Our Just Cause
“Rulers will never be reasoned out of their thrones nor will society be argued away from their madness. To live free, a man must act.”
~ Tanner Cook
I’ve defined the role of this organization in many different places before, but I wish to elaborate more on this idea here and now. The Sons of Liberty ambition is not to overthrow, install a revolutionary government, engage in long-term guerrilla warfare, or any other usurpation. We steer clear of these objectives, not because I don’t believe that they can be justified – for I most certainly believe that the people have just cause to oust a tyrannical authority – but it’s because I believe that our cause is fulfilled in the act of resisting tyranny, not the extermination of it. Allow me to explain.
The rise and fall of empires, rulers, and institutions are a staple within our history. We’ve all heard the aphorism, “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times.” History bears witness to the rise of tyranny, the fall of tyranny, followed by its resurrection. I suppose we could end this mad cycle of despotism if humanity treated their collective history in the same regard as their own collection of personal tragedies. If it were possible to manage this, mankind could slip past the surly bonds of tyranny, avoid the impending doom, and live as free humans should. Of course, this is entirely unrealistic.
Outside of our tendency to a sinful disregard of history, we are confounded by a greater and more complicated issue. There are among us, a great deal of people who are truly slaves at heart. Their concept of freedom is freedom from consequence. Their ideal state is one reminiscent of childhood; where your consequences are absorbed by those who maintain authority over you; when your only concern was self-satisfaction; a time when your needs were answered by crying to those who controlled all the resources. All of these conditions are more preferred than the aspect of accountability, responsibility, and risk.
It’s for these two primary reasons, along with many other lesser causes, that our race is forever damned to be tyrannized. Cutting off the head of one tyrant merely releases the spirit of authoritarianism like a jinni let loose from his confinement; its nature is to possess. So this act of overthrow and despot extermination is not only fated to fail, but it’s assuredly the executioners that become the very thing they fought so hard against.
That is why, my brothers, we do not cross that line. Our cause, our just purpose, the meaning behind our existence, our faith in freedom, is what defines us. The space between the slave and tyrant – that is where we exist – in liberty. For we do not submit to the rule nor become the rule itself. In a constant and unwavering resistance, we keep the flame of liberty ablaze and pursue a noble endeavor to keep tyrants at bay. Our freedom is found in the journey; it has no destination. We are free, so long as we resist.
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One of the most influential thinkers in my life has been Friedrich Nietzsche. He opened my eyes to these concepts and inspired within me a more purposeful course of action. My book, Liberty and the Will to Power, was an attempt to integrate his concepts with my pursuit of freedom. I will leave you with an excerpt from Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, where he puts forth one of his perspectives on the idea of liberty.
“My Concept of Freedom. —Sometimes the value of a thing does not lie in that which it helps us to achieve, but in the amount we have to pay for it, —what it costs us. For instance, liberal institutions straightway cease from being liberal, the moment they are soundly established: once this is attained no more grievous and more thorough enemies of freedom exist than liberal institutions! One knows, of course, what they bring about: they undermine the Will to Power, they are the leveling of mountain and valley exalted to a morality, they make people small, cowardly and pleasure-loving, —by means of them the gregarious animal invariably triumphs. Liberalism, or, in plain English, the transformation of mankind into cattle. The same institutions, so long as they are fought for, produce quite other results; then indeed they promote the cause of freedom quite powerfully. Regarded more closely, it is war which produces these results, war in favor of liberal institutions, which, as war, allows the illiberal instincts to subsist. For war trains men to be free. What in sooth is freedom? Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves. It is to preserve the distance which separates us from other men. To grow more indifferent to hardship, to severity, to privation, and even to life itself. To be ready to sacrifice men for one's cause, one's self included. Freedom denotes that the virile instincts which rejoice in war and in victory, prevail over other instincts; for instance, over the instincts of "happiness." The man who has won his freedom, and how much more so, therefore, the spirit that has won its freedom, tramples ruthlessly upon that contemptible kind of comfort which tea-grocers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen and other democrats worship in their dreams. The free man is a warrior. —How is freedom measured in individuals as well as in nations? According to the resistance which has to be overcome, according to the pains which it costs to remain uppermost. The highest type of free man would have to be sought where the greatest resistance has continually to be overcome: five paces away from tyranny, on the very threshold of the danger of thralldom. This is psychologically true if, by the word "Tyrants" we mean inexorable and terrible instincts which challenge the maximum amount of authority and discipline to oppose them—the finest example of this is Julius Caesar; it is also true politically: just examine the course of history. The nations which were worth anything, which got to be worth anything, never attained to that condition under liberal institutions: great danger made out of them something which deserves reverence, that danger which alone can make us aware of our resources, our virtues, our means of defense, our weapons, our genius,—which compels us to be strong. First principle: a man must need to be strong, otherwise he will never attain it.—Those great forcing-houses of the strong, of the strongest kind of men that have ever existed on earth, the aristocratic communities like those of Rome and Venice, understood freedom precisely as I understand the word: as something that one has and that one has not, as something that one will have and that one seizes by force.”
