We Must Claim Our Birthright

YOU are indigenous, and what's yours is yours. No exceptions. No compromise. (DN 3.10)

Cover page | Preface | Introduction 1 | Introduction 2 | Introduction 3 |

(Part I) Why: 1.0 | 1.1 | 1.2 | 1.3 | 1.4 | 1.5 | 1.6 | 1.7 | 1.8 | 1.9 | 1.10 | 1.11 | 1.12 | 1.13 | 1.14 | 1.15 | 1.16 | 1.17 | 1.18 | 1.19 | 1.20 | 1.21 |1.22

(Part II) What: 2.0 | 2.1 | 2.2 | 2.3 | 2.4 | 2.5 | 2.6 | 2.7 | 2.8 | 2.9 | 2.10 I 2.11 | 2.12 | 2.13 | 2.14 | 2.15 | 2.16 | 2.17 | 2.XX | 2.18 | 2.19 | 2.20 | 2.21 | | Where: 3.0 | 3.1 | 3.2 | 3.3 | 3.4 | 3.5 | 3.6 | 3.7 | 3.8 | 3.9 | 3.10

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Chapter 3.10
Allodial Land, 2

Our goal, as people interested in forming a new kind of “distributed” nation, is true freedom. We want independence from involuntary governance of any kind. We share this goal in common with many others.

As we discussed in Chapter 2, fellow seekers of independence are taking different pathways to our shared goal. Some seek to form polities with specific territorial boundaries. Some efforts will be semi-territorial. Some will be entirely online, or will begin online and then move to a more territorial approach down the road.

Some will seek complete independence right away. Most will attempt to acquire it in stages.

We support all such efforts.

Ours mixes several of these approaches with unique elements of our own. We have discussed this at length throughout this work. Here in the Where chapter, we are looking at the locative element of our approach, focusing especially on the essential nature of property.

What’s yours is yours

Though we will be comprised of a dispersed population, property will still be very important to the distributed nation. Except it won’t “belong” to that nation—it will be yours. The distributed nation will be an archipelago of sovereign kingdoms. Your kingdoms.

This is how it must be.

When you join a nation, it should be your choice. A real choice, with a real social contract—not a pretend one that is imposed upon you by force.

When you join a nation, you should not give up any of your natural rights. Your property must remain yours, totally and completely. No overlords. No gray areas. No doubt.

What’s yours is yours.

Among the many advantages here is one that might not pop to mind right away. If your property is allodially yours, it facilitates entry and exit. This is exactly what we want.

Among your many natural rights are several pertaining to your associations with nations and organizations. We call these the framework rights:

• to ESTABLISH your own polity, association, or nation;

• to AFFILIATE with a polity, association, or nation on mutually agreed terms;

• to EXIT from any polity, association, or nation;

• to SECEDE, unilaterally and without hindrance, from any government or involuntary imposition of authority; and,

• to REMAIN on one’s own property and not AFFILIATE any polity, association, or nation.

The distributed nation will be an alliance of sovereign beings, not an imposition of authority. Your allodial ownership of your own lands and dwellings just makes it that much easier to respect your framework rights.¹ (We will discuss framework rights in greater detail in chapter 5.)

Online and IRL

Naturally we will need an online component as well. However, we will not be so heavily online as, say, Srinivasan’s vision of a network state. Our where will, first and foremost, be in the real world.

There are good reasons for this. Though the internet is certainly a fixture in our lives and promises to continue to be so for a long time to come, there are no guarantees. Power outages, electromagnetic pulses, and acts of war or tyranny might jeopardize our access to the net, and hence to each other. Thus, we want to take advantage of the internet without being solely and wholly dependent upon it.

If we are, first and foremost, based on principles and property, then an internet outage would be quite inconvenient, but it would not cripple us. That is how we want it.

No superior landlords

Freedom begins with you. It begins with your ownership of yourself. That is the line we draw with the distributed nation. A line around each of us. A line around our homes, our dwellings, our land.

By right, our ownership of our property—the sovereign spaces in which we dwell—is, and ought to be, allodial. Allodial title means ownership with no superior landlord. No taxes. No control. Your property is yours because it is yours.

Natural order

If you unpack this in terms of natural law, it makes perfect sense.

Different religions hold that, in some sense, we “belong” to God. But here on Earth, no human may rightly be considered to be the property of another. You are the sole owner of yourself.

Property ownership is entirely an outgrowth of self-ownership. You own yourself with no superior landlord, so how can anyone justify a claim to be the superior landlord of your property?

Here too, a religious view may argue that in some sense, we are all “renting” our little corner of the world from God. That’s fine. But when it comes to all other humans, your ownership ought to be exclusive and complete.

Why should it be any other way? By what moral alchemy do some small group of people calling themselves government “officials” or “authorities” gain some sort of “right” to tax your property and take it from you by force if you refuse to pay them?

They call this “the price of living in a society,” but it isn’t. It’s a grift. A racket. Until humanity realizes this, we will continue to live as a slave species.

Allodial property, voluntary exchange, and uncoerced cooperation are the natural order of things. They comport with natural law—with, if you prefer, the beneficial order created by God. Ultimately, human life will not work properly so long as we are working against natural law rather than working with it.

Citing French physiocrat Mercier de La Rivière, Hans-Hermann Hoppe notes as much:

By virtue of his reason, [Rivière] explained, man was capable of recognizing the laws leading to his greatest happiness, and all social ills follow from the disregard of these laws of human nature. In human nature, the right of self-preservation implies the right to property, and any individual property in man’s products from the soil requires property in the land itself. But the right to property would be meaningless without the freedom of using it, so liberty is derived from the right to property. People flourish as social animals, and through trade and exchange of property they maximize the happiness of all.

Property titles

History is replete with violent displacement. One band pushes out another. Clans, tribes, chiefdoms, and nations do the same. Paleolithic, neolithic, modern… Same dance, different tune.

Yet violence is not the only way to gain property, nor is the threat of violence the only way to keep it. We also have the phenomenon of recognized property titles, protected by custom and law. Property titles can be exchanged voluntarily and peacefully.

Involuntary governance is not required to protect property titles and exchanges. All that is needed are title companies operating in a free market, and a private court system to adjudicate any disputes that might arise.

Ultimately, the system works because people want it to work…not because a government forces it to.

Customary land

Some have suggested that events such as the Enclosures in Britain somehow invalidate the concept of property. The Enclosures were monstrous and entirely unacceptable, but the incestuous machinations of a few landed gentry and government officials hardly invalidates such a basic and necessary human phenomenon as property ownership. Nor can it invalidate the notion of property titles, which are an excellent (and peaceful) way to protect property rights.

Part of the misunderstanding here stems from the belief that titled property is the only kind of property. It isn’t.

The sections of commons that were enclosed had been used by people from time immemorial. Customary claims of this kind also constitute a form of property.

A tribe in the Amazon rainforest may have its territorial range. A man may have his hut. A bear, for that matter, may have his den. All of these are types of property.

As Good Neighbor, Bad Citizen rightly points out,

Record keeping and property aren’t the same thing. A lack of formally written titles doesn’t mean a lack of exercising the natural right of property. Birth certificates in the U.S. have been the norm for less than a century; would this mean births didn’t happen before then?

The peasants who were dispossessed of the ancestral commons were dispossessed of a kind of property.

YOU are indigenous

The violent displacement of one people by another has been a feature of human existence since time immemorial.

In the 16th century, Europeans began to displace various indigenous tribes in North America. Before that, many of those tribes were displacing each other. And before they got to the North American continent, there were even earlier inhabitants whom they eventually displaced.

New evidence, for example, indicates that 125,000 years ago, there were Denisovans in what is today California . And while the homo sapiens ancestors of today’s “Americans” were displacing the Denisovans, homo sapiens in Europe were doing the same to Neanderthals. Now, all Native Americans have Denisovan DNA, and all Europeans have Neanderthal DNA. There’s been a whole lot of displacement going on.

When the word “indigenous” is used today, it basically means, the population that was displaced most recently. Usually this involves a less-advanced population whose ancestors arrived before the ancestors of a more-advanced group. And this is certainly an important status to recognize.

But there is no way to “give” an area back to the original population, because for any given area, no one knows who the original population actually was.

And even if we could know, the last thing we want to do is to start assigning property claims to entire groups based on ethnicity. As Noah Smith trenchantly writes,

[W]hy does being the first human to set foot on a piece of land give your blood descendants the right to dispose of that land as they see fit in perpetuity, and to exclude any and all others from that land? What about all the peoples of the world who were never lucky enough to be the first to lay eyes on any plot of dirt? Are they simply to be dispossessed forever?

I have never seen a satisfactory answer to these questions. Nor have I seen a satisfactory explanation of why ownership of land should be allocated collectively, in terms of racial or ethnic groups. In general, the first people who arrived on a piece of land did so in dribs and drabs, in small family units and tiny micro-tribes that met and married and fought and mixed and formed into larger identities and ethnicities and tribes over long periods of time. In most cases, the ethnic groups who now claim pieces of land as their own did not even exist when the first humans discovered or settled that land.

But even in those cases when it did exist, why should land ownership be assigned to a race at all? Why should my notional blood relation to the discoverers or the conquerors of a piece of land determine whether I can truly belong on that land?

He then goes on to paint the ugly picture of where such notions lead:

“Decolonization” of the land of the U.S. would likely be an act of ethnic cleansing surpassing even the previous conquests — there are 330 million people here now, and almost none of them descend from Native Americans. An attempt to dispossess 330 million people would inevitably involve violence on a colossal scale. […]

Of course, “colonizers” could presumably avoid violent death or second-class citizenhood by voluntarily deporting themselves. But where would they go? Take me, for example. My ancestors were Lithuanian Jews. I could leave the country of my birth and go “back” to Lithuania — a land I don’t know, whose language I don’t speak. Yet my ancestors were not “indigenous” to Lithuania either; they moved there from somewhere else. What if the ethnic Lithuanians chose not to accept me? Where would I go then? Israel? But the folks who do land acknowledgements would consider me a “colonizer” there as well.

Would I then wander the Earth, desperately seeking some ethnostate that would allow me and my descendants to live there as a permanently precarious resident aliens?

(The whole piece is worth the read, when you have a chance.)

We do not want to go where this logic takes us. Rather, we need a new way of looking at the concept of being indigenous. To wit,

You are indigenous to the place in which you live, by virtue of the fact that you live there.

Your status is not determined by your ancestors, or by the ancestors of others. The notion that we would ever use genetic testing to determine a person’s degree of guilt or privilege is, and ought to be, appalling.

Rather, you are a sovereign human person, indigenous to this planet, and to the land upon which you live.²

Claiming your birthright

As a sovereign being, you hold exclusive authority over yourself and your property. This means that legal property statuses like fee simple, though it is a higher level of ownership than some, still isn’t good enough.

Governments claim the “right” to tax your property and seize it for non-payment. They claim the authority to confiscate it, force you to sell it to them for “public” purposes, and take it when you die. None of these are morally legitimate claims.

Ultimately, land titles must be allodial.

Part of what each of us will be doing, as members of our distributed nation, is claiming allodial title over our own property. Our respective governments will not recognize this claim at first, but it is important that we make the claim nonetheless.

This is not a LARP. It is a first step toward a larger goal:

• We will make the claim because it is true, right, and good. And it is important that we acknowledge what is true, right, and good.

• We will make the claim as an example to others—to light a beacon that they can follow.

• We will make the claim to put our would-be overlords on notice: we are free people, not their serfs.

• We will make the claim as part of a larger strategy of sequential steps toward greater independence.

We will be the first humans in many generations to claim what is rightfully ours. This is not a game. This is nothing less than our birthright.

We will also be the first generation of a new nation of free people. We must do the hard work now, so that our descendants can live as humans should.

We will plant the seed, so that they might stand beneath the boughs of a mighty tree.

How can we do any less?

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1. See also https://christophercook.substack.com/p/human-constitution

2. This is the approach being taken by the Universal Community Trust. This is very wise.