In this thread I’d like to hear other’s opinions. It’s not about “X video by Stef changed my life” or anything. It’s about people in general. Why some individuals find out that State is a massive scam, basically, worst religion ever while the majority still are strict believers who do not ever question the legitimacy of state. So how? Why and how some break out of the matrix? Discuss.
A nominalistic materialistic mindset that is interested in socioogy that asks the question “how do things work”.
When I changed my major to political science at the end of my freshman year, I decided to become a libertarian because the government was lying and murdering all the time and that people were being forced to pay for it.
in High school I thought bill clinton and the liberals were pretty cool because I thought they were so anti-racist, but then I realized they were nothing but hypocrites out to get power. In 2007, Ron Paul’s ethics turned me to libertarianism and helped to set in stone my then-one year old realization that the Clintons and other liberals just wanted power. I realized they lacked ethics because they had enough money to give to the poor without advocating theft. After seeing what a good man Dr. Paul was, I didn’t want to be associated with dishonest people like the Clintons.
In 2009 I simply realized that the Constitution was statist.
I’m still hesitant about diving into the full anarchist position, although I do call myself a voluntaryist. However, what made me skeptical of even minarchy was a couple of things. One, of course, was the breaking down of a lot of the myths and dogmas surrounding our current government. Two, understanding fully what democracy entailed. We always hear it’s supposed to be bringing people together, but in reality it all too often sets them at eachother’s throats because of rent-seeking activity, special interests, etc. Three, understanding social contract theory and how it’s basically just used as cover by people who are trying to gain an unjust advantage, even if it’s for a “good cause”.
The biggest step, and one of the first, on the path to supporting a stateless society is to throw out the Nirvana Fallacy that “good government” is something that actually exists with any consistancy.
To answer the OP’s excellent question about other people though, I guess it’s just because a lot of people lack ethics or they want something for nothing. Also, some people are too emotional and not rational enough. For example, most peoples’ reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks was “kill that evil bastard Bin Laden”, without even knowing much as to who the hell he was, why he did it, that innocents could be slaughtered if war was the response, that it could put americans at further risk, that American foreign policy sucked, that the government could’ve done it, etc. However, I’ve never felt attached to this country (or any country really), so I wasn’t like that. But now, I’m not only not a violent nationalist, I also think that if the government exists, then it should abolish the standing military and fight all of its wars on the continent.
Chance?
I think some people never enter the Matrix to begin with. Most of them are probably in prison or living in inner-city slums on the boundary of civilization. I suspect that there is a dispositional tendency of some people to love to belong. They crave the feeling that someone is in control of the circumstances of their life. They feel that is what makes the world sane and bearable. If the Matrix did not exist, such people would create it from scratch just so they could live in it.
If true, I am not sure what percentage of the populace has this disposition but I suspect it is a majority by virtue of the persistence of the State over so many millenia. For this reason, I do not believe that the system is reformable, certainly not in this generation, maybe in the next probably not for a few generations yet. People have to start being free before people without the dispositional longing to belong will become a majority.
In the meantime, I think freedom is something you just have to create for yourself. If you wait for society to stop believing in its own taxation and enslavement, you will never be free. We can contribute to the eventual freedom of mankind by continuing to promote the ideas of freedom in the hopes that as people begin to be more free, they will change the constitution of future generations to be less innately disposed to enslavement.
Clayton -
Tribal instincts account for the statist mentality. Tribal instincts are blind to scale; it worked to trust authority when the tribe was like an extended family, but humans are not evolutionarily adapted to thinking about modern conditions with millions or billions of people. At this scale our instincts still tell us to trust the tribal elders and medicine men, and that we need elders for the entire gigantic “tribe” of a whole country. Simple as that. To reject statism requires digging deeper and/or rejecting authority. The Internet is enabling the digging and fueling mistrust of authority as their propaganda support structures crumble. Plus the recent global chaos is making people want to find out how the world really works.
Oh gag me.
thank you all for responses, many of them made me think and I a little bit changed my opinion. What I think is that one of the most important things is questioning and understanding authority, meaning, which authority is “good” (voluntary, like in medical practice, for example) and which is bad (imposed by force).
the other thing is simply being skeptical, like LogisticEarth said. Seeing not only scam in newspapers (especially their last pages, called “horoscopes”) but in first pages too (A politician X attended event Y. Who the fuck is X? Why should I care about him? I don’t care about supermarket owner’s personal life and how he spends his free time, He doesn’t affect me at all. I can quit going to his shop, but with the politics… you can’t quit, you’re in the game since the day you’re born. Why is that?)
Still… I think it would be too arogant (and quite insane) to say, that we are somehow intellectually or physically different than other people. Maybe it’s enviroment? Maybe the parenting? I don’t think there’s only one answer though. But yeah, vive la insurrection hit the point: “how do things work” is almost essential question in the road to anarchism.
- Still… I think it would be too arogant (and quite insane) to say, that we are somehow intellectually or physically different than other people. Maybe it’s enviroment? Maybe the parenting? I don’t think there’s only one answer though.
Well if you ask progressives/leftists it’s because of white privilege herp derp!
I think parenting, life experiences, educational opportunities/tone/method all have an effect. Personally, I have a feeling parenting, or at least interaction with adults during childhood, has a good deal to do with how someone takes in information. During my childhood, my parents rarely gave me “childish” explainations for things. My dad would always accept my questions and explain things to me, and my mom would too. If I stumped them, they’d tell me rather than flubbing it off. I think it lead to a really strong sense of curiosity and self reflection that helped me look back on what I’d been taught in school and question it. This didn’t manifest itself in political theory so much until I was in college, and I didn’t call myself a libertarian until a few years ago. Back to the point though, I still cringe every time somebody gives a wrong/terribly simplified answer to a kid, or toying with them. I think it does a great deal of damage.
I do think libertarians are a different breed of people. I think our minds work differently. That isn’t to say we’re superior, it’s just that we think differently about topics. That’s also not to say that we can’t convince people, but when I see studies like the one that came out a little while ago about libertarian morality compared to conservative or liberal morality, I can’t help but feel it’s like Sisyphus pushing the proverbial boulder up a hill.
Prior to becomming increasingly aware of the libertarian mindset i was your typical in-your-face liberal, who everyone was wrong and heartly and discompassionate and the likes. Then, trying for a 5000 dollar or more scholarship i read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. While its not her capstone book, it still introduced to me a whole set of morality counter to the liberal, and gave me a different perspective to look at the world with. Also prior to this, i had, though, considered myself a “social libertarian,” but being in highschool at the time was never exposed to anything that made fiscal libertarianism make sense to me until then.
To be clear, i wouldnt consider myself quite an anarchist, though if i was i would be more of the Bastiat variety. But even so anarchist theory inspires my ideology as much as any else.
A lot of it is simply ignorance, and not digging deep enough to find the root of current events or problems. I can tell you, just from posting links on my Facebook page, and some friendly debate, at least two of my friends have become anti-statists, one a Paulite.
Beyond knee-jerk appeals to emotion and morals, most statists have no resons to keep believing the myth, you just have to show them that.
As an aside, as a perpetual statistical outlier (how many prog rock nerd mystic Stirnerites do you know?) I’ve always considered Steppenwolf to be a great treatment of the struggle between being part of the herd, and being a lone wolf.
I think that genetics has something to do with it, but don’t ask me how exactly.
I see the state as a type of domestication of the human animal. A bad type, obviously, but that’s what it is.
If you think about dogs, it’s obvious that selective breeding doesn’t just change their physical attributes, but it also changes their basic personalities. You do get qualities and quirks specific to individual animals, and upbringing plays an enormously important role. Any dog will become vicious if it is raised abusively or traumatically.
However, “breeds” of dog do have very strong stereotypical traits that tend to be true across the vast majority of individuals within a “breed”, and are more obvious if the dogs are all raised in a non-traumatic environment when they’re young. Labrador retrievers tend to be very gentle and easy-going with everyone they meet, Doberman Pinschers will tend to be warier and more aggressive etc. Pretty much any dog can be raised to be friendly towards the people it bonds with early on, but there are many breeds which will always view strangers - both dogs and humans - with extreme prejudice; as the ‘other’ which threatens them.
It’s not impossible to take a newborn wolf and raise it to be essentially domesticated, but it’s not an entirely safe proposition, and it will never behave quite like a normal dog. If you ever encounter a “tame” wolf or wolfdog you will know what I mean… Whereas the first reaction for most dogs towards a strange human could vary from naive overfamiliarity and friendliness to wary shyness to wary aggression to conditioned wilful ignorance, you will never get the same impression one gets with a wolf - that it doesn’t look up to you in either reverence or fear, but sees you as a peer in nature, and reacts accordingly. If it doesn’t chew your arm off, it’s because it took the cool-headed, measured decision not to. Maybe it had better things to do. You get a similar sort of impression when you encounter any very large wild mammal that won’t instinctively flee when it detects a hominid, e.g. an elephant or bear. It will stare you down until you shit yourself, and then it will turn its back and slowly walk away when it smells you aren’t a theat. 
I think that the same selective breeding for juvenile traits that is done intentionally to breed dogs to be domesticable also happens to humans, but it’s mostly a spontaneous process which has been going on naturally for a very long time. A normal adult Homo sapien naturally exhibits what might have been described as ‘juvenile’ physical traits in earlier hominids. “Civilisation” depends very much on a pervasive juvenile mindset - that we’re all juvenile members of a tribe waiting around for food and everything else we need to descend upon us from our provident superiors returning from their hunt.
Belief in God is associated with this. If you believe in God, you believe that human beings are eternally, immutably and fundamentally juvenile spirits with God as their eternal parent. Theists do not generally believe that humans are destined grow up to become a God ourselves and have little humans of our own one day, which is a bit strange if you think about it. People apparently feel that in their souls, they are supposed to feel like children forever.
I think that it’s the root of a lot of economic fallacy. People simply cannot shake the mindset that ‘wealth’ - that which is to be valued - is not just a wildebeest, i.e. a fixed quantity, waiting somewhere out there for the hunters to go out and kill it and bring it back for supper, and then divide it up ‘fairly’ between the rest of us. ‘Wealth’ is not a fixed quantity. We have the power - human beings have the power to breed wildebeest, or indeed cows, for food if they want to, and this changes the rules of the game completely. We actually have the power we attribute to God. But it doesn’t change people’s instincts. When there is no need to hunt wildebeest, people tend to hunt each other instead.
Sometimes, I think that the genetic precursors which make people susceptible to Pavlovian conditioning, i.e. behaving like dogs, are weakened or even non-existant due to a recurring mutation of some kind. I don’t think that this will necessarily turn someone into an ‘anarchist’ - i.e. someone who has a highly developed ethical theory concerning ‘punishment’. What happens from this point on depends on environment. Perhaps a number of things could happen to someone for whom punishment and reward simply does not work as effectively as it does for others.
They might become a “psychopath” - someone who is incapable of building an ethical theory outside their conditioning, and yet for whom the conditioning itself was ineffective. So they become an intraspecies predator.
Or they could react defensively in a “schizoid” or “schizophrenic” way - lose the ability to form proper object-relations, at least with regards to ethics, and descend into their own fantasy world as a defense against an unworkable reality.
Or, if they are lucky, there is a third option… They are able to recursively analyse their position, and escape the trap of Pavlovian conditioning. They are able to construct an ethic, based either on utilitarian or deontological reasoning, which does not incorporate the concepts of ‘punishment’ and ‘reward’ to achieve its desired outcomes.
Sadly, I don’t think you can talk the good kind of ‘anarchism’ into most people any more easily than you can talk a gentle nature into an abused Rottweiler. The recursive analyses has its place, but it’s only really going to work on a very small number of genetic mutations. For the rest, ethics will always be synonymous with reward and punishment. Virtue will always be synonymous with obedience.
A nominalistic materialistic mindset that is interested in sociology that asks the question “how do things work”.
Seems that most of the people I come across who actually end up taking sociology classes in college turn out to be leftists of some sort.
I think it falls on whether the person who has the question of “how things work” goes into it without bias, looking at the “mechanics” of society, politics, and economics objectively and accepting what is, compared to going into it with a view and agenda of what ought to be. This seems to be the line in those who favor some sort of centralization, state, government, collectivization, whatever. Some will take the role of government, and say “it should be like this” and “it world work if so-and-so was in control” as well as “this is needed to help [insert group here]” and so on, compared to those who say, “no, it clearly doesn’t work, and changing the variables won’t make it any better” as well as someone who’s willing to trace the roots of how something works through it’s entire “functioning system” and coming out with a view even if it goes against their previous stance.
+1 James… aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawesome post.
And that’s exactly what I take the term “originary secession” to mean… it means gradually transitioning oneself out of the mindset of obedience to imposed authority out of either reverence or terror and into a mindset of measured indifference… the police officer pulling me over, armed to the teeth is a peer. He can threaten me, probably even beat me and cuff me and I will likely not respond with violence but it will be solely the result of a measured decision, not awe or terror at his uniform and institutional backing.
Stop being a lapdog, start being a wolf.
Clayton -
See: “The Reluctant Anarchist” by Joseph Sobran
Regards, onebornfree.
P.S. A good start can also be made by refusing to swallow, “hook, line and sinker” , any of the states bigger lies; for example, the official story about 9/11,or Pearl Harbor, or the Moon landings, [etc. etc.] and instead to automatically assume that every part of the states story is in fact an unmitigated pack of lies, until [if ever] conclusively proven otherwise.
“I do think libertarians are a different breed of people. I think our minds work differently. That isn’t to say we’re superior, it’s just that we think differently about topics. That’s also not to say that we can’t convince people, but when I see studies like the one that came out a little while ago about libertarian morality compared to conservative or liberal morality, I can’t help but feel it’s like Sisyphus pushing the proverbial boulder up a hill.”
I’d like to see a link if you have one.
I honestly feel as though it primarily has to do with how open minded one is. Most people I’ve talked to have honestly been convinced or swayed to my viewpoint simply based upon my arguments. It sounds presumptuous but it is my experience. It all depends upon how engrained the idea of a government and ‘intention makes reality’ is engrained into ones brain.
Intellectually honest and open to reason.
This is the study: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1665934
This is the summary: http://reason.com/archives/2010/11/02/the-science-of-libertarian