Dr. J.R.R. Tolkien is the most important fantasy writer in all of history and the most important writer of the 20th century. His two most famous works – “The Hobbit” and its sequel trilogy “The Lord of The Rings” – are the foundation of the entire fantasy genre. The themes and ideas of his writings have captivated people for almost a century now and nowhere is his keen insight into the nature of humanity, history, and society better demonstrated than in his writings about government and what we would today called the State. Tolkien in his own private letters identified himself as an anarchist. In this article I will be exploring exactly what he meant by calling himself an anarchist, why we should be paying attention to his insights about government, and the economic ideals he championed, which are fundamentally free market in nature. Using his public works and his private letters as sources, I will demonstrate that Tolkien was, in modern terms, an anarcho-capitalist.
Category: Society
What Christians Should Think of Memorial Day
Today I want to share a talk that a friend of mine delivered the Sunday before Memorial Day in 2017. He used Apostle Dieter F. Uchtdorf’s General Conference address, “Perfect Love Casteth Out Fear,” to counter the endless bombardment of propaganda that takes place at this time. My friend told the truth about the pro-state, pro-military lies that inundate us, preached the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and focused on the Gospel’s demand that we renounce violence and fear as means to achieving our social, political, or economic ends. In turn he also talks about the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, the US military, the idolatry of worship weapons as if they can keep you safe, missionary work, serving our enemies, loving those who hate us, and the way to build Zion.
What Mormon Women Had To Say About Polygamy- Part 3
This is the final part in this series where I have been comparing the actual words from women who lived in plural marriages with the claims that anti-Mormons make about what is was like for Latter-day Saint women. Unsurprisingly they do not match up. Latter-day Saint women found polygamy to be a liberating experience and say government efforts to eliminate polygamy as tyrannical and oppressive. They called the government out on the hypocrisy of claiming polygamy was oppressive whilst using state power to actually engage in oppressing women who wanted to engage in polygamy.
In the addresses reprinted herein they also discuss how polygamy helps to limit and eliminate serious social ills such as adultery, prostitution, elective abortion, and sexual immorality.
We also get an interpretation of the Twelfth Article of Faith that contradicts how most members today understand it but which the speaker learned directly from the Prophet Joseph Smith.
Finally these women saw that as the government increasingly legislated morality it wouldn’t only cause a massive loss of liberty but it would lead to social chaos, predicting the situation we find ourselves in now. They even endorse what today we would recognize as nullification.
These women were incredible and they deserve your time. You will be enlightened.
Why The Minimum Wage Has Never Worked, Will Never Work, And Only Devastates Poor People
The minimum wage is a hot topic right now with a lot of ill-informed people having very loud opinions about what it should or shouldn’t be and what the government should or shouldn’t do. As Latter-day Saints we are of course drawn into the discussion because we, as a matter of commandment, have been directed by the Lord to care for the poor and needy, to uplift the sick and afflicted, to lift up the heads that hang low, and to strengthen the feeble knees of those ready to collapse under life’s burdens. But, caught up in the tumult of political opinion, many of us have no idea what we should or shouldn’t do regarding a great many things, including the minimum wage.
This article is meant to address that by looking at the effects of the minimum wage on poverty, jobs, prices, monetary value, income inequality, and its roots as a racist practice designed to cripple the ability of minorities and women to care for themselves and their communities. After looking at all the evidence of history the conclusion becomes inescapable – the minimum wage is a racist policy designed to destroy the ability of poor people, especially minorities, to be able to care for themselves or improve their lives and that if we want to actually help everyone in society, including helping those in need, we must take drastic action to rein in government actions, including abolishing the minimum wage.
What Mormon Women Had To Say About Polygamy- Part 1
We all know how we are supposed to think and feel about the practice of polygamy by early Latter-day Saints. We have been told that it was sexist, oppressive, abusive, and harmful to women, something we should be ashamed of, so much that even many Latter-day Saints assume the assertions are axiomatic. But, are they? Are these statements in fact true or are they, like so many other things today, merely modern anti-Mormon drivel projected onto the past?
In order to figure this out I have decided to go back to listen the voices of the women who had firsthand experience with plural marriage, the polygamous women of Utah, to see what they had to say about the practice. Needless to say what I found is quite the opposite of the malignancies spread about plural marriage today. These powerful, intelligent, educated women saw plural marriage as an essential right of theirs that brought numerous blessings and protections to their lives which they would rather die fighting to protect than give up at the demand of the law. In this series I want to make their voices heard to counter the lies falsely spread in their name in by anti-Mormons. When it comes to plural marriage, thee truth about, like everything else, will set us free of the falsehoods we believe and reaffirm the truth of the Restored Gospel.
LDS Reviews: The Falcon and The Winter Soldier
Here I review “The Falcon and The Winter Soldier,” Disney’s newest MCU show, not only for entertainment value but for the messages and ideals it promotes as a piece of mass media. It doesn’t shy away from issues of military violence, state propaganda aimed at civilians, poverty, political oppression, blowback, racism, hope, and friendship. After giving a basic synopsis of the show I then address each of these themes and how they are explored within the context of the show, comparing them to the ideals and ethics of Christianity and human liberty.
What About The Ages Differences Between Joseph Smith And His Wives?
It is common and unsurprising for anti-Mormons to attack the character of the Prophet Joseph Smith. By doing so they can elicit fury from among their co-believers and engender confusion and hatred among the ignorant. A common tactic I have encountered recently is the argument that even if Joseph Smith wasn’t a pedophile (an accusation I have disproven elsewhere and a link to which will be in this article) they nevertheless argue that because some of his plural marriages were to people significantly younger than him those marriages were necessarily abusive by default because of the differing levels of maturity and therefore power and equality present in the relationship. In this article I dismantle this argument and evaluate its accusations and assumptions in the light of what we know of the culture and history of the era that the Prophet Joseph Smith lived in. Ultimately, I demonstrate that for multiple reasons this argument is incorrect and nothing but a fallacious act of presentism that has little to do with Joseph Smith or the times he lived in.
How Language Is Used To Convince You Of Transgender Ideas And How To Fight Back
There is a lot being said right now about gender dysphoria, transgenderism, and the usage of personal pronouns to affirm a person’s individual gender identity. In this article I cite several studies to prove a few very important things: Language has a massive influence on the way that we see the world, that altering how we speak, even in small grammatical ways, has a huge impact on our consciousness itself, that the repetition of information over time changes the way we think and convinces us that what we are saying or hearing is true, and that ideas spread like virus, co-opting what we believe and how we live and changing them to turn us into ideological spreaders. I then put it all together to argue that the usage of preferred pronouns takes advantages of all these facts and act like a viral vector to infect us with the beliefs and ideals of transgenderism. The ultimate culmination of this is a form of reality control where what we believe is re-written by the things we hear repeatedly until we win the victory over ourselves and adopt the ideas in question as our own – in this case transgenderism. Finally, I discuss how we can resist this process and why liberty is so essential in establishing a society where all people can live as they believe.
The Great Dangers of Democratic Socialism to Minorities
There is a lot written about the titanic failures of Socialism and I’m sure more will be written in the years to come. But, thanks in part to the fetishization of democracy and the propaganda fed into the minds of people that convinces them of the lie that all you need in order to have a just, equal, free, and prosperous society is to “enhance democracy” within it, there is not enough written about the grave dangers of democratic socialism. And I use the term grave here exactly because that is where most minority peoples would end up in a democratic socialist society – in the grave. Every genocide, every act of slavery, every war crime, every act of segregation, every act of apartheid, every act of systemic oppression has always been a public, democratic, popular endeavor. Placing within the hands of a majority the power to do whatever it wills has been and always will be a disaster. This article is about how “democratic socialism” does nothing but exacerbate these threats to the lives and liberties of those weakest in any society – its racial, ethnic, and religious minorities.
President Oaks Taught The Principles of Anarchy at General Conference
This past weekend was General Conference and President Dallin H. Oaks delivered an address where he outlined five inspired principles of government which he taught are what make the U.S. Constitution an inspired document and why Latter-day Saints should feel some special loyalty to the document. Outside of the typical American culturalism in his talk, what really astounded me was that the five principles he outlined are not unique to the U.S. Constitution. They’re not even fully realized in the Constitution because of how the violence of statism limits or altogether prevents these inspired principles from operating to their fullest. But they do in consensual, non-statist government systems such as those found in libertarianism, anarchism, and voluntaryism. In this article I explore each principle individually, demonstrate how they are hobbled in the U.S Constitution, and how they are actually principles of consensual governments like anarchy, libertarianism, and voluntaryism because those forms of government allow these divine principles to operate at their highest and holiest potentials. In teaching these divine principles as the basis for righteous governments, President Oaks has inadvertently made the strongest argument for the rejection of the U.S. Constitution and the embracing of anarchy I have heard from any General Authority.