Evolution Is Preferable to Revolution

If you go carryin' pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow.

“The last time I checked, wars only destroy.”
—Keynes vs. Hayek Rap Battle Part 2

As classical liberals (conservatives, libertarians, anarchists), we hearken back to the classical-liberal philosophers of the last two millennia, from Cicero to the natural lawyers of the Enlightenment to the many thinkers who have come since.

The revolutionary founders of America were acting upon those ideals. So when we think back to the American Revolution, we tend to do so with some fondness. Whatever might have happened after, the Declaration of Independence was a powerful distillation of those ideals, and the Revolution was an attempt to actuate them.

Moreover, in comparison to other revolutions, the American was a comparatively orderly affair. It included the horrors of war, of course, but with less wanton brutality than most. And it was nothing like the psychotic abattoir that was its counterpart in France a few years later.

As a result, we have a more favorable attitude towards the concept of revolution in general than I think we should.

Don’t get me wrong—the architects of the psychotic oppression under which we now languish deserve to be violently overthrown. And then put on trial for crimes against humanity, and punished according to their crimes.

Indeed, I probably take the matter even more seriously than many of my fellows. After years of thought and painstaking philosophical calculus, I am rock-solid sure that even the most benevolent authority is morally impermissible, so long as it is forcibly imposed without the explicit consent of those it claims to rule. So I am not at all soft on any of this.

But the typical violent revolution won’t work…and we wouldn’t want it to anyway.

In the classic scenario, the revolutionary looks at a given territory and says, We don’t like the way things are done here. Once we have used force to stop the existing power from imposing its will on everyone by force…we are going to impose our will on everyone by force.

This is rooted in the pathological human trait of believing that all solutions must be collective solutions—imposed on large groups of people living in large areas. Even if we could succeed, that is not what we want. That just creates more of exactly what we want to get away from.

During a revolution, many are killed, maimed, and displaced. People who are just trying to live their lives are forced to pick one side or the other, and many others become collateral damage.

After a revolution is successful, its original aims tend to be perverted. The idealists who started the revolution are replaced (sometimes violently) by political operators.

And even in the best circumstances, ideals end up being replaced by the reality of trying to impose a new form of governance upon a whole people. “Give me liberty or give me death” ends up in the Alien and Sedition Acts.

Our principles are rooted in an ethos of consent and nonaggression. This is not a pacifistic doctrine—there are times when protective force is absolutely justified in response to the initiation of coercive force. And oppression is a kind of coercive force.

But imposing new forms of oppression—which is what a typical revolution inevitably leads to—is not what we’re all about. We need to break that cycle, not perpetuate it.

Instead, we need to evolve.

Over the next year, we will increase our discussions of the kind of evolution I am talking about.

Being red-pilled is only the beginning. It will require shifts of consciousness and new declarations of independence.

It will open the curtain on Act 3 of the human struggle for freedom…

• In Act 1 (monarchy), one person decided for everyone.

• In Act 2 (democracy), majorities decide for everyone.

• And both monarchy and democracy end up, de facto, becoming oligarchies in which a select few are really running the show.

• In Act 3………everyone will decide for themselves.

What that will look like in practice is a subject we have discussed elsewhere, and which we will continue to discuss. How we will get there is…complicated.

It is going to take time. It might even be a generational project—which is all the more reason why we should start NOW.

Instead of revolutionary overthrow, some of this process will involve what Max Borders calls “underthrow”—a peaceful exit-and-build approach about which he writes extensively in a book and stack of the same name.

Some of this journey will likely involve civil disobedience and counter-economics. There may even be some impromptu violence, as Kulak posits here. But a planned revolutionary overthrow, whatever its ultimate outcome, is not going to produce results we would want or like.

This is a large subject to which we will be returning over the upcoming year. But here are a few quick notes on reasons to be hopeful:

Technology

New technologies are changing the way people interact, in business, personal, and every other area of life. Government is becoming an increasingly irrelevant and irritating middleman. As that process accelerates, fewer people will be willing to put up with the meddling. The change will be gradual, but inexorable.

Money

The technology that allows goldbacks and crypto may be the biggest of all. As Neal Stephenson pointed out in Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, if governments lose the ability to tax, and to restrict people to using only their inflationary fiat money as legal tender, they are finished. Kaput. Over. Governments are fighting back against these new, decentralized monies, because they see the writing on the wall. But the ascendence of these new moneys is inevitable. Governments can delay it, but they cannot stop it—not without waging an open war so terrible that humanity would fight back and win. (There are far more of us than there are of them!)

Special economic zones

Próspera and Ciudad Morazán in Honduras, Shenzen, in China, etc. are the first forays into what will eventually become a phenomenon of free city-states. These early efforts are still under some state control now, but they are slowly getting more autonomous. Over time, a more complete independence will just happen. Governments won't be able to stop it. Especially since the number of these SEZs is only increasing. Other sort of experiments in free polities are rising now, and these too will continue to proliferate.

Shift towards the private

Private agencies will slowly take on more and more of the roles played by government. Market anarchism won't be imposed by force; it will just slowly happen. This process will be aided by sovereign debt and unfunded liabilities collapsing governments' ability to provide, and thus maintain a monopoly upon, various services.

Choice

The proliferation of individualized choice in various goods and services provided by the market is also conditioning people to expect individualized choice generally. As alternatives to clunky government services start poking up their heads, people will increasingly consider choosing those over the government alternative.

There are plenty more such reasons to hope, and much more detail to discuss. But this will do for now. In the meantime, E is for Extropy! ’s Sterlin Lujan has a few more thoughts here.

Governments will resist change, but government authority is a house of cards—strong until people realize that all they have to do is blow.

In honor of all of this, here is a classic for #FreedomMusicFriday. Listen to the words—they are quite appropriate!