Hiding in plain sight
- The key to unlock global peace hides in plain sight within a phrase that all reasonable people already accept: ‘live and let live’.
- The phrase has two imperatives. The first is: ‘live’. Live your life! We are so fortunate to be alive for this brief time - make the most of it! Enjoy it! It is yours to live! Is there anyone else better placed to decide how you should best live it?
- In order for each of us to be free to live, we must let others live.
- This second imperative, ‘let live’, means allowing other people the exact reciprocal right to live as they choose by setting a legal boundary around behavior that is conducive to freedom, peaceful coexistence, and fair to all reasonable people.
- We call this legal boundary the Legal Principle, the essence of which is: ‘don’t aggress!’
The safe container that makes peace possible
- Protected by this legal boundary, all are free to adopt the virtues that turn a free society into a peaceful one. Virtue cannot be legally mandated or forced.
- Without freedom, defined as the absence of aggression, there can be no peace. Peace on Earth is made possible, but not guaranteed, by freedom.
- What a peaceful society requires in addition to freedom is some form of moral decency. We voluntarily adopt the Aspirational Values to meet this need.
- Freedom and peace are natural - it takes effort to aggress.
- Both freedom and peace exist naturally - they are our universal inheritance. It takes effort in the form of aggression to override these invaluable gifts.
- We could phrase the opposite of the Live and Let Live Philosophy as ‘be right and fight’, where, instead of letting others live freely and peacefully, we fight for the power to impose our preferred version of morality on others coercively. Instead of being grounded in the ancient principle of the Golden Rule, the law is currently based on the capricious whim of those who achieve power, an endless and unjust struggle we call ‘lawfare’. The 3L Movement changes this.
You are free