By Hunter P. Thompson, Peoples Samizdat

How does one determine his purpose in his life? How does a man seek out finding his life mission or vocation? In today’s society, these are largely left as open questions, at least by most Western Governments. On the surface, this decision might seem beneficial — after all, it allows for the individual to find his own purpose in life. However, I would argue that for the vast majority of the population, leaving these questions solely to the individual is detrimental.

A healthy authority must aid the general populace in establishing their purpose in society primarily because if it fails to do so, it opens itself up to subversion. Power, in the political sense, is largely conserved. If one entity loses a certain amount of power, that power does not disappear into the ether; instead, that power is reclaimed by other entities. Therefore, if the central government fails to aid its constituents in establishing meaning in their lives, some other entity will. This observation is one of the fundamental follies of most minimal government conservatives and libertarians. Both of these groups do not actually provide a way to prevent an external entity from interfering in someone’s personal life, they simply qualify that the government cannot interfere. However, whether we are considering libertarians, republicans, democrats or, “classical liberals,” they are all liberal; a worldview where the needs and wants of the individual almost always supersede the needs and wants of the collective. A liberal worldview does not allow for the state to even loosely impose a worldview on its constituents because this worldview might not satisfy the needs of some individuals in the population. The consequences of the liberal approach are disastrous — the population looses unity through a lack of collective purpose while simultaneously allowing the dysfunctional fringe to impose their worldviews on everyone else. Again, a liberal worldview does not allow for the state to impose a worldview on the citizens, but it does not specify against errant individuals within that society from doing so.

However, the paradox of liberalism is that a liberal state’s insistence on not providing a worldview to its constituents is a worldview itself. The state’s decisions of inaction are sometimes more important than the state’s decisions of action. While the early liberal states of the 1700s and 1800s may have been more idealistic in their rationale for not, “interfering,” in their constituents lives, that is not the case today. The liberal states of today deliberately avoid providing answers to these questions as a way to create space for non-state actors to execute this very interference. The state will not enforce a worldview, but it does this so that entities like Netflix, Facebook or Amazon can. This concept is a generalization of Sam Francis’ concept of Anarcho-Tyranny; while Francis’ concept dealt more with the state relinquishing its power in the form of things like law-enforcement as a way to tyrannize and control its constituents, the relinquishment of power that is being described in this essay occurs on the nonphysical level. A liberal state is not only capable of abandoning its physical means of power exertion, but also its nonphysical means. In fact, the state’s abdication of its nonphysical authority is potentially more insidious than the abdication of its physical authority.

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