Civilisation is organised. Who organised it, we did. Whatever the result. There is no invisible hand doing this, we are doing it. WE.
That said, any real discussion would include an actionable model. Not a criticism of the status quo.
Civilisation is organised. Who organised it, we did. Whatever the result. There is no invisible hand doing this, we are doing it. WE.
That said, any real discussion would include an actionable model. Not a criticism of the status quo.
One anarchist presented to me the follow theory:
Throughout human existence, we’ve had government get bigger and bigger and bigger until revolution happens and it shrinks. Then it grows bigger and bigger and bigger, but never as big as it had been previously. Again, a revolution happens, and government is left even smaller than it had been after the previous revolution.
Government gets bigger and bigger, boom! Magna carta.
Government gets bigger and bigger, boom! American independence.
With that last one, we came very close to statelessness.
But then government got bigger and bigger. Now here we are.
In his opinion, the next time a revolution takes place, the whole thing will be scrapped.
Although, if we are to apply his theory more consistently than he did, then we would have to say that after we achieve statelessness, there will be calls for a return of government. It will return, will at first be minarchist, and will finally grow too big for minarchists, at which point it will fall and we’ll be left once again with statelessness, but this time also with a civilisation who realises it is ready for it.
But, I’m not convinced that the government is on a long slope downward. A world of warentless wiretaps and no Habeas Corpus does not seem all that more free than the Oriental despotisms of the past to me.
Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if A) statelessness is the result of the next great revolution (since these past two centuries the idea has definitely blossomed in a way that it had not at the time of the American revolution), and if B) we relapse for some length of time into a governmental system.
I like this theory
If only because it is cause for some hope. I think that maybe part of the cause of this pattern (assuming it is correct
is that as information becomes more freely available, economic truth spreads and wrong theories find it harder to stick around. Every piece of evidence of the harm of the state gets replicated thousands of times over. When information is controlled, lies are more convincing, but the internet is the ultimate out-of-control information stream. Even states that try to censor it have a lot of difficulty doing so. Nobody else in history has anything like Mises.org, and now all this knowledge is available almost anywhere in the world.
Ghandi and Nelson Mandela were not killed. They forced the state to go to war on them, and won, because they offered an alternative focus of loyalty for the people.
If you want to become free, you have to force the state to go to war on you. It may be sad to say, but this is the kind of fight that you win by suffering.
Civil disobedience is one way, but you need to have conscience on your side. Just disobedience simply because you disagree is not enough. Once conscience is identified, the issues have to be discussed in detail in order to create an objective viewpoint. Since no one has the complete view, even the opposing side might have something relevant to say.