Tag: social change

Four Options When Government Gets in the Way of Your Dreams

Four Options When Government Gets in the Way

Illustration by Matthew Drake

 

This article is adapted from a presentation given at FEE and SFL seminars.  Co-authored with James Walpole for The Freeman.

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We all want to live free, but we have a problem: governments don’t always want us to.

From seemingly mundane rules (like banning raw milk sales) to the truly horrific (like taking your house from you or throwing you in jail), the state is probably going to mess with you at some point in your life. It will throw taxes and fees and fines and rules at you and erect roadblocks and regulations inhibiting your progress — especially if you’re trying to do something new and innovative.

What can you do?

You do have options. Grave as the stakes may sometimes be, you must first accept this outlook: it’s all a game. If you treat it that way, you’re more likely to find a way forward rather than simply cowering in fear or trembling with anger.

Here, then, are four options when you’re faced with the game of government interference.

1. Play the Game

This is the strategy you’re probably most familiar with. It’s what we’re all encouraged to do. Whether through voting, lobbying, or holding office, you can try to take on the state while playing by its rules. You can try to change it from the inside. This is a strategy we cannot recommend.

In business, this strategy leads to the phenomenon economists call “regulatory capture.” Many companies become involved in lobbying and political action to prevent hostile regulations. It’s understandable. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on campaign donations and dinners trying to sway politicians and regulators to delay a vote, join coalitions, or carve out exceptions.

It’s a tough, slow process, one that involves endless compromise of principle and decency, and the few who succeed end up with political power and the ability to gain more. They end up using that power not just to expand their own freedom but to crush the freedom of competitors.

But any changes you make will be temporary. Laws passed in one decade are easily repealed in the next, especially if they limit state power. The bigger loss is a personal one. If you play the game long enough, the game ends up playing you. You become a part of the power structure you were trying to fight.

2. Defy the Game

When the state crushes your dreams, you can fight back. History is full of people who stopped taking oppression for granted and started resisting. Look at the civil rights movement in the United States, the Hungarian revolt against Communist rule, or even Uber’s commercial rebellion.

Today, the ridesharing company is operating illegally in dozens of cities, and it’s already paid hundreds of millions of dollars in fines for its drivers who are caught violating local laws. The company is growing fast enough to absorb the damage, and while governments don’t like Uber, customers love it. In Uber-hostile cities like New York, riders are standing up for their favorite way to get around. The “rebellion” has been a huge success.

But rebellion plays out in more desperate ways in the rest of the political world. For people and companies without the money and reputation of Uber, successfully defying the game is hard. While you can get tremendous satisfaction from sticking it to the man, you might end up in jail. You might be killed. In other words, playing this way means you might run into the real power of the state in its rawest form.

3. Change the Game

Changing the game is about recognizing the incentive structures and putting external pressure on the government to bend. Often, all you need to do to win is to hold the state to its own rules.

But it’s not as easy as it sounds, and the people who try to change the game in this way have to be heroic, if not martyrs. They’re taking the longest route. Game-changers lower the cost of information to the public while raising the cost for government to break its own rules or be thuggish. This group includes lawyers, journalists, public intellectuals, and everyday citizens.

Look at the case of occupational licensing. Municipal and state governments throughout the United States require entrepreneurs to give up money and time to comply with regulations. Many would-be entrepreneurs are stopped dead in their tracks by competition-killing regulations.

Before the Institute for Justice (IJ) challenged the regulation, eyebrow threaders in Texas were required to train for 750 hours before they could set up shop. Before another IJ case in 2011, Texas required bakers wanting to sell cookies to the public to rent commercial kitchen space and obtain food-handling permits.

Changing the game isn’t limited to the courtroom. Governments will break their own rules if they can get away with it. Both IJ cases included concerted efforts to raise public awareness about the unfair consequences of the regulations while simultaneously challenging them in court. These efforts raised the stakes for any judge who wanted to rule for the status quo. It also resulted in politicians jockeying to change the law before the court case was even settled so that they could take credit and benefit from the positive PR. Think about the state lawmakers who jumped at the chance to restrict eminent domain after theKelo outrage.

This is one of the biggest pros of changing the game: if you’re successful, you’ve kept your own integrity, and you’ve helped to protect others from the dream crushers in government.

The problem is that you may not win. You can spend years of your life fighting the battle to change the game and lose — plenty of people have, from the Dred Scott case to the Kelo decision. Even if you do win, the victory is too often short-lived: as soon as public awareness and scrutiny abate, courts will “reinterpret” hard-fought constitutional changes put in place to restrict government.

4. Ignore the Game

Entrepreneurs in the last decade have made international-trade and immigration restrictions less and less important. Today, anyone can telecommute to work in the United States from a call center in India, an Internet cafe in Bangladesh, or a personal laptop in Mexico. These innovations allow labor to move freely, and the inventors never needed to lobby politicians.

You can quit, exit, and opt out of the games government uses to stop you. You can move. You can pull your kids out of school. You can alter your business plan. You can quietly sidestep the obstacles placed before you.

There are major benefits to ignoring the game. For one thing, you don’t have to think about politics. Psychologists and philosophers have long told us to not worry about things not under our control. By ignoring the game, you can be politically ignorant and much happier. You don’t have to fight court battles or Internet comment threads. You can focus on creating, not protesting.

Ignoring the game isn’t always as satisfying as defying it, but ignoring the game offers an immediate sense of personal freedom. It allows you to create a freer life for yourself while providing an example that others can learn from. Over time, if enough people ignore the game, it begins to wane in importance and power.

How Will You Respond?

If your goal is to live free, first understand the game and know the rules. The way you respond to the game is then up to you. The strategy you choose will have more influence over your quality of life than any near-term victory or defeat will.

You may respond to the government in many different ways throughout your life, but if you treat it like a game, it will be less likely to ruin you.

The Futility of Reform

Don’t run for class president.  Don’t go to HOA meetings.  Don’t join a committee.  Don’t get involved in political campaigns.

All of these activities are about reform.  Get into the institution, play by its rules, and try to make it behave differently than it wants to.

Forget this approach.  It sucks.  Here are four reasons why.

It makes you less happy

Have you ever been to a town hall meeting?  Life’s too short to endure such horrors.  The worst life to live is a boring one.  The machinations of every political institution are stale and boring and full of self-serious processes, procedures, and practitioners.  Your every moment is too valuable to suffer through it.  It’s inhumane.  If Roberts Rules of Order are relevant to any effort you’re involved in, get out and go build something new.

You can’t change the game by playing

Political institutions do one thing best: restrict individual fun and freedom.  It’s natural to want to reduce the role of these rule-happy entities.  But you can’t win playing by their rules.  You can’t vote your way to a system where votes no longer curtail progress.

Trying to reduce the role of the state by engaging in politics is like trying to put a casino out of business by playing blackjack there.  “Oh, I have it figured out.  I’ll beat the house!”  No.  You won’t.  They want you to think that.  They want you to keep playing.  Abiding by house rules is no way to protest or change them.  Especially when the house gets a little richer every time you do.

If you don’t want the casino to keep luring people in don’t go in yourself.  Build something better that people want to go to instead.

Progress always comes from without

Political institutions are reactive.  They wait until the world forces them and then they change.  If humanity is a car these institutions are the brakes, able to stop progress but never create it.  If you want to get to a new destination you need the accelerator.

Accelerators are new ideas and products and services that forge ahead, paying no mind to the consensus-seeking bureaucrats nested in the status quo.  Accelerators don’t care about argument, nor protest.  They care about creation.  They build the world they want to live in instead of hoping to prevent its decay.

There is no permanence

The great thing about innovation is that it only needs to happen once.  That painful, gruelling, child-birth like experience of the creative act or eureka moment is born out of imagination, hard work, and courage.  If the result is of any value to the world it lasts forever and serves as the stepping stone to still greater innovations.

The wheel was invented once.  No one has to re-invent it.  It’s world-improving powers are permanent and irreversible.

Any apparent victory within a political structure is fleeting by definition and design.  You align all the powers and elites and interests just so after years of butt-numbing meetings and pompous proclamations from people you’d never want to have a beer with but now you must woo and coddle.  You have your mandate or constituency or whatever other serious sounding label you slap on the gaggle of interests vying for a win within the house rules.  You get your way.  Hooray!

Until the next month or year or election cycle when the new interests group outmaneuvers you and the tables turn in an instant.  Everything you created in your coalition vanishes, along with all the money you convinced people to throw at it.  The same tiny sliver of ground must be re-won, each time as if from scratch.  Only then do you realize that broader social forces created by the outsiders accelerating humanity are the master, not the servant, to these stale political institutions that apply their rusty brakes against all odds.

Go out and build something

Build something instead.  Exit.  Go your own way.  Forget the suits and speeches and posturing and canvassing and internal climbing and deal-making.  Go build your wildest dream.  Imagine and create things that excite you.  Move to a place that doesn’t suck.  Create a job that’s not boring.  Live a life you want to live.

Don’t wait for the world to change or beg for permission to let it evolve.  Go change your own world.  The rest will follow.

How Change Happens – Higher Ed. Edition

The current higher education model is flawed.  If we’re serious about changing it, first we need to get serious about understanding how social change happens.  Intentions and action are not enough to bring about desired ends.  We need an understanding of the causal relationships involved in order to effectively bring about change.

The great truth that flies in the face of civics textbooks and popular myth is that politics is not the source of social change.  It’s more like the last in a line of indicators of cultural shifts that have already occurred.  Politicians and the policies they create only change after the new approach is sufficiently beneficial to the right interests, and sufficiently tolerable to the public at large to help, or at least not harm, political careers.  Of course some politicians guess wrong and suffer accordingly, but by and large the political marketplace tends toward preservation of the status quo until a new direction is imperative for survival.

An entire, and entirely fascinating, branch of political economy called Public Choice Theory examines the incentives at work in the political marketplace in depth, and I highly encourage anyone attracted to political action to gain a working knowledge of this field.  It reveals, in short, that incentives baked into the democratic system create and perpetuate policies that are bad for the public at large, and good for particular concentrated interests.  What Public Choice has a difficult time accounting for is the role of changing beliefs.  There are countless policies that, based purely on the incentives of various interests, ought to be in place but are not, or vice versa.  Some things are simply out of bounds, no matter how much a particular group might benefit and be willing to lobby, because the general public finds them unacceptable.

Contrary to the seemingly ironclad rule of interest driven politics, public beliefs can and do change, and dramatically sometimes, putting parameters around the area within which political actors can ply their trade.  Slavery is a striking example.  At one point, it would’ve been hard to get elected, at least in some areas, if you publicly supported abolition.  Not too many decades later, it’s unthinkable to get elected anywhere if you’ve ever even joked about supporting slavery.  There is certainly a complex relationship between changing economic incentives and public beliefs, but it is undeniable that the about-face on the ethics of slavery was more than a mere shift in power among competing interests.  What most of the public found tolerable they now find reprehensible.

Our institutions are formed by incentives, and incentives are constrained by beliefs.  That makes the beliefs of the public the ultimate key to change.  Smaller changes might occur within the window of things already publicly acceptable, but major change requires a shift in that window.  How to change those beliefs?  There are two primary drivers, both of which feed each other; ideas and experiences.

Ideas are the raw data that form beliefs.  If you accept the idea that minimum wage laws make lower skilled individuals less employable, and you accept the idea that a society with fewer unemployed persons is desirable, then you will have the belief that minimum wage laws are bad.  If, on the other hand, you’ve never really thought about the economics behind minimum wage at all, but your low skilled neighbor lost his job when minimum wage increased, that experience might also cause you to believe minimum wage laws are bad.

I spent a good part of my life focusing entirely on disseminating ideas as a way of changing belief.  It was fulfilling and, I think, valuable work.  But it wasn’t until relatively recently that I began to understand the immense value of experience as a vital second prong when it comes to changing beliefs and the world.

Consider the difficulty of convincing your mother that the New York City taxi cartel is inefficient or immoral.  It requires a great deal of economic theory or philosophizing about rights and coercion.  Your mom might have other things she enjoys more than reading books on these subjects.  Even if you convince her, her newfound belief will probably barely register among things she cares about.  Sure, taxis aren’t the greatest.  So what?  She’s never had that bad an experience.  Even if a policy change to end the cartel were possible, your mom mighn’t pay any attention, or she may be concerned about what the new world without cartels would look like in practice.

Now consider recommending your mom use Uber on her next trip in to Manhattan.  She uses it, likes it, and becomes a regular customer.  She may be completely ignorant of the current cab cartel and the problems with it, but she’s now a believer in an alternative system.  If Uber comes under attack from vested interests, she’ll defend it.  If the chance to end the cartel comes up, she won’t fear because she already knows what the world looks like without it.  She can’t easily be convinced out of her experience.

It is for this reason that dictatorial countries not only ban literature that propagates new ideas, but also goods and services that compete with government monopolies and let people experience something better.  The Soviet Union feared blue jeans, jazz, and Marlboro cigarettes as much as free market textbooks.

If we want to break out of the educational rut it requires new ideas and new experiences.  We mustn’t only talk about new approaches, we must build alternatives.  The best part is, you don’t have to wait on anyone.  You can take your own path right now, and by so doing not only improve your life, but serve as an example to others of what’s possible outside the status quo.  Educational entrepreneurs, not just intellectuals, will change the hidebound approach to education.  It’s already happening.

While policymakers, pundits, professors, and provosts squabble about the future of higher education and jockey to secure their position, entrepreneurs are busy creating and delivering alternatives across the globe.  The educational consumer is enjoying new experiences and getting new ideas about education in the process.  The old guard can argue any which way they like, but at the end of the day they’ll have to prove more valuable to the learner than the myriad new options.  All the protections and advantages in the world can’t stop competition now.  Technology has helped break it wide open.

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Excerpted from The Future of School.

When to Take Action

I’m highly action biased.  I get the frustration of identifying a problem or having a new idea and wanting to do something about it, good and hard.  I believe jumping in with both feet as soon as possible is always preferable to lots of analysis.  Still, there are times when the best thing to do is nothing.

This is particularly true when the problem is a grand one that affects all of society.  Just because you realize that there is something wrong with X system or process doesn’t mean there is an obvious and immediate action to take.  The realization is the first, often most powerful but also most fleeting step.  It’s easy for action biased people to get antsy and want to do something quick.  Start a campaign, write an article, launch an organization, etc.  Often though there is no clear vision, understanding of causal factors involved, or strategy.

Our culture is one that provides social rewards for any kind of action.  If you say you’re doing something to alleviate poverty, people congratulate you no matter how stupid or useless or even counter-productive your efforts might be.  Volunteering is deemed noble and effective, whether or not it’s either of these things.  The obsession with nonprofits and vilification of win-win for profit activities further incentivizes blind action.  Start a club.  Host a fundraiser.  Do something!

The most profound improvements in the world are typically born out of many years of following the initial identification of a problem deep down the rabbit hole.  Those who see something they don’t like and jump to do something come and go, as do the effects of their efforts.  Those who internalize the problem – let it steep, let it alter the way they think, pursue an in-depth understanding of the problem and knowledge of tried and untried solutions, and only act when the idea they hold is one that doesn’t just suggest but demands action – are typically the ones who best solve it.

There are a lot of dysfunctional beliefs and institutions around us.  Discover them.  But when it comes to action if you feel the itch ask yourself exactly what kind of action you want to take and why.  Do your ideas demand action?  That specific action?  Will you be unable to sleep without taking that specific action?  More importantly (and much harder) ask if the solution you have in mind can be obtained within the context of a for-profit business model.  If not, the odds that it will work are incredibly low.  If a solution is real, it will create value.  Non-profits can create value, but it’s much, much harder to know if they are and far too easy for them to do the opposite.  If the solution is political it’s almost assuredly going to do more harm than good.  If the goal is good feels, launch a nonprofit effort or lobby politicians.  If the goal is effectiveness, try as hard as you can to discover a way in which your ideas can generate a profit.

Until action is clear, and clearly value-creating, let your ideas direct you to further understanding.  Channel your hunger to act towards the act of learning more.  When the time is right and the idea is ripe you’ll know.

Are All Governments the Same?

Here’s a radical proposition: The US government is no better or worse than any system of government in history.  In fact, all government systems are the same.  Governments do not differ in quality based on the rules, structures, or procedures they employ.

To support this proposition one would have to demonstrate that there is something besides the system of government that determines how oppressive a state is, since there are obvious and dramatic differences in levels of tyranny and quality of life under different governments.  The correlation between certain forms of government and lower levels of oppression causes many to believe the former cause the latter, and that if you just get the structure right you can avoid bad rules and limit extortion.  I don’t think the form of government matters much.

Any kind of state can be brutally oppressive.  Monarchy, democracy, and all forms of republicanism in between are capable of and have engaged in massive acts of violence and oppression.  All these forms also have examples of far less oppression than the historical norm.  It’s not the structure or the ways rulers are chosen or laws are passed and enforced.  So what is it?  What determines how oppressive a government is?

Belief.  That’s it.  It’s not that people get the government they want or believe in, it’s that they get the government they are willing to put up with without resistance.  It’s not just explicit, stated belief, it’s belief as demonstrated by action or lack of it.  How governable are the people?  That will determine how much government they get.  Not how much they want or claim to want.  Not what they idealize as right.  What they give in to.

It is obvious that all governments are run by small minorities who cannot command great populations unless a great number are willing to carry out and enforce their orders and a great number are willing to obey the enforcers.  Etienne de La Boetie described this phenomenon beautifully in his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude .  David Hume shared the same understanding of the origin of state power, as did Ludwig von Mises.  Yet most scholars and laypeople ignore this fundamental fact.

We get distracted in debates about procedure or arguments about the form of government or particular rulers or parties.  These are all just particular manifestations; the outgrowth of our own willingness to submit.  The US has been one of the freest countries in history not because of the Constitution but because the people happened to be some of the hardest to govern.  The Revolt against relatively benign British rule is evidence of a low tolerance for being governed by the early European inhabitants of the continent.

The great tragedy, as Boetie points out, is that once subjugated by whatever means (and it is always a means that involves convincing people they have to put up with it for some emergency or expediency), each successive generation tends to tolerate more oppression.  The existence of the oppressors is not an affront when you’ve never lived in a world without it.  The steady churn of propaganda and normalization of deprivation take hold.  This is why famous abolitionist Harriet Tubman said she could have freed twice as many slaves, if only they knew they were slaves.

Add to the propaganda and acceptance the fact that a great and growing number of people work directly for the state and make their living and gain their social status as its operatives.  An army of self-interested bureaucrats and their loved ones are in the long term more powerful than an army of soldiers.

It is not the rule of law that will save us from tyranny.  It is not a new parliamentary procedure or Constitutional amendment.  It is not an election.

The insight of scholars like Boetie reveal that the ultimate freedom from oppression is when we, “Resolve to serve no more.”  Be ungovernable.  Camus said, “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”  Walk away from the bread and circuses.  Ignore the patriotic pomp.  Don’t work for the rulers.  Build the kind of life and society you want to live in.

Frank Chodorov, a libertarian activist and thinker, put it this way:

“If a prominent politician hires a hall to make a speech, stay away; the absent audience will bring him to a realization of his nothingness. The speeches and the written statements of a political figure are designed to impress you with his importance, and if you do not listen to the one or read the other you will not be influenced and he will give up the effort. It is the applause, the adulation we accord political personages that registers our regard for the power they wield; the deflation of that power is in proportion to our disregard of these personages. Without a cheering crowd there is no parade.”

It doesn’t require revolution by force.  That is only replacing one tyranny with another.  Imagine a law the proposal of which would be so deeply offensive that no political figure would dare bring it forward.  That is the mindset.  Now ask about why the constraints placed on politicians in this case, and the fear they have for acting, aren’t the same for every law they propose?  When they are, full freedom will reign, no matter what formal pieces of paper say.

Problems with the Ideas/Action Dichotomy

It is possible to have ideas without action.  It is not possible to have action without ideas.

In my personal habits I am a very action biased person to the point of impatience and occasional recklessness.  Yet in the bigger scheme I place far more importance on the role of ideas over action, theory over practice.  Not because I think theory without practice is good, but because I know action without ideas is impossible.  Thinkers can not act.  That’s a tragedy.  But actors can never not think.  If they believe they are just acting and not philosophizing they’re simply doing bad philosophy.

All action is based on theory.  My friend Steve Patterson summed this up nicely:

“Human action is an expression of philosophy. Every decision we make is inescapably framed and guided by our ideas about the world. Sometimes these ideas are clearly communicated by our actions; we write a book or create meaningful art. Other times, our ideas are so silent we aren’t even aware of them; they become a kind of subconscious framework for our actions.”

When you act you do so because you have ideas about your present condition, beliefs about a preferable future state, and beliefs about how the action will bring it about.  Those who brag about acting over thinking are admitting to taking actions based on unexamined ideas.

There are two main ideas underlying all action, and both need to be examined.  The first is an idea about an end state one wants to reach.  The second is a theory of causality about what will bring that end state.  An end state that is actually bad, or that the actor wouldn’t actually enjoy if they reached is is troubling.  It’s the dog that catches the car.  Many activists or “doers” imagine they want what they are chasing but they have not put any difficult, disciplined philosophical work in to examine their desired end, and to get to know themselves and see if it’s truly a desirable state.

Theories of causality are even less examined.  So many well-intentioned people imagine a better world.  Even if they’re sure they’d want to get there, many lose patience with theorizing and want to just do something.  Doing something can be an integral and valuable part of forming a theory of how to get there the way experiments help shed light on physical phenomena.  But if the actor doesn’t regularly stop to theorize, incorporate experience as feedback, adjust causal assumptions, and repeat, the action is useless or worse.

In our society you get points for doing something.  If what you want is noble and you’re doing something, you’re applauded.  Never-mind that you may lack any understanding of physical, economic, or social realities that can cause your action to result in nothing or even the opposite of your goal.

It is for this reason that I cringe when I hear people praise either ideas or action at the expense of the other.  In fact, I think the only camp that really does this are the activists.  The thinkers talk about the importance of ideas, and many may be too fearful or lazy to do any real-world testing, but they don’t typically claim that action is worthless.  The self-proclaimed doers often vociferously vilify philosophizing  as a waste.  They do not realize that their denunciation is simultaneously an announcement that they are acting on unexamined and often bad ideas.  By decrying philosophers they don’t separate themselves from philosophy, they just become bad philosophers.

Practice without theory is not an option.  For this reason it is incumbent on all action-biased people to engage ideas with ferocious seriousness.  Ideas not acted upon may be sad, but action not contemplated can be utterly disastrous.

Think clearly; think boldly; think big and you can achieve big results.

Agere sequitur credere.

In Praise of Weird

At the Students for Liberty International Conference over the weekend I heard and overheard several jokes and comments about how many weird participants were there. It was mostly good-hearted self-deprecation, but there was often a hint of concern. There was perhaps a subtle but sincere belief that, if libertarian ideas and the individuals and organizations at the event are to have an impact on the world, the oddballs need to be drowned out by normal people. I’m not so sure.

Of course any group that rallies around a particular interest or set of ideas will have it’s own vibe somewhat distinct from the “average” person in the world. (If you ever meet this average person, I’d be curious what he or she is like. I’ve searched for many years and have yet to meet them.) If insiders and outsiders alike view events like this as gatherings of assorted weirdos, that’s probably a sign of a vibrant, healthy, non-group-thinkish phenomenon. With libertarian ideas as the rallying point, all the better to have a broad swath of all that humanity has to offer in attire, personality, tastes and preferences; what a wonderful testament to the humane and universal character of the ideas.

If, on the other hand, there is a drive to get more conformity and less weirdness in order to look more like the mythical average person, such gatherings tend to end up either stale or cult-like. In the former case, a lot of social pressure to wear non-offensive clothing and behave in an average way can sap the energy and creative life out of groups of shared interests. I’ve seen churches like this. Everyone makes such a point to be normal – in part to prove to the world that believing what they do doesn’t make them strange, in part to prove it to themselves – that it’s like a bunch of Stepford wives. While it may make being a part of the group less risky, it doesn’t make it any more attractive to outsiders, and it certainly makes it more dull for insiders.

The latter and far worse result of the desire for normal is cult-like conformity. If nobody wants to be the weirdo who gives their “movement” a bad image by dressing out of fashion, everyone can end up wearing cute little matching suits. There are subcultures where everything down to facial hair is uniform. Not only is this creepy and off-putting to the outside world, but such pressure for aesthetic sameness seeps into the realm of the mind and grows into intellectual conformity, the death-knell of any social movement, especially one as radical and free as libertarianism.

The weirdness or non-weirdness of a group of people doesn’t seem to indicate much about their life and potential. It’s the sameness that does. If everyone is weird in the same way, you’ve got a closed off niche easily caricatured or ignored. If everyone is normal in the same way, you’ve got much the same thing. If you’ve got enough weirdos to make the normals feel surrounded by weirdos, and enough normals to make the weirdos feel like the minority they enjoy being, it’s probably a pretty exciting, interesting, dynamic and growing bunch united around some pretty powerful ideas.

I saw a lot of unusual looking and acting people at the event. They stood out because the majority of participants looked pretty normal and acted pretty sophisticated. I took both of these to be wonderful things, and I hope those commenting on the need for less weird were poking fun more than seriously hoping to change the culture and weed out the oddballs. The range of religions, styles, personalities, persuasions, motivations and behaviors in that room were a beautiful testament to the breadth, depth, and life of the ideas of freedom. Bring on the weird. May it never die.