"All of this, I concede, is an affront to the mores. So be it!": comments on Leonard Read's, Anything That's Peaceful

I was given this book back in November by one of the leaders of College Libertarians. Why? Because I won a raffle! Yeah, it was one of those rare instances (how rare are they really?) when the universe aligns in my favor. So I was given this book a while back, but only got to reading it after returning from winter break. I finished it around the middle of January, and now I'm finally getting around to writing out my comments on it. First comment: It was a clear and concise representation of the libertarian philosophy of the author - very much worth the time to read!

Read's thesis: "Let anyone do anything he pleases, so long as it is peaceful; the role of the government, then, is to keep the peace."

In Chapter 1, "A Break with Prevailing Faith", Read discusses the maxim that "Truth will out!". He says that the only way to "give truth a hand" is to assist seekers in finding it for themselves. There are no shortcuts. Since truth has no real meaning apart from "our individual perceptions of it", it is imperative that "many individuals do their utmost in searching for it and reporting whatever their search reveals". This commitment to truth he calls also a commitment to one's "own conscience". To ignore or to fear truth is to compromise one's integrity.

Later in the chapter, Read expands on this commitment to conscience, listing its corresponding virtues: Integrity, which means only holding positions one believes to be right; Intelligence, which means consistently, everlastingly, seeking for the right; Humility, which means understanding one's place as a human among many with the "inability to run the lives of others"; and Justice, which means never doing to others what one would not have done to oneself.

To conclude the chapter, Read (nobly, I think) concedes that he is reasoning from three premises: 1. "The primacy and supremacy of an Infinite Consciousness" (God) 2. "The expansibility of individual consciousness, this being demonstrably possible" (Progress) 3. "The immortality of the individual spirit or consciousness, our earthly moments being not all there is to it" (Heaven). From these three premises, he has concluded that man's earthly purpose is this:

To expand one's own consciousness into as near a harmony with Infinite Consciousness as is within the power of each, or, in more lay terms, to see how nearly one can come to a realization of those creative potentialities peculiar to one's own person, each of us being different in this respect.

To be continued...