How 'High Fidelity' Showed Me the Right and Wrong Way To Spread Liberty

I was thinking recently about the movie High Fidelity (set mostly in a record shop) made in the year 2000 and based on the book by Nick Hornby. The scene that really stuck in my mind was when two of the main characters Barry (played by Jack Black) and Dick (Todd Louiso) are selling records. Dick's approach is to identify what bands the customer likes and make suggestions of bands who influenced (or are similar) to said band. This is in stark contrast to Barry's approach, which is to bully the customer and make them feel inadequate for not having certain records, which can be seen best when he says “You don't own Blonde on Blonde? Don't tell anyone” and while shoving the record in the customers hand says “it's going to be okay.”

So what does this have to do with the price of fish? Well, I realised that when talking about liberty and freedom to random people I have often taken the same approach as Barry. “What? You don't know about fractional reserve banking?! Sit down while I lecture you aggressively for twenty minutes. Don't worry, it's going to be okay.”
 

When Caity and I interviewed Darrell Becker from VoluntaryVisions.com he gave us some great ideas for strategies when talking to other people based on non-violent communication. But a week or so after our interview I found myself getting over excited and lecturing people just as I always had.

Since realising this a while ago I have tried to figure out why I am so aggressive. I could put it down to extreme passion to spread the philosophy of liberty or extreme frustration that more people don't understand (or don't care about) this stuff. Either way, this is clearly not the approach that is going to work. I realised that you cannot bully people into accepting your philosophy. Then I had a more disturbing realisation, who are the real Barry's of the world? They clearly are the statists, dictators, politicians etc. I say this because even though Barry sold the records, he was selling them through coercion and shame – the same way the public is sold welfare and government schools. “You don't want to help the poor? Don't tell anyone.” And as you begrudgingly hand over your tax money you hear “Don't worry, it's going to be okay.” And so just like the bemused man in the movie handing over his money for the records he feels he must buy because of the shame and aggressive sales tactics so the average person is left with useless government programs that help no-one but feels (out of misplaced guilt) that they must hand over their money for them.
 

I began to contemplate people who had inspired me philosophically (not just libertarians) and I immediately thought of Murray Rothbard, Walter Block, Alan Watts, Bill Buppert and Neil Kramer (among others). When I think of how these speakers talk and what drew me to their work, I realised that it was largely the humour and the lightness they bring to their subjects. They engage on a conversational level without having to raise their voices and jump all over the person they are talking to. In tone they are more like Dick than Barry and in reaching me it certainly worked.

 

The conclusion I have come to is that if we are serious about spreading liberty we have to be more like Dick in this analogy. We have to find common ground and build on it gently and in good humour, we can't preach non aggression physically and engage in aggression verbally to get our point across, all that does is make us look philosophically inconsistent not to mention alienating the people with whom we are speaking. What I am saying here is not new, many libertarians (and people with other beliefs) have said the same thing many times, it's just that many of haven't been really listening and if we truly want liberty then that's what we must begin to do.