Letting go of long-held beliefs is not easy—especially when nearly every other person around you still holds those beliefs. But consensus ≠ truth. Believing in a lie just because lots of other people also believe in that lie does not make it any less a lie.
Few beliefs are more widely held than the notion that democracy makes government ‘consensual’ and that democratic governance is thus ‘legitimate.’ In Step 1, we examined the moral fact that this widely held belief is dead wrong.
Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough.
—Michael Crichton
Even if you are afraid to let go of this belief, somewhere, deep down, you know it is a lie. You know this because you live in a universe governed by natural law, and natural law produces certain inescapable principles…
Let us say that you go out for a walk, and when you come back, you find that a gang of carny grifters has taken possession of your home and all your stuff. Does that mean that your home was never yours? Of course not. Your home is yours by right. Being alienated from the enjoyment of that right does not mean that the right is gone. It simply means the right is under attack. It is essential to understand this distinction.
Over the last few years, the Dutch government has begun making war on its own farmers. Unsurprisingly, the government’s excuse—and it absolutely is an excuse—is ‘climate change.’ But make no mistake—this is direct violence against these human persons, their livelihood, and their land.
There is no excuse. Their right to their farms is natural, and they continue to have that right whether their farm is taken from them by government or carny grifters.
Step 1 began with realizing that the problem is not that the Dutch people voted the wrong politicians in power, but that the system allows anyone to exercise this kind of unilateral power over others. The problem is that we have written rights-violations into the system and deemed those violations legitimate.
Consider this fictional but illustrative moment in an episode of the television program Highlander: Immortal Duncan MacLeod washes up on the shore of late 18th century Japan and is saved by a samurai. The Shogun has decreed the death of all gaijin, however, and for saving MacLeod, the samurai is condemned to death. Stoically, he says, “If my lord chooses to have me die, that is his right.”
I do not know much about Japanese history, but I do know that systems and beliefs like this have existed in human history. And I also know, as sure as the day is long, that decreeing that all people not of a certain ethnicity must die, and killing people who defend them from this fate, are violations of natural law.
The samurai may choose to believe that it is his “lord’s right” to have him die. He may choose to live by that code. But that does not make it true according to the moral precepts emanating from the natural fabric of reality. An evil act does not cease to be evil just because a government does it.
Governments have convinced you that they have the right to do it. They have convinced you that you gave them that right—that you consented to be governed, and that therefore whatever they do has been sanctioned by you. They tell you that your consent makes them legitimate, which means that whatever they do is legitimate, even if you don’t agree with it.
Does that sound like actual consent to you?
All of this is a house of cards. They say you consented, but you did not actually do so. You signed nothing. You agreed to nothing. If a particular thing is done to you (or to someone else in your name) and you did not consent to that thing, that is not actual consent.
Step 2 of declaring your independence is to stop pretending that it is…and to do so formally and openly. To say, aloud,
“I do not consent.”
Or, if you prefer, I did not give whatever consent you claim I gave, and whatever it is you think I gave, I hereby officially withdraw.
OBVIOUSLY, I am not suggesting or implying that you break the law in any way. I am not suggesting or implying that you do not pay your taxes. To the contrary, you should pay your taxes and you should not break the law.
However, you need to change your mindset about what it is, exactly, that you are doing:
When a mugger puts a gun to your head and demands that you hand over your wallet, you do not do so because you believe the mugger has a right to your wallet. You do so because you do not want to get shot in the head.
Step 2 is not only recognizing, but formally stating to yourself and anyone else who will listen that government is that mugger. The act of saying it out loud has power.
This is not LARPing. Governments rest on only two pillars: their ability to project force and your presumption of their legitimacy. We will never be able to fix this problem—this fundamental flaw in human social organization—so long as you continue to grant them this presumption.
And yes, I mean you. You must not hide behind the skirts of the tribe and claim that the problem is our presumption of their legitimacy as some sort of amorphous collective—that until everybody does it, there is no point in you doing it.
No. That’s not how this works. Withdraw your presumption of their legitimacy. Own your share of this. Let others see your example and follow you. The system isn’t going anywhere so long as you continue to agree to the system. Say it out loud. Put in in print. Scrawl it on poster-board and hang it in your kitchen.
Repeat it frequently. I did not consent to this. I do not consent to this.
The conflict between government and natural law—that is, between government and human beings—is inherent. It cannot be fixed with tweaks. Government is the conflict. Violating consent is contrary to the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.
This is not a problem because the wrong people are in charge. It is not a problem that can be fixed by voting harder. It is a permanent flaw in the nature of all involuntary governance.
I say again—do not cede government the ground of legitimacy. If you do so, you are continuing a lie. Ontologically, organically, morally—government is not legitimate.
This inevitably raises an objection along the following lines: Okay Cook, your philosophizing is all well and good. What do we do now? Opt out? If we don’t vote, the bad guys win.
As it happens, some anarcho-libertarians do indeed make a strong argument that voting itself is morally problematic, and their argument has weight. My argument is perhaps more nuanced (though some anarchists will call it wishy-washy)…
In essence, I recognize that things can actually be made worse or better depending on who is elected and what policies they implement. So if you are one of those people who is really effective at working in that field—getting substantive policy changes and holding the line against a further slide, then by all means, continue doing so. But you cannot be holding the line with no end in sight—just an endless slog in the mud, fending off an intractable foe until your shield arm tires…whereupon you pass the task onto our children, and their children, forever. There must be an end somewhere.
The rest of us must help bring about that end. While they work to hold the line, we must work to find a way out of this endless war.
I will be blunt here. If you are not one of those people who is really effective at holding that line—if you are not working in that field or donating a lot of money to those who are—then stop talking about ‘democracy’ as if it is the only way we can possibly live.
Stop saying, “This is the most important election in our lifetimes” over and over again.
Stop pretending that we can get back to some ‘original vision’ of the Founders, when even they did not agree about that vision and wasted no time sullying their own principles anyway.
Stop doing what today’s socialists do and claiming that,
What we have now isn’t REAL American constitutional republicanism—REAL American constitutional republicanism has never been tried because it wasn’t done the right way, or by the right people.
Is that really where you want to hang your hat?
The Founders—and the Enlightenment philosophers from whom they drew—were brilliant men who changed the world. Their core principles were sound. But do not beatify them. They were correct that government must be consensual in order to be legitimate. They were wrong that the government they gave us satisfied that requirement.
They were wrong that your consent to the ‘social contract’ is “tacit” and implied” and that that makes the contract “consensual.”
It does not.
Step 2 is seeing that, admitting it to yourself, and then saying it out loud.
Keep voting if you wish, but do not think of it as a solution. Think of it as an emergency stopgap measure—buying us a little more time until we can help humankind move to the next stage of our evolution.
We managed to move on from HumanGovernance 1.0, which we can call, for shorthand, monarchy. We replaced it with HumanGovernance 2.0—with what we know today to be all the systems under the umbrella we call democracy. It took men and women of vision to bring about that change.
They saw the flaws of the ancien régime. They knew it had to go. Some even had the vision to see what might come next. But they were a tiny number, and at any one moment, they were surrounded by doubters and naysayers and people who deemed them to be a genuine threat to the established order.
Tut tut—that’s just not how we do things.
It took centuries for their ideas to catch on, but at some point, critical mass was reached and the rest is history. And now we take it all for granted, as if it were all a forgone conclusion at the time. Now, most people treat what we have now as just the way we do things.
Who do you want to be?
Do you want to be one of the naysayers living in a past that never existed? Do you want to react in fear at new ideas because you refuse to see beyond they way things have always been done? Do you want to see today’s system not as a stage in our social evolution, but as the only way things can ever be, for all time?
Do you want to harumph and cluck your tongue and defend the status quo because it’s the status quo?
Or do you want to be one of those people of vision?
Fact
"...you cannot be holding the line with no end in sight—just an endless slog in the mud, fending off an intractable foe until your shield arm tires…whereupon you pass the task onto our children, and their children, forever. There must be an end somewhere."
Salut.
By coincidence, I recently wrote this blog about our state legislatures and Declarations of Dissent.
https://deplorabledavid.com/2023/09/declarations-of-dissent-a-forceful-new-role-for-our-state-legislatures/