by Chris Basten

  The power of persuasiveness is a dead science these days. Indeed, force is the tool of trade to complete our worldly projects. Coercion is the political credit card that tempts us to get further and further into debt. Meanwhile, we rationalize to ourselves that bullying others serves a good purpose and is only temporary until people learn to play nice. Before long, we find ourselves exclusively using force and give up on any other solutions. We figure that there’s really no turning back now so further "coercive debt" won’t really matter. Since people will never learn, we become addicted to coercion as the one and only answer to life’s deep social problems. 

Though acts of kindness will never disappear, they become more and more overshadowed by the mighty displays of force that are presented to us as sovereign over human choice. The world aches and moans for simplicity and peace but we find this to be a slow, rather evasive, process. As a result, we play the reliable coercion card to stay in the game even though we have no chance of winning this way.

Primitive cultures remain primitive because of their reliance on force in the belief that it creates civility and peace. But it does the exact opposite. The pointing of guns, the burning of villages, the raping of women, and the killing of innocent children is not the sign of an advanced civilization. A strange paradox is birthed when more laws create more lawlessness. Civilization is enraptured in violence and lawsuits. Superstitions prevail over logic. We convince ourselves that aggression is deserved for others’ lack of control.

A careful look at any so-called progressive ideologies will reveal a strong reliance on the use of government force as an alleged means of doing good. Their philosophy is founded on and exists by coercion. The means through which the coercion will be administered is the only difference worth noting. They all lead to and are lead by the same principles of government compulsion.

Perhaps we grow tired of defending life and property. It definitely is no small undertaking. It requires constant monitoring and assessment. If we do not do it individually, the State will most assuredly do it for us. This is when force becomes so illustrious. It gives the false hope that all is taken care of. Our rights are secure with one strong unit watching over us. It becomes our God.

Yet this country was not founded on socialist tenets. Our government was established on the basic premise that each citizen has an inalienable right to life. One must be persuaded that if a person has a right to life, they must also have a right to defend and sustain that life through one’s own productive efforts. Surely, the right to life without the right to protect and sustain it is meaningless.

Many factions give lip service to the ideal of submitting to God or common sense. While these ideas sound valiant in word, they often wander elsewhere in deed. That elsewhere is state-sponsored compulsion. It often sounds like the God of a private religion but it tends to look like regulations or laws that infect those public individuals who are harming no one apart from themselves. If sounds like common sense but looks oddly like coercion to pay our dues.

What we frequently call reliance on "God’s will" or application of "common sense" is what shrouds our means to obtaining these premises. God’s will and common sense exists in the private minds of individuals, not in the promises of Presidents or lined up soldiers and tanks. And yet we are told that one must be used to apply the other. If we do not agree with something or if we see that it should be a certain way, the proponents of such measures implore us to contact (who else?) our Congressional leaders or the President himself. Since well-meaning groups are impatient and fretful, they beg for a forceful measure to make life a certain way for all of society. This is not the art of persuasion but a knack for bullying to which too many of us prescribe.

The results seem like a mixed bag but are always the same. Most coercion appears to initially make things better but then becomes more and more of an expense and then a nuisance. What becomes a nuisance becomes a joke. What becomes a joke becomes an outrage. What becomes an outrage becomes an infraction. What becomes an infraction becomes and injustice. What becomes injustice becomes fighting. What becomes fighting becomes war. Such is the outcome of compulsion; all the time and every time. There are no exceptions. The only disparity is the lapse of time it takes from one culture or civilization to another. It is always done with the support and guns of government. It cannot survive otherwise.

Until we finally see that no person on the face of the earth has any moral right to use force against another, unless it is of a defensive nature to protect one’s life and one’s property, we are doomed to fill up future timelines with more bullets, more bombs, and more bodies. If we cannot envision any other mode than compulsion and the use of government guns to bring about what we want in our lives, we will never get out of our coercive debt. We will be too busy bullying and fighting for our fair share, like we are currently absorbed with. This never leads to anywhere else but the same bloodbaths that have befallen all dictatorships and restrictive markets in the past.

If we choose not to learn from the past we must choose to learn from the present.

Presently, we are far too dependent on government bullying to even whisper freedom upon our lips. We care too much about the integrity of government (an oxymoron if there ever was one) instead of the rights of the individual to do as he or she wants as long as the rights of others are not harmed in the process. We have wedded our personal and private lives into the fabric of big government promises and enormous taxes that rob us of our right to life and property. Liberty is not possible if we think we can bully it into being.

They say the first step in getting help is admitting that there is a problem. America, we have a problem with bullying. Choosing to locate coercion’s futility will birth the process of reducing government size, bureaucrat by bureaucrat, lobbyist by lobbyist. If individual rights are still precious to us, many of us will have to be persuaded, never bullied, into giving up our addiction to bullying.