May 5, 2015
A personal message from Jim Babka and Perry Willis, Co-Founders of Downsize DC and Co-Creators of the Zero Aggression Project
We’ve been telling you a story-in-reverse to introduce the Zero Aggression Project. That story began at the end goal we aim for — the creation of a Zero Aggression society. We took you on a tour of that society. We then showed you the final stages of how that society was created.
Next we described how universal visibility was essential to this outcome. We then provided evidence that there are already enough libertarians to achieve that universal visibility.
Somewhere between 33 and 72 million Americans already hold libertarian views.
And that brings us to…
Episode #5:
You remember the argument Jim Babka and Perry Willis made back in 2015. They said…
- The number of people with libertarian views is nearly equal to the number of people on the Left and Right.
- This has been achieved despite the fact that libertarian ideas are rarely heard.
- This suggests that libertarian views could rise to a dominant position if only universal visibility could be achieved.
Willis and Babka also reasoned that those who do NOT self-identify as libertarians, despite holding libertarian positions on the issues, were missing one crucial thing…
A principle to unify their stands on the issues.
Babka and Willis asserted that the Zero Aggression Principle could be that unifying idea…
Don’t threaten or initiate force against others, or ask politicians to do it for you.
Willis and Babka suggested a plan of attack. Do things in the following order…
- Share the Zero Aggression Principle with all 300 million Americans
- Discover those who agree with the ZAP, and recruit them to become active supporters
- Persuade the remainder in a libertarian direction
You remember how they drove that home…
- Share first
- Discover second
- Recruit third
- Activate fourth
- Persuade fifth
You notice at the time how different this was from the old libertarian way. Libertarians had always placed persuasion first. But that approach had ignored the fact that millions of people already agreed!
Those millions were more than enough to achieve the universal visibility needed to forge a new social consensus. If only they could be discovered and recruited.
But Babka and Willis went one step further — they created a machine to execute all of those steps, from sharing through persuasion. The first candidate version of that machine was the Zero Aggression Project.
You remember how you first heard about this machine, when Willis and Babka started telling a story-in-reverse, starting at the end result, a Zero Aggression society, and working back to the starting point.
The individual components of that machine will begin to emerge in our next episode. In the meantime…
If you’re not already a member of the ZAP Founders Committee please consider joining before it closes on May 31st.
Founders will be immortalized on the ZAP website.
You’ll be able to say, “I was in on the ground floor of the Zero Aggression movement.”
- Become a Founder by donating here. Or…
- If you’re already a member, raise your current listing on the roster by donating more (the names are ranked by size, cumulative)
You can take a quick tour of the new ZAP site when you visit the contribution form. Some sections are already open, and some are behind a curtain, to be unveiled after we finish our “story-in-reverse.”
Please stay tuned for the next installment of that story. And…
If you have libertarian friends who might be interested in ZAP, please forward this to them.
With high hopes for the future,
Perry Willis & Jim Babka
Co-creators, the Zero Aggression Project