Dear Friends,
It seems to me… liberty is the answer to all of our desires. Those who seek equality, fairness, fraternity and brotherly love, the answer is, and has always been, liberty. To seek equality through oppression is like breaking someone’s bones and expecting them to run a marathon. To try to attain fairness by force is like strangling someone with velvet rope. To achieve fraternity with exclusivity is to take a fish out of water. Finally, to create brotherly love with hate, is baking a cake with nightshade as flavoring. No matter how much someone might want to get these things, fairness, equality, brotherly love and fraternity, the means is always liberty… oppression, force, exclusivity and hate create the opposite of the desired goal. This is terribly important for people to understand, so that we can achieve these things, instead of searching for them by destroying them.
Equality is to be treated the same. It is not equal distribution of the goods of society, it is to be seen as the same as everyone else. Equality is an attitude, not a state of being, it is a state of mind. To confuse a state of mind with a state of being is the source of the misunderstanding. A state of mind cannot be got by oppressing certain people, it cannot be had by government lowering some to the state of others, it must be created by holding everyone the same. Oppression and force effect the state of being, liberty effects the attitude. An attitude can only be effected by changes to the mindset from oppression to liberty… of individuals, politicians and the cultural elite.
Fairness is another state of mind and not a state of being. One cannot force another to be fair and thought is not subject to regulation. That is absurd. To be fair a person needs first to treat all people equally. So if equality requires as a prerequisite liberty, and fairness requires treating others equally, than liberty is a prerequisite for fairness as well. It is the opposite of fairness, to damage the one to help the other, that is the definition of unfairness. Force cannot make people treat each other fairly, it is the application of unfairness to create fairness, which intuitively, is unfair. To be fair to each other, we must have the mind set that everyone is equal, to hold some more equal than others, is the very opposite of fairness.
Fraternity is a state of the heart. A state of the heart cannot be changed by force, it is not subject to government regulation and it certainly is not improved by hate. Fraternity is to both support each other and to be friends with our fellow human beings. It should be obvious that the state of the heart of fraternity cannot be created by exclusivity. How can we hold others as our fellows if we are exclusive in our love of them? Those people are bad, and so they are not deserving… is the opposite of fraternity. To be exclusive in our love cannot lead to mutual support, it cannot create friendship, no, such a feeling instead makes us angry, hateful and jealous. Fraternity is the opposite of jealousy, hate and anger, it is to support each other, to be friendly and help our fellow travelers, regardless even of their flaws.
Brotherly love is another state of the heart. Hate is the opposite of love and so cannot be the font of any form of love whatsoever. To harbor, nurse and husband hate in our hearts is to reject brotherly love. Love of our brothers and sisters improves the lot of mankind, it makes us healthier, it makes the economy work better, it enriches us in so many ways that it is hard to fathom why so many of us wax hatred in our hearts. To hold hate in our hearts is to lower ourselves below animals. A mere animal doesn’t hate, but it can love, and so to hate is to opt to be lower than an animal. Our hearts are there to love. The love of humanity, not one segment, not one economic group, and not a certain religion, is the definition of brotherly love. Hate lowers while love elevates.
The underlying theme is, to effect a state of mind and a state of heart, there must be liberty. Oppression, force, exclusivity and hate are the opposite of liberty. They are the tools of evil. It is self evident, that the tools of evil cannot lead to a good outcome, no matter how much someone might want them to, the tools of evil will never achieve good, no matter how many times they are tried, and the tools of evil always result in evil, no matter who uses them. The tools of evil must be rejected, while liberty, the tool of good must be embraced.
Liberty is the tool of virtue. To be effective however, liberty must be used, inculcated, felt and understood. We can talk all we want about liberty, but until we actually implement it, in our own hearts and minds, the result will always fall short. So we must ask ourselves, do we want equality, fairness, fraternity and brotherly love, or do we want to continue to oppress, use force, be exclusive, and harbor hate in our hearts? The two paths diverge in liberty. It is up to us what future we beget to our children…
Sincerely,
John Pepin
