Harry Browne’s Freedom Principles By Frederick Mann
Harry Browne at the time he wrote How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World - Photo by Jill Krementz
In 1973 author Harry Browne in the midst of a long career as an iconoclast wrote a book that was the most iconoclastic thing he ever wrote. Most of Harry’s books were Investment Books, and while far from dry, they did not prepare the reader for the excitement and revelation of his Freedom book. The book, How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World, was more than the sum of its parts. It was philosophy, without the baggage that the word philosophy engenders. It provided the reader with clearly defined guide-lines explaining how to attain freedom, and clear explanations of how we often sabotage of own efforts to be free, and suggestions of how we can defuse that sabotage within ourselves.
I read How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World in 1973, and it changed my life radically and for the better. It showed me what freedom was and how to attain it. The book was instrumental in my creating this website, because I realized that I would never be free in the United States, but that I could find freedom in various nations by knowing the difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law.
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This article is a “keeper.” It contains insight that I have managed to absorb or work out for myself over decades, but which would have been immensely helpful if I had read them – and really absorbed them – when Browne’s book first hit the bookstore shelves in paperback, just after I was graduated from prep school. Problem is, I misread him – what little I read. I thought, for instance, that he was arguing for amoral behavior in the Morality Trap. This was a very popular view at that time, and I completely missed the point that Browne was not arguing for NO morality, but for an honest PERSONAL morality – one in which professed beliefs and actions were in exact correspondence and fully thought out. Stupid mistake, imagining that a highly moral stance was a justification of sociopathy.
Oh well; better late than never.
Further to my earlier message. I do respectfully disagree with Mr. Gallo regarding the Rights Trap. Just as dealing effectively with others requires a fully-thought-out personal morality, effective resistance to importuning demands requires full consciousness of one’s rights and of their source. Only a sociopath exercises power divorced from thoughts of right and wrong, or rights and obligations, because for him other people don’t really exist and therefore need not be considered. A sane person wants to know that he is right in taking a stance or an action, and if he is not convinced of it he is as completely and effectively disarmed as if he had no personal power to exercise. Therefore it is vital that we understand our rights, understand their source and recognize the obligation that our public servants assume and routinely ignore when they swear to abide by a constitution that recognizes those rights. A sane man must always have the moral high ground in order to act effectively.