A Framework for HumanGovernance 3.0

Escaping the Devil's pretty trick. (DN 2.2)

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

Chapter 2.2: Introduction to the Framework

“La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu’il n’existe pas.”
(The Devil’s prettiest trick is to convince you that he does not exist.)
—Charles Baudelaire

We can, for our purposes, borrow from Baudelaire and say that the greatest trick government ever pulled is to convince you that you need it to exist.

This plus belle des ruses leads people to perform the following sacred statist ritual:

1. Agree with the ‘devil’ and insist that we cannot get by without government.

2. Grant governments the presumption of ‘legitimacy.’

3. Recite tired platitudes about keeping them in check with our “eternal vigilance.”

We may not have known better in the past, but we do now. Yes, we need order, which means we need to be able to deploy protective force when needed. And yes, governments do intermittently deploy some protective force.

But they constantly initiate coercive force. 

Do you understand? In exchange for a smattering of low-quality protective force, we have empowered a beast that steals our money, constrains our rights, and violates our consent…every minute of every day. A monster that starts world wars and enslaves us to fight in them.

It’s not eternal vigilance. It’s eternal Stockholm Syndrome.

Some of us have figured out this scam for what it is, and we are now trying to move ourselves, and anyone who will come with us, on to the next level of human social organization. Not ‘utopia’—for no such thing is possible on Earth—but at least something without the foolishness of this Faustian bargain.

Unfortunately, this particular devil controls just about every square inch of land on the planet. Escaping the state is not easy when the state is everywhere. As a result, most of our efforts must begin in areas over which governments claim total dominion.

You can see this laid out on the right side of the top-level category of our chart (out/in) and the three subcategories that flow therefrom:

Territorial

Polities in territorially distinct locales with defined borders.

Semi-territorial

Archipelagos of properties and people; dispersed populations; temporary free zones; pre-territorial polities; panarchic or market-anarchic regions; etc.
(Don’t worry—we will clarify all this as we move forward.)

Virtual

Polities, communities, and organizations that operate exclusively or primarily on the Internet.

Numerous people benefit from the ongoing existence of the state: those who are enriched by it (the powerful, the connected, the moochers) and those who need power (the psychopaths, the control freaks, the cowards). These entrenched interests, and thus our obstacles, are tremendous.

Our second set of subcategories, then, must focus on each effort’s relationship to the state and its method of achieving independence from it.

Before we can explore those subcategories, however, we must introduce a piece of terminology and then make an important clarification:

In 1974, philosopher and Harvard professor Robert Nozick published Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which became one of the seminal works of modern libertarian analysis. In the course of the work, he reasons his way to the position that nothing more than a minimal “night watchman” state can be morally justified. He then goes on to posit that the ideal scenario is one in which people are free to create their own experiments in governance and lifestyle, to offer membership to others, and to move freely between such experiments. He calls this scenario the “framework.”

We are going to borrow the term framework and use it in a roughly similar way.

Setting aside doctrinaire debates about minarchism vs. anarchism, Nozick’s underlying premises and overall thrust were largely spot on. If human consent is to be properly respected—and it must be!—then something like Nozick’s framework is required:

• People must be free to establish polities—on their own property or in unclaimed spaces—that best suit their vision for a good life.

• They must be free to offer membership therein to others, upon mutually acceptable terms.

• And others must be free to join such polities, and to exit them freely so long as any contractual obligations are fulfilled.

Within this framework, people must also be free to remain where they are and form virtual or distributed communities, or to contract with providers of governance services, as they see fit. 

There are plenty of details as to how all of this can and should work. We will get to those. But the basic concept is sound, and ultimately, something like this framework is what the world ought to be evolving toward.

This leads to our clarification: In any such framework, it is possible for polities or communities to form that you or I might consider illiberal. Some people may wish to live in a micro-monarchy, a religious community with strict rules, or any other type of arrangement that seems not to comport with the overall ethos motivating the creation of the framework in the first place.

If we are to respect human consent—and we must!—then they must be free to do so. If they are not—if we try to control the ways in which people choose to live—then we are no better than the involuntary states whose grip we are hoping to escape.

Of course, this does raise questions (e.g., what if such illiberal polities do not respect exit rights?) and we will address those too, later in this work. For now, we can simply rest on the old aphorism that this is a problem we want to have.

This is a rich topic that will take the rest of this book to fully illuminate. For now, the above will suffice as a quick introduction.

Whether an attempt to gain independence is territorial, semi-territorial, or virtual, these framework rights must be respected: to ESTABLISH, JOIN, EXIT, SECEDE, and REMAIN.

(Don’t worry—we will be explaining all this too, in the days and weeks to come.)

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