The study of action. Read “Human Action”.
Good points, and I think this is the final answer. Convince enough people not to force others into supporting the monopoly on law and force, and the State monopoly must surely dissolve.
The million-dollar question: how to?
Exactly. This is why it is so important to understand the social mechanisms by which society enslaves itself. It is not enough to point at the State and say, “It must be torn down!” because it is your fellows slaves, serfs of the state, exploited by it, who will be the first to jump its defense and call for your incarceration or whatever. To make real progress towards freedom, we must analyze and exposit the self-enslavement of society. If even 50%, maybe even as little as 25% of the public had read, understood and assented to the ideas presented by Etienne de la Boetie in his epic Politics of Obedience, no state could exist. No one could dream of imposing a tyranny on such a public. So, it really is a battle of ideas with very material consequences.
The tactical approach of the Ron Pauls and Lew Rockwells - as indispensable as they are as the “front lines shock troops” for spreading the message of freedom - in itself is deficient and can only have a hope of success in conjunction with the long-term siege of the court intellectuals that dominate the academic establishment and the message of individual empowerment to escape the would-be feudal society that our “betters” in business and government would impose on us, if unopposed. I am of the opinion that the single most subversive action any individual can take is what Guido Hulsmann in an online article (sorry, don’t remember the title) called “originary secession”, the act of simply declaring yourself sovereign in your own mind and ever only obeying the state out of prudence and self-interest, never out of a sense of duty or moral obligation. To me, that is the real goal… get people around the world (the US, at present, is a basket case, I don’t have much hope of real progress within US borders, at least, not for the next decade or so) to mentally emancipate themselves and only ever obey their governments out of a sense of prudence. Pay your taxes for the same reason you’d pay protection fees to the local gangster… not because you believe they are really owed, but because you know they will break your legs and hurt your family if you do not.
And I think the most fertile ground for this is societies who have recently lived under naked tyranny - Somalia, Ivory Coast, former parts of the USSR, etc. Those who have recently lived under naked tyranny understand that the trappings of government are just so many stage props. The badge, the uniform, the flag, the seal, the judical and clerical robes… they are childish, primitive fnords intended to short-circuit reason in favor of groupthink.
Clayton -
Very much so. One idea is to get people thinking in terms of allowing others to opt out of government, introducing the ideas via a multi-step process. First, maybe try to get the notion of a “right* to opt out of some aspects of government” on the table, out in public debate. Without any political action, the idea could still end up being raised during discussions and even during elections.
Adam Knott has suggested starting with the most benign issues first, which would at least get the idea of “opting out” in the public consciousness. For instance, a certain group of people might advocate for the right to work for less than the minimum wage (just amongst themselves, in their community - could be an online community). Once the precedent has been established, a subtle reframe has been pulled off, allowing for the notion of “opting out” to pop up in debates at the most inopportune times (for Statists that is).
Right now the biggest problem is that libertarian ideas aren’t even on the table, so to speak. The libertarian party tries to lower taxes as such, but this is just quantitative wrangling, not the paradigm shift that is required.
Moreover, lowering taxes significantly faces huge obstacles and doesn’t change any paradigms, but getting a concession on opting out of some tiny thing faces what seem to be only minor obstacles and it does change the paradigm. It seems it would get people to re-think the whole idea that everyone must be bound by every last law in the territory. Better still, the idea seems appealing to liberals and progressives, who could use it on civil liberties issues. It might just occur to them, gently as can be, that “coercive charity” is an oxymoron - because the argument is not so in-your-face but more an end run around their usual way of thinking.
*Like “right to a trial” this isn’t a positive right but merely a rephrasing of one aspect of the right not to be coerced (i.e., the NAP).
Educating the masses right? Debating small issues and illuminating many. My good friends, reasoning is not the way to go with children, neither do you reason with you employees on the way you run your business. The reason I simple: it is a fact of life that there a clear demarcation line among humans, separating those that can get abstract ideas, and those who can’t.
Do you really think that if people could get the very simple fact that the State is criminal in nature, they wouldn’t have by now? Every time I listen to people conversating on politics, they almost always go like “politicians never cared for us”, “they’re just a bunch of thieves”, and so on. There’s hardly anyone who has an untainted opinion about the State, and if you look close enough, you’d be surprised by how strongly repelled by the State people are ( of course they won’t reveal this much in a “dynamic” debate with an anarchist, but on small talk betrays their true thoughts).
STILL they won’t turn libertarian if introduced to Mises or Rothbard, because saying that things are bad is something, but lacking an alternative mean that one has to endure things as they are. To the mind of the mass-man, where abstract ideas and creativity do not exactly thrive, in his mind only the State exists. Mise and Rothbard look like wackos. After all, the State is all he ever knew, and so did his father, and his father’s father.
If we want anarchy, let us liberate ourselves of illusions as to the “power of ideas” and see the truth as it is: people are going to flock to anarchy ONLY when it is handed over to them in silver plate, just like investors turn to an entrepreneur only after he shows them solid sale figures.
How, than, to create anarchy with only a bunch of like-minded people? I believe that if the brilliant minds of this forum set themselves to think of ways to do this, at the very least a couple will come out with original and practically feasible ideas. And at least one will be lucky enough to get to try his. But first we have to see that nothing can be done by begging others to follow us.
There are a whole lot of very intelligent believers in Statism, even among people who study politics for a living.
No, no, no. Think about why people believe what they believe: their parents, their teachers, their pastors, their smart friends, and their trusted news anchors told them so. Why do these trusted sources of information tell them that? Because they listen to “the experts.” How do the experts come to the positions they hold? The experts actually can understand abstract ideas.
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Besides, the idea of “opting out” isn’t any more abstract than the idea of voting itself.
I don’t think it is lack of government that gives room for government to arise internally. Though it does invite them from being imposed from outside.
Governments being formed from within I think is mostly due to dysfunctional civil societies (general deficiency of trust and also ethics in society) and unequal distribution of guns. If only the rich can afford to engage in military defence for instance like in the middle ages this will make other people surrender there liberty to them in return for protection. Eventually the lord might start imposing restrictions on opting-out of this arrangement and that will be a government.
The question is what breaks down civil society and cause also cause inequality in the first place and the answer to booth is government.
This means that governments create a self-sustaining cycle. If a government should fall it will leave behind the best environment a new government can wish for.
How the first governments popped up in the first place is more difficult to answer. I would guess it was often from groups finding other groups with less military capacity then themselves and deciding to enslave them. This oppression of external groups then spreads to oppress the own group as the organisation becomes more powerful. Combined probably with the existence of external military treats that forces the community to work more closely together and pay less regard to individual rights. Even if people do this sacrifice voluntarily at first there is a great risk it creates an institution that is difficult to break free from when the treat is over, especially if they are already in the business of enslaving others.
This regime would probably have to get more lenient after the treat is over. Tyrannies formed during war generally don’t last long once the wars are gone. But as long as they keep the perceived cost of having them around lower then the perceived cost of getting rid of them though could stick around…
The power of ideas is not illusion. It is called APPEAL.
I like what you said about governments creating self-sustaining cycles but the above sentence does not sound right to me. Is this not a circular argument? If government causes break downs and inequality, what break downs and inequality caused government? If you are looking for a governmental regression theorem, I am not sure this works.
My guess is that government arose naturally/logically out of nuclear family units as they competed for natural resources. Ultimately the strategy of forming alliances was discovered and not to long thereafter, viola, critical mass was achieved–coercive government was born.
I am not convinced, however, that it must necessarily/deterministically be so. As Murray Rothbard once pointed out (I paraphrase) history does not proceed in a strictly linear fashion. It does seem to generally move forward, but sometimes it goes backwards and even sideways. We can see this in the evolution of the science of economics, for example. In my mind this implies there is a certain amount of randomness built into the nature of reality and I think it is potentially useful to be aware of that.
What about the health analogy? Health is never perfect, that is, there is always some virus, bakteria or internal malfunction threatening the function of our bodies. Unless we are not hampered by them we consider ourself healthy, no?
Now the government is made up of people that choose to be on the parasitic side of life, i.e. they do not produce but take away the production of others to survive. In health terms society is always infected with parasits. I agree that those parasites do bad things to society, as viruses and bakteria do to an individuals health. If it gets to much you need to see a doc, that is someone who knows how to cope with your illness. But you wouldn’t say, because those viruses that make me ill will eventually make me ill in the future again, I do not think treating illnesses make sense.
Such a thought would come close to Keynes’s " In the long run we are all dead".
Yes this is true. It can explain why revolutions and civil wars just replace government with another one and why they are so difficult to get rid of. But not really the ultimate origins of government. Mainly I think the problem is the trust deficiency that follows a regime where bribes and such has been rampart. It is very difficult to form any voluntary associations in such a society so it defaults to barbarism.
I speculated on that in the second part of my post, I don’t have an answer here but I do believe that similar conditions can arise out of situations where there has been no government. It is just alot less likely, but it only have to happen once and we are stuck in the cycle…
The reasons similar conditions could occur without government more condensed expressed could be:
Basically voluntary tribal associations starting to exercise power over weaker tribes in the area.
External treats (from other humans or natural) creating a concentration of power in the community in order to make defence more efficient.
Undeveloped societies are greatly restricted geographically which is troublesome for creating enough competition in protection services … also concentrating power.
Yes, I agree this is probably how the basic institution that becomes government is formed. But I believe some kind of shock is required to make it morph from just being the administration of a voluntary community everyone abides by voluntarily for the benefits it provides to go to the point to where opting-out becomes impossible and it is a government.
I agree it doesn’t always have to be like this. Technically the methods government use to stay in power have varied radically (they switch between brute force, propaganda, fraud and bribes in various forms), this indicates that things happen all the time that counteract governments and then it stands to reason that eventually they will fail to adapt.
It also has to do with technology when weapons are very expensive it is difficult. The knights for instance could easily maintain there monopoly cause they where the only ones who could afford armour. Then came rifling which got rid of them, in Europe which was already highly unequal in wealth this allowed Kings to centralise power around themselves cause they could afford to hire the most soldiers. But in America I think rifling played a large part in making it possible for the colonists to organise there society in such a decentralised way. (disregarding here it was also useful in being able to wipe out the natives and colonise at all)
To Håkan Kindström Arnoldson:
Yes and it is worth noting tangentially that while coercive government is not ubiquitous throughout history, voluntary government is. Most of what we see around us is the free market, or we would all presumably be dead. That always gives me hope.
Salud
This an excellent point and I agree with you but it does not address the question about whether coercive government is inevitable. If I am mis-reading the thread, please correct me and I will bow out. [:)]
I am actuall not sure it is inevitable, like a disease might not be inevitable, yet, if it is not, what follows? Give up liberalism as useless? Or use the known cures and search for better ones. I think the latter is the way we cope with health issues usually,no?
I tend to think, that the appearance of a coercive government might inevitable at times, at least as long as there will be humans that opt for the parasitic side of life. You can take hygienic precaustions, i.e. educate, convice, compell them to choose the “good” side, but at the end of the day they got to choose.
I am on your side. Let’s definitely NOT give up liberalism! [:)]
Does the existence of something prove its inevitability?
An almost perfect analogy. I might only add that even if some kind of disease is inevitable right now, it doesn’t mean that evolution won’t give us someone that is immune. In analogy, only because the government could have been inevitable up to now, in our days with such a great mobility of people, mixing of different gene pools, communication and cheap defensive technologies, perhaps somewhere a society that is immune to government is already evolving. Let us not forget, societies evolve much faster than people.
Granted. With them arguments will work, and “conversion” is indeed I viable strategy. Just don’t’; except to convert 1) everyone, 2) those with a capable mind but beyond a certain age and 3) those with a capable mind and of a productive age but dependent for some time on the government for their livelihood (i.e. academics). Neither of these guys shall ever get it.
Suppose we’re in anarchic , or even in 1920’s northern . The State is a foreign concept to your community. Now you, having spent ten years of study in, say, Constantinople or , you armed with your invincible believe in Statism, seek to convert them. Many professors like you also start converting people. Do you think they’ll follow you? Let me furnish an example in recent history.
The region of Mirdite is a small aggregation of tribes in northern Albania, and during the Ottoman occupation of the country they never agreed to either pay taxes or submit to outside justice, preferring their own (incredibly complex) customary law. After 1920, when had an independent, centralized government, (headed by a genius, I might say) and the inhabitants of Mirdite where asked to pay taxes as “now that Albanian is independent, not paying taxes would amount to treason”, they plainly refused. Notwithstanding all the “expert opinion” and massive propaganda that was thrown at them, notwithstanding the fact that many sons where actually working for the government back in the capital, they refused to take the bait. It took a communist regime and its unheard of repressive measures to beat them into submission.
My point is such: people do not buy the lies of the government because they buy what “opinion molders” tell them. I submit that that the very 80% of people that can’t get abstract ideas, cannot understand statist propaganda either, and see no point, deep down, in voting (again, they will difficulty admit this). They vote only because they know of no alternative, not because they believe statist fables. Deep down, theirs is a very rational behavior: if you can’t see an alternative, take what you have, no matter how wrong it seems. Education has nothing to do with it.
To broaden the question.
Evil is inevitable. So should we stop fighting evil and just give in? Hardly.
Means are more important then ends.
No. State building requires concerted effort.