My question in all this is what will you contrive that stands some chance to have an actual, palpable effect?
Look at Black Lives Matter. Someone vomited forth this idiot hashtag forth from their shriveled intellect and it caught. Now, countless idiots of all manner of denominations are on board this derailed freight train to hell, marching, whining, threatening, demanding, twittering, mastur... oh never mind.
The point is that all high-minded philosophizing aside, a simple, clear thing is what is needed. Something that will cause people to act. Something that will catch people's imaginations. This is a tall order because you do not have stupidity on your side, which makes things tons easier in a culture now and apparently hopelessly addicted to idiocy of almost any form.
Is there anything sane, rational, and decent that would bring people together to make themselves heard and felt to the end of furthering the cause of human freedom?
That is the question you need to answer.
An excellent question, which I will examine within framework of the Liberty Blueprint that I put forward.
You are correct that the high-minded philosophizing won’t get the job done, but it does serve as a foundation for all other things to come from it. The Foundational Knowledgebase, Part #1 of the Liberty Blueprint [1. Educational guide points on the definition of liberty.], will have two level of explanation, one is a short form that is easy to read and gives simple explanations of the material. The long form will get into the cutting edge of liberty thought and be geared for the die-hard high-minded philosophizing type. The simple form however is still not a tool to win people over to liberty beyond being used as an educational point for a single issue. The Foundational Knowledgebase can serve as an education system for certain analytical learning styles but the point stands, the high-minded philosophizing won’t get the job done.
To seize the moment or capture an audience, we do need as you say, something that will catch peoples imagination. This is Part #5 of the Liberty Blueprint [5. a) Outreach to connect our educational programs to new people. b) Execution of the programs], where Part a) is the development of the marketing campaign material and Part b) is the executing of the campaign. Exactly what that is, how it will look like is something that no one person can define. This is its own process and can change daily based on the news cycle. Ideally the site and the liberty movement can do better to coordinate with this.
What we have found however, is that this is not enough. In the “state of the movement” thread [MENTION=36577]presence[/MENTION] pointed out (to which I’d agree) that a lot of the liberty movement was lost since they did not get entrenched into the liberty mindset, some were single issue voters, some just caught on to the Ron Paul campaign. This is why Part #4 of the Liberty Blueprint is important [4. Educational programs to teach what liberty is, why it’s important and how to defend it.] Once we do capture peoples imagination, then what? We can’t just send them off to the Foundational Knowledgebase and say “read all of this” – no, we need structured and well thought out educational material and pathways that will drive people to change their viewpoints on a fundamental level.
One key however is that all of the material within Part #4 and Part #5 of the Liberty Blueprint has to be philosophically sound within the Foundational Knowledgebase, Part #1. Without this, the message gets confused and obfuscated; people in our own ranks won’t even be aligned.
This also assures we have real substance to our Mission and campaigns. With lots of other movements, if you look under the hoods, they aren’t based on much substance; we are, we just have to communicate that.
So in this way there are three very separate layers of effort and material: captivate, educate and foundation. The captivate layer is very dynamic and creative. The educate layer is stable but adapts to the times, technology and learning styles. The foundation layer is left for the high-minded philosophizing and should hit a very stable state. Without all three, we get nowhere, or gains are limited. This can be seen within the Ron Paul 2008/2012 campaigns; the campaigns were part of the outreach (part #5), but we lacked in the other areas.
Another important part of #5 is that once we have someone’s attention and they are in our camp, we need a way to make sure that people progress within the education material. This can be done with having mentors, structured programs, progress tracking and monitoring and the like. This also has to be done in a palpable manner, but the point is, once someone is done with an education program the success rate that they are really onboard the movement is much higher. Putting together a successful educational system is also its own challenge. Of course there is a lot of education material out there within Part #4, it wouldn’t make sense to redevelop that, but it’s not well structured, vetted or packaged up within a system that is easy to use.
So in a nutshell, we need lots of pieces to come together. I can’t do it all, but want to structure the site to be a hub to get this done for the people who actually want to make a difference. This is where the Mission Advancement Framework (MAF) comes in, which really has a few goals:
-- Make it desirable for people to want to contribute.
-- Plan before action is taken, including setting goals, expectations and making sure efforts play a proper role within the big picture.
-- Make it easy for people to contribute by having connecting workflows between different functional needs. In this way, it’s easy to do one small thing and have that effort benefit the whole; it can be similar to an assembly line, but not exactly either.
-- Limit failure points within groups.
If someone has a better plan, great, let’s discuss it. If someone can develop a better Liberty Blueprint, I’ll be willing to debate that too.
Rather than seeing thing as being over-thought, as some here have suggested, I think the movement has done the exact opposite, these issues have been completely under-thought. We need a holistic master plan; I submit the Liberty Blueprint as being it.
