This week's post is up, but it is at the new URL and host for the Mad Philosopher blog.  You can reach the post here.

The new URL, where the blog will continue (there will be no new material on this site) is www.MadPhilosopher.xyz.

All of the main posts have been moved to the new site, but all of the old "daily resource suggestions" will remain here for your reference.

Carpe Veritas,
​Mad Philosopher

Yes, the title sounds really bullshitty, but it certainly is an eye-catcher, isn't it? If you listened to last week's belated post, you may recall me talking about my journey to anarchism. When I was rounding the bend on my final approach to liberty, I was repulsed by certain environments I encountered and was kinda' forced to enter the philosophy of anarchism through the back door. The rabid paulbots were throwing temper tantrums over the media ignoring the existence of their messiah. The Libertarians were too busy voting, raising money, pretending to be freedom-minded while also pretending to be politicians and endorsing ridiculous concepts like abortion and gay marriage. The objectivists were being generally surly, demeaning, and staunchly atheist. The AnComs were too busy burning down private property to be bothered by the fact that the government was out to get us all. Most distressing, though, were the AnCaps.

“Wait, ain't you an AnCap?” Not quite. If you recall my post about the MadPhilosopher logo, I consider myself to be just a straight-up anarchist. Since before I had started this blog, I have been economically literate enough to know that capitalism is, for all intents and purposes, a necessary and inevitable feature of pre-and-post-state societies, but that doesn't necessarily make me an AnCap. Part of the reason I don't consider myself to be so is because of the experiences I had with them on my way to liberty.

My first exposure to anarcho-capitalism was under the more innocuous name of “Austrian Economics” when I was reading Rothbard and Spooner. I read these guys towards the end of my communist days, when I was trying to figure out why previous attempts at the communist experiment didn't work out. I was hoping to find a handful of controls that those dirty capitalists had come up with to ensure that products were manufactured within expected tolerances. For example, if I go to Home Depot, a great number of things are standardized. You've got X, Y, and Z diameters of pipes and fittings, and there seems to be the perfect supply available to meet demand; rarely would something run out, but there were only ever a couple dozen items on the shelves... and in communist experiments, people would cut corners to meet the letter of the regulations while putting in the minimum quantity of resources. “Make a million nails,” results in thumbtack-sized nails. “Make this weight in nails,” results in railroad spikes. And when it gets to the point of “Make a million nails that are exactly this size, shape, and out of this material... and if you don't, it's off to the gulag with you,” results in everyone saying “fuck it, I quit” and the USSR collapses overnight.

Clearly, I didn't get the answer I wanted. “Stop making regulations, and let people do what they will... don't worry, it'll all work out just fine,” isn't exactly what a communist wants to hear. I learned a lot, though; it definitely had a pronounced effect on my migration from communism to the Tea Party and then to liberty. I returned to doing research in the Austrian School when I was getting into objectivism, later on, and that's when I discovered the AnCaps. There was a specific distinction in the rhetoric of the Austrians like Rothbard as compared to the AnCaps I met: awareness of the is/ought divide.

The AnCaps I met, either through their ignorance or a misunderstanding on my part, seemed to equivocate that which is economically advisable as identical to that which is ethically desirable. This was disappointing to me; AnCaps were clearly the inheritors of the Austrian School, but they lacked the moral awareness of their predecessors. My motivation for communism and the subsequent ideological migration was primarily a moral one, as fits in the rhetoric of Aristotle, Aquinas, Marx, and Trotsky, and to hear “That which is profitable is that which is moral,” rubbed me every wrong way. I am totally open to this interpretation being mostly due to misunderstandings on my part, though.

The communist projects, ostensibly, are an attempt at adapting economics to ethics. Ironically, the Tea Party, in their own fucked-up way, are engaged in a similar project: attempting to adapt politics (the widespread application of violence) to ethics. Even Rand and the objectivists are engaged in that project: adapting public consciousness to ethics. So, to see AnCaps seeming to do the reverse, adapting ethics to economics, was so contrary to my methods of reason that I didn't know how to process it. Now that I've mentally acquired my liberty legs, I see anarchism as an attempt to adapt oneself to objective moral facts... something that Christians ought to be more sympathetic to.

In hindsight, I think that I misunderstood mostly due to the paradigm I was operating in, adapting various things to ethics. I think that one thing that didn't help, though, was the lack of philosophical knowledge on the part of the AnCaps in question. I think I'm gonna try to fix that here. That which is profitable is not necessarily moral. It could be profitable to rob a liquor store, but it's a violation of one's right to be free from theft and is therefore immoral. On a long enough timeline, I argue, that which is moral is most profitable. For example, not robbing a liquor store will most likely play out better for one in the long run. Even virtuous things, such as sustainable living or industry, when done responsibly and rationally, are likely to play out well in the long run; investments in oceanic desalinization would have suddenly become incredibly profitable in California in recent years and the same can be said for growing homegrown organic hipster-feed.

What do I mean by this is/ought, ethical/economic divide? As I said, when talking about Paradigmatic Awareness and Moral Ambiguity, one's actions ought to be informed and rational. Statements of “should” or “ought”, when concerning a person's actions, are without exception either ethical or moral statements. (Taxonomic note: I consider moral statements to be statements as relate to objective moral facts and ethical statements to be “if->then” statements predicated on value judgments, but that's a different blog post that hasn't been written yet.) Moral statements are relatively easy: something is either moral or immoral, depending on it's status as relates to deontological principles... you know, murder coercion and theft are immoral. Ethical statements are a little more involved, and tend to be at the heart of a lot of angry internet arguments: “If you care about poor people, you've gotta vote for this rich guy,” or whatever.

In order to make an accurate ethical statement, one must understand the intricacies of the “if” and have a solid grasp of the way the world works in order to produce the appropriate “then”. This is where economics comes into play. It goes well beyond “if you want to pay rent, you probably shouldn't buy this meth,” and even beyond, “if you care about poor people, you should probably lift employment regulations so that they can get a job.” For example, an understanding of basic principles of economics can inform decisions that have nothing to do with money itself. This is because economics is about management of scarce resources, not just money. For example, if I have a limited amount of time and I'm trying to maximize my gains in family relationships, self-education, and general pleasure, then I should probably try to generate an overlap in applications: do something educational with the family that isn't boring as hell. Knowing when to cut one's losses is another useful piece of information: cost-benefit analysis, risk assessment, utility assessments, etc. are, too.

In other words, it's not a statement of morality to say eliminating perverse incentives can incentivize productive behavior; however, it is an ethical statement to say “if you want to encourage productive behaviors in moocher and looter classes, then you should try to eliminate perverse incentives.” I'm not talking matters of political policy, mind you. After all, managing the widespread application of violence is immoral and if one wants to make the world a better place, then they should opt-out of political engagement.

Remember: anarchy is a philosophy of personal responsibility. How can one hold themselves to a moral or ethical standard if they don't know how to accomplish their goals or even set those goals? If one wishes to travel to a third world country and improve the quality of life of the people there (preaching religious views included, but optional), they ought to understand what behaviors are being incentivized by showing up and just giving things away or doing the work oneself. Without educating and assisting in the development of infrastructure, gifts and labor are more harmful than helpful. Before trying to do good, one must know how.


TL;DR: Economics and ethics are two different fields of study. However, ethics devoid a solid understanding of how the world works is useless at best and misanthropic at worst. As much as statists will try to deny it, economics is an excellent instrument for understanding human action. Basic scientific literacy, including physics, chemistry, economics, etc. is necessary for the development of a solid ethical grounding. This distinction and requirement is important to acknowledge explicitly when discussing economics and/or ethics with non-anarchists, lest outsiders misunderstand.

 Has Mother Church wielded the sword and shackles of the state for so long She has forgotten the use of the shepherd's crook?

A Response to Laudato Si

As is usually the case, the Pope did something and the liberal media came in their pants with excitement. My less-involved Catholic friends and some non-catholic friends then asked me what he actually said and did and what it means, media spin aside. I make it a point to read Encyclicals as they come out, as often as possible. While I'm skeptical of Catholic social teaching for a number of reasons, it would be unbecoming of a Catholic intellectual critical of some social teachings to not keep abreast of progress made in that regard. Also, with the persistent questions from others, I find that it is beneficial to myself, my friends, and our relationships to be able to provide a service in the form of translating 170-odd pages of teaching that's very involved and built on millennia of scholarship into something digestible to a more secular mind.

In interest of defending Church teaching against the portrayal it will receive in the mainstream (RE: pagan) culture, I spent a good chunk of yesterday and this morning reading and re-reading Laudato Si and reading many short commentaries written by various clergymen and lay Catholic journalists. I have several pages of handwritten notes, addressing specific things that were said, the general theme of the encyclical, and its relationship to history and standing Church teachings, and I'm not sure how much use those notes are going to find in this post, as there's some very important general themes that need to be addressed. These issues far overshadow individual lines or phrases that may be misinterpreted or otherwise used contrary to the goals set out for the encyclical, so these smaller issues may be overlooked in this post.

The most important point to get out of the way is the relationship between Catholic social teaching and the general body of scholarship within the Church. Many Catholics, even devout Catholics do not understand the role that the encyclicals and other works in Catholic social teaching play in the Faith. Catholic social teaching is not Doctrine or Dogma, it is not an infallible pronouncement by the Pope acting alone and in persona Christi. Catholic social teaching is, essentially, the magisterium of the Church saying, “Based on what we have to work with, here, this looks like the best solution to a particular problem the Church faces.” In the case of this encyclical, it identifies several problems, some real and some imagined, and looks for a root cause for these problems in order to make “a variety of proposals possible, all capable of entering into dialogue with a view to developing comprehensive solutions.” In such a dialogue, “...the Church has no reason to offer a definitive opinion; she knows that honest debate must be encouraged among experts, while respecting divergent views.” This post (that will be wholly invisible to the magisterium and to those who could and would affect change) is an attempt to address the issues presented, their root causes, and continue the dialogue sought by Pope Francis. No, I don't claim to be an “expert” as indicated in the encyclical, but I am confident that I am no more or less an expert than a substantial majority of the people involved in and affected by this dialogue. As such, I am as entitled as anyone else to express my informed assessment of the situation.

This document is essentially three different encyclicals blended together in a frenetic and haphazard arrangement, a departure from the more analytic and procedural voice and style of Francis' immediate predecessors. It may sound strange, but I will do my best to explain what I mean.

One of the encyclicals is an assessment of mankind's relationship to it's environment, the role that we play in our environment's well-being and the role that our environment plays in our well-being, both spiritually and physically. It explores how exploitative and irreverent practices with regards to creation develop vicious attitudes within the practitioners which results in the exploitation and irreverence being directed at other human beings as well. In a surprising but well-defended argument, the Pope lays out how industrial monoculture farming is culturally related to inhumane medical experimentation and abortion, for example. This encyclical reads as a slightly less poetic text that one would expect Francis' namesake to have written, waxing on and on about the glory of the Creator as seen in His creation, our role as stewards of that creation, and the teleology of all things. This encyclical appears to be addressed to the traditional audience of the encyclicals: the people of the Church in the world at large and within the magisterium. It calls for a pastoral approach centered on acknowledging the almost panentheist nature of reality, how God Himself is part of his creation and His presence in His creatures must be respected, lest one fall into the habit of not acknowledging that same presence on one's fellow humans. With typical Franciscan flair, the primary focus is on how the poor are marginalized and harmed the most by these irresponsible and irreverent practices.

Another one of the encyclicals is drawing a connection between this renewed environmental focus and the greater body of Catholic teachings, the relationship between abortion, postmodernism, consumerism, the destruction of the family, the evils of war and violence, etc. These passages are, unsurprisingly, the main focus of the articles popping up all over the internet titled some variation of “Ten things that the mainstream media will ignore in Laudato Si”. This encyclical is, essentially, a reaffirmation in the long-standing tenets of the Church: Abortion is murder, contraception is bad, gay marriage is a metaphysical impossibility, postmodernism is an intellectual cancer that is killing humanity and faith, etc. The only new addition to this litany that is presented is to try and add “and mind your greenhouse gasses” somewhere in-between “Postmodernism is bad,” and “We have to be careful with GMOs.”

The main focus for everyone, myself included, is this third encyclical. This one is addressed to “world leaders” and the UN in particular, as opposed to the Church and its people. This encyclical is rife with praise for worldwide economic manipulations, the use of government violence to accomplish the ends of the Church, an appeal for granting all governments more authority and force to implement stricter environmental regulations, broader economic manipulations, and redistribution of wealth. This encyclical explicitly calls for a progressive carbon tax, a world government with a navy and police force with authority to supersede national governments, national and local governments to implement “free” public housing and utility access, and heightened enforcement of drug laws.

Worse, though, than pleading with the state to use it's swords and shackles to coerce responsible behavior out of humanity at large, Francis takes a page out of Pope Urban VIII's book. Overstepping his authority in moral and theological matters, the Pope attempts to side with the “scientific consensus” and endorse a worldview that is anti-scientific and empirically falsified. Declaring human-caused global warming to be an existential threat to creation of a magnitude equivalent to the great flood which God repented of in Genesis, Francis demonstrates that he needs to hire better researchers and ought to be more reticent before declaring Galileo anathema. He makes this mistake twice, in rapid succession. After demonstrating an unwillingness to critically assess the legacy academic stance in light of empirical evidence in science, he does so again in the realm of economics. Using Keynesian economic prescriptions and “green” socialist rhetoric, he creates a straw-man of the free market which is even more flimsy and caricatured than those manufactured by liberal college students on social media.

  There was one line, in particular that required a double-take, a re-reading, and it ultimately elicited a violent reaction from me:

“Civil authorities have the right and duty to adopt clear and firm measures in support of small producers and differentiated production. To ensure economic freedom from which all can effectively benefit, restraints occasionally have to be imposed on those possessing greater resources and financial power. To claim economic freedom while real conditions bar many people from actual access to it, and while possibilities for employment continue to shrink, is to practise[sic] a doublespeak which brings politics into disrepute.” p96

This quote is taken from the midst of pages upon pages of diatribe against international outsourcing of labor, speculative investment, development of trade infrastructures, the automation of menial tasks. While lamenting these actions, the Pope calls for an increase in the policies which are the direct cause of them. Economic regulations, such as the minimum wage, intellectual property legislation, and progressive corporate taxation and subsidies creates innumerable perverse incentives within the market, as a natural matter of course which is empirically verifiable. To blame “the market” and paint such claims as “a magical conception of the market, which would suggest that problems can be solved simply by an increase in the profits of companies or individuals,” demonstrates a wholesale ignorance of the science that is economics. One should expect a former scientist to understand the limitations of his understanding of others' fields and at least call upon them to inform his opinion. If he has done so, he needs to look harder for a reliable resource.

The reason this sudden interest in mainstream sciences and display of ignorance in these matters is offensive is because the Pope is a moral authority in the world, and to draw upon obviously false data, bundle it up in moral language and issue ethical and political proclamations demeans both the sciences he misrepresents and the position which he occupies in the See of Peter.

These three encyclicals are blended together in a manner that makes them inextricable from each other. In one sentence, Francis will point out a theological understanding concerning substantive relationship of the trinity, move to an analogy concerning the nature of agriculture, and indict private ownership of resources. Because of this, it is impossible to tell where the Pope is addressing individual Catholics and exhorting them to consider their role in creation from a theological perspective and where he is exhorting politicians to use violence in order to protect the poor in the developing world from global warming from an economical perspective.

There is no denying that people everywhere in the world are facing ecological crises: living in cities that are not conducive to human flourishing, living near industrial mining operations, facing evictions from tribal lands or private property in the interest of economic gains for the powerful, the destruction of biodiversity in inhabited areas, and a general disregard for the inalienable rights of human beings are all issues that need to be addressed, and quickly. However, to blame “the free market” when there is no such thing, to pin the blame on people that are merely doing their best to survive when faced with systematic violations of their rights, and to fall back on methods that are the direct cause for the decline of Christianity and the rise of the postmodern world seriously misdiagnoses the cause of the problem and results in a very dangerous situation, both in the world at large and in the Church itself.

This political edict in the guise of moral teaching places those that are well-versed in science and economics in the difficult position of trying to justify the teachings of the Church that are explicitly contrary to what they know to be true. Some may lose their faith, either in the Church or in reason. The loss of faith in either is a tragedy, and it can be prevented simply by Francis double-checking his work and being cautious not to overstep the bounds of papal authority. An even greater tragedy than some umber of individuals losing their faith due to a contradiction in moral teaching and empirical fact is the alienation that such teachings has formed between the Church and the people and institutions best situated to aid the Church in pursuing a more Christian world. Economists the world over are denouncing the Church and discovering the long-standing trend on Catholic social teaching towards full-blown socialism. The scientific communities that tend to lean more socially and fiscally conservative (like the Church) also happen to be the ones that have disproven any substantial causal relationship between human activity and global climate change, in outright ignoring their findings, the Pope has alienated the scientific community once again, driving the long standing wedge between reason and faith even further. Even in moral and philosophical circles, there is outrage that the pope would undermine basic human rights (such as the right to be secure in one's property) for the sake of the rights of woodland critters and soil bacteria, which is explicitly done in this document.


TL;DR: Despite all of my defenses of Pope Francis to-date, my re-interpretations of his words in the light of reason and Church teaching in order to explain to others how one can rationally support his teachings, there is no way to deny that he is a full-on socialist with a callous disregard for economics and science. While I am not a sedevacantist or about to apostatize, this is an excellent opportunity to begin picking apart the whole of Catholic social teaching and calling for reform in the Church, not concerning matters which are doctrinally secure (such as prohibitions on gay marriage or abortion) but concerning instances where the Church draws too heavily on philosophically and scientifically flawed information. Many lament that this encyclical will be remembered as “the global warming encyclical”. I lament it as well, the global warming was merely a pretext for pushing a theologically-backed call for one world socialist government, and to remember it as the “global warming encyclical” discounts the very real damage that has already been done by the document to the integrity of the Church and the incalculable damage that will be done if world leaders heed the Pope's plea.

Discovering that the See of Peter is occupied by a died-in-the-wool socialist is a good opportunity to review Church history. I've found, in my limited education of the subject, that the delineation between a Doctor of the Church and a heretic is a razor-thin one between those who are willing to admit the possibility of error and those too prideful to do so.

Only time will tell.

You can read the full text of Laudato Si here:
http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html

Red, black, and yellow? Is that some Illuminati Jew symbol? Didn't you put an uglier version of this logo on last post? What's wrong with the nice, simple, easily dismissed anarchy Ⓐ you were using? Why should I care about a picture on a blog I don't read? These are all legitimate questions.

The new logo, like the blog itself, is intended to be a conversation starter. The idea for this design actually emerged as a result of my frustrations in trying to find a lapel pin with a respectable-looking anarchy Ⓐ. I eventually gave up and said, “I will have to design my own.” Of course, if one has to design their own product (especially a costly product), there is no excuse for not designing it in a manner consistent with one's own desires.

My desire for a lapel pin that looked nice but also looked like the anarchy Ⓐ was to be able to start conversations in the least obnoxious way one could start such conversations, like a sort of respectable bumper-sticker. Of course, if I were to ever encounter someone who is even slightly educated with regards to the history of modern political thought or the philosophy of anarchy, the simple red and black Ⓐ may cause some confusion.

Wait, what? Isn't the red Ⓐ the definitive anarchy logo? Haven't you made the case that anarchy is, as a philosophy, incredibly simple and straightforward? It's the rejection of criminal institutions. Simple and straight forward.

It is simple in theory, but humans tend to make things more complicated when putting them into practice. Time for a history lesson. One upon a time, avoidance of coercion, theft, and murder were widely the daily routine. Free exchange of goods and services and people minding their own business was far more common than kings stealing, armies murdering, and sheriffs enforcing, statistically speaking. As social technologies and infrastructures develop and become more efficient, the daily freedom of action diminished due to efficiency in government. After a time, empire collapses and freedom returns. Rinse and repeat.

I am speaking vaguely and mythologically on purpose, as this narrative is cyclical and each cycle consists of generations at a time. In the course of a more recent cycle (circa 19th century AD), a certain philosopher named Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is credited with resurrecting an ancient Greek concept called anarchism. The anarchy he resurrected was, philosophically, in its nascent stages. The Greeks that were prone to mentioning anarchy always did so from the perspective of statism and provided very little development before passing the torch to gnostics and other heretics in the early centuries AD, which did not bode well for the philosophy's development under christian empires. As a philosophy, it is motivated by the same moral principles today as it was at its inception, but a great many more considerations have been provided with regards to the necessary conclusions of those moral principles.

Proudhon's infant anarchy was a radical reaction to imperial statism and institutional violations of human rights. In his fully justifiable fervor to do away with that which is inherently criminal and misanthropic, Proudhon made the mistake of throwing out several ideas that were misrepresented to him and institutions that were not inherently criminal but only incidentally so. Influenced by the popular philosophical zeitgeist of modernism and communism, witnessing the historical relationship between the Church and the state, and the state-like behavior of aristocratic industrialists, Prudhon rejected the ideas of religion and capitalism. This mistake made his particular brand of anarchism indistinguishable from secular communism in practice: a violent revolution of the poor against their oppressors and those who resembled their oppressors in favor of a social justice warrior utopia of violent atheist egalitarianism. The classic punk-rock anarchist Ⓐ is commonly associated with this brand of anarchism, “anarcho-communism” as it is now known.

Something needs to be made clear here. Two things, actually. First, even though I used to be a straight-up commie when I was younger, I am not an ancom. Second, Proudhon was correct in rejecting the state-like behavior of the industrialist aristocracy and the Church's use of state violence in pursuit of worldly power. The mistake was believing these crimes to be intrinsic to the philosophies of capitalism and religion instead of a result of individual human failings or the influence of the state.

Fortunately, the philosophy of anarchism has not yet waned. Others have taken up the mantle of anarchism from Proudhon and further refined and developed the philosophy. Most notable of which are likely Spooner, Rothbard, and Mencken. Something all three share in common is the fact that they were all economists. Real economists, not Keynesian socialist bullshit artists... Austrian economists. They were also abolitionists. In the moral pursuit of eradicating the crimes and slavery of the state, they applied their understanding of the human condition, as received from economics, and cleaned up anarchism. They saw the political correctness, feminism, egalitarianism, and socialism embraced by ancoms for what it is: statism.

In response to the red and black ancoms, these second-generation anarchists billed themselves anarcho-capitalists, agorists, voluntarists, and a handful of other names. Being economically minded, these men were more aware of the marketing challenges of advocating freedom in a slave society. Some boldly called themselves anarchists, trying to reclaim the truth; others, justifiably, took the easier and arguably more productive route of adopting wholeheartedly the name, “voluntarist” (or voluntaryist). This, more human-friendly, brand of anarchism took on the yellow and black V of voluntarism to differentiate themselves from its communist progenitor, while still hearkening back to its heritage.

Something else must be made clear here, as well. No, I'm not an ancap. More importantly, the excessive focus on voluntary interaction and economics has come at the expense of an awareness of a deeper, more fundamental, aspect of anarchy. If one's rights are directed at the goal of human flourishing, there must be more ethical rigor and development beyond simply determining whether or not an action was voluntarily assented to. Anarcho-capitalism (aka real capitalism) may also present certain complications in practice, not as severe as the practical results of anarcho-communism, mind you, but results which resemble the environment which produced Proudhon in the first place. In a society devoid of the pernicious influences of government and absent a more developed ethics, a feudal-grade series of corporate rentership fiefdoms is likely to develop. One needs to look no further than Google, Facebook, or Goldman-Sachs to get a taste of what this would look like. If you see nothing wrong with any of these companies... just go back to sleep.

If I am not an ancom or a voluntarist (ancap), what am I? Well, as far as this conversation is concerned, I am an anarchist. I reject all belief in institutions predicated on coercion, theft, or murder. I recognize my responsibility to secure my rights to liberty and property in pursuit of flourishing and acknowledge the same in others. I pursue the abolition of slavery, including the slavery of the state. I believe human interaction is largely voluntary and all agreements and exchanges ought to be voluntary, but that is not a necessary result of anarchism, not the point of origin, nor is it the goal. I believe that, in a state-run society, the truly rich are such at the expense of those who cannot purchase their freedom from the law, but I am not opposed to the legitimate acquisition of material wealth or social influence.

So, the new logo is designed to be identifiable to one with even a basic exposure to anarchy, in either of its popular brands. It is designed to convey that I am either a mixture of both or neither. It is designed to look cool, obviously, and it is designed to resemble a hex or Illuminati doo-dilly because everything is. Most importantly, it is designed to start conversations. As a lapel pin, it can start real conversations, IRL. As a simple logo on a website, it can serve as an identifier for my radical notions and aggressive philosophizing.

Best of all, it can instigate conversations amongst anarchists. We need more discussion amongst ourselves, to try and better understand our own position more deeply. I would love to see Christopher Cantwell, Sloane Frost, and Brian Sovryn go on a retreat together for a weekend. We can all benefit from sharpening our teeth on each other and forging deeper friendships and support structures, as free men are a small minority in today's world. As I pointed out in “Is Anarchy a Bad Word?”, we face a tough marketing challenge against an institution with a mandatory 15,000 hour child indoctrination system; every little bit helps.

Remember, more important that changing people's minds by way of symbols or rhetoric is to simply do what is right and pursue flourishing. Setting the example has always been more productive than arguments or advertising. Without an identifier and an explanation, though, the example set will be too esoteric for others to follow.


Tl;DR: The red and black Ⓐ is typically associated with anarcho-communism. The yellow and black V is typically associated with anarcho-capitalists (aka voluntarists). The new logo, a work in progress, is supposed to be suffix-agnostic, so it's got both logos integrated in one simple design. Please give feedback on the history lesson, the logo itself, or on the idea behind the logo. Also, Please, please, let me know if you would be interested in purchasing a lapel pin at a reasonable price. Manufacturing the pins requires a certain large number be ordered at once, due to the casting model that is used. I can only get my pin if I want hundreds of them or if enough people want to reimburse me for their own pin, thereby reducing the cost to me.