Some time ago a friend of many years visited me. Let's call him Tom Blackmore. Tom is an accomplished Professional Gambler. He makes his living by beating the casinos. He and his associates have developed practical knowledge, methods, and skills to gain statistical advantages over certain casino games with a high degree of predictability. To succeed in this activity requires a high degree of numerate skill, concentration, and self-discipline.
Such skills constitute an aspect of Freedom Technology. They enable you to enjoy a high degree of freedom. They could also be very useful if you have to survive in bad times. They can be profitably applied in many casinos around the world. They can also be used to amass a fortune.
Tom is a former schoolteacher who became a Libertarian many years ago. He rightly abandoned his teaching career in disgust. Tom has certainly taken Freedom Step #1 - he discovered freedom when he became a Libertarian. He took Freedom Step #2 when he abandoned his teaching career, became a Professional Gambler, and started operating in the free-enterprise sector. He has done a great deal of work on developing thinking skills (Freedom Step #3), in fact, he is one of the most advanced thinkers I know. He certainly rejects coercion (Freedom Step #4). I'm pretty sure he has discovered he is free by nature (Freedom Step #5). He has developed considerable personal power in the area of professional gambling (Freedom Step #6), but I don't know that he has much power in other areas. What he does for a living does not in itself create value and isn't particularly productive, however, the proceeds may be used to create value (Freedom Step #7). As far as I know he's not involved in selling freedom for profit. His work is highly profitable and enables him to travel all over the world (Freedom Step #8). He has also organized his life so he's pretty well protected from government criminals. (Freedom Step #9). He has made considerable progress towards understanding that politics and religions tend to be fraudulent hoaxes - phenomena of mass hallucination (Freedom Step #10).
During his visit I had a discussion with Tom and his girlfriend. After a while I noticed that he frequently made unjustified negative statements, and that these were automatic and unconscious. I tactfully indicated to him that he sometimes sounded like an "automatic negativity machine." His girlfriend nodded in agreement.
I also indicated to Tom that, in my opinion, our biggest challenge was to overcome the fact that most freedom-activists operate at a productivity level of maybe 1%. I don't think Tom realized that I was also referring to him personally. At that time, his compulsive knee-jerk negativity was quite debilitating.
The following day a friend of Tom met with us to tell us about some promising freedom-promoting ideas he had developed. The meeting lasted about two hours. To practically every freedom-promoting suggestion his friend made, Tom reacted with automatic knee-jerk negativity. It seemed unconscious and compulsive to me. I just observed it without saying anything.
Tom talks a great deal about promoting freedom and provides me with all kinds of suggestions. Since I met him eight years ago, he's been writing a book on freedom. It seems like he'll never finish it. As a freedom-activist he hasn't been very successful.
Tom also demonstrated that someone can be highly positive and successful in one area of life, while being very negative and failing dismally in another.
There is also a form of compulsive negativity that borders on fraud and coercion. It's often used by political candidates to smear their opponents. It involves spreading falsehoods and half-truths.
About seven years ago when I lived in Belgium, I was involved with a freedom organization. We advertised in several libertarian publications around the world. Suddenly one month, the editor of a particular libertarian newsletter decided to stop accepting our ads. I found out about this when I called his office for the next deadline. The person answering said that he didn't know why and the editor would be away for a week. I wasn't told that they had also pulled our ad for their latest issue for which they'd accepted our advance payment.
When I received the latest issue of that newsletter, I discovered to my surprise that the ad for which we'd paid wasn't there. I contacted a friend who was also an acquaintance of the editor. She told me that he'd told her that I'd worked in a company where my job was to delay refund requests so customers' refunds wouldn't have to be paid. This falsehood came from a Libertarian I'll call X. A few years before I'd had a conversation with X during which we'd discussed this unethical practice of not paying refunds. X apparently had a reputation at the time of spreading falsehoods about other Libertarians. Anyway, X then used the contents of our conversation, and twisted it into a falsehood to tell the editor. To my surprise, when I got that newsletter, X's ad appeared where ours should have been.
Naturally, I felt quite upset. Usually, in situations like this, it's assumed that one has been falsely smeared, betrayed, stabbed in the back, defrauded, etc. - and in a cowardly fashion. I wrote a letter to the editor in which I accused him of the following:
I reacted that way because I was not yet aware of the phenomenon of compulsive knee-jerk negativity and how to deal with it. Note that everything I accused the editor of was "justified." There's an almost automatic impulse to react to negativity with more negativity. When someone strikes you, you strike back. And that's what I did. As a result, that editor will probably be my enemy forever!
Recently, a friend in England wrote to me that he experiences considerable resistance to Terra Libra, both from some people he knows in "cryonet" (a computer network of people interested in cryonics). The resistance is because I supposedly have been involved in "failed business scams." But when my friend asks his correspondents to provide specifics, they refuse.
Ayn Rand suffered from severe compulsive knee-jerk negativity. At one point her negativity got so bad that she "excommunicated" any of her followers who questioned any aspect of her philosophy. Her movement was characterized by vicious infighting and schisms.
One of the speakers who had undertaken to speak at our Orange County seminar, sent me a fax outling the theme of his talk. Among other things, he said that it was impossible to make a living selling freedom and activists should curtail their proselytizing. I faxed him back a long letter on why you could make money selling freedom and how we were doing it. A few days later I heard third-hand that he'd decided to dishonor his agreement to speak at our seminar, because "Terra Libra is a chainletter!" He didn't even show the courtesy of informing me.
The automatic knee-jerk negative reaction on my part would be to simply write off this person as a "useless asshole." A more positive attitude would be to simply say, "Too bad. If I run across this person again, I'll do my best to have a friendly conversation with him. Maybe something worthwhile will develop out of that."
I apologize for all this negativity. But it needs to be confronted. Most humans suffer from debilitating knee-jerk negativity in at least one area of life. Much of this negativity comes from all the times their parents shouted "NO!" at them, and all kinds of other negative warnings - "You'll hurt yourself!"; "Get away from that... ! (whatever)"; etc.
There are other psychological sources for negativity. Generally, freedom-activists see the political system as a huge negative. To some extent their identities are defined by having to "fight" this negative. Many of them use big bad government as a scapegoat for their lack of success and freedom. They tend to be diehard altruists who believe in sacrifice and suffering for the noble cause. Few of them have progressed beyond Freedom Step #1.
When Terra Libra comes along and says that you're free by nature and you can make a fortune selling freedom, some freedom-activists see this as a horrendous threat to their very identity. They see the threat as so strong that they'll resort to the most vicious lies and cowardly back-stabbing attacks . For a better understanding of why they have this attitude, read the online book Mind and Matters, The World in a Mirror.
Jealousy and envy also play a role. Imagine that you've been gallantly fighting for freedom for several decades. You've invested thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollars. You've produced only marginal results. Overall, the experience has been painful (Freedom Step #1). Some upstart comes along with some new ideas about freedom. His organization seems to be growing rapidly. Full-page and multi-page ads start appearing all over the place. The thought that the upstart organization might succeed, where they have predominantly experienced only failure is unbearable. Therefore the upstarts are fair game and must be attacked.
It's ironic that so far the only attacks against Terra Libra have come from people in the freedom movement (except for a mother whose son wanted to work with us).
This debilitating compulsive knee-jerk negativity is pretty pervasive among freedom-activists. It probably reduces the effectiveness of our movement to less than 10% of what it could be. The time has come for us to become more positive.
How to Transcend Negativity
The Benefits of Freedom Step #16
17 Steps to Freedom (Index of Steps)
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Freedom
Step # 17
Copyright at Common Law, West El Paso Information Network, 1997
What to Say When You Talk to Your Self