The Neighbor from Hell:Lessons learned, part III

There’s something to be learned about freedom from all that. But what, exactly?

1. Individual action and adrenaline go together.

-S pointed this out in the comments. If we’re ever going to get past the completely ineffectual “call the police or call the landlady” stage with the Neighbor from Hell, we’re going to have to put ourselves on the line in some way large or small. The same is true if we intend to halt the police state. It can’t be done nicely or “within the system.”

Most people don’t like putting themselves on the line.

So as -S says, the best action is one that’s fun for the perpetrators (or makes them feel good about themselves), gets cheers from even those neihbors who want nothing to do with it, and produces such amusing results that even the cops are likely to laugh.

And what applies on a neighborhood scale, applies on a larger scale.

Just this morning, the amazing activist Adam Kokesh tweeted, “When will we have the courage of the 1st Am revolutionaries? Never mind shooting redcoats, when do we start ACTUALLY throwing tea?”

With all respect to Adam — who virtually defines the bold Outlaw Agitator — the first thing that came to my mind was, “Who needs tea-tossers when we already have folks who take down the CIA’s website?”

Because the police state is growing larger, we sometimes think the whole world is full of “sheeple” (hate that word) who either do nothing or make only weak gestures. But it ain’t so. Are there millions who are either inert or actually approve what’s being done to us? Sure. But majorities have always been that way.

We actually live in a world where adrenaline junkies take lots and lots of direct action for freedom. How many American colonists participated in Samuel Adams’ little costume party? A tiny minority — bold enough to act, but cautious enough to disguise themselves. Same today.

This is why I celebrate Freedom Outlaws.

Because once you know you can’t work within the system — whether it be the local law or something much bigger — you might as well be bold and have fun.

2. Nobody has a “system” that works. Never will.

We live in a world designed for, if not by, Hobbes. People are such savages, so the theory goes, that vast & complicated systems have to be built to cage us. Those systems are the only thing that can protect the innocent against the guilty, the peaceable from the unruly, etc. so on.

Except that they don’t, of course. Then the systems themselves, born as agents of coercion, become ruthless, self-preserving, and more of a problem than the things they pretend to protect us from. Or at best (as in the present Neighbor from Hell case) simply a waste of tax money.

Ah, but how would things be in Libertopia? That question has been on my mind ever since the NfH problem began.

The glib answer is that, in Libertopia, everybody in a given area would voluntarily agree to be bound by certain covenants, no doubt forbidding all manner of ordinary nuisances like excess noise and providing real remedies for violations. Never mind that anybody who’s ever lived in a covenanted community can tell you that the enforcers are nannies to the max, who are as likely to come down on you as on your pesky neighbor. Or barring voluntary covenants, we’d all be taught from childhood to honor the golden rule. And barring that, we’d … well, have our ways of dealing with miscreants.

And indeed, in the NfH mess, dependence on government systems has kept people from taking action for months, whereas if they knew they had to solve their own problems, more would have acted — and probably acted quite responsibly — a long time ago.

We might have had a neighborhood organization in place to deal with situations like NfH. Or somebody would have gone over there and, very politely, with sidearm properly holstered, reminded NfH that, really, nobody has to put up with him.

In either case — Hobbesville or Libertopia — as one purist commentor suggested, the rest of us could simply pick up and move if we didn’t like one neighbor’s bad acts. Never mind that that also solves nothing, penalizes the innocent, and lets the bad guy win.

And if you’re talking on a larger scale … sure you can leave your city or your state or even your country when it hinders your freedom too intolerably. Plenty have, plenty will. Can’t knock it. But in a recent comment section, nearly everybody viewed leaving an increasingly unfree country as a sort of surrender — and again, a win for those who most ought to be stopped.

Bottom line: Nobody who claims to have a workable, wide-scale answer actually does. The only answers are the ones we find for ourselves in this messy, complicated old world — hopefully guided by solid principles, but definitely not limited by abstract theories — theories that are inevitably too simplistic to cover everything that arises in Real Life.

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One more part of this screed to come shortly.