I have consulted with a mathematician friend, Dafydd
ab Hugh, and this can be stated as an equation:
[SIGMA] = F +( [mu] / [phi])
where SIGMA is Sex, F( ) is an increasing function, mu is
muscle, and phi is fat.
This is the equation that rules my desire for the physical pleasures
of life. Medieval theologians would say
I am torn between the competing sins of gluttony and lust. Every
mouthful of delicious food I eat puts me farther away from the
opportunity for great sex with some hard-bodied goddess.
Past a certain point, I find solace in eating more delicious
food than my body can burn, and I get fatter. When I get sexually
anxious enough to overcome my desire for food, I start eating
spinach and trudging up the Stairmaster. I've
been eating a lot of spinach of late.
The Stairmaster is an exercise device, usually
found in health clubs, that allows you to climb stairs without
ever reaching the top. It was invented by a man named John
Harrington. I bet John got the idea by reading the stories of
how King Eurystheus had to come up with twelve impossible tasks
for Hercules to perform. If King Eurystheus had
had a Stairmaster to put Hercules
on, he could have skipped having Hercules clean
out the Augean Stables.
Another common exercise device found in health clubs is a treadmill.
This is a sidewalk that goes nowhere, and takes you forever to
get there.
Then there are weights, and health clubs have various contraptions
for lifting them. One expends great effort lifting things that,
at the end of the efforts, are in exactly the same place they
were when you started.
Have you detected the insanity here yet? Throughout human history,
hard labor was necessary for survival. Nobody liked
it but there it was. Now, a lot of us make our money by using
our brains rather than our backs, so we get soft and
fat, which is bad for us. So we go to places where we
pay good money we earned with our brains
to do hard physical work which produces no goods whatsoever.
Why has no one picked up on this? Instead of paying slave
wages to migrant workers for picking grapes, grape growers should
hire Teri Hatcher--the gorgeous Lois Lane on
Lois & Clark--away from being the spokesmodel for Bally's
Health Clubs. Teri could seduce us brain-workers into
paying the grape-growers for the privilege of picking their
grapes. The grape-growers would hire hard labor at a negative
cost and we'd get hard bodies in return.
So this isn't a diet book.
My previous book, Stopping Power,
was subtitled "Why 70 Million Americans Own Guns."
It examined the ability of privately-owned firearms to produce
individual freedom and individual
security. This current book is going to follow
the format of Stopping Power
in that it's also a book I grew from articles and essays rather
than a book I outlined in advance; but this book will "spray
and pray" ideas full-auto rather than my more directed-fire
last book.
About a third of this book deals directly with firearms-related
topics. But unlike Stopping Power,
this current volume doesn't contain a comprehensive treatment
of the firearms issue.
So if that's what you're looking for, I'll direct your attention
to my last book.
Stopping Power set out to prove that guns
are instruments of power, and the people with guns
are the people with power. If that power
is used more by criminals and tyrants
than by decent ordinary people, then you get a crime-ridden and
tyrannical society. If that power
is, alternatively, treasured and exercised by decent individuals
to defend themselves from gangsters and powermongers, then freedom
from crime and tyranny is the social result.
In contrast, SELF CONTROL Not Gun
Control explores assorted issues which revolve around the
uses and abuses of power. Because firearms
are implements of power, some of the materials in
this book must again deal with firearms; but much of it will
deal instead with how power is exercised--either by
individuals who wish to rule their own lives,
or by other individuals who wish to rule their
lives for them.
For that, in fact, is the primary political question
in any society: if you can not, may not, or do not
exercise the power to control your own life,
someone else must and will.
Not all the explorations in this book are political
or even ideological. Some questions which would naturally arise
in any discussion of power relate to economics; so
I have some articles on that; there are some pieces on how technology
can empower us with new tools and frontiers; I've included some
discussions of literary technique and values, since
that is a kind of power with which I have had direct
experience; and if you think I went out on a limb by telling everyone
in the entertainment and publishing industries that
I approve of guns, I'm going even farther out this
time: I'm going to explain as precisely as I can what I think
about God, religion, and the place
of human beings in the ultimate scheme of things.
My friends who participate in organized religions,
and my friends who are atheists, will both find
reasons to distance themselves from me, as I find myself
in that twilight zone of philosophical theology
which used to be called "free thought."
In other words, while I believe in God, I don't believe
in religion.
So why should I alienate friends on both sides of
me?
Call it a form of flashing, if you wish; but I couldn't see putting
together a book about the power of the individual
without treating ultimate issues. Power relates to
what we do. We can't have a comprehensive discussion of that without
also getting into who and what we are.
Returning for the moment to a less lofty discussion of power,
it's notable that proponents of government control over private
guns wish always to bring the subject around to children.
Their rhetoric always focuses on the tragedies that result when
the ignorant or undisciplined among us--and children
certainly are numerous there--misuse firearms. For their political
purposes, advocates of government control over private guns
are exactly right to do so.
But the difference between a child and a grown-up--and
I am speaking personally as the father of a four-year-old girl--lies
not in the child being any less passionate than the
grown-up in the pursuit of her goals, but merely
less practiced in the selection and achievement of them. Kids
are born with an adult-sized willfulness. The job
of growing up involves learning to harness that will to the better
judgments of the brain and heart.
Our society does not handle the transition from childhood
to adulthood well. Biological puberty
makes us physical adults usually between ten and
fifteen years old; our brains need a few years
practice after the onset of physical maturity to be able to control
reproductive impulses with any rationality; our
current society passes out condoms to thirteen-year-olds
but discourages marriage until they're thirty.
But the point is, the psychological difference
between the child and adult is the relative
ability of adults to control their own lives and
negotiate various problems and dangers.
Let's solve the problem of children and guns
right here, since it can be solved easily. Firearms--like
automobiles, like matches, like pharmaceuticals,
like rat poison--are safe and useful when used properly
and dangerous and destructive when used improperly.
Some children can handle responsibility; some adults
can't. The successful ability to make rational
decisions about potential dangers is a function of an individual's
natural gifts, the parenting skills with
which they were raised, and their individual
life experiences.
It's also a function of that ability we have to reinvent ourselves,
which we can conveniently label free will.
Beyond the age of reason when the brain
has completed its growth--which is around the age of seven--the
rates at which individuals master assorted tasks
vary. In emergencies, three-year-old human beings have punched
9-1-1 and called for help. Five-year-old human beings have saved
their parents using CPR which they saw performed on television.
Ten-year-olds have soloed as airplane pilots cross-country.
At seven-years-old, Mozart was composing symphonies,
Sarah Chang was performing violin
concertos, and Bobby Fischer was winning
chess tournaments. Admittedly these are prodigies…but why
should laws be written which hold the gifted among
us to the lowest-common-denominator?
Our society's current practice of imposing uniform
age standards on the transition from childhood to
adulthood--in driving prohibitions, alcohol and tobacco
prohibitions--is collectivist bigotry.
There are some children whom I would trust with a
match or a gun without hesitation; there are some adults
whom I would keep away from anything as dangerous as a can of
hair spray.
In my novel, The Rainbow Cadenza,
I portray a space habitat with a social
contract called, simply, the Lease. The Lease
says nothing more than that signatories agree to answer for any
liabilities for their debts or damages to others. Any adult
may sign it. The test for adulthood is the ability to read and
understand the Lease. No one is required to sign the
Lease--this is a libertarian society
I'm portraying--but anyone who doesn't sign the Lease
must either find someone to act as a legal guardian…or
go somewhere else. In my imagined society, responsible
adulthood is a matter of reason and choice; childhood
ends when you are capable of ending it.
My friend, Dafydd ab Hugh,
puts it more succinctly: if you can't be trusted with a gun, you
need a keeper.
I do not believe this is a utopian goal. As a matter
of fact, I see our current society's problems as
a function of not understanding the differences between childhood
and adulthood in its political decisions.
Statism in all its pathological variants--communism,
fascism, Nazism--treats the government
as a wise parent and its citizens as irresponsible children.
The current term for this is infantalization.
Paternalistic thinking is at the base of even the
more moderate politics of the United States, though
I have often remarked that the United States has two political
parties: the Mommy Party and the Daddy
Party.
The traditional Democratic Party--the "mommy"
party--has wanted the government to take care of all our physical
needs from cradle to grave, with government child
care and education, welfare, social security,
government health care, and government jobs--and plenty of government
oversight for any remaining nominally-private activities.
The traditional Republican Party--the "daddy"
party--expects us to pay our own way, but is more concerned with
our moral upbringing: we must pray, avoid sex
out of marriage, work hard, stay out of trouble--and there's hard
punishment for anyone who disobeys.
Of the two philosophies, the Daddy Party's is
less destructive to society, but both approaches
still miss the point. You don't turn children into
adults by shielding them from either economic or
moral failure: you turn children into
adults by letting them learn from their mistakes
so deep down they know the reason for not doing it
again.
Politicians are the most arrogant, self-important busybodies in
the country. They honestly believe that if they don't solve a
problem, it won't be solved. If there's a scarcity of something
the public wants or needs--child care, Shakespeare
in the Park, literacy, a colony on Mars--the private
entrepreneur sees this as an opportunity to enter the market
and provide it. The political entrepreneur in a
legislature or executive mansion sees it as an opportunity to
create a program--and starts by making it impossible for the private
entrepreneur to compete with the government.
Gun control is at its essence a product of socialist
thinking. It has all the earmarks of virulent statism.
Gun-controllers don't want us to have guns because
we--poor children--are too emotionally unstable and
careless to handle them without shooting ourselves and our friends.
Gun-controllers don't want us to have guns because
in their view we're not supposed to protect ourselves: that's
what the police are there for. Finally, gun
controllers don't want us to have guns because they
have been working hard for the last century to create a cradle-to-grave
socialist utopia--and now that they
have vast bureaucratic mechanisms running our
lives, they're terrified that we might come to our senses
and shoot the bastards who have enslaved us.
They are right to be afraid. That's what the guns are
for.
Not that arrogant tyrants don't deserve being shot
for subverting the American Dream, but it's
a damn sight less messy to overthrow statism in
the voting booth than it is in urban guerrilla warfare.
So Congressman Charles Schumer won't have
the opportunity to accuse me of encouraging armed rebellion:
I advocate working peacefully within the system so long as we
have free speech, free elections, and occasional redress of grievances.
But I'm still going to hold onto my guns in case the
statists get one percent more arrogant and decide
to do away with free speech or free elections, too--for our own
good, of course.
Under those circumstances, Congressman Schumer--the circumstances
of King George III's America, Stalin's
Russia, Hitler's Germany, Castro's Cuba--I would not
hesitate to use my guns to overthrow the government
by force.
We must make a fundamental choice about how we want to live in
this country. We can have a country of self-reliant grown-ups
who are free to succeed or fail--and to pick themselves up after
failure to try again. In practice this means letting us decide
for ourselves what drugs we want to take, what speed
we want to drive and whether or not to strap in, how we want to
educate our children, what weapons we carry for defense.
Or, we can live wearing political swaddling in a
society that makes drugs forbidden fruit,
diverts cops from catching carjackers so they can give out speeding
tickets, convinces children that teachers
are their jailers, and shows by our intolerably high violent crime
rate that only suckers obey gun laws.
The difference between children and grown-ups
is that children are not yet competent to run their
own lives; grow-ups can and must be. We destroy the innocence
and beauty of childhood if it has no
end. We destroy the meaning and pleasures of adulthood
if we do not have the independence to control ourselves.