Join the Liberty Rapid Response Team

When I think about how to accelerate our movement towards a freer, more just, prosperous, peaceful and egalitarian society (i.e., the agorist evolution), for some reason, my mind takes me to Pete Eyre and Ademo Freeman. They are at the center of lots of constructive and even surprising activism. That must be why, after talking on Cop Block Radio last night about the need to innovate, I dreamed of Pete and Adam. In my dream, we were sitting around a table and they were demanding to know when I was moving to New Hampshire.

I don’t remember a lot of dreams but this one has stuck with me. For some reason, it keeps popping into my mind. It’s nagging me, actually. I thought about the reason why I won’t move to New Hampshire right now (I need to raise my son without undue risk of being thrown in prison). Then I thought, why can’t I just go and spend a month in New Hampshire? Other people have moved on a transient basis. Why can’t I?

What would I do during that month? I would focus full-time on marketing libertarianism, organizing libertarians and supporting existing liberty organizations. I would go full-bore to build upon the great work that other Free State Project (FSP) members have already done there and continue to do everyday.

Listening to some FSPers talk, you would think that crossing the border from Massachusetts into New Hampshire, one became healed of all afflictions, the birds suddenly chirped melodiously, the sun came out from behind the clouds and you instantly become a better version of you. But it’s just another imaginary state line. New Hampshire is not The Promised Land™. It is, however, a currently unrivaled laboratory in which to experiment with liberty activism.

What if we could take the liberty focus that New Hampshire enjoys, like a searchlight on a rotating base, and focus it on another location? What if we could, this month, place that focus on Vermont? Next month, Delaware. The month after that, Cleveland. Early next year, we might take it to Los Angeles, New York and eventually places like Egypt, Turkey and Syria. The only limits are our imagination, our attitudes and our wallets.

We will send three to fifteen committed, experienced and well-educated liberty activists on each trip. We will spend one to four weeks at each location. While there, we will run educational workshops, distribute literature, do media interviews, engage in counter-economics, videotape government employees, give sidewalk soapbox speeches, produce videos documenting our work, live-tweet our activities, carry out a final project with our students and whatever else is appropriate to our goal and the local context.

The goal is to spark a new or grow a nascent liberty movement in the spotlighted area. Our task is to teach people the basics of libertarianism, incite in them the courage to live free, demonstrate how these principles can improve their lives, connect them with the global liberty community for ongoing support and be inspirational examples for them as beings who already get liberty and hold a burning desire to see it realized.

We can share techniques for self-sufficiency, create an incubator for agorist businesses, train unemployed people, inform targets of police harassment and brutality of how to counter that treatment and much more. The principles and practices of liberty are powerful and ruthlessly germane to everyday problems across the globe.

Think of it as a rapid response team for liberty. A Liberty Corps. An Expeditionary Force. If we are to have any hope of achieving the libertarian or agorist vision in our lifetime, we have to think at this level and, just as importantly, we have to actually make big ideas like this happen.

We must make our struggle not just local and national but also global. At a tactical level, the more of us there are, the more liberty cells that are agitating and growing, the harder it is for government agents to zero in on one of them and shut it down. As agorist communities grow up around the globe, it will make the agorist counter-economy more vibrant and resilient through competition. Imagine if we could buy, not just a few odd products and services from agorist vendors, but if we could select from a global menu, with providers everywhere from Mumbai to Milwaukee.

On a philosophical level, if we allow governments to limit us with their imaginary lines and their passport control checkpoints, then we are ceding ground. The only borders we seek are property lines among homes and businesses. By making connections across these imaginary lines we weaken their power. We strengthen our global voice in support of freedom and against oppression.

As our Liberty Rapid Response Team(s) (LibRRT) accumulates resources and expertise, we can become more agile. When protests break out in Los Angeles or Lima, we can have people there the very next day to conduct nonviolence training, create professional media such as pamphlets and videos and generally assist them with their goals of achieving greater freedom, in whatever form is most appropriate for that local context. Around the world, people are under- and unemployed. They live in grinding poverty. They are subject to coercion and oppression on a daily basis. But they don’t have the vision we do. They do not know in their hearts that they are free, independent beautiful human beings and/or they don’t know how to realize their vision. We can do something about that, something huge, beautiful and effective.

Next Steps

1. Self-select leaders: If you want to be a part of this, share your ideas below in the comments section.
2. Build a pool of aid workers: Self-select a sizable pool of individuals who are interested in going on missions (i.e., aid workers).
3. Pick our first location: Our first few should probably be in North America.
4. Set a date for our first mission: So that we have a tangible deadline and the urgency that accompanies that.
5. Develop a budget: I suspect we could carry off a first mission for $5,000 FRN/USD or less. We will need to cover travel and lodging costs, media production costs, one-time startup costs and incidentals. Aid workers must be compensated for their work.
6. Design ways to defray costs: By trading with individuals in the spotlighted areas, the organization can eventually become self-sufficient. Just by reporting on local events for a global audience, we might even turn a profit.
7. Develop a training program: Develop an internal training program in libertarianism, agorism, privacy tools, alternative currencies, unschooling, activism, the success philosophy, public speaking, mentoring, languages and all the other skills aid workers will need.
8. Present a progress report: Present a progress report to the community.
9. Raise funds
10. Plan long-range: Based on community support, engage in long-range planning so that we have something tangible to work towards.
11. Carry out our first mission
12. Initiate a feedback cycle: Collect information during and immediately after the first mission so that we can evaluate our work and continuously improve it.
13. Prepare the donors report
14. Start again on the next mission

I would like to locate this project under the Shield Mutual umbrella. At this time, however, you have not grown Shield Mutual enough in terms of paying customers in order to finance much more than a trip to the supermarket. In the future, I am certain that this project will become part of the Shield Mutual vision. For now, it will need independent community support in order to become a reality.

Is this only Fantasy?

This may sound like fantasy to you. But what is impossible yesterday is routine today. If we don’t stretch our imaginations now, the ideal of a peaceful, prosperous and free world will never arrive. Each successive generation will continue to hit the snooze button on our respective wakeup calls. Our slide into tyranny will accelerate. And we will reach a point of no return. What will you do to make your vision a reality? What comforts are you willing to put on the line for liberty? Tell me in the comments below.

“Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done.” – Robert A. Heinlein

“Every noble work is at first impossible.” – Thomas Carlyle

“Believe and act as if it were impossible to fail.” – Charles F. Kettering

“In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd.” – Miguel de Cervantes

“What we can or cannot do, what we consider possible or impossible, is rarely a function of our true capability. It is more likely a function of our beliefs about who we are.” – Anthony Robbins

“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.” – Paulo Coelho

“It always seems impossible until its done.” – Nelson Mandela

“To believe a thing impossible is to make it so.” – French Proverb

“Never tell a young person that anything cannot be done. God may have been waiting centuries for someone ignorant enough of the impossible to do that very thing.” – G. M. Trevelyan

“Impossible only means that you haven’t found the solution yet.” – Anonymous

“The only place where your dream becomes impossible is in your own thinking.” – Robert Schuller

“So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.” – Christopher Reeve

“There is nothing impossible to him who will try.” – Alexander the Great

“It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.” – Walt Disney