The Imaginary Revolution

Some 147 years after the first colonists arrived at Sirius 4 from Earth, a new commonwealth was formed, dedicated to the notion that free people living by a spirit of zero aggression could live in peace and prosperity with one another.

At the ceremony establishing the commonwealth, Raymond Douglas Kaliber proposed "a bold experiment in humanity based on these tenets: Love your neighbor as yourself. Interact with love, not force or violence. Give more than you receive."

But before the people of Sirius 4 were ready for commonwealth, they tried to overcome tyranny the old-fashioned way: by force. It turned out to be an imaginary revolution, replacing one violent regime with another. Kaliber suggested another way: Here is his story in his own words.
The Imaginary Revolution is available as an ebook or a hardcover print edition. A paperback edition and audiobook will be available early in 2013. I offer three options:

To buy the book for Kindle at Amazon for $4.99, click here.

To buy the handsome softcover print edition for your bookshelf – price an astonishing $5.95 – click here.

For more information, email me at warren@warrenbluhm.com. Let's have a conversation.

A preview of the finished product

Are you ready for a little revolution?

If you've been paying attention to the countdown in the righthand column of this blog, you know it's only a matter of days before the novel The Imaginary Revolution will be published. As my gift to you, I have prepared a sampling of chapters from the novel to whet your appetite for the real thing.

The story of how Sirius 4 threw off its shackles will be available for public consumption starting Dec. 15, 2012 – Bill of Rights Day – in both ebook form and a handsome, hardcover print edition. This is your opportunity to get a taste of it so you can decide whether to put it on your Christmas list.

The link below (click on the colorful green button with the blue whale) will lead you to a place where you can download a .zip file containing the Imaginary Revolution sampler in .pdf, .epub and .mobi forms. Enjoy! And consider coming back on Dec. 15.

Click here to download your free sampler of chapters from the novel The Imaginary Revolution, scheduled for release on Dec. 15, 2012. P.S. The Oronjo site is designed to ask you if you want to donate a little something in exchange for the gift. It's free – just click past that and enjoy!

The Tiny Dot

"A situation too weird for 99.999% of people to adequately explain."

For anyone who wonders if the principle of noncooperation in The Imaginary Revolution seems too "unrealistic."

Entry 89. The End – an editors' note

One planet’s journey to freedom has now been told via this blog, from the perspective of Ray Kaliber, who has received much of the credit for bringing about the Commonwealth of Sirius 4. The task that remains for us is to compile these sometimes rambling thoughts into a coherent narrative for you, the reader. Our goal is to make this available for your purchase and perusal on Dec. 15, 2012.

Why that date? This is a story of liberty, and on Dec. 15, 1791, a new nation on Earth ratified a Bill of Rights, intended to affirm the rights of the individual by prohibiting the new nation’s government from violating those rights. In the centuries since, that list of 10 tenets has been the subject of much discussion.

The nation had been forged a few years earlier by violent revolution against a far-off state that had routinely trampled on the rights on the list, as states are wont to do. The Bill of Rights was championed by people not so concerned about that far-off former threat as about making sure the newly formed state never behaved as tyrannically, ensuring that the revolution did not turn out to be an imaginary one.

To release the story of The Imaginary Revolution on Dec. 15, then, is a nod to the anniversary of that revolutionary document. The extent to which Ray Kaliber’s story is relevant to the ongoing discussion is entirely up to the reader.

Watch this blog and warrenbluhm.com for updates about how to obtain your copy of The Imaginary Revolution.

Entry 88. Unlikely brothers

I consider one of the greatest proofs of the Tenets of Common Wealth to be my friendship today with Fred Masterson. By trying to reason with him instead of cowering in fear, by settling for disarming him after he took the shot instead of returning kill force with kill force, I reached something inside him.

“I thought you were a dangerous lunatic,” Fred told me some time later, an ironic statement if I ever heard one. “A world with no government, sovereign individuals working out their differences without the force of law to compel them – it sounded like an false idea of a utopia just waiting for a strong dictator to swoop in and convince people otherwise. In fact, I was pretty sure you expected to become that dictator.”

“Me?” I said, and apologized immediately for laughing at him.

“Sure. Who better, if anarkhia didn’t work, to be the benevolent dictator who would step in and make it work? You were telling us and showing us how it could work anyway, so you knew we’d turn to you and beg you to become the leader and force us to behave. And if I was wrong, if you weren’t planning to set yourself up, someone else could come forward and say he was taking over because the commonwealth wasn’t working.”

“If I was dead, maybe the consensus would be that we need a government after all.”

“Exactly.”

“What changed your mind, my friend?”

“You called me your friend.”

“Of course, that’s what you are,” I said, confused.

“No. That’s what changed my mind: You took me as your friend, after I tried to kill you and put a hole in your shoulder. I saw no ambition for power in you. You really believe those tenets you talk about all the time.”

“I do,” I admitted. “And if I didn’t treat you with love, if I didn’t respond to your violence with love, if I didn’t give you more than you were willing to give me, we wouldn’t be friends, would we? I believe in those tenets because I’ve seen them work time and again.”

“As have I – now,” Fred Masterson said.

One night not long afterward, I walked the beach near sunset looking across the harbor at the oxygen-nitrogen generator and hearing the distant hum of its machinery, my arm around a beautiful red-haired woman, both her arms around me, and I felt a sudden throb where the slug had gone through my left shoulder. My cry of pain ended with a joyful peal of laughter, knowing I would always carry a reminder of my deep friendship with Fred Masterson – a friendship forged by an errant bullet.

Entry 87. The third time

“Oh! It’s you.”

If Fred Masterson had pulled the trigger at that moment, those would be remembered as my last words, and the historical conversation would be ablaze with speculation about what I meant. Did I know Fred before that moment? Was I aware that an assassin was afoot? Why didn’t I act more surprised? Conspiracy theorists would seize upon it as evidence I knew all about the plot and perhaps even faked my own death, choosing to live out my remaining days in peaceful obscurity.

But somehow, my lack of surprise and seeming acceptance of the moment made Fred Masterson pause, and those would not prove to be my final words.

If my calm kept me alive for a few seconds, I would strive to stay calm until we could get the barrel of the fun pointing somewhere other than the center of my chest.

“Here’s the thing, sir,” I said as cheerfully as I could – which was more cheery than I ever imagined I could be in those circumstances. “You can’t kill an idea. In fact, if you martyr a man who has an idea, you make the idea stronger. If you kill me here, the nonviolent revolution will continue. The commonwealth will go on.”

The assassin hesitated for only a moment. I saw his eyes glaze over with confusion, but they sharpened again almost at once.

“You may be right,” he said with conviction, “but they’ll have to go on without you.”

I had to admit, he had a point. I prepared to die.

Fortunately, John Hemlock and Buffalo Springsteen realized what his answer would be, and they had already sprung when he fired.

They barreled into his body together just as the weapon went off, knocking his aim aside so that instead of blasting a hole in my heart, he blasted a hole through my left shoulder. John Hemlock had saved my life for the third time, this time with the help of my beloved.

I had barely an instant to stare stupidly at the jumble of bodies in front of me, and then the pain receptors in my shoulder connected with my brain.

I have to say, I do not wish to be shot again. Ever.

Entry 86. The fall of the Sirian state

One of the basic principles of free enterprise is that the market determines the survival of a business. If you don’t deliver a quality product or service, if you don’t listen to your clients, if you abuse your clients, if you price yourself out of the market, your business will sputter and fail.

Governments through the ages have been immune to this principle – to a point. People endured products and services of questionable quality; governments ignored the wishes of its clients or even abused them; fees and taxes were increased without regard to the taxpayers’ ability to pay.

At some point in the decline of a business, the customers lose their trust in the product and stop buying it. Often they turn to a competitor, but sometimes they realize they no longer need the product. Centuries ago businesses and industries thrived around products that depended upon horse power; when horsepower became a unit of mechanized energy rather than a literal description, those businesses dwindled to nothing.

At some point in the decline of a government, the customers lose their trust and change the regime.

The most clever governments gave people the option to switch leaders on a regular basis through the voting process; that relieved the sense of hopelessness that comes when a leader seized control for life. It also reduced the violence with which governments were overthrown.

But when our violent revolution turned out to be illusory, when Silas Fredersen was replaced by Badiah Sinclair and almost nothing improved, and when 35 Sirians were killed by the forces of “free” Sirius 4, a different switch was thrown in people’s psyches.

Yes, our lives depend on choosing the right leader – but we came to understand that means leading our own lives, not handing the reins to someone else.

Yes, we need to work together and respect each other’s boundaries, but no one need dictate to a free people how that happens.

And so, in the aftermath of my trial that was not a trial, people realized that the power of government resided in their cooperation – what a wise man once called “the consent of the governed.” Simply put, we withdrew our consent en masse. Government began to sputter and fail without taxes, without support, without the people’s cooperation and participation.

Badiah Sinclair thought of doing what many a leader has done in the past – go after the dissenters with security forces to intimidate people into compliance. Two problems presented themselves when he called his generals together to discuss the options. First, there were too many dissenters; I was right in saying that if we work together, they can’t arrest us all. Second, as we saw at my trial, people refused to participate.

They were happy to help fight off an alien invasion from Earthians bent on subjugating the planet. They had no desire to threaten and kill people whose only motivation was to live their lives free.

As I said at the beginning, I always thought war was stupid. Finally, one day, the people of my planet agreed. Badiah Sinclair and the council resigned and disbanded the government, and life went on.