Liberty Needs a Self-Study Movement
We each must first put our own house of ideas in order
The liberty movement is not prevailing because it has primarily been a political movement. To succeed, it must transform into a movement centered on self-improvement: or more specifically, self-study.
The liberty movement (defined broadly to include libertarians, liberty-leaning conservatives, and principled antiwar and civil libertarian leftists) as a political movement is preoccupied with the following types of measures:
Winning elections and legislative battles
Advancing a pro-liberty narrative through points of fact, like policy failures and successes
Pro-liberty sloganeering, meme-making, and other forms of “marketing”
Humiliating “culture war” enemies by exposing their depravity, mocking, or otherwise rhetorically “owning” them
Harming the interests of political enemies through government policy and economic maneuvers
Some of these measures can do some good if they are not overdone or over-prioritized. Others are worthless and counter-productive.
In general, the liberty movement’s preoccupation with these political and culture-war methods generates a lot of sound and fury, accomplishing little to nothing.
The liberty movement is too fixated on “correcting” others directly, which winds up being self-defeating. Pro-liberty individuals pay too little attention to improving themselves: particularly to improving their own understanding, consistent adherence to, and ability to explain the philosophy of liberty.
Many liberty advocates will rail against violations of rights. But precious few (even among professional liberty advocates) spend any significant time developing a thorough and consistent understanding of what rights even are and how they apply to our lives, much less the ability to articulate that understanding to others.
Many defenders of the free market will recommend works like I, Pencil and Economics in One Lesson. But precious few have studied them enough to be able to effectively relate their basic arguments and messages to newcomers.
Could you?
Liberty is not merely a slate of policies or a “side” in a culture war. Liberty is a philosophy: a system of ideas. Ideas must be comprehended to be adopted. And to make ideas comprehensible to others, we must first fully comprehend them ourselves.
As Leonard Read taught, if liberty is losing, it is because those with the potential to be liberty leaders are neglecting to “do their homework,” i.e., to first put their own house of ideas in order.
For liberty to meaningfully win, we must become a movement centered around contagious self-improvement and self-study.
This idea that we need to focus on the ideas of liberty rather than the enemies of it is a powerful one, but I'm also reminded of a line from Oikophobia: American Self-Contempt: "The human psyche seems to crave an antagonist in order to flourish."
I find this to be true.
So many people seem to need an enemy to act. It's as if the only reason they can act is if they are acting against something. It's not enough to act for something.
Sun Tzu wrote:
If you know yourself and your enemy you will prevail in every battle
If you know yourself and not your enemy for every victory gained you'll suffer defeat
If you neither know yourself nor your enemy you'll lose every battle.
It is more important to out think your enemy, than to out fight him
Attack the enemy's strategy.
By first putting our house in order is to truly know yourself (Western Civilization worldview) and know your enemy (the cultural Marxist worldview). This way you'll be able to out think the Marxists by understanding their strategy and tactics for destroying Western Civilization.