Reason, Reward, and Fear

A long time ago, my prefered method of implementing social change was to participate in electoral politics. I was a campaign worker. And, as a campaign worker, I met a diversity of people.

One fellow and his experiences stuck in my mind. He was a veteran of World War Two, and he joined and supported the Reform Party because of their stand on The National Debt. He was a one issue guy. About abortion, the death penalty, or immigration, he did not care. No, he just had that working class 'borrowing is wrong' attitude.

One day, he and I were going door to door, dropping off campaign literature. He and I were dressed in suits, and our feet were sore. The day dragged on, and he started to open up to me about his experiences in World War Two.

One door we knocked upon was opened by person who could be described as a sterotypical leftist feminist activist. Such stereotypes do not exist, so any similarity between this fat woman with short hair and the sterotypical man hater is purely right wing propaganda. We introduced ourselves, and I could see that my war veteran buddy was looking forward to giving his reasoned argument about why government deficit spending is bad policy. He never argued about abortion, the death penalty, or immigration. Only deficit spending.

The non-stereotypical Person-Canadian spit in his face. She called him a Nazi. This was Motivation by Fear misapplied to a person who is Motivated by Reason. In that moment, my war buddy, whose body was scarred by Nazi shrapnel, who had daily thoughts and prayers for his school chums who died around him, who knew what real Nazi's were like, became a changed person. The nice activist lady who spit on him did not change her personality. I suspect she giggled with her friends over a cup of soy milk about it all, getting a full goober into the face of the racist enemy.

Indeed, my war buddy no longer saw this woman as a Canadian who cared about her country enough to care and participate in politics. Instead, she was the regrown spawn of the enemy that he and his friends had spilled blood over so many years ago. He was enough of a gentleman to not throttle her like some SS Oberscharfuhrer he came across on the battlefield, but in his heart, that is what she was.

One mistake, common to the Bolsheviks groping towards winning the hearts and minds of taxpayers so that they pony up the cash for the taxspender programs that they administer, is to use Motivation by Fear upon those motivated by Reason. I presume they are bad telemarketers, and have weak empathy skills. Fear is the great motivator in collectivist taxspender bureaucracies, with its heavy load of administrivia and secret police management systems. Calling a war veteran a Nazi was not a wise thing to do. Since then, and until now, he has become an Army of One. He became a Lone Wolf, researching and acting quietly, studying this new enemy he calls The Fourth Reich. And only recently, we re-acquinted: he reads my blog, he emails me, but he does not comment openly.

One thing about this furor about Freedom of Speech. An astoundingly large number of people are not talking openly about it. E-mails are flowing, dinners are being held with blog-buddies, coded terms are developed, and secret rituals are being agreed upon. Freedom of Speech is never welcome by any collectivist entity, but without it, rebellion, uprising, and mutiny inevitably occur. I can understand the desire to cut out the tongue of those that disagree with me. However, history teaches us that it does not work. The tongueless babbler inevitably becomes a martyr with a cloud of fanatics. Who needs that?

Regardless of what you think, you should think about what other people think. When people look at a man with political ties, who seems to be making alot of money out of silencing dissent, who is not curbed by those that should be curbing him because, well, he generates alot of billable hours and overtime. This changes the message from one of you overstepped the bounds of free speech to one of a gob of spit.

One night, think about what those silenced people are now doing. They are no longer on the internet. What are they doing? I suspect they are in their basement workshops, making projects, building craft items for Not-Christmas. They are buying shortwave radio transmitter-receivers, ordering interesting books from mail-order mail-only catalogues, and re-reading The French Connection. This group of dissidents has an average IQ greater than 85, so their form of rebellion will not take the form of defacing with spray paint or defecating in public.

One way or the other, taxpayers like me are going to come out on top. I can work for whoever wins, they need my skills, and they need my money. As for the taxspenders and those that keep them in diapers, they are soap. I can learn Arabic and the Koran as easily as I learnt French in high school. Some people live in a fantasy world where bears are cute and cuddly; some people live in reality, and know that bears play with their food in that they will eat you alive. Be careful who you spit on, or better yet, spit upon those it works upon.

I, Fenris Badwulf, wrote this at both Mitchieville and the new and improved DustMyBroom.