 At the Libertarian Convention in San Francisco in 1977, Nathan spoke there, and he was just starting at that time, his intensives, these are 40 hour long sessions held over a weekend, and he was telling us a lot about what these accomplished and how good they were, and I was sitting there very skeptical, and when I heard the price, I was even more skeptical. And I thought, you know, 100 people at one intensive, you divide 40 hours by 100, and you get a very small number of minutes apiece with Nathan, how could it be worth $250? You haven't heard anything yet, Roy. So, a friend of mine went to one in Los Angeles, and reported very highly on it to me, and then another friend went, the same reaction. In fact, incidentally, one of these other friends was telling another friend of mine about how good it was, and he was very skeptical, and this particular person was usually very defensive, and yet she didn't get upset at all. She didn't get upset that she hadn't convinced him, and that in itself convinced him. So I went to an intensive in New York in February of 1978, and at the start, Nathan did something that he said he'd never done before. He wanted to convince us that we should relax and get the most out of this. Well, the way to do that is to convince you don't have too much to lose. So he said, I will refund anyone who is not satisfied at the end of this intensive, the full price of the intensive, $250. So immediately I relaxed. At the end of each session, when we'd have a break, I would ask myself, have I hit $250 yet? By the end of the Saturday morning session, I'd hit $250. And the rest, to use economists' jargon, was consumer surplus. I'll tell you how I hit $250. Nathaniel was talking about, a couple more minutes, couple more minutes. Nathaniel was talking about what it's like to be a child, and how we have to learn somehow how to deal with the world. And we're in the worst position to learn because we're completely ignorant. And we have to pick up from what we see around us how to deal with the world. We pick up ways of dealing with it that are actually very rational then, but don't really make much sense later when we're 20 years old or whatever. And he said that in such, in a way that I felt like I was understood more by him than by anyone else in my whole life. So I would like to present to you Nathaniel Brandon, a man I love very much. Thank you. May I say that that introduction was totally unexpected, and I converted it into an opportunity for me to practice breathing and being poised. The next thing I want to say is that I'm completely bewildered. Everywhere I go at this convention, I am seeing signs saying toward a three-party system. It was my understanding that the Libertarian Party came into existence so that at last America could have a two-party system. When I was invited to talk at this event and began to think about what area of my interest could be perhaps most useful, I began to think about certain problems or certain challenges that I could see arising at this point and from now on in the present and future of the Libertarian Party. Certain battles that would need to be won, and certain barriers that needed to be overcome, which had nothing to do with what anyone thinks of as, quote, the enemy. Because the particular battles that I've always focused on are those that we engage in with ourselves. And I began thinking about the attitudes we carry within us that could lead some of us to subvert, sabotage, or otherwise get in the way of the very extraordinary things that were happening in the Libertarian Party. So this talk entitled as it is the coming challenges of Libertarianism could have been entitled How Not to Self Destruct at the First Signs of Success. Now I need to say a few words about my work in psychology to give a kind of context for my remarks. One of the operating principles of my work both as a psychotherapist and in the intensive workshops is that self-concept determines destiny. That how deep inside we perceive and experience ourselves has everything to do with how we're likely to act in the world. Has everything to do with the kind of life we create for ourselves. For example, when people deep inside see themselves as unlovable, they tend out of that self-concept to behave in ways relative to other people that turns off other people. And when they see other people withdrawing, they tell themselves, you see, nobody cares about me, nobody could be interested in me. A certain kind of person will begin to talk to you and you're bored almost from the first second. And you may not know why because what he's saying has got perhaps some merit or some potential interest, but he's talking in a way that his manner is constantly broadcasting the idea, you're not going to be interested in anything I have to say. And out of fear of that, he is being very uninteresting and even boring in the way he's talking. And he's making his own fear come true through his behavior. In my work, we deal a lot with self-fulfilling prophecies of this kind. A story I often tell that will serve as perhaps my last example. I was giving a lecture at Northwestern University in Chicago on man-woman relationships and at the conclusion of the lecture, a group of college students came up to ask questions. A very energetic young woman complimented me vigorously on my talk and said, Oh, how I wish men understood what you've been saying. The trouble with men is they don't appreciate women with brains. And as she was talking, I was feeling myself turning off. I was feeling myself wanting to end the conversation and move on to someone else. And I was fascinated by my own process because it happened in an evening when I was feeling quite marvelous spirits and very benevolently disposed toward the whole world. And a person would really have to work hard, I knew, in that state I was in that night to get me to really feel that powerful an impulse to withdraw. So as she went on talking for another perhaps 30 seconds, I was focusing more carefully on what was happening between us so that I could see how she was achieving this particular effect. And when I saw it, I said, Hey, I'd like to tell you something. Right now, I'm feeling very turned off by you and I'm feeling an impulse to withdraw and turn to someone else. And I'd like to tell you how and why it's happening if you're interested. She looked very nonplussed, but she nodded her head and I said, Okay, as you've been talking, I'm experiencing myself simultaneously as receiving three separate and distinct messages from you. One, you really like me and would like me to like you. Two, you're absolutely certain I'm not going to be interested in anything you've got to say. Three, and you are very angry at me for rejecting you. I'm going to call before I've opened my mouth. She grew thoughtful and then she became a little sad and she says, you know, this is absolutely true. As I was walking up the aisle, I was telling myself, he won't be interested in me. He won't want to listen to anything I've got to say. I said, that's right. And already getting very annoyed at me, weren't you? She said, yes. I said, listen, you're in luck tonight because this happens to be my game. So I like analyzing and explaining things of this kind. But under most circumstances, this is not the way it would happen. Say, you're in a cafeteria and some young man sits down to chat with you and he starts getting all of these very unpleasant messages or vibrations that she doesn't express in language but really feels on some level and wordlessly he thinks to himself, who needs this? So quickly he excuses himself and as you're watching his disappearing back, you're telling yourself the trouble with men is they don't appreciate women with brains and you're absolutely oblivious to your own contribution to your suffering. Now the thing I want you to get from these anecdotes and especially from this last as a pattern is that we can consciously be moving in one direction and subconsciously moving in exactly the opposite direction. And since it's subconscious, we're not aware of it in the ordinary sense of which we speak of aware even though there are deeper levels on which perhaps we could be said to be aware of it. The important point was that here was a person going through life creating her own disappointments, creating her own frustrations, creating her own tragedies. Now, how is that relevant to us? Well, it's relevant in the following ways. Perhaps I need one last example that suddenly occurs to me to nail down the point before I bring it back to libertarianism. I was doing intensive on self-esteem in the art of being in San Francisco and we were working on just this area of how self-concept determines destiny and a very nice, very intelligent man stood up and he told a group at a certain point in the weekend the following story. He'd come from a poor family but not only a family who was economically poor but a family of losers in their self-concept. So he got a lot of messages from very early in life, nobody in our family makes it. Nobody in our family is supposed to make it. If you want to be a member of our family, you don't make it. If you make it, you're an orphan. Now, this was picked up on a subtle level, largely on the nonverbal level, largely on the subconscious level but still in some form the attitudes were cooking away in the psyche while on the conscious level the person was thinking I want to make something of myself and he had a lot of brains and a lot of ambition and a lot of drive. What he didn't have in the way that he developed was perhaps sufficient independence to fully repudiate on the deep emotional level these family messages. So he had these two different themes operating in his mind simultaneously. I want to be successful and I mustn't be successful. Now it's 30 years later. He's a grown-up, hard-working and one day he wakes up and realizes that he's managed to earn $2 million. And while on one level it's very gratifying, on another level it provoked for him a lot of anxiety and disorientation because he felt I'm not a person who ever owns $2 million. So there was anxiety, there was disorientation. This is not who he experienced himself as being. He had a problem. He couldn't burn the money. That would offend his conscious rationality. He couldn't keep the money because his negative self-concept couldn't accommodate it. He had to produce a solution that would satisfy all the different elements of his psyche. He did. It was called bad investments. He satisfied his conscious mind by working very hard to preserve, protect and expand his income. He satisfied his unconscious negative self-concept by investing foolishly so soon he didn't have the burden of owning $2 million. So one of the things that surfaced for him in the intensive was the power of the negative self-concept and what he had to let go of if he was ever to be free to enjoy the benefits of his own intelligence and energies. Now, forgive the long psychological introduction but it seemed necessary to set the stage because just because individuals join in the libertarian movement or the libertarian party and just because it's my conviction that it's the most reasonable political philosophy to be extant today doesn't mean that automatic psychological sainthood is conferred upon this by being here. And that means that most of us have got a lot of unfinished business from the early years of our life. One of the characteristics of most political movements and perhaps radical political movements attract a lot of people who experience themselves as outsiders. Now, there's nothing wrong with experiencing yourself as being an outsider unless you're incapable of experiencing yourself as anything else without panicking. And by that I mean there are an awful lot of libertarians who are happy and content when the odds are impossibly against them and nobody takes them very seriously and they're chiefly talking to themselves. But what happens when the libertarian movement begins to succeed a little bit? What happens when it begins to achieve a kind of impact? What happens when it begins to be taken seriously? For some of us this is marvelously exciting and inspiring. For some of it it is very nerve-wracking. And the problem is that we don't necessarily know this on a conscious level. There's been a lot of thoroughly justifiable self-congratulation going on this week. We all know that when you consider the short time that the libertarian party has been in existence and how much it opposes in that which most people take for granted politically something damn close to a miracle has happened in the decade of the 1970s. A lot of extraordinary people have combined their efforts to achieve an extraordinary result. So there's a lot of euphoria at this convention. There's a lot of pride, there's a lot of excitement and there is as I say a lot of very earned self-congratulation. But I want to say something which I sometimes say to people I'm working with. Sometimes the most dangerous time in our development is when things are going right for us. Sometimes the most dangerous time in our development is when we're beginning to get what we want. Because if deep in our psyche there is the idea, I'm not the person who can ever get what I want. I am not a rebel at this point in history or in this culture that I am in effect a metaphysical rebel. I don't know how to exist as anything but a rebel. Which means please I need to keep having things to rebel against if I see myself as perhaps a martyr. If I see myself as perhaps hopelessly, inevitably alienated. If I feel nobody can really understand me. If I tell myself that being an individualist means not knowing how to function with other human beings then I wake up one day and find myself here. Well if that isn't cause for anxiety and disorientation what the hell is? Now what happens is that the Libertarian Party or rather it's the people involved in it. If I talk about the Libertarian Party that's an abstraction. Obviously I'm talking about the people who are actively involved in supporting it. Helping it, fighting for it. If the Libertarian Party contains a lot of members who feel they can only be outcasts, can only be isolated, have no real bonds to other human beings. That means that good intentions not withstanding. There is a time bomb ticking inside the psyche of many people at this convention. And as the movement gets more successful the ticking will get louder. How to precipitate catastrophe while seeming to be fighting for Libertarianism. That will be the great challenge. How not to allow us to get there while seeming to be the purest of the pure in struggling to get us there. That will be the great challenge. How to go on seeing myself as the number one hero of Libertarianism while doing everything possible to screw up. That will be the challenge. And if you don't think that there is the brains to pull that off in so august a group, then you underestimate the intelligence combined with the diabolical cunning of which the subconscious is capable. So it becomes very interesting to ask ourselves and obviously I don't wish to imply this applies to all of us. It doesn't. But these are trends to watch for in ourselves and in our colleagues. So it would be interesting to ask ourselves, okay, suppose that I or my friends or my colleagues while genuinely believing in these ideals at the same time have this unrecognized negative self-concept of which Brandon speaks. That means that my self-sabotaging behavior wouldn't happen on a conscious level, but it would happen. How would it happen? What kinds of mistakes might we make? Well, for example, suppose that you're talking with people who don't already share your views and yet you believe your views have evidence and reason to support them. Now, if you really believe that you're in this to win, to see your ideas prevail, then you give a lot of thought to how to become a good communicator, how to reach human minds, how to appeal to human intelligence. What do you do if you're really in it or keep proving that you are a heroic but doomed martyr? What do you do if your deepest belief is you're never going to get it? You're hopelessly corrupt. I may be one of the two or three last moral people on earth. What am I doing at this party anyway? You engage in a lot of flaming rhetoric. You talk about statists. You talk about looters. You talk about parasites in context where you know this language is Greek to your listener. Why should you care? Your dialogue isn't directed to him anyway. It's directed to the spectator of you watching you being a hero. He knows what you mean. Don't get confused over the fact that your listeners don't. The show isn't for them anyway. So, one of the signs that we want to look out for and one of the most important signs happens in how we approach communication. Are we really out to reach human beings? Are we really out to build a bridge to somebody whose context may be very different from our own? Do we still remember that a lot of what we now regard as self-evident once upon a time wasn't self-evident? Or do we walk into a conversation on the premise that I'll give you one chance after which you're irredeemably evil? You see, that could be called a communication problem, but I think it would be too superficial to describe it in that manner. I would call it a phony image problem. You're not in it to win. You're not in it to persuade. You're not in it to convince. You're not in it to reach out and touch another human mind. You're out to make yourself right as the lonely, unappreciated, misunderstood heroic martyr who just knew you were ever since your mother gave more attention to your brother. Perhaps communication is one of the chief areas where this problem manifests. Another example in the area of communication that occurs to me is libertarians who cannot seem to come off the level of extreme generality. Once they have made up their mind that, for example, some of their programs are inappropriate or improper and ultimately immoral, that's the end of the conversation. They're not interested in dealing with the perfectly natural questions that perfectly civilized, decent people are going to ask next about the very real problems of people in our particular world. They don't think in terms of responsible answers. They don't think in terms of voluntary solutions. They don't think in terms of developing highly concrete, highly specific libertarian alternatives. Why don't they? Because they never believed they could persuade anyway. To invest that much thinking, you have to really think you could make a difference. To do your homework, to master the subject, to know how to argue, beyond the very general level, you have to really believe you can make a difference. What if you don't? But you want to play in the game. You climb up on your white horse, confine ourselves to generalities, and curse those who aren't convinced. It gets into small things, like voter registration, like planning every event carefully to get the maximum mileage, like looking at an event where voter registration might be necessary, and planning out everything possible to get those names on those cards. It consists sometimes of very small work, a very detailed work, coming out of the conviction that everything matters. I'll tell you a little secret. The world belongs to whoever is clearest on the premise that everything matters. Most battles are won by the people, not who have the most intimate relationship with God, but who did their homework and preparation the best, who did their planning the best, who were willing to take responsibility for seeing that everything was done 100% appropriately. Now, to have that kind of motivation working in an office, working volunteer on a voting drive and a registration drive, on many of the less glamorous aspects of promoting political movement, one has to really believe in the practical efficacy of what one is doing. If it's only historical posturing, the motivation isn't there. The self-destruct mechanism can work is the following. This is one that concerns me a lot. What are you going to do if deep down you see yourself as a lonely martyr that nobody can really understand except maybe three or four elite? But here you are at a convention with two or three thousand people, all of whom seem to share at least some very basic common goals. At that point it's not enough to have enemies on the outside world. You've got to start having some enemies within the party. You have to start creating your conflicts right here, so we have little subgroups, little cadres, little infighting, so it's not any longer us trying to do something out there. It's me and my four most intimate friends against the forces of evil within the libertarian party. Now, I believe in fighting for principle. I do believe lines have to be drawn. I'm not saying that just because people call themselves libertarians, one can expect any libertarian to automatically ally himself with any other libertarian. That would be ridiculous. But I am talking about persons who seem to love the drama of inter-party conflict. A week without secret meetings, private manipulations, and people to curse is hardly a week worth living. It will be obvious to you by now that I have chosen very consciously to speak a little bit generally. I have chosen not to name names. I have chosen not to name concrete historical examples of the last year or two. I want to own the fact that thinking it over very carefully I decided today that I would talk to this group on the level of certain kinds of generalities and leave it to you to fill in your own historical documentation if you wish to. I said earlier that if deep down we don't really believe we can be effective in this world, if deep down we don't really believe we are able to reach other minds, one of the practical consequences if we choose to involve ourselves in these kinds of activities is that generally speaking we plan to get where we're going not by persuasion but by manipulation. We don't believe in the efficacy of persuasion. We don't believe in saying, hey, you and I seem to be moving in different directions here, let's sit down and talk about this. No, we get on the phone, we contact our friends, we think about how to ace you out. We don't confront, we don't talk, we maneuver. Then we feel like real politicians. Then we feel like we're really being practical. So you can tell a lot about how we feel, not just by how we deal with people who don't agree with us in a broader sense, but also how we deal with one another. What's the spirit of friendship, openness, honesty, goodwill, facing of differences with dignity and straightforwardness or the lack thereof. You can learn a lot about where we're coming from. You can learn a lot about our deeper feelings about ourselves and whether we're on some kind of private trip of our own or whether we're really trying to get something accomplished that we think is important in the real world. You know, right now, let's face it, big successes and all, it's a pretty small pond, but all the marvelous things that have happened, it's not too difficult still to get somebody to say at a cocktail party, what's libertarianism? So we're a pretty small group. Now, from a conscious rational point of view, one would think, well, of course, beginnings aren't necessarily small, but we all want to be a big group. Check your assumptions. Some of us do, some of us don't. What could be bad about being a big group? I'll tell you. As my mummy used to say when I was a little boy, I think at the time she might have been urging me not to move to New York, better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond. The larger the libertarian movement grows, the bigger the competition, the talent competition within the party is going to grow. It's not going to be half a dozen people anymore and shouldn't be. The game is going to keep opening up and needs to. That's where growth and vitality come from. So there may be some deposing of kings. It could happen. Or if not kings, generals, left-handed commanders, gurus. I don't recall ever giving a talk before in quite this style with my passion for specificity. This is a bit of a strain on me. But I thought it would be an interesting way to come with the subject matter. What I want to invite is to think about, and now in good will and truly in good will. Because it isn't as if, if some of us are struggling with a negative self-concept or with feelings of alienation or with feelings of being a hopeless outsider, does that mean we're not intelligent? It does not. Does that mean we may not still be making a valuable contribution? It does not. Does that deny that there can still be very valuable things about us as persons? Of course it doesn't. So we'll drop the notion of villains. We'll assume good intentions. And we'll respect the fact that we can't all that readily jump outside our own psychology. But we can help one another. We can admit that at three o'clock in the morning when we think about some of the extraordinary steps we've taken probably a lot of us are thinking, Jesus, is this really happening? Are Timer Newsweek really writing about us? It is a little disorienting. A lot of us never dreamed any of this ten years ago or fifteen years ago. It would be great if we could talk honestly about that. Share those feelings too. When we feel a little disoriented, own it. So what? If it feels a little bit strange at times to have so many people agreeing with you and the impulses there to start an argument just for the hell of it, own that. It would be so great if we didn't have to pretend. If we could just say, hey Joe, do you ever feel a little bit weird when you see more and more people agreeing with us and if Joe could say, yeah. It's even a bit scary sometimes, isn't it? I mean, this is the real world. If we could just release the pressure and say we're all embarked on a great adventure, it's fun, it's exciting, it's exhausting, it's frightening at times, it's discouraging at times, it's bewildering at times, then perhaps we could help one another to anchor what's really happening in the real world on the emotional level. For me, these are the biggest challenges of the Libertarian Party. And with every year of increasing success, with every year that more people take it seriously, this is going to be the challenge. How will we handle being part of the real world? How will we handle having our ideas taken seriously? Listen, let us be honest with ourselves and with one another. It's going to feel strange sometimes. It's going to violate our earlier feeling about the way things were going to be. So we need honesty. You know the old joke about, you show the fella a Rorschach ink blot and you ask him what he associates with and he says he associates with sex and you show him another picture and again he associates with sex and you show him another picture and again he associates with sex and the examining psychologist says, what is this? What is this? How do you find this in every picture? And it's an old joke with his point here. He says, everything makes me think of sex, doctor. Well, I guess everything makes me think of psychology. Even at a Libertarian Convention, here I am talking about self-concept as destiny. One of my favorite psychological themes. I hope you'll think about it. I hope you'll look very clearly at the question of do you want to succeed or do you want to be a hero in a losing battle? Because if what you really want is to be a hero in a losing battle, I promise you you will find a way to help see that the battle is lost. If that's your self-concept, I promise you you will find a way to contribute your share. If, on the other hand, you really do want to see this take off, you really do want to see this happen in the real world and if at times it's frightening and disorienting and if we can talk about that honestly and as friends, I think then we have a chance to see some very, very exciting and dramatic developments happen in our own lifetime. Thank you. I wanted not to use up my full time on the talk because I love question periods. I love interaction periods. I love time to find out what your thoughts or your questions might be relative to what I've been talking about. And I'm wondering if anybody would like to raise anything. Yes. If I hear you correctly, you're asking if I could point you at or suggest behaviors by which you might detect some of the attitudes you've heard me talking about. Correct? I'll give you a great, if somewhat hilarious, idea for a party. You invite your libertarian friends over and you tell them to bring notebooks and you say tonight we're going to play a game. Let's make a list of all the possible ways we could screw up while pretending to be fighting for the success of libertarianism. And each person will have his own list because we have different styles. Some of us are more expert in some forms of fucking up than others. And after you've got your lists, then you begin to see if you could help each other or think of still other ways that you could self-sabotage that you hadn't noticed. And you write them all down and you read them at least once a week. That's all. Write them all down. Read them once a week. It'll get increasingly harder to pull off some of the shenanigans. Yes. Crazy numbers of times. It feels kind of boring. I feel I've gotten out of the standard line of what we used before but it doesn't seem a line. I'm off the story. I missed the bottom line. I get your general thought. Give me the question in one final sentence. What are some of the manifestations of this that might be in my experience that shows that we're really out working against what we're doing? Oh, a certain boredom or anxiety when things are going well. You have more energy when you're attacked than when things are working for you. Kind of an impulse to withdraw when there are obvious things that you could do when things are moving. Things like that. Yes. Well, you make an interesting distinction. The gentleman asks a very interesting question. He says, do I see it as an educational process or as a conversion process? Do you discover libertarians when you persuade them to libertarianism? Well, this is very interesting. At least to me. When I speak of conversion, I obviously mean it in the sense of rational persuasion and not in the sense of a religious revelation. So I use conversion obviously in a non-religious sense. I mean it in the sense of persuade. Now, some people will have discovered libertarianism long before you met them. More people than not have not. If your idea is I am only interested in those who are already libertarians, forget it. No intellectual position, no intellectual movement ever grew whose exponents weren't on the premise of changing people's minds. I do not believe that there is some genetically endowed elite group of people in this world who were born libertarians. I think this is vanity and self-deception. Some of the nicest people that I know personally were political liberals when I met them. Now they are libertarians. I don't see their character has changed. What has changed is their knowledge and their information. You see one of the attitudes that I really want to discourage you against because it's dangerous that if you're a libertarian you are some kind of elite. You just were born with the right instance. You really believe in freedom and you believe in individual rights. Oh, you may have to read a book or two, but you know, I don't see it that way. Sure, there are some people who are libertarians because they are really in a core sense psychologically very independent, very reality oriented and have looked at a lot of issues very, very hard, very early in life. I promise you they are a minority. There are also libertarians who are libertarians because their father or mother are socialists. Just as there are socialists who are socialists because their fathers or mothers are Republican. I mean the idea that all the common sense motivations that affect other people don't affect us is really invalid and we can't afford the luxury of entertaining ourselves with those kind of delusions. If we're on the premise that, you know, I suppose it's coming out of an objectivist background this issue is very close to my heart because believe me, if you believed in the philosophy of objectivism you were not just superior, you were sacred. I mean you were pretty close to being a holy man and as an ex-holy man I've had a lot of chances to look at how people filled with unresolved fears filled with all the problems of immaturity that the rest of the world have got have got the most superb rationalization for not dealing with their own evolution or growth I am an objectivist. I am a libertarian. How can you expect me not to beat my wife in such a state-historiated world? Of course I don't know how to talk to human beings. What human beings? Listen, when Christianity came along a lot of people who had what a psychologist might call an anxiety neurosis or an inferiority complex heard the good news that it didn't die at all it's the virtue of humility. So by relabeling it, it was terrific. Now a lot of very shy, very socially insecure people launched on to libertarianism or objectivism and finally got the word they don't have any problems they don't know how to handle their own superiority perhaps we have to let go of that nonsense we are human beings and they are human beings and I have more shocking news for you yet they are us, they are us I'm not wanting to belabor this point too much but I really would like you to be open to the possibility they are us think about what that might mean because if you begin to entertain it at least as a possibility you'll talk to them differently then it will be two human beings trying to understand each other not two fortresses then something can happen look, I'm not an egalitarian I believe in equality before the law but I don't believe all human beings are born equal but neither do I believe that adherence to any particular political philosophy automatically elevates you psychologically it may only mean that you're saner in that area than in the rest of your life yes what is the question? ringer in the beginning of restoring the American dream talks about the up and down feeling one day you meet a fellow libertarian and you feel great the next day you meet three socialists and you feel the situation is hopeless I suppose keeping yourself on an even keel might entail seeing that you constantly have a more varied social life what did you say? now I just pause for a breath I wanted to give you a moment to get that thought before I moved into part two I guess part of what's involved is cultivating the art of thinking long range about these issues because most of us have known those highs and lows I have and all I can say from personal experience is after you go up and down enough at some point it begins to come to you that when you meet two new libertarians that doesn't mean we're one week away from paradise and when you meet two new socialists it also doesn't mean we're two weeks away from the end of the world so I think the most important thing one needs to do is perhaps cultivate a memory remember I've been here before yes, Al? you might do in general to help us include the idea of fighting this low cost and getting these little ideas out I think it might be interesting to have meetings to kick around some of the problems we're talking about if they seem valid to you I wouldn't have anything more specific that I cared about I hadn't thought about your question previously and I think it would be useful to meet with people to talk about this to put this on the agenda by the way I want to say something because I'm afraid I'm going to forget it David's lovely introduction of me relative to my intensive was both unexpected and I felt very appreciative over it and I wanted to announce something which just came up at the convention here so that it couldn't have been announced earlier and I'd be pleased if you'd mention it perhaps the persons who are not here now or who had to leave earlier something we did four years ago not four years ago, I guess two years ago and we're doing it again here is the following we're doing an intensive on self-esteem in the art of being next week in Los Angeles we have a table in the room where there's literature about all of that if any of you who are at this convention do the intensive next week here in Los Angeles please put on your registration card LP because if you do the Biocentric Institute will make a $50 contribution to the Libertarian Party in your name no, it's for this someone put this idea in my mind why the hell didn't I think of that so let's get on it I just met a former student and he proposed this to me and I'm very grateful to him because I wished I had thought of it no but listen, so there's no arguments later and you won't drive my office crazy the only way we're gonna know is when you fill out the card and you can get them downstairs or you can call my office and get them or if you enroll at the door write LP beside your name then there's no argument I mean don't phone up six months later and say you know and then we gotta take time looking back into our records and we're you there okay it's next week it's at the Holiday Inn in Wilshire Boulevard near Westwood it's possible to enroll on a space permitting basis at six o'clock on Thursday night and if you then fill it in LP anyway the contribution is made in your name okay, I saw someone else yes, well okay it's easier to be gung-ho about these issues when you're here in the midst of act of people sharing your views then it may be next month living in the community where perhaps nobody you know thinks as you do if I hear you correctly this seems relevant okay, so there's a natural impulse in people to want to affiliate themselves or spend some time with people of a similar orientation they reinforce each other they support each other it's very natural that we look to find people who think as we do but there again don't you see you will find them very good chance you will find them almost anywhere but not if your deepest idea is I am alone again self-concept going in is very important I don't think you have to be that alone politically I mean you might be living in some exotic place but in most places in the United States you don't have to be if you don't know anybody create some friends that's right create them take that responsibility if you're so sure you're right and you know your case don't tell me but I couldn't change anybody's mind Nathaniel look into that couldn't change anybody's mind hard to believe yourself from some political friends yeah it seems to me that you have in very particular people and your tendencies in the LP in mind I'm dying to know exactly who you met and I think that you have a responsibility for people who know you no I don't no I don't and I'll tell you why I don't because if I would get into one particular election or the way one particular registration drive was handled or one particular conflict between four different people in the movement then we'll get into a debate such as Nathaniel but you don't know what was really going on because it blah blah blah I couldn't care less I know that the things that I have described have to be happening here somewhere to somebody not because it's us not because this is the libertarian party but for a far simpler reason because we're human beings you understand me I could sit down and just figure out what in the nature of things has to be happening somewhere in this situation and as I was talking you know the way I talk as I talk and I watch faces and when I see the little twinkles in people's eyes and a smile I was okay and you better say stay with that subject a bit longer there I saw enough non mystified looks I doubt that we're all thinking of the same situations or the same people but there is an old cliche that fits if the shoe fits where if it doesn't don't worry but the point is not to argue over this person or that these are trends these issues are natural they're what human beings do and I must tell you something when I came out of my life in New York when I ran in 1968 one day my wife since deceased came into the room and she'd been reading a book about she'd been involved in the objective of Circle of New York and she'd been reading a book about the development of the left wing theater in New York in the 30s and all the conflicts and she said to me Nathaniel you gotta read this book it's all about life in New York it's all about now this was not philosophy it was theater it was not objective it was socialist but she said the psychological dynamics are all identical so don't you see it's not an issue of having to scoop on Mr. X or Mrs. Y please don't hear it that way I take responsibility for kidding with you a little bit about that's not really it think about the trends think about the phenomenon that's what's important yes afraid of what? freedom yeah later in the conversation when they it seems like you've gotten very defensive it seems like you're really completely close to anything else that you might want to try to discuss with them after they start with any fuel well you can't always there's no magic you're asking in effect Nathaniel how does one deal with people who turn off or get very defensive well there are limits to what you can do I'm not taking the position of only you're artful enough you can persuade anybody providing your cases valid in the first place there are some people who are very very closed a lot of people if there were not a lot of psychological fears of freedom rationalized as a lot of other things the whole struggle wouldn't be as difficult as it is so you don't have to convince everybody you only you don't have to convince the world because most people accept whatever is the dominant consensus most people don't think out independently a political philosophy when free enterprise was in vogue they were free enterprises when the welfare state is in vogue their welfare is not neither represents their convictions it's part of belonging to a particular society I remember once I was at a party in London I was listening to a group of of liberals talking about Frank Sinatra switching over from his allegiance to the Democratic to the Republican party and I heard a classic remark a woman said in complete seriousness when the complete indignation she said it is so ridiculous it's a mattress not a republican I mean where he grew up in New Jersey nobody from that part of New Jersey can bear public and the whole notion is absurd and it was very interesting for me because it was a different kind of sociological perspective on what determines political philosophy than we think about at libertarian conventions but it has a lot of relevance to a lot of people without getting into the truth or false said of it relative to Mr. Sinatra I just use that to make a wider point do you see I want to tell you something I'm going to stop for the minute I really I want to share one small thing with you that I was very pleased to hear I was at a this past Labor Day weekend at a someone's home in near Santa Barbara where it was set up for me to meet some people who were fairly aggressively involved in the Democratic party and the host was sort of getting fascinated by libertarianism and he wanted to I don't know throw me into the lion's den or however you want to put it see what would erupt and it was kind of an entertaining experience but in the course of it one tiny thing happened not involving me that I liked a lot a lawyer a Democrat who'd run for some political position but lost a very active very aggressive Democrat said one thing that I liked in fact I meant to say this last night in my talk about the dinner and I forgot somehow the name of Roger McBride and Ed Clark came up and this man who was really angry in his conversation with me and was very vigorous said oh I know them they are two marvelous men you would not meet two finer more decent more honorable human beings now why did I feel good when I heard that one thing that I like about both those men when they present or argue for their political beliefs is they really function as human beings they are not libertarian on a statue of automatons they talk like human beings and that's one thing I admire about both of them and in the context of how zealously this man was taking a position that I am vigorously opposed to he interrupted this thing to say how impressed he was by these two men now I think this is a marvelous thing for us to aim at to be a human being and when we relate to other human beings to relate as a human being because I believe not only that is the best way for us to be I also believe in the long run it is the most effective way to be if I want to change people's minds the other pleasant thing last night I was at the SIL dinner some of you probably were there and I was asked to say a few words about the subjectivism my youth and has it pertained to the libertarian movement etc it was sort of a fun evening for me but there was one statistical fact that I forgot talking about the various historical factors which have fed into the growing libertarian movement I said last night that although I have got some pretty important differences with Ms. Rand she is a genius and I think that she made an incredible contribution and what I didn't say but the thing is that she probably single-handedly turned more people on to the younger generation to the ideals of political freedom than any other writer because she really gave a kind of moral vision that inspired a lot of young people well a lot of us including me are not all that happy with what's become of Ms. Rand in the last 10 or 11 years but if one can believe her publisher and I'm inclined to in this case it might please you to know that her collected works New American Library and Paperback are continuing to sell 25,000 copies a month so in her own way what might say she is still in their pitching thank you very very much for your attention