE DEFEAT INJUSTICE, THEN WHAT?
Preventing injustice is not an end in itself – it is merely necessary to allow our work to proceed without molestation.
Does justice matter? For sure! But it is not the central issue – it is only necessary to keep destroyers away from our real work.
The purpose of law is to prevent successful coercion. It is necessary, even crucial, but it is not the end goal. Otherwise, once we kill injustice, we have nothing else; we are abandoned in a void.
Think of it this way: Let’s say that we were fully successful in getting rid of the state; then what? What do we do after the celebration party?
Play with this scenario for a minute:
It’s over. The state is gone. No big boss is telling you what to do any longer. There’s nothing to be angry about except some intermittent, garden variety crime. Now what do we do?
I hope you are not drawing a blank, but most of us do when presented with this scenario.
Here’s the big point I’m trying to make:
Whatever we would do after the celebration ends is what we should be doing now.
THE PURPOSE OF LIBERTY
Liberty is not an end in itself. It is fundamentally important, but it is not the final goal.
The real goal is for life to be expressed it the world. We have almost incalculable potentials. We possess the incredible gift of consciousness. We are – literally – the engines of creation.
Think about it: Humans can choose to create. However we wish to define our component parts (mind, brain, soul, heart, psyche, will, desire, whatever), we can use them to create things that have never been before! We can also use them to continuously improve ourselves!
What really matters is that this set of abilities, which I will simply call “life,” is used; that it is expressed in the world to the fullest extent possible.
No one has the faintest clue as to how far we can go, what we can become, or what we might be like a hundred or a thousand years down that path. But it is certain that we are capable of massive improvement. In fact, we are capable of massively improving almost everything we touch! We need to do this, not merely be “getting ready to do it.”
THE TRAP OF REACTION
When you focus on the bad things that are happening, you are forever reacting to external stimuli. Again, some level of this is necessary, but if you fall into a pattern of doing it, you become unstable. Always reacting to external things leaves you no time to build a sound internal foundation and to work on the things that matter most.
You are the mechanism that matters; your central goal is to improve and use that mechanism. If you want to do this, and improve the mechanism, your focus will have to be internal.
If you had a magic box, keeping it from being stolen would certainly matter to you, but the whole purpose of protecting it would be to use it. The magic box is your life, and reacting to outside threats is not enough.
To make things worse, people that constantly react to threats end up at the mercy of the largest current threat. So, if a more serious threat than the forcible removal of earnings or the loss of rights comes around, it will find them in their usual reactionary mode; they will react according to the threat, and not according to their principles. The big threat will come and their principles will fail. It happens all the time.
IDENTITY
When we focus on externals, we define ourselves by what we do.
When we focus on internals, we define ourselves by what we are.
Because of this, fighting injustice is a faulty foundation for identity. Identity needs to be independent of external factors. For it to be solid, it must rest on internal factors.
LIBERTY IS HARD
Liberty is not easy, and it is a mistake to pursue it in the hope of getting specific payouts. That is the wrong goal, and chasing it will end up hindering the cause.
Liberty is right because it is the only thing that allows human potential to be realized, not because it stops abuses. Those are side-effects.
Liberty is the essential condition for an advanced human existence, but there is a fundamental difference between the thing itself and the environment that allows the thing to thrive. Liberty is the necessary environment; the expression of life is the thing.
Goethe once said, We are always getting to live, but never actually living. This must not be true for us any longer. We must begin living as if we had already triumphed over injustice. Today.
© Copyright 2009 by Paul A. Rosenberg
Paul Rosenberg is the author of books such as 
Excellent article. As I sometimes put it, what comes after outrage?
L. Neil Smith has a classic article on what you are talking about:
http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2008/tle497-20081214-04.html
This is why libertarians rarely win elections; too much preachimg and not enough action. They would rather win an argument than an election!
You may want to look at this post, Bill J.
Bill,
The reason libertarians don’t win elections is: 1. An assumption — probably wrong — that ballots are actually counted. 2. The elections are openly rigged — when have you voted where the district outcome for a certain party’s candidates were not certain? 3. libertarians don’t give a rat’s ass about getting elected, Libertarians do. You have been hanging out with the wrong crowd. 4. The purpose of the Libertarian Party is to use the tools of the state — in this case, election tools — to proselytize libertarian philosophy, not get elected. Which if you are no longer a puppy and have been paying attention to the above getting elected as a Libertarian is not possible anyway.
So stop wasting your time fretting over “if only we did this, we could be ruling this planet.” I vote not.
The reason libertarians don’t win elections is because being anti-government is a horrible way of running a government. Name a successful state run by libertarian ideals. When you try and fail, you have learned a vitally important lesson.
This is an amazing post. This is something that has ALWAYS put me off about people like Alex Jones and other “libertarian” sites. It’s all about fighting to them. This is why I love listening to Free Talk Live, because they don’t fit the same mold as people like AJ. So there’s injustice….WHAT are you going to do about it? That was something so fresh and new for me to hear and I’ve been hooked since.
I don’t want to fight. I want to learn. I want to help you learn, and I want to learn from you.
This is why I LOVE BoldVoices.tv too! I just discovered this amazing site in July and have been hooked ever since. It’s not just about “libertarianism” or politics. It’s about learning. Yes, we kick and scream about what’s going on in the world, but we also learn from each other.
To anyone who is sick and tired of exactly what Paul is talking about, take a look at BoldVoices.
On the one hand, I agree completely that the meaning of life is not just getting rid of something bad. As you say, “Then what?” That’s also why I point out that anarchism is not a complete philosophy: it’s merely the desire to NOT have one PARTICULAR thing (the state). It says nothing about what anyone should then do with their lives.
But the reason the problem (the myth of “government”) is discussed so much, and what we would each do without it is discussed so little, is because it gets in the way of EVERYTHING that everyone productive wants to do. In addition, for the most part there is no need to discuss what “we” would do without it, because what each of us would do would vary widely.
Occasionally people express shock when they find out that, when I’m not railing against the state, I’m pretty good at knocking down trees, and even better at making music. (And I mean something beyond “Cowboy Clyde.”) “I didn’t know you could do that!” Well, I don’t feel much need to talk about it, and I suspect that’s true of most freedom lovers: what they would do once the chains of slavery are removed will be different for different individuals, rather than being some big collectivist plan that needs public discussion.
Nonetheless, there is something very important in your article. Warriors who know nothing but war, and rebels who know nothing but rebellion, are doomed to frustration. Either their battle is never successful, or it IS successful and then they have nothing to do. So, while I don’t see the need to talk about it much, everyone should have lots of things he would be doing, and is doing as much as he can already, BESIDES resisting injustice.
I rarely ever say this, but I completely agree with you. I want to have more stuff, but the government gets in the way of this by destroying the productive process. I want to have a job I am proud of, but the government makes all the jobs unproductive and tedious by imposing so many regulation and by propping up so many cartels. I want to make more music, but I have to spend all my time working just so I can pay taxes and rent and food (so I can’t afford a lot of the stuff needed to record and produce music) because the government bubbles and regulations have made it hard to find a job in the first place. I want to live a moral life, but the very existence of the State makes it near impossible to be entirely consistent (ie. driving on public roads and going to public schools). The list goes on and on. The reason I hate the State is because it hampers everything I do want to do. There may be lots of people who hate it just to hate it, but I’m not one. I’m a consequentialist. The only problem is that the State makes good consequences impossible. Someone always gets screwed over.