You are a human. You don’t need a law in order to exist. You don’t need a law in order for you to want to have preferences and for you to want to be treated according to those preferences in line with a common standard of decency. You don’t need a law in order to have boundaries that you will not cross.
To invoke such laws is akin to paying honor to those laws and recognizing them as legitimate. They have so many illegitimate applications. Be very careful with decrying them legitimate. It just takes a vote from a crooked legislature to do away with them. Moral codes of decency on the other hand are not up for determination by legislature, executive, or judiciary.
Have A Human To Human Conversation
So many are so used to resorting to force and escalation with people, saying things like “Let me speak to your manager!” Or “I’m going to sue you if you don’t _______!” Speaking to managers can be good and suing people can be good too, but to prematurely resort to threats to get your way is not good.
The prevalence of this behavior across the political spectrum is merely a symptom of the moral decay that socialism has wrought, particularly among conservatives and libertarians.
You’d think they were Communist Party supporters, the way they threaten bringing matters to the state for resolution literally within 45 seconds of an uncomfortable problem arising.
Don’t escalate prematurely. Handle things calmly and with the lowest level person who is able to address the concern. If you need to escalate, escalate. When the state gets involved, there will almost always be two losers in the process. Almost no one walks away from an interaction with the judicial system 100% whole.
Invoking Laws Prematurely Is The Same Bad, Socialist Route
And I also mean that about invoking laws such as HIPPA or the ADA around medical privacy. These are great laws to have in your back pocket, but really, they virtually never need to be mentioned. What should instead be mentioned and is far more helpful is the moral foundation that is used to empower those laws: common decency.
If someone asks something Private don’t say HIPPA, say “That’s private.”
If someone says “I can’t do that for you,” don’t say “ADA accommodation,” say “That doesn’t work for me. What else can we do?”
If someone “doctor’s note,” to you, don’t just go fetch your doctor’s note for them, be just as comfortable saying “That doesn’t work for me. What else can we do?”
I Am Unable To Wear A Face Mask Safely
There are so many things that can be said that simply indicate what you need from the person and do so with little need for conflict. The sentence “I am unable to wear a face mask safely,” appears to be among the most effective of them. This is not a lie. Very few people are truly able to wear a face mask safely. They cause psychological, sociological, and biological harm.
This Issue Speaks To A Deeper Uneasiness In Many People
This is really an issue of being comfortable in yourself and being able to say “I am a fully functioning human and I am fully capable of telling others what I want.” You don’t need a law to do that. If you really feel the need for a law, sure use that crutch, but you are kicking a can down the road.
What kinds of feelings of guilt? Of inferiority? Of worthlessness? Of shame inhabit your internal terrain that you aren’t able to say to someone “Sir, I would like X, what can you do to get that for me?”
You can find a psychiatrist to help you address that internal shame, but that would bring us to a collection of wisdom that has really only been codified in the last century and a half through the work of professionals who largely follow in the footsteps of Freud. Some of that wisdom is specious at best. I think you have a problem that long precedes the modern era and that Freud and his adherents have some trouble truly addressing. Pick up the Bible. Start at the beginning. Suspend your disbelief for a while. Find a preacher who isn’t laden with religious shackles and guilt and use his services to get yourself out of whatever internal mess you happen to be in.
Being able to be feel forgiven and to forgive lifts such a burden from ones shoulders. You are meant to walk this earth blessed and prosperous, not cowering and begging.
If you need a law to justify your boundaries, something is amiss and needs prompt correcting.
Your Humanness Is Far More Legitimate Than Any Law
If you can’t identify your boundaries, communicate your boundaries, and defend your boundaries without the need to justify it by saying “It’s the law,” you miss a far more important law: you are created in the likeness of God and have certain qualities that merit honoring.
You are not legitimized because of some legislative body. You are born legitimate. Speak openly about your boundaries, because it is legitimate and proper to have clear, solid, impervious boundaries, not because someone in an office somewhere deigned to write some edict on the topic, nor because some group of “someones” got together to pass a law.
Your individual boundaries are far more legitimate than any claimed boundary of any artificial collective. The former is true and legitimate, the latter is artificial and almost always illegitimate.
The Battle Is For Your Mind
This battle we are in is not kinetic. It is very much a spiritual battle, and the terrain on which it is fought is very much in your head, on your face, and in your home. It is a war for your mind. Laws and police officers are not the most effective tools in this war. If anything, they tend to be distractions from the real battle, and they can even be methods of sabotaging that precious space in between your two ears. That can be true even when you are the one initiating use of those tools.
These tools can be used as a crutch, but it’s far better to use common decency as your crutch along with civil conversation and polite requests.
Watch Out For Your Ego Run Amuck
You don’t get the same gratification as you might get from yelling at the top of your lungs with ego about how right you are and waving a legal document around (it really can feel very gratifying, I must admit), but you get a far better gratification: the one that comes by simply asking your ego to take a few minutes off and by you having a civil, human-to-human conversation in which you tell the person what you need and in which they are treated by you with such respect that they wouldn’t feel right telling you “No.”
It doesn’t always work. It almost always works. When it doesn’t work, you still get to walk about your day with an inner peace and calm that the other method does not offer.
Two-Year-Old You Intuitively Understood This
What’s so hard about just saying “No!” to something you don’t want to do?
Two-year-old you knew exactly how to say that. In fact, with very limited vocabulary two year old you knew how to very clearly communicate “No, that does not work for me.” Reconnect with two-year-old you.
There are bad aspects of life as two-year-old you, but two-year-old you is also someone tyrants in your life hated. Two-year-old you and your ability to communicate “No, that does not work for me,” is a far more powerful, resourceful, and useful being than anything the wicked world wants you to connect with and emulate.
Some parents like to see two-year-old you as a spirit that needs to be crushed and it can be no surprise that’s what the vile world wants. Two-year-old you needed training in communication and negotiation and cooperation. Two-year-old you didn’t need spirit crushing. Two-year-old you is important, because the skills you learned as two-year-old you have a very real and legitimate role to play in contemporary you saying “no” to a psychotic world that has little interest in stopping and listening to other humans for a moment. That world is eager to dismiss them and far worse.
The world does not want to hear from you. The world does not want you disrupting things with your opinion about your boundaries. The world wants obedient silence from you. That should be no surprise. In the modern era, if you are to be a fully functioning adult, it is your duty to make your boundaries known.
The other option is to choose to be something less than fully functioning, to offer the world your compliance, your silent obedience. That promises to work out poorly.
If two-year-old you could say “No, that doesn’t work for me,” what exactly is it that stops contemporary you from doing exactly that?
I’ve yet to hear a good answer to that question.
Waving Laws Around Can Be Very Effective
Waving laws around can be very effective. Mentioning a law can be very powerful. I don’t recommend it as a first resort, second resort, or third resort.
There are many better techniques. I talk about them in my LewRockwell.com writing, in my bestselling book “Face Masks in One Lesson,” and in my videos and classes available through my newsletter at RealStevo.com. I’ve laid out much of the foundation in this piece you’re reading.
There Doesn’t Need To Be Heated Conflict
There doesn’t need to be heated conflict. You are likely to have a much better day without it and to grow as a person if you can deal with a difference of opinion calmly and nimbly. Maintaining calm during a desire to rage can be very powerful. The more worked up that you feel you want to be, while maintaining an inner peace that allows you to maneuver nimbly, the more you grow.
The face masks are not the oppression they are made out to be. They are a voluntarily complied with lie that allow any onlooker to separate the lion from the sheep.
Never be seen as a sheep again. Be a lion. Take off that mask. Until you do, even those who know you best and love you most, see you in the mask and feel your cowardice and lack of leadership, even if it is just something they realize subconsciously, even if you just wear the mask disobediently, or even if you just put it on to get past the checkpoint.
Don’t let it ever be said “When it really mattered, daddy was only a coward 5% of the time,” “When it really mattered mommy blindly obeyed authority and put us in harm’s way only 5% of the time.”
95% doesn’t cut it.
You Either Have Boundaries Or You Don’t
You either have boundaries or you don’t. You either are a person of values or you are a person of preference. He who always stands on his values is a person of values. He who is flexible with his values is a person of preference. Be that person of values.
Of Course They Want Authority Over You, But Why Do You Want Them To Have Authority Over You?
If you can do it without resorting to the methods of the great state, and to instead use common decency and polite, civil conversation with another human, how mighty you will be able to grow in the face of every such person who claims authority over you.
Their desire to have authority over such a specimen of human specialness as yourself should not be surprising. Who doesn’t like a trophy? What is surprising should be the ease and comfort with which you permit them dominion over you.
That behavior, dear reader, has no place in the life of anyone who claims himself to be a free man.
Be ready to reject the face mask. Allan Stevo’s bestselling “Face Masks in One Lesson” prepares you for that, as does his LewRockwell.com writing and his newsletter of videos, classes, and activism opportunities at RealStevo.com.
