(This speech was given to the September meeting of The Order of the Heldhigh Torch.)Good Afternoon!
My name is Dan Barber and I am co-founder of The Order of the Heldhigh Torch.
I would like to talk about my purpose, my reasons for doing what I do. Many people struggle with finding a purpose for their lives. I propose they are already doing it, their purpose, that is. They just might not know it.
For example... When I was a child, I had this overwhelming desire to right all the wrongs that were happening around me. Yes, a child has the ability to know right from wrong instinctively. And a child is already finding more effective ways each day to achieve his purpose.
One of the best teachers I had growing up was a 10-year old thug named Scotty. He was a terrorist! Seemed like every time he was on the playground, he did something nasty to earn him a permanent spot in the principal's office, in our 100 year old brownstone grammar school. The principal would lock Scotty in the second floor office during recess. Scotty would eventually climb down the old gutter system and run through the vacant halls during class and stare in at us - menacingly - through the classroom's glass pane window. Remember those door windows with wire embedded in them? I remember his face staring right at me with the "I'm going to kill you after class" stare. He was a master at creating fear and controlling everyone. I hate it. And I could not live like that!
I loathed bullies who attempt to strike fear in the hearts and minds of the rest of us. I had no patience for them then or now, and as I said, I knew I could not EVER live inside of that fear. Something was eventually going to have to happen between us.
Every kid in that school feared being alone in the hall, alone on the playground. No one wanted to go to the rest room during classes. Scotty would pop out of the shadows. He would shoot paper clips at your head, steal your lunch money, or push you down the stairs. You know him, he was the first kid to smoke cigarettes.
I could not stand people who thought they had some God-given right to control and manipulate the innocent, and I was building a resentment to those who would always lay down and take it.
I tried chasing him down, but he was like a monkey and knew how to get away fast. I noticed, no one, not even the teachers would stand up to him. I knew it was just a matter of time before I was to be alone with him. And he had a special place in his ruined heart for me.
The boys' room in that old school was in the basement. No one was ever down there except for all the ghosts! When they installed the urinals, they decided to build a false cinder block wall to hide all the plumbing. I didn't know that was Scotty's favorite hiding place! Looking back, I could always smell the cigarette smoke. Sure enough I was alone down there when he jumped out like a demon with a pitch fork, eyes blazing, ready to kill!
The built-up fear and anger that was in me said, "I will not be held hostage to this person." I knew I would rather die than live my life this way. Poor Scotty didn't know what hit him!
I don't remember what he wanted exactly. I just know he wanted something. He probably wanted me to pay his tax for letting me live, my milk money. He needs to buy those cigarettes, you know!
I just remember how weak a kid he actually was. When I grabbed hold of that arm of his, it was easy to manipulate him anywhere I wanted, like a rag doll, so I gave him a taste of his own medicine! I pulled him into a bathroom stall and struck the fear of God into him that morning showing him his future in the reflective pool within that toilet bowl. I hope he saw the terror on his own face.
He cried for mercy and I, always the trader, offered a deal. I would spare his life for my freedom. He agreed rather quickly, and I never saw that poor kid again. I heard he was eventually moved to a special school for boys like him - where they probably ushered him into a military career. That way that destructive spirit could be harnessed for a better use. Wonder where he is now? I will go check Facebook.
Surely a bully wasn't what his parents had in mind to create, was it?
A bully is the unintended consequence of abuse. I suspect there was an excessive use of FORCE on him or just neglect, which is also an abuse of force. Neglect forces a kid to make decisions he should hot have to make at his age.
Either kind of force used on a human being, effectively KILLS a child's creative spirit. It creates a spirit of self-destruction instead, one that can only be used to destroy himself and others along the way. This was to become Scotty's purpose: Self destruction.
(As I said at the beginning, if you don't know your purpose, you may be living it. It might be one of many forms of self destruction. You don't know your purpose because you don't want to know it. Being a bully, manipulating people, or using government, religion or turning any idea into a dogma to do your bidding is a clue!)
This is the tragedy of an abusive government too. An abusive government is one that abuses its monopoly on the use of force. A moral government only uses force to protect its citizens from each other, outside threats, and the government itself.
The unintended consequence of abusive government force, force like that which the bullies' parents probably used, is the destruction of man's most valuable tool for survival - his creative mind. Man's creative mind is the source of his creative power to build, to solve problems, to foster within the desire to have skills, to find the right vehicle for achieving his purposes. Without man's creative mind, we are left with only one driving purpose: To survive!
Take away the ability to think creatively and all we can do is hold each other at bay, like a western movie standoff. My favorite was the one in Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs." Remember that scene.
We are like that, each left alone, pointing a loaded weapon at each other's temple, just nervously hoping no one fires the first shot. We become hostages to each other's fears. I think we should be linked by our strengths, our virtues, rather than held hostage by our fears and weaknesses. Don’t you?
So, here is the question: Why was I so strongly against the bully when others were not? I could say it was due to some deep unresolved issues, but it was not.
One fact about me is that I have always been a networker. I have always seen the value of having friends with many different skills. Once in class when the math teacher was encouraging me to learn some new algebraic equation, I asked him, “Why do I need to learn this when my best friend is your top student? If I need to do this, I’ll just ask him. He loves to do it. I do not.” She didn’t have an answer.
That bully was killing a free market; he was forcing people to focus on him instead of themselves and causing everyone to compromise themselves for him. Bottom line? He was destroying everything good, within everyone good - by everyone’s standard except his. And I found out in the bath room that his standard of good was the same as mine anyway. He wanted to live free too!
One of the character building things for me was that my small family moved around a few times during my formative years and this moving gave me a unique perspective on relationships.
I could see from a distance who people were and what they were good at. And I had the free choice to select individuals I admired out of the cliques they belonged to for whatever reasons they belonged to them?
I think most people that don’t move around like we did learn to accept and tolerate those with whom they happened to grow up with. I could see there was a bond within their sub groups that I was isolated from.
I was left out of those special relationships and I knew I needed to be a trader. The Libertarian was born! The creative spirit in me was cranking up. The question for me was ”What did I have of value to bring to any and all relationships?”
This is another reason I respect free choice. I needed all the choices in order to create solutions and values. Free choice drives our human value system.
Those bullies who would have our choices limited, do so not because it is good for us, but because it feels good for them. They feel rotten and blame those who don’t feel rotten. They need us to value only them - all the time. This is how they get paid, how they get attention, how they find some perverted form of respect.
Our fear is the currency they trade in. This is how to recognize a latent bully. First they create fear and then step up to cash that check! (One of the major ways to create fear is by creating unearned guilt.)
There are those who create fear and then tell us they will protect us. And we willingly grant them the power to protect us. We call these people politicians. And they never deliver us from the fear ultimately. Just a few minutes of a feeling of peace is enough for us.
We can see this principle each day. In this past week’s compromises with terrorists over the Koran burning day for example. Our leaders pleaded with that preacher in Florida to not do it because the terrorists might harm us. We are letting the bullies run our lives. Yes, burning books is stupid. But, leaders who use fear to grab more power over us are worse than the terrorist - and we let them take all of our milk money! It is the price we must pay for peace, we tell ourselves each time. As we bury our heads deeper in denial each time.
As you can see by my standing up to run to be a Lieutenant Governor, I have never lost that spirit for justice. I now have much more complicated rights to fight for: The RIGHT to liberty - the RIGHT to choose one’s way by the moral standard one chooses to live by.
I do not play God. I do not have the knowledge to choose for anyone except myself. I know that when people make the wrong choices, I know the consequence will be there. And when we infringe on another’s right to choose; a just government will stop them. An unjust government stops the innocent in the name of compromise with the bullies who demand it or else.
The RIGHT to value, to value what only you as an individual can value until the consequences good or bad befall you and you can then know how to change it or keep it. This is how we work and how we learn.
The RIGHT to create what has never been created before from what only you can imagine in your particular way.
The RIGHT to keep the profits from your efforts and creations, the primary reward for putting effort into something worth your while. There are many other rewards, but it isn’t my place to push them to want what I might want.
The prime reason to put a product or service into the market place is to get paid! And I mean paid enough to further your purpose, to reinvest in yourself and your future profit-making creations, not just to cover your expenses as the bullies would have you think. They shout names at you – and me - from behind the urinal. GREEDY!! SELFISH!!
I realize I cannot fight this battle alone. The battle lies within the spirit of every one of us. We can’t let that spirit be turned. We can’t become our own terrorist who sees danger lurking around every corner. We can’t continue to sanction an ever abusive government that continues to abuse, manipulate and destroy us as creators and as humans.
Force, and arbitrary regulations hold our creative spirit hostage.
Due to this wide scale hostage taking, we, as a culture, are voraciously seeking the only domain left for our freedom - our minds, where we can create our fantasy. Our only interest seems to be in escapism. As some of you already know, I have some very incredibly interesting books in my waiting room, and I also have “People” magazine. Which do you think is the most common choice?
We can see how this affects us, the desire to escape reality. We watch TV and movies to get away from our accepted enslavement. We read more fiction than non-fiction and fact. Our children wear head phones all day and they talk on cell phones about nothing in particular. There are dozens of sports games on in every restaurant. The art of conversation is gone, dried up. We as a people have every distraction available to us to run away from this “boring” reality, where we are to follow the regulations because we have to.
We aren’t even allowed to talk about it. Political correctness holds our minds hostage too. The creative spirit is becoming foreign to us. We push it on our kids. Our little kids become creative machines, churning out all kinds of projects for us, so that we can hang them on our refrigerators.
This is why I helped create Heldhigh Torch. I see the creative spirit the key to it all - the key to health, the key to real happiness, the key to solving the problems we face. The creative spirit is the key to finding our own moral standard that allows us to hold our purposes aloft like a torch, for all to see.
As I stand here today and for the next 50-something days fighting for those freedoms that have being given away for a false sense of security, we need to re-evaluate what the consequences really are and thusly renew our creative spirit.
We need to fight the good fight within ourselves to not become the bully or the bullied that results from force and neglect. You know, the one that is always justified by the rest of society (taking the role of the bully) to be drugged, or to be rehabilitated into a mindless robot (taking the role of the bullied) to be used at every whim of anyone who has this spirit of “thuggery” to use us in any way they please.
To me, priority one is to create the space to be free within a forceful and manipulative world - a world that I know I cannot single-handedly change.
The Order of the Heldhigh Torch is that creative space, that free place with responsibilities, the responsibility that holds us accountable to the principles that we agree to keep here together.
Freedom requires responsibility, responsibility requires principles. Principles require thinking. Thinking requires freedom. Interrupt that circle and all you get is a flat tire, and the vehicle you are using to further your own purposes in life can’t get out of the garage!
For example, at last week’s Alpha Kappa Alpha Forum, I noticed what happens to me when just a little nervousness sets in. I felt as though part of my mind just went away! It went into a bit of a survival mode of thinking and operating. It was weird! I become very relaxed. And my thinking was directed towards survival mostly. My creative spirit was zapped! I managed to get a few coherent things out. But I was not at my best.
That demonstrated this principle: Force on a man, in this case self-inflicted, destroys him. It places us into a self preserving state and all our energy is spent on “just surviving.”
For some that looks like a walking, talking zombie who just votes in an attempt to fix the unfixable - unfixable by any government regulation or new welfare program we could ever possibly come up with.
Or we just become a bully. I noticed the political bullies that were around me that night generating fear, wanting revenge, wanting the power to use abusive force for a new kind of good with more unintended consequence of course! And we now know the severity of the unintended consequences that come with all things forceful.
So this is my purpose: FREE MYSELF AND INSPIRE OTHERS - to live within the wonderful creative spirit that is possible to us all. I refuse to become the bully that my fellow Americans might have me become, unintentionally of course.
When the Libertarian party offered me this opportunity to become a leader, I jumped at the chance, not because I seek revenge or want to have a bigger stick. I want to be an example of a free mind, a free man, who shows a new possibility a better way of living. I want to point out the game of thugs and bullies. I want us to recognize what is going on here, who we are becoming and what our future will be if we continue on this path of ruin.
We are better than that, we have these wonderfully creative minds, that when set free, can work on our purposes and freely trade those new values they created.
Patrick Henry once said “Give me liberty or give me death.” I understood what he meant at a very young age, and am still working on that noble project to this day. I just have the opportunity to have a longer lever to move our great state into a better environment for growth, health and happiness.
Since I have had the moral fortitude to stand for my principles, the world has rewarded me over and over, with family and friends that I can’t tell apart. I don’t know who is family and who are friends anymore! They all trade their talents and their creative spirits with me.
It is a wonderful life to not have to do everything myself. I wish for everyone to experience the wealth created when we are set free from each other.
My campaign team is a shining example of how this works: All I had to do was say that I was going to run for office, and all my friends, willingly by their own self-interest, stepped up quickly to share their talents. All I did was ask. I have never seen them more alive and creative as I do now!
No one owes me anything, no one is doing this out of guilt or shame or for any other manipulative reasons. I am no bully, I will never initiate the use of force on another person, but I will fight for my principles and my freedom every time. I will never stop. A creative world is much too valuable to me to allow anyone to ruin it.
And only those who have tasted it, those who have seen this view, know its real value.
I wish you to get the chance to taste true freedom and the creativity and prosperity that comes within it.
Here’s to freedom! Here’s to the creative spirit inside that is our true purpose. Don’t let anyone kill it!
You are all seeking your own purpose in your own way. Thanks for finding some time to trade with me today. I hope I have given you something valuable to use for your own purposes.
Thanks to The Order of the Heldhigh Torch* for the chance to stand for mine today.I hope you all to have a great rest of the day.
(If you are interested in Dan's political campaign, you may keep up with him at www.VoteDanBarber.com.)
*The Order of the Heldhigh Torch is an organization for the purpose of people, one person at a time, making a commitment to their lives. This supports them to identify their purpose (the torch)and morally stand for it (the stiffened arm), no matter what.
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