Mr. Elliot and The Spark
When Mr. Elliot was a kid he could remember back to when The Spark was the strongest.
Creativity and freedom flowed through him. He could remember when his energy to go out and learn new things about the world flowed through him and was like second nature. He thought back to when he was curious, when he used to take things apart to find out how they worked, where the world was new and open to him. He was young and impressionable, like a blank canvas.
From there the spark became larger. He could remember having so much energy to pursue things. After a few years, he couldn't remember when or at one point, but the spark began to grow weaker. He could remember the first day of school, how he didn't want to go. Kids thought there was something wrong with him, he didn't learn the way others did. He thought that might have been when the spark began to grow smaller. Each passing day of repetitive indoctrination into a society, in a system where the end goal is to produce workers; there was no place for the young Mr. Elliot's curiosity or energy to question things and think freely.
Him and his best friend saved their curiosity for after school and weekends where they would ride bikes into the wilderness, explore nature, and write and tell stories. The spark was still strong, but he could remember how year after year of mindless repetitiveness and getting yelled at by authorities dulled the spark. He was still able revive it relatively quickly.
Eventually, slowly but surely, now looking back Mr. Elliot could remember giving in to the indoctrination. The State is your friend, pledge allegiance and your life to the collective, it is shameful to think individually outside of the normal ideas and whitewashed version of history presented to him each year in his early career of 12 years of forced indoctrination. There were years of rebellion where the young Mr. Elliot tried to go against the grain and he was seen as not being normal.
During summer breaks he volunteered to be a day camp counselor, teaching younger kids about nature and the woods. He hung out with some kids there and they became friends. Summer after summer, he would look forward to the two weeks where he could have freedom away from society and where he was free to think freely among his new friends. He met a girl there and had his first kiss on the picnic table near one of the pavilions. In the evenings when he wasn't taking younger kids on hikes he was experimenting with drugs, cigarettes, and all the things he wasn't supposed to do because they were thought of as being immoral.
The last year they got together they vowed they would remain friends, but years went by and they drifted apart. Some had kids, some moved to different parts of the country and got jobs. They were too busy for such childish things.
He met a kid there named Nick and they became best friends. Nick grew plants in his parent's yard and sold buds to his friends to make money after school. The slave enforcers eventually caught up to Nick's evil deeds and he was kidnapped and thrown in a cage for a year. Mr. Elliot wrote him a few times and his letters were censored and surveilled to make sure he wasn't speaking ill of the Panopticon.
Still, Mr. Elliot was misdirected and led astray by years of repetitive brainwashing. He eventually did what he believed at the time was an honorable thing and joined the military. He believed from his years of institutional confined learning and being taught what to think that he was fighting for freedom. A few months after 17 year old Elliot joined, an event happened in the country that would cause a paradigm shift in the government's ability to exponentially grow government and take away more human rights from its citizens (recommended reading -- Crisis and the Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government).
Elliot began to see the contradictions, why do they have to take away freedom in order to protect freedom?
Now what about the Spark? Years in the military had all but extinguished it. Mentally, he had been trained to follow orders and kill on command. He looked back, and although he felt he was doing right at the time, for him as an individual it snuffed out what was left of his individualism (one of the goals of The State). He tried going AWOL several times, but they kept ordering him to come back. Every time he would report in for duty, he noticed obvious signs of waste, fraud, and abuse. Millions upon millions spent each year being flushed on useless projects and "defense." For a standing military that had originally been commissioned as a defense force it displayed signs of being an aggressor. He never noticed it throughout his career of mindless orders, until later he realized this was an Empire.
"Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."-James Madison
The constant beat downs when Elliot questioned anything or tried to think freely left him, now in his late 20's, a broken man. He took up excessive drinking to fall asleep and to feel good about himself. The State's enforcers locked him up a few times for his drunken escapades and forced him to pay fines and dragged out legal problems. At this point, whatever spark was left in Elliot had all been extinguished.
Shin-Kwang-Ho - Empty Kingdom 2013
Getting out of a four year enlistment, his only hope was that he continued to pursue and read the ideas of Ayn Rand and others, but most of his time was wasted after work with grand political crusades which ended accomplishing nothing. Elliot finished college and started a dead end job at a large bank. The back and forth rat race routine each day, although it was self imposed, a few years went by and it seemed like he was just existing. This was no way to live.
The Rat Race - Drawing by Miles Arakaki
After years of mundane routines and stumbling around in the dark, something happened to Elliot that caused him to question his life, to see it for what it is, to get off the government prescribed drugs, to sober up and start living, to restart the spark. Mr. Elliot is older now and looks back on his life so far. Although he doesn't regret his past, he continues to use his life experiences as lessons to strengthen himself now as the individual that he is now.
It's present day
and it's been about a year since Elliot discovered the philosophies of Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises. With each book he begins to understand the world in a whole new way. It is exciting and Elliot's spark grows intensely now, it's so bright it can be seen by others in the things he does, in his kindness and wisdom. For once in his life he feels like he is not just spinning his wheels or caught up in some large State engineered time wasting cycle. Occasionally, he does think back and compares the brightness of his Spark to when he was a kid. He still lives within society, but he also pursues counter-economics and educates people where he can on the principals of Voluntaryism through writing or slipping a casual remark into a conversation with Statists.Instead of feeling beat down all the time from drunkenness, prescribed drugs, and time wasting energy zapping propaganda, he feels like he has gotten the Spark back. He feels like he has a whole new chance on life. It is a new beginning after all these years in the dark.
Mr. Elliot holds the Spark closely and carefully and never wants to let go ever again.
I hope you enjoyed the story of Mr. Elliot and holding on to the Spark inside him. Some of us are so beat down from the struggles of life and the State's myriad of laws that the citizenry must follow as well as the products of our labor being syphoned off to the parasitic class. It can get tough at times and sometimes you can wander down the wrong road, but there's always an opportunity to get back on the right track, regain that spark that we all had inside us when we were young and free.
