Shortcuts & Delusions Special Edition: The Absurdity of Gary Johnson

A satire piece...or is it?

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absurdity

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” – Albert Camus, Philosopher of Absurdism

Obituary:
Libertarian satirist and vengeful deity Dillon Eliassen (spelled with an E for comedic purposes), whose work I sincerely admire, has died (but only spiritually). He is to be succeeded in death by a micronation of homeless people, his fellow members of the Fictitious Cement Workers’ Union, and Being Libertarian’s very own Editor-in-Chief Martin van Staden.

Dillon “The Jesuit” Eliassen (née Ottovordemgentschenfelde) was probably born on Christmas morning 1949, somewhere in Canada. Known for his youthful shenanigans, Dillon brought a smile to the faces of all who encountered him at San Quentin. While fighting for our freedom on the blood-soaked soil of Vietnam, Dillon gave birth to a mostly healthy yet premature appendix, and he named it me.

Let us begin.

Introduction:
Dillon left off with an in-depth analysis of ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome,’ a very real ‘condition’ that ‘I’ have personally heard firsthand accounts of on multiple occasions. TDS is a sign of the times; there is nothing left to talk about once one has talked about TDS. The torch was not passed to me, but I am hereby picking it up off the ground, wiping the dirt and canine feces from its gleaming bronze exterior, and running with it in the exact opposite direction of any achievable goal.

I’m qualified to write about shit because I am a revolutionary. I haven’t got a Che t-shirt, and I never attend the meetings. But like many communist tovarisch, I do have an iPhone. Postmodern climate scientists, for instance, have indicated that it’s really all the humble revolutionary needs these days. I am constantly confused as to the value of my executive role at Being Libertarian but remain the least confused as to why I maintain this position.

Every day is the same. You try your best to wake up and go to work, and try your hardest to give a shit about what you do there. This year didn’t turn out to be what you thought it would. Neither did last year, or the year before that. But next year, you promise yourself, you’ll finally figure out what your purpose is. Every day, every month, and every year, you find yourself pushing a boulder up a hill just to see it roll back down.

Today is my favorite day of the year, second only to New Year’s Eve. For me, today acts as a reminder of the closest thing I have ever encountered to universal truth; a realization that haunts, comforts, astounds and enchants me. Yesterday, we were simple people, pushing our simple boulders up a simple hill. Today, we, we’re going to try it again. Tomorrow, we’re going to try it again. There is nothing else to do with our time.

Join me, brothers and sisters. Sit for a moment, and watch your boulder roll into the valley again. Tomorrow is a new day, and we’ll fashion smiles to our faces as we break our backs in a sea of sweat trying to redo something that we already did that didn’t matter the first time and won’t matter this time.

Join me in The Absurd.

We Are All Sisyphus:
It’s quite pointless, analytically speaking. You probably don’t remember being born, nor were you an integral part in making your birth happen to you. No number of artifacts can preserve the complexity of an individual human being, and even if one could live immortally in the memory of others, time turns the existential into the mythological. Nothing you do is permanent, and you are probably going to be forgotten.

The universe is dying. It will live scarcely longer than we will. You appear to have come into existence at random, in a time and place inherently foreign. Child, you wandered into an adulthood without happening on the answer key to any questions relating to how or why you exist in the first place. And as for the hows and whys about the universe itself… forget about it. A consequence of this is that We, The People tend to convince ourselves conveniently that the answers to such questions not only exist, but can be found in such places as your local political party, the holy book you were raised to read, your arbitrary interpretations of the signs and seasons presented to us by the light of the cosmos, or even your imagination.

And we know, because we can’t avoid knowing, that whatever facade we’ve sold ourselves is still a facade even if we fall for it.

Every day spent living is a performative affirmation that something about you, even if you can’t figure out exactly what it is, still wants to find those answers. If this weren’t the case, the players of this game would be dropping like flies as they discover that there is no point in playing, no conceivable way to win, and that eventually there will be no evidence that you ever played at all; in short, that life itself is highly unlikely to be worth the trouble.

Albert Camus, French philosopher and journalist, was plagued with thoughts like those stated above. Camus became a constitutive inspiration of the Existentialist Movement (a tradition of philosophy asserting the importance of human experience in the appraisal and interpretation of ideas), partially during the Second World War, while serving in fierce defiance as the Editor-in-Chief of the French Resistance newspaper ‘Combat’ amidst the Nazi occupation of his homeland, and continuing this roll into the post-war world.

Though such matters in the realm of fundamentals and absolutes can be difficult to define, you may have wondered similar things about yourself, and perhaps continue to. Camus was particularly perturbed by the sheer fact that the universe itself and all that exists within it has no objective meaning or purpose. The rational insights we have both blessed and cursed ourselves with poke holes in our mortally limited attempts to invent meaning of our own, and in the Modern Age, the old ideas of Abrahamic deities, universal truth, and inherent ethical rules, each having been rudimentary to the shaping and formation of modern society in some way, have been penetrated into philosophical Swiss cheese.

The Non-Aggression Principle is a rather useful little limerick when one doesn’t overthink it. But like all things implying morality, thinking it all the way through will lead you to fundamentals that cannot possibly be confirmed or denied. What, exactly, makes murder wrong? What about robbery? Or socialism? Or the unfairness of free markets? When all is said and done, is it really going to matter whether every little thing we choose to do is right, or wrong, or equitable, or unfair? At the highest level, with capital crimes especially, it is not hard to find that the supermajority of humanity may agree on some basic ethical positions. But when applying these basics, they become more complicated. By the point that we are discussing the specific rights and wrongs of typical human behavior, no two people will find themselves in agreement on the application of what they may believe are universal, self-evident principles.

Camus asserted, rather poignantly, that suicide has always been an option. And the scariness, confusion, and uncertainty of existing in such an uncertain world have apparently not driven you to it. And why shouldn’t we die now? It all adds up to the same thing. Nothing is permanent. It’s very possible that nothing matters. Yet we, practically all of us, seem to be making the conscious choice each day to live on. It’s as though if we pull away some of that upstanding rationalism gifted to us during The Enlightenment, there is some other part of us playing such an integral role in our existence that it stabilizes and confirms our will to exist at all.

Camus was an antifascist hero, and today is his day. There are very few people who want to legalize murder, yet droves of people who wish to legalize marijuana, and to many hearty fundamentalists, these may be comparable issues. Sin is sin, oppression is oppression, and aggression is aggression. To many libertarians, and to what should be our collective shame, such things as unionizing the local labor force, stealing a sandwich from a street vendor, sexually assaulting a helpless victim, and aborting the fetus conceived in such tragic circumstances are all comparably “aggressive,” and may not even be considered in terms outside of “aggression” regardless of how useful a new approach or perspective may be when considering such cases.

At the risk of losing all of my libertarian acquaintances, I will admit that once upon a time, I charged my iPhone using a stranger’s charging cable without asking when he wasn’t around. I aggressed. I haven’t repented. I’m not sure my soul will be where yours will be on judgment day.

The point is, it makes so little difference whether we are right or wrong about what is “aggression” and what is not “aggression,” that it’s a wonder anybody even cares to discuss it for more than a than a few minutes.

I do not care who builds the roads, or who decides what color to paint the bathrooms at Beacon Hill, or which Union and/or Confederate heroes/villains are memorialized in stone. I do not care about taxes of a meager nature. Of course, I will consistently support lower taxes; it’s my own self-interest at stake. I will not, however, declare that anyone who doesn’t concern themselves with these things as deeply as myself to be a “sheep.” To the best of my knowledge, I have never met anyone who doesn’t fit that description, and yes, this includes myself. I’m no determinist, but I know that I know essentially nothing about the mechanics of what really makes something moral or immoral. I also know that you don’t know either.

The universe you live in doesn’t care what you think. It doesn’t “care” in any way about anything, as far as we can tell. Clinging so staunchly to principles may as well be escapism from the dread and uncertainty of existing in the first place. Cults operate by exploiting this inherent dread, and unlike the average man on the street who will immediately deny any experiences of being uncertain about his own existence, cults can see through this bullshit. The Liberty Movement should be no cult.

“The Absurd” is a boulder. Every second you live is an exercise in pointlessness. Searching for meaning, embracing the experience of uncertainty, and cracking a smile as your shoulders, yet again, are put to that boulder… these are exercises in defiance. It is no coincidence that Albert Camus, espousing the conviction (or lack thereof) that no objective truth or purpose may ever be identified, was willing to put his life on the line to dignify and endorse the French Resistance Movement. Despite his eventual death in a car crash, his efforts live on. At least for now.

We libertarians are the quintessentially anti-establishment political identity. When our fists are clenched around the chains of dogma and theoretical universal principles we may as well be chained to the same despotic foundation we’re trying to help others liberate themselves from. To think for one’s self, one must realize the degree to which the nuances and practicalities of the world we live in influence us. Peddling promises of applying some universal ethic that we representatives of the Liberty Movement can’t even agree on the parameters of is no different than selling a religious experience; a method by which to keep the conscience clean, and supply a little convenient certainty that will never stand up to the scrutiny of the skeptical. If our universal truths were as permanent as they are constructed to be, we would never change our minds about anything.

This rant will resume in 365.25 days when National Absurdity Day returns in calendarial obscurity and a memento mori.

And speaking of scrutiny, I’m going to have to toss in a trigger warning. This isn’t even my first trigger warning. I’m a professional.

**TRIGGER WARNING**
What you are about to read may cause severe bouts of Trump Derangement Syndrome. If you are a leftist, please do not read the following paragraphs while in close proximity to sharp objects. Symptoms may include blood shooting from the eyes, indecipherable screaming, close encounters of the fourth kind, and varying degrees of irritable face syndrome. Please notify a physician if you encounter itchiness of the spleen, cirrhosis of the autobiographical memory, or diarrhea of the oral cavity.

Why We MUST Defeat Gary Johnson
You’re probably wondering about the guy in the title of this article who, thus far, has been absent from said article.

Gary Johnson is not a real libertarian. Why libertarians get starry-eyed in his presence is beyond me, with his espousal of blatant communism and acceptance of homonormative deconstructionary Islamomarxist Postmodernism. Johnson as a representative of libertarianism is a clear sign that the left is invading the liberty movement, further eroding private property norms and propping up support for the deep state agenda of the globalists.

Johnson has pretended to support unfettered free market capitalism, and even went as far as to insist that tearing down barriers of entry could give the average person better, fairer access to goods and services. “The model of the future is the sharing economy. It’s Uber. It’s Airbnb. I think it’s gonna be Uber everything.” Yeah, Gary, but things can get too free. What happens if the people benefiting from Uber are Chinese or something?

“Uber everything” sounds like a great idea until you take your Red Pill and realize that this is just code for white genocide. Without a heterogenous government of the people, who will stop immigrants from driving Uber taco trucks and parking them on every street corner, forestalling traditional nuclear family values and private property norms? Americans would lose their jobs, possibly to immigrants. Even libertarian heroine Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sees through Gary Johnson’s thin veneer of egalitarian lies!

He ran for president. Twice. On the second try, he broke every Libertarian Party presidential vote count record in the party’s history, surpassing even the likes of Our Lord and Savior Dr. Ron Earnet Paul. Mark my words, we will never forgive Gary Johnson for not being Ron Paul. His tax cuts were clearly a Democrat ruse to give spending power to the politically correct internationalist cabal of internationalist libertine elites like George Soros, Walt Disney, and Oliver Cromwell.

After making the Libertarian Party lose twice, Gary Johnson snuck in one more attack on libertarian legitimacy by losing in New Mexico in a Senate race where he only claimed 15.4% of the vote, singlehandedly handing victory over to communist Democrat Vladimir Len- I mean… Martin Heinrich (if that’s his real name).

Gary Johnson must be stopped. He cannot be allowed to run for office again, regardless of what degenerate socialist feminazis say about “free speech” and “democracy.” Democracy is a secret codeword known to the Fourth International for white genocide and subversion of private property norms. To Make America Great Again™, we must Physically Remove™ this man that even the Democrats recognize as a tyrant. Socialists say that Gary Johnson is no threat to the system. This means Gary Johnson is probably a socialist (and a threat to the system the Founding Fathers put in place to protect our freedoms) because everything socialists say is a lie.

What further evidence do you need? So far, I have used some of the most Red Pill buzzwords on the market, and even considered using “optics,” “LOLbertarian,” “SJW,” and “open borders.” Libertarianism is an obvious right-wing ideology. We have standards, you know.

I won’t keep you here. Now that I’ve owned you with facts and logic, you are free to go.

Outro:
Left intentionally long and with minimal editing, everything written above makes a single point that, in context, doesn’t mean anything. Most things, and probably all things, don’t mean anything. But that observation is no taskmaster; true freedom is the freedom to waste your time, and the time of others, in a way that is quintessentially you. There are no strict parameters here. Drifting a little off the straight and narrow shouldn’t be cause for panic. If there was a takeaway in this article, I don’t know what it is. Perhaps there is a Gary Johnson in all of us, rolling a boulder up Mount Everest just to watch it roll back into the ravine much like the Libertarian vote count will in 2020.

And that’s the way it is, as far as you know.

Happy National Absurdity Day, comrades.

سُبْحَانَ اللہِ

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