Past Creating Future

One of the most closely guarded secrets of magic is that the past creates the future and yet the present can change the past. It is no betrayal for me to publicly state this secret, for it is a secret guarded by the nature of man. Only a man's own power, will, and experiential knowledge can unlock it's gates. And this is true of other esoteric secrets as well; one could paint esoteric knowledge on a billboard and still keep it secret.

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Here begins my writings on political philosophy. As I contemplate time and the world before me, the latter in constant flux due to the former, I consider my own past in regards to my political positions. One criticism of the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche is that his views and definitions change with nearly every passing book. But I say this is no fault; it shows growth and continual power. It is in that manner that I view my own progression of political positions.

When I was in highschool, I often flirted with communism. When I read Marx and certain French political philosophers, I found myself drawn to the idea of a communal existence. With my distrust of authority, I thought that the world would be better if the people themselves were the government of their own villages. But I always couldn't help but notice that such an end goal never seemed to be accomplished, and that governments always seemed strongest and most permanent in that middle transition from capitalism to communistic village. Furthermore, in is within that transition that horrible atrocities occur in the name of a utopia.

By the time I was in college, I had moved onto the position that societies needed to be formed and maintained on a mutually agreed upon basis. I came to this realization after insights gleamed from life experience and history. As I talked to more and more self-proclaimed advocates of the people, I realized more and more that they were either little big men or emasculated intellectuals. Both types harbor the will of murderers, thieves, and dictators. And indeed, this may be why no society has survived the violence of the ever-so-permanent transition from socialism to communism. As I opened the tomes of history, however, I saw alternatives to the death-mongers of the socialist and communist bandwagons.

People say that magic can be found in books. This is false. But one can create magic from books, and what better place to find these books than a good library? There I found examples of constitutional republics and truly democratic tribal societies (as opposed to false democracies found today). My gaze passed from would-be revolutionaries and fell upon great peoples; colonial-era Germanic and Celtic peoples, Icelandic vikings, pagan Irish, and masked farmers in the hills of Chiapas. While these people may not have been perfect or libertarian by any means, at least I started to find alternatives. And alternatives are good, at the least, for getting the wheels of the mind turning.

When I was posted in Zambia I began to truly see the need for such alternatives. Many in Africa blame the whites for the motherland's modern problems. But this is a cop-out, since the truth is hard to swallow, and no men enjoy walking through thorny bush. The problem of the African nations is that there are centralized powers attempting to buy off, control, and dictate the very lives of their citizens. The African nations, in general, attempted to replace the colonial powers that conquered their tribes. They didn't consider dismantling those colonial powers; they only considered replacing white rulers with black ones. The result is that they fell prey to the exact same pitfall that ruined the whites; the continental European idea that society is an artificial construct to be molded by little big men and intellectuals in power. In short: they too succumbed to the might of the state and the economic folly of socialism. The difference between the Africans and Europeans, however, is that the latter has experience using the state to lord over citizenry. The former, on the other hand, has neither the experience nor the tradition of it, and unsurprisingly has all the horrors of the state and little of the supposed benefits.

It took the heat and isolation of Texas to allow myself to fully overcome all resistance that stopped me from embracing a radically free market position. It is now my position that everything must be privatized for liberty to truly flourish. In achieving that goal, we in the United States would also enjoy a transitional constitutional republic that far exceeded the one originally crafted by the Founding Fathers. I say this because such privatization wouldn't be immediate; it would likely be piecemeal and punctuated as groups of people withdraw their consent from the state. And this withdrawal of consent, this secession from the government, originates from the right of self-ownership, which I elaborate upon further in an upcoming post.

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This blog will serve two purposes. First it will be a more permanent way for me to keep track of my own writings on this topic. Second it is my intention that the ideas discussed here will act as a springboard for others who still grapple with their own political positions. As my own tale demonstrated, people can change their positions as new information becomes available. If my writings contain such information and help a few out along their paths, then the work will be well worth it.

In passing, however, I also ought to add that these writings will be from the perspective of one who is not Christian in any sense of the word. As such, certain ideas, topics, or forms of writing may be difficult to understand for people who are not magicians or pagans. To those people, all I can say is this: try your best.