My Ideological Journey: From Left to Right and Beyond, Part 4

HumanGovernance 3.0

Here is the final installment. Thank you to everyone who upgraded their subscriptions to read this, and to support my work. It means a great deal to me. We will be going back to more free content next week.

Questioning and escaping the left. A time in the desert and safe haven under the big tent. Rebuilding everything from the ground-up…followed by the disturbing feeling that perhaps none of us ever left the desert. What a long strange trip it’s been.

And it’s not over yet…

Phase 6
None dare call it ‘anarchy’

6b: Inescapable conclusions

There’s a bumper-sticker slogan in libertarian circles: I used to be a minarchist, but then I ran out of excuses. Rather abstruse, as slogans go, but it does accurately encapsulate a common libertarian-anarchist view, which can be summed up thusly:

Hey minarchist—you believe that the only legitimate function of government is to protect people from force, fraud, theft, and breach of contract, right? Now, take the same principles that led you to that belief and draw them out to their logical conclusions. Keep going… Keep going… Just a little more… Boom—you’re an anarchist.

For minarchists, like most people, the big stumbling block is the fact that humanity has lived with the involuntary state for so long that it is simply difficult to imagine life without it. Everyone has