Presenting the Liberty Project and some more of Emerson – D29

After lunch, Isa, Alejo, Pablito, Marce, and I presented our idea on forming a liberty club, and I must say that it didn’t went as we expected. Many of our classmates misinterpreted us in many things of our project and reacted in a negative way towards it. After some intense dialogue, I found it helpful to see other perspectives and actually decided as a group that it would be better to implement some suggestions they gave us and substitute them for what we had before. After the discussion, we were able to improve our project in order to do a better work.

Later, we read some more of Emerson’s essay, which we are finding the true meaning of what Emerson is trying to tell us. I found this essay very interesting and accurate in his ideas. I’m also starting to think that Emerson is quite a libertarian for the way he writes and what he claims on individualism.

Carmen's look during the dialogue

Just dialoguing

How to advance liberty – Dialogue with Alexander McCobin – D28

This afternoon, we had AlexanderMcCobin as a guest at the MPC. Alexander is the president of the huge, pro-liberty, student movement, Students for Liberty. He studied a major in the University of Pennsylvania and now is getting a Ph.D. in philosophy from Georgetown. Our dialogue was about the best ways to advance liberty, and for that we read Leonard Read’s article, How to Advance Liberty, a Learning, not a Selling Problem. By the way, it’s a great article, which I highly recommend. Our dialogue was very interesting, dynamic, and thoughtful. As Bert told us later, “I was very proud to hear so many strong voices in the dialogue yesterday. Very thoughtful and courageous. We have come a long way from our first dialogue.” I have to agree with Bert, we have improved dramatically since our first dialogues and I hope we keep improving.

The argument, which Leonard Read proposes, is that in order to advance liberty, we must use the power of attraction and it consists of attracting people to the libertarian ideas through our passion and expertise towards these ideas. He opposes to mass media communication because he believes it’s not a selling problem but a learning problem, which we must engage personally. Although many of the MPC’ers thought like this, Alexander didn’t. He thinks marketing is very useful to accomplish the expansion of libertarian ideas. I agree with both perspectives in the sense that marketing is a useful tool to engage people to learn the libertarian ideas, and we must also encourage them through our experience and expertise for them to understand these ideas by themselves. What we all agreed on, was that there is a long road in the success of advancing liberty, nevertheless we must start now and do our best to expand them.

*Download How to Advance Liberty!