IntroduceYourself - I'm Rollo McFloogle!

A few weeks ago, after doing a podcast session with @insanityisfree, we were talking about various social media platforms.  I asked him what other platforms he thought I should be on, and he said ALL OF THEM.  We got talking about the avenues he was pursuing and I liked what he said about Steemit.

So here I am!

My name (well, pseudonym) is Rollo McFloogle.  I'm here because I'm a voluntarist.

What's a voluntarist?

A voluntarist, sometimes spelled voluntaryist, is someone who believes that all transactions and associations ought to be voluntary.  Therefore, the use of force against peaceful individuals is wrong.  I think that most people wouldn't have much trouble with such statements, but if we're going to say that they are true, then we need to take them all of the way to their logical conclusions.  This means that institutions that use coercion, i.e. violence or the threat of violence against peaceful individuals, stand in the way of voluntarist ethics and should not exist.

This means the state.  The idea of getting rid of the state is a huge pill to swallow for nearly everyone.  It certainly was for me!  We'll talk about how I got to where I am now shortly.  But first, why didn't I just call myself a libertarian or an anarchist?  I am of these things and I will often refer to myself as both, when the terms have taken on all sorts of perverted meanings.  Libertarian is a big tent term and could mean anything from what I am all the way to a Republican who thinks pot should be legal.  And hearing the word "anarchy" just makes people's heads explode.

Oh, and one more thing, I am a thin libertarian.  While I have my own personal moral convictions, I don't think that we need to agree upon some certain moral code before we can achieve a stateless society.  That's what the market is for!

How I became a voluntarist

I wasn't born this way--or actually, I was.  We all were!  We're conditioned to believe the status quo.  It's all around us.  It's normal.  And even if how we structure society is currently flawed with obvious injustices, since the vast majority of people believes it to be correct means that those like me have a lot of explaining to do.

I grew up in a Catholic family with strong conservative views.  On a side note, I still am a practicing Catholic and do believe that it compliments my voluntarism perfectly well.  I developed an interest in politics kind of early on and proudly saw myself as part of the vanguard against the liberal slime that I believed was what was preventing the United States from reaching its full potential.  And like many people on both sides of the typical political paradigm, I had nothing but good intentions.  It was sometime around college that I started to develop more of an interest in economics (since I had to beat the liberal economic agenda!) and the seeds of the idea that the state got in the way of progress started to take root.

And I continued to debate people.  Some people were really stubborn.  I knew they were wrong, but I didn't have much of an answer for their rebuttals.  So I started reading.  And what I found was surprising.  Not only did I prove to myself that my debate opponents were wrong, but I also discovered that I was wrong as well.  That made me want to keep on reading.

I was still holding on to my view that we needed the state for a military to protect us from all of the evildoers around the world who hate us for our freedom.  Then one day at work not long after I graduated college, I was talking to a coworker about politics.  We had a lot of similar views and he mentioned something about Ron Paul.  I replied (and I cringe recalling this), "Oh, he crazy."  He asked why.  I had no response.  So he suggested I read a book by Ron Paul called A Foreign Policy of Freedom.  The book is a collection of Dr. Paul's speeches given to Congress regarding foreign policy.  And every time he warned them about a foreign engagement and they did it anyway, the next speech was Dr. Paul pointing out that all of his predictions came to fruition.

It was amazing to me.  That flipped a switch inside of me.  And then I read The Road to Serfdom and the hook was truly set.

So what am I doing about it?

I was talking to a friend of mine, Slappy Jones, one night and we discovered a shared interest in free market economics and how the state gets in the way of all sorts of things.  I remember being ready to go home for the night and the next thing I knew it was after 3 AM.  We started texting and emailing back and forth about liberty and eventually we tossed the idea of starting a blog to get our ideas out to the rest of the world.

Last month actually marked the 5 year anniversary of our blog, mcfloogle.com.  We had no idea what we were doing when we started, but we've learned along the way.  We've also added a weekly podcast that is a few weeks over a year old.

A lot of people criticize the internet activism.  They say, "Go out and actually do something!"  I agree, but with so much of our lives online nowadays, this is doing something!  The internet and conversations with people I will never meet in "real life" had tremendous impacts on my conversion to voluntarism.  With so much information and propaganda promoting the status quo, we need voices pushing back with a message of the importance of the individual and his rights.  

But it's more than just that.  I have a number of "real life" friends who read the blog and listen to the podcast and have had changes in the way they think as well.  It's great to have the outlets for a few reasons:

1. Not everyone wants to listen to your pro-liberty message when you want to, so they can read or listen whenever they want
2. There's no pressure to agree with me at the moment since I'm not there with them
3. As we get older, we move away (well, I did), so we don't get to hang out as much as we used it.

I don't just use the blog and podcast as my only means to abolish the state.  I also do my best to live my life in a way that advances that goal.  This means supporting other activists like myself, buying bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, engaging in various forms of agorism, paying as little I can feel I can get away with in taxes, etc.

So really, the best way to win people over is to show them that you're living a happy, productive, and fulfilling life.  Sooner or later they'll want to know what you're doing so they can copy it for themselves!

I'm using Steemit as yet another social media outlet to meet new people who share my views and get the voluntarist message out to people who might be open to it.  I love this platform, so I plan to use it to talk about some other interests as well, like gardening, cooking, fishing, and maybe even some boxing.  I've already started making use of Dtube as a mirror for our Youtube channel.

Thanks for reading and I'm looking forward to my time here!  Please, introduce yourself to me below!

If you're on other social media outlets, please connect there as well:

• The main blog, McFloogle.com (Be sure to sign up for the email list there!)
• Our weekly podcast, The Rollo and Slappy Show  
  • iTunes
  • Stitcher
  • YouTube
• Our YouTube channel
• Twitter: Rollo and Slappy
• Our Facebook page
• Gab.ai
• Patreon
• Hatreon