Leading the Revival of Individualism & Self Reliance

Posts

The Titan Among The Enlightenment’s Giants.

/in /by

Poetic Justice Warriors represent many disciplines of human endeavor – philosophers, inventors, entrepreneurs, economists, writers, statesmen, educators, publishers, self-made men, and defenders of the natural rights of man, but no one has led his peers in all of them except Poetic Justice Warrior Benjamin Franklin. However, one of Franklin’s notable attributes, one that is unique to him, was that of a humorist.

Poor Richard Saunders

In the early days of mass publication, pamphleteering was a common way to communicate political ideas, and the newspaper industry was in its infancy. At the time, many articles were published under the byline of fictitious names, or pseudonyms. Franklin was no exception, and he used this technique to his advantage. This didn’t happen on its own; as a young boy Franklin was a voracious reader who would borrow books in the evening, read all night, and return them early the next day. And he taught himself creative writing techniques by rewriting the essays of others from sparse notes, and converting his own prose into poetry, and then back to prose, all to improve his vocabulary.

At age 15 Franklin created his first pseudonym, Silence Dogood, and secretly contributed a column to his older brother’s paper because it never would have been published otherwise. In it he would poke fun at various contradictions and injustices, and in one such article Silence explained,

I am naturally very jealous for the rights and liberties of my country, and the least appearance of an encroachment on those invaluable privileges, is apt to make my blood boil exceedingly.

A few years later Franklin created two other pennames, Martha Careful and Celia Shortface, and wrote a series of letters to the editor of a Philadelphia paper that were humorously critical of another paper’s abortion articles. Franklin was eventually able to buy the rival paper and shortened the name to The Pennsylvania Gazette.

At the age of 26, in 1732, Franklin began the publication he is most famous for, Poor Richard’s Almanack, and again used humor and wit to best his rivals in the publishing business – they were no match. But there was more to his writing than a humorous turn of phrase. Franklin was best known for inspiring others in behaviors for living well, especially among America’s rising entrepreneurial class, or as columnist Jon Hersey explains:

These proverbs helped make Franklin a symbol of the self-made man: he who helps himself by helping others. Franklin’s focus on mutual benefit proved to be another aspect of his tremendous success.

By the time Franklin was 42 years old he was wealthy, retired from his printing empire, and a philosopher whose inspiration was known and felt throughout the colonies, and he literally had the second half of his life ahead of him.

The Poetic Justice Warrior

In June 1775, the Continental Congress established a network of post offices in order to ensure the rapid transmission of information throughout the colonies, and appointed Franklin, America’s Interconnected Individual, its first Postmaster General,  In December 1776, Franklin arrived in Paris as America’s ambassador to France, for the express purpose of winning the French over as an ally in the war with the British. Of course, this was not going to be easy, and Franklin was the only man in the world up to the task. He was already a world renowned scientist, journalist, and philosopher. Or as President John Adams relates:

There was scarcely a peasant or a citizen, a valet de chambre, coachman or footman, a lady’s chambermaid or a scullion in the kitchen, who was not familiar with Franklin, and who did not consider him as a friend to human kind.

In France, Franklin was a charming conversationalist who could speak with natural elegance in a straightforward manner. The man was a scholar who had taught himself five languages, started America’s first volunteer fire department, and city police force. With the successful prosecution of the war for personal liberty, Franklin returned to America to join another campaign, one that would eventually extend natural rights to all Americans. In 1787, he was elected president of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery. In 1789 it issued a statement:

Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature, that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils. The unhappy man, who has long been treated as a brute animal, presents a serious duty incumbent on us, to instruct, to advise, to promote in them habits of industry, to furnish them with employments suited to their circumstances, and to procure their children an education.

The Constitutional Conventioneer

With the failure of the Articles of Confederation, delegates from every state except Rhode Island convened in Philadelphia, in 1787, to fix the problem. Pennsylvania’s delegate was the 81 year old Benjamin Franklin, who along with George Washington, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, would have the greatest impact on the Convention. In fact, Thomas Jefferson had previously commented on both Washington and Franklin by saying that he “never heard either of them speak ten minutes at a time, nor to any but the main point. They laid their shoulders to the great points, knowing that the little ones would follow themselves.”

What the Convention ultimately constructed was a Constitution using Madison’s Virginia plan as its foundation. Historian Donald T. Phillips explains:

It was a completely new idea. A simple proposal that, when presented to the convention at large, caught all the other delegates by surprise. It was imaginative, creative, audacious, and almost radiant in its artistic balance and symmetry.

This achievement was characterized by John Adams as “The greatest effort of national deliberation that the world has ever seen.” George Washington simply declared the Constitution “a miracle.” During the signing ceremony, Franklin gazed upon a painting behind Washington’s desk, it was of the sun low on the horizon, and mentioned that painters “often found it difficult to distinguish in their art a rising sun from a setting sun. But now at length, I have the happiness to know that it is a rising not a setting sun.”

Common Sense Inspiration

Poetic Justice Warriors inspire people to act, they give people a sense of purpose. Prior to the American Revolution, Franklin inspired the British commoner Thomas Paine, who was a failure at everything he tried, but a passionate writer, to become a pamphleteer in America. The first of many editions of Common Sense was an immediate sell-out. After the Revolution began, he inspired General Washington to hire the Prussian Baron von Steuben as Inspector General of his army at Valley Forge, and turn a ragtag, ill equipped group of volunteers into a formidable fighting force.

But most importantly, Franklin was an inspiration to every strata of society. In the 18th century, it was commonly believed that aristocrats and commoners would live and die as such, but Franklin worked to erase this distinction. He was a commoner who became a wealthy self-made man, who lived a life of reason, purpose, and pride, and fought for all Americans, including the children of slaves, to be able to do the same. Upon learning of Franklin’s death in 1790, the National Assembly in France called for three days of national mourning in homage to –

The rights of man and to the philosopher who has most contributed to extend their sway over the whole earth. Antiquity, would have raised altars to this mighty genius, who, to the advantage of mankind, was able to restrain alike thunderbolts and tyrants.

Poetic justice served. Poetic Justice Warriors wanted.

The Uniquely American Self-Made Man

/in /by

Is there really such a thing as a self-made man or woman? The common wisdom of the progressive left is no, as famously expressed by President Barack Obama when he said “you didn’t build that.” Obama went on to say that anyone’s success is because of the circumstances created by government policy and government spending. This implies that everyone has a duty to government service, and even worse, it implies that successful people have a duty to “give back.” To believe this drivel is to ignore two facts – that self-made men and women pay for everything, and that our government exists by the consent of the governed.

These are the self-made men and women who gave us the most free and comfortable living standards the world has ever known. Yet we owe them no duty, just admiration and gratitude. Frederick Douglass is the Poetic Justice Warrior who epitomizes this, and who created and delivered the Self-Made Men lectures in 1872.

If not ourselves great, we like to explain why others are so. We are stingy in our praise to merit, but generous in our praise to chance. Besides, a man feels himself measurably great when he can point out the precise moment and circumstance which made his neighbor great. He easily fancies that the slight difference between himself and his friend is simply one of luck.

Perhaps no one in American history has a better claim to the title self-made man than the one who escaped slavery to become one of the America’s greatest anti-slavery activists, and an author, lecturer, and diplomat.

The Self-Creation Process

The Self-Made Men lectures celebrated heroic figures who rose from obscurity through their own hard work. Douglass referred to engineers, poets, political revolutionaries, and industrialists. “If they climbed high, they built their own ladders.” But Douglass also acknowledges the role of contemporaries and predecessors in helping everyone create their own fortunes.

Properly speaking, there are in the world no such men as self-made men. We have reaped where others have sown, and that which others have strewn, we have gathered. The brotherhood and inter-dependence of mankind are guarded and defended at all points.

Yet, this does not diminish the idea that everyone has the capacity for self-creation, as this draw my life video demonstrates, and Douglass knew how it was done and what it meant. Self-made men do not accomplish their status through luck or fate. They accomplish it with vision, ingenuity, and perseverance, or as Douglass put it – WORK! WORK!! WORK!!! WORK!!!!

One thing Douglass never told his audience was to follow your dreams. To him, this would encourage passivity and negate self-reliance. While dreams are important, they are the easy part. For Douglass, to have ambition, will, and aspirations is very self-regarding, and this is necessary for self-creation. It has nothing to do with service to your fellow man, that is a natural consequence of living free and with dignity, or what Douglass calls “mutual esteem.” And to Douglass, self-creation has an aesthetic quality:

Art is a special revelation of the higher powers of the human soul. There is in the contemplation of art, an unconscious comparison constantly going on in the mind of the pure forms of beauty and excellence, which are without, to those which are within and native to human heart. It is process of soul-awakening self-revelation. Art is both an expression of ideals, and a means by which we can contemplate those ideals more objectively.

As biographer Timothy Sandefur says about Douglass’ philosophy, “making art plays a role in self-creation and self-definition. The self-made man is like an artist who sculpts his life and his actions to reflect his model of the ideal.”

Asserting One’s Abilities

During the Civil War, Frederick Douglass served as recruiting officer for the Union Army. However, he never urged black Americans to enlist out of service to their country. They owed the country nothing. To Douglass, the United States owed black Americans the right to fight, to be free to assert themselves, to build their sense of self-worth. As he famously said, “citizenship rests on three boxes – the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box.” Douglass was not an advocate of non-violence, but an enemy of those who initiate force. Or as he put it during recruiting speeches, “Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow.” In other words, the threat and use of violence shackles you, don’t depend on others to win your freedom and dignity.

In April 1863, Douglass published a letter encouraging blacks to enlist in the 54th Massachusetts Regiment. In it he gave nine reasons to enlist. The first one was a question of action or inaction. Another reason was that, “every Negro-hated and slavery-lover in the land regards the arming of Negroes as a calamity and is doing its best to prevent it.” Others include the necessity for learning the use of firearms, defending themselves against accusations of cowardice, and taking ownership of their freedom, dignity, and self-respect. The eighth reason was to help prevent America from drifting back into pro-slavery compromise at the end of the war, which was Douglass’ greatest fear.

What Douglass wrote was echoed over 100 years later by Poetic Justice Warrior Ayn Rand in her address to the graduating class at West Point in 1974, “The defense of one’s country means that a man is personally unwilling to live as the conquered slave of any enemy, foreign or domestic.”

The Romantic Manifesto

Douglass was the most photographed American of the 19th century, and someone who delivered lectures on the new science of picture making. He said about asserting one’s self in this gentler context:

Making pictures is one of the most basic aspects of what it means to be human. Picture making is the process by which man is able to posit his own subjective nature outside of himself, so that it becomes the subject of astute observation and contemplation. When we make pictures, we make an abstract ideal concrete.

His portraits are unsmiling, intentionally so. He refused to play into the caricature of the happy, docile slave. Much like early 20th century black leaders such as J. B. Stradford, O. W. Gurley, and W. E. B. DuBois refused to be referred to by their first names by white men. It was a blatant form of condescension in the Jim Crow South. But Douglass’ sense of life was utterly romantic. His favorite authors were Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, and Lord Byron because of their timeless characters of nobility, idealism and strength. Douglass was also a dedicated advocate for women’s suffrage, he understood clearly that female slaves suffered most. As Douglass explains in his autobiography.

Conscience is an interior dialogue with the self, and slavery obliterates it. The self-made man who asserts his ability and becomes an independently real person, cannot outsource the functions of conscience. On the contrary, he seeks to bolster his conscience, and exercise it more vigorously over his actions so that the story of his life as whole will be a comprehensive, focused, and rewarding one.

A Poetic Justice Warrior like Douglass would never submit to the unchosen obligations of the social justice warrior who boasts “you didn’t build that.”

 

 

Write for CFI