About

Original Animation by Kerry Pearson (ver 1.0)

The Philosophy of Liberty (PoL) is a flash animation based of what is now the epilogue of Ken Schoolland's book, "The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible." It began in 1992 as a Russian translation of the book was being published. The publisher Dmitry Kostygin informed Ken that few people in Russia even knew what 'property' or 'taxes' were, and Ken responded by writing an introduction that described the philosophy of his book. It became so popular that it now appears as the epilogue in every language edition (40+ and counting), and it inspired Kerry Pearson (aka Lux Lucre) to turn it into a flash animation with an audio track 'Betrayal' from Music2Hues. Kerry passed away in 2004, however the animation has continued on.
 

Updated Languages (ver 2.0)

With the success of the English version of the PoL and so many international fans of The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible, there was great demand to translate the animation into other languages. Many new languages were completed, but progress was slow due to the way the English version was originally created. All the animation elements were hard coded and changing each one of the language elements was very tedious and time consuming. In addition, the old animation could not print special languages written from left to right. A vision for a new more flexible version of the animation developed that would allow for easy translation into any new language.
 

New multi-font animation (ver 3.0)

A new animation using a newer version of flash was created to allow for easy translation between languages. Rather than being hard coded in flash, it uses .xml files to store information about the various languages and animation elements. Now translation is as simple as modifying an excel spreadsheet with the new character set. Led by Steve Cobb, an international team worked on various elements of the animation. Expect to see The PoL available in all major languages and many minor ones in short order.