Federal Bureau of Investigation
935 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20535
April 25, 2012
Dear Special Agents:
I write this letter to all of you who are employed by the F.B.I., in the hopes that I can persuade you to resign.
Ever since a statement posted by Occupy Oakland quoted me, my mail has been extremely wonky. On letter from a friend of mine that mentioned events related to Occupy took 45 days to reach me.
I know in the old days, mail would sometimes be delayed because the Pony Express was attacked by hostile Indians. However, to my knowledge, the postal service no longer employs horses for their mail delivery. I am also unaware of any attacks by hostile Indians.
This leads me to believe that the chronic delays in my mail are caused by you guys. I’m guessing that you are “monitoring” my mail. You likely see this as a security measure to make sure I don’t disseminate ideas that would endanger public safety and so on.
If I attempt to see this from your perspective, if I stand in your proverbial shoes, I bet you’re patriotic and you love your country. You think the United States is exceptional because we have guaranteed freedom, and you wish to serve this country and its citizens by keeping them safe.
That’s admirable, I think. It’s the reason I joined the U.S. Army. I wanted to defend freedom, an I saw our freedom as originating from our government’s founding documents, so to defend freedom is to serve and defend the institution of government that guarantees that freedom.
I get it.
From this view, any irresponsible bomb-throwers who advocate actions against the government and its officials, or who spout off incendiary ideas that stir up the psychologically-imbalanced to engage in destructive behaviors threaten the stability of the system and threaten our freedom. And you, in defense of freedom and government, must then read my mail.
But what is “freedom”?
To answer that, we could brainstorm a list of freedoms like the freedom of religion or freedom of speech, and that would help us to understand the varieties of freedom, but it wouldn’t get us any closer to a general definition of what freedom is in the first place. What we need is a working definition.
I like this one: Freedom is the absence of regulation. That’s pretty simple and general. The less regulated you are, the more free you are—and vice-versa. At one end of the spectrum, you are completely and absolutely free; you have no external regulation or control over you. At the other end of the spectrum, you are completely regulated, and you have no freedom whatsoever.
Of course, between those two extremes you have various shades of gray, where freedom and regulation are in constant tension and your level of freedom depends upon the degree to which you are regulated.
And to make a quick point here, with our definition, it matters not what sphere of human conduct you’re talking about—whether it’s speech or gun ownership or religion or what have you. In whatever sphere, freedom is the absence of regulation and the more regulated the human conduct, whatever it is, the less free it is.
In our country, we think of ourselves as free. We have a constitution with a Bill of Rights. We’re proud of that. We live in a country where the government is founded upon the idea of individual freedom.
But as we already established, freedom is the absence of regulation. So, each time we say we are free, we are saying that we are unregulated. When we talk about free speech, we’re talking about unregulated speech; when we’re talking about the freedom to own firearms, we’re talking about the absence of regulation over firearms.
Do we really have free speech? Is speech unregulated? If we’re being truthful with ourselves, we must admit that our government certainly regulates speech. It is a crime to induce panic or to advocate the assassination of the president. Whether those regulations on speech are justified—that’s really a separate question—we have to admit that speech is regulated. And if the government passed only one law to forbid us from saying just one thing, our speech is no longer free but regulated. Our speech might be less regulated than speech in other countries where the government forbids two or three or ten instances of speech, but it is still regulated and it is still no longer free.
The same goes for religion or gun ownership. If the government passes a single law that regulates the exercise of one religious practice, then the exercise of religion is no longer free but it is regulated; and if government passes a law that regulates even one person’s ownership of one kind of firearm, then gun ownership is no longer free but is instead regulated.
Freedom is the lack of regulation. If you are regulated, you are not free.
Still, when we say we live in a free country and we speak of our freedoms, we now that our conduct is regulated, but we claim to be “free” because we think of ourselves relative to everyone else in the world. We know that we are regulated in our speech and religion and gun ownership—in every sphere of human conduct—and we don’t question that; we simply believe we are less regulated and therefore more free than people in other countries.
For that reason, we see our exceptional government as the source of our freedoms. But is this true?
Freedom is the absence of regulation. Every regulation limits freedom. If we look at this objectively, we’ll see that it could never be the case that government is the source of our freedom.
Governments govern. That is what they do. They are external authorities that regulate. As their very reason for existing is to regulate, governments by their very nature limit freedom. It is their job.
Whatever it is that regulates us, we call that a “government,” and where there is regulation, there is the absence of freedom. Government could never conceivably be the source of freedom or the protector of freedom when it is, by design, by nature, the regulator and limiter of freedom. Where there is government, there is regulation; where there is regulation, there is the absence of freedom.
So, contrary to our belief that the U.S. government is the source and the defender of our freedom, the truth is quite the opposite.
So, having established that freedom is the absence of regulation, and having established that the U.S. government is the source of our regulation and not our freedom, some would still argue that we are still relatively free; that is, we have a Bill of Rights and we are therefore more free and less regulated than people in other countries. This is what we believe. We think of the United States as exceptional.
And just a quick aside here, but to argue that we are more free than others is to say we are not completely free; it is to say we are regulated but not as regulated as the next guy. That’s like saying we are slaves, yes, but we are not treated as badly as those other slaves on that other plantation; or we are slaves, yes, but we are slaves who work in the master’s house rather than toiling in his fields. We are slaves but we are relatively better off than those others who are demonstrably less free than we are.
When looked at closely, the argument doesn’t quite feel so compelling, does it?
At any rate, if we look at the argument that we are more free and less regulated than other countries, we will see that this simply isn’t the case. The United States has far more laws and regulations than other countries, and our government systems prosecute far greater numbers of our citizens for the violation of those numerous laws and regulations.
The United States has the most complex and sprawling punishment system to regulate its own citizens, larger than any punishment system in the world. In fact, it is the largest punishment system in human history. The United States is the most regulating government that has ever existed in human history.
Not only are we less free than people in other countries around the world, but we are quite conceivable the least-free people who ever existed in the history of human kind.
That is not a belief. It is an objective, demonstrable fact. You can move to any point on the globe and not be less free or more regulated than you are right now. The only way to become less free, at least in theory, is to stay where you are and wait until tomorrow to see if your government will pass more laws to regulate you even more.
You work for the United States. You enforce its regulation of us. As long as the government exists, those of us who are subject to its regulation can never be free. I suspect you go to work each day with the best of intentions. You perform your jobs, believing in freedom and patriotism. But the fact is, from what I have just presented here, the United States government is an enemy of freedom and it relies upon you to continue its operations. This giant regulation machine continues its assault on freedom with your assistance. You are essential for the United States government to impose itself upon hundreds of millions of people who are tricked into thinking they are free.
I hope you think about what I have written and that you will share it with others who work with you. It isn’t too late for your to have healthy, happy productive lives—lives with meaning and purpose. I suspect your identities and your senses of your personal importance are inextricably tied to your occupation. Your minds have been seriously mismanaged. You probably cannot imagine life apart from being special agents making the world safe and defending freedom.
But that story isn’t true. The story you were living out is provably, undeniably untrue. You’ve been playing for the wrong team. You need a new story to be in, a new definition of yourself. Feel free to write to me when you get done rifling through my mail. If I can help you in any way to make the rough transition to becoming a real, complete human being unplugged from the monster Matrix, I will.
Please resign.
A better world is possible.
Freedom,
Sean Swain
c: Everybody