Paul Rosenberg
Sunni: [laughs] Okay, that was a dumb question—you couldn’t have written A Lodging of Wayfaring Men and not be pro-freedom!
Paul: Discovering Eris is actually a fairly long story. I began moving from traditional electrical work—lights and power—into the new electronics-based developments. This, of course, led me into computers and fiber optics. I was actually one of the founders of the Fiber Optic Association, a professional organization for that business. Anyway, in these pursuits, I ended up at the Comdex show in 1997, and attended an excellent auxiliary event—a “focus on the future” type of meeting. At this event, I found myself in the same room as a thousand other people, every one of which was intelligent, informed, and engaged in life. It was wonderful. I remember that one of the panelists made some silly quasi-socialist comment, and while I thought about stepping up to correct it, some other man jumped to the microphone and gave an excellent defense of free markets. I decided then and there that I wanted to find more people and events like these, and to do whatever it took to get to them. Precisely how I stumbled across Eris, I don’t quite remember. I know it was on the internet in 1999. I saw the web pages and decided that this was just the kind of thing I wanted to go to. Attendance was [and remains] by invitation only, but there was an “ask to be invited” form. I filled it out and got a nice email back from Vernie Kuglin, who was running the conference that year. I was president of the Fiber Optic Association at that time, so Vernie asked me to speak for an hour on some related subject, which I did.
Sunni: Your story touches on one of the things I like best about Eris—the diversity of individuals and subjects present at each meeting. But back to you: how did you discover the freedom philosophy?
Paul: An interesting subject! You wonder how some of these things start, and if you try, you can go pretty damned deep. I think my milestone events come down to three.
The first was reading the Declaration of Independence when I was sixteen or seventeen. For some reason I just walked up to a copy on the wall—and I think it was actually in my chemistry classroom, odd as that sounds—and read it. I was stunned. This was just at the age when I was starting to think hard about right, wrong, and the state of the world. Jefferson’s brief yet potent statements about freedom and rights hit me hard. My instant reaction to reading it was, “No one believes this.” I knew it was the clearest statement I’d ever heard about what was right upon earth, and I somehow knew that no one else really believed it. I understood that this was a well-known and widely-read document, but also that no one was giving it anything more than lip service. Well, at least no one that I had known, but when you’re sixteen ...
Sunni: Fascinating.
Paul: The second was reading the gospels. I was raised as an atheist in a Jewish neighborhood, so I knew as close to zero about Jesus as is humanly possible in the United States. Long story short, I ended up all alone, reading the gospels at length. Again, I was stunned. This was a great man! Remember, I had absolutely none of the religious baggage that other people do, and I think that made a huge difference. Jesus was a complete unknown to me. I was deeply impressed with him. And, again, I said, “No one believes this.” While I knew nothing of Jesus, I did know some Christians, and I knew that they were nothing like this guy.
The third was when a friend—who happened to be a professor of economics—begged me to read Atlas Shrugged
Sunni: Sure. But wow, Paul, what a singular way to arrive where you are! By way of helping spread the focus some, do you have any heroes in the movement?
Paul: I have many heroes, often for specific reasons. I’m really reluctant to name them because I’m going to leave far too many off the list. But, I’ll try to give you some. This is just off the top of my head: Peter McWilliams, for several
