‘If You Don’t Pay Your Taxes, I Want to See You Hurt’

A conversation with a normie serves as an important reminder (DN 4.YZ)

I was at a party a couple of weeks ago, and I ended up in a disturbing conversation with a normie. I won’t say who. It was someone intelligent. Someone decent and civilized. Someone whom I know well.

I know some of you do not like the term “normie,” and I understand why. Nonetheless, it is useful and highly recognizable shorthand for someone who generally believes and trusts the mainstream narrative. A normie is either unaware of any alternative information or refuses to accept that anything other than the mainstream narrative could possibly be true. The term is applicable here.

Let’s call our normie Bob. (It’s quick and easy to type, and everyone loves a good palindrome.)

It was not I who started the conversation; it was my wife. I was just sitting there, minding my business, eating my pulled-pork sandwich, when I heard her say something to Bob about the immorality of certain kinds of taxes, and certain uses of tax money.

We must note here that my wife hasn’t yet made the final swim to Anarchist Island. She’s still in the phase in which she is coming to understand the immorality of taxation, but hasn’t carried that understanding to its logical moral conclusions. It is the place I was just a few years ago—the place where most people in the freedom movement still are. The logical conclusion is there—brilliant and undeniable, like a bright shining crystal. But it is hard to focus on it, because as soon as one does, one must face the reality that what we’ve all come to believe about governance, and how things are supposed to work, is just plain wrong. This realization takes some warming up to, even for people who truly believe in human freedom.

My wife is certainly aware of where I am, though. So as soon as I heard her say this to Bob, I thought,

Is she teeing this up for me? She knows what I would say here.

No. Just keep eating your dinner, Chris. Don’t interject. Don’t blurt out ‘ALL TAXATION IS THEFT’ (or extortion or slavery). Just keep your mouth shut.

And so I did. At first.

But then she got up to go get some cake or whatever, leaving her words about taxes hovering in the air like hummingbirds looking for nectar. And since Bob and I have had many spirited (and generally good-natured) debates over the years, we figured we might as well have one more!

I don’t know who started it, and I won’t bother with the details. Briefly…

I attempted to lay the groundwork for the anarchist/voluntaryist/consentist case: The centrality of consent to human morality; the lack of genuine consent in all forms of involuntary governance; and the moral crime of initiating coercive force against people who have not themselves initiated force against anyone else. I also threw in the fact that government agents have special “rights” to do things to others that would be deemed immoral and criminal if the rest of us did them.

He responded as I knew (or should have known) he would.

In essence, he sidestepped my arguments entirely. It didn’t matter how logically coherent—or even logically unassailable—they were. My moral reasoning, no matter how good it was, was essentially invisible to him..like a perfectly clear crystal that he just could not see.

The reasons he gave were instructive and, in hindsight, predictable.

We do things the way we do things…

• Because that is how we do things.

• Because that is how we keep order.

• Because society.

Since the discussion centered on taxation, there was a fourth reason why Bob believed it is perfectly fine to violate human consent and force peaceful people to do all sorts of things:

• Because everyone has to pay their fair share.

We have spoken of all of these before, but the combination of them bears special notice.

Because that is how we do things

Most people are not able to see beyond what exists. Jordan Peterson has spoken many times about the applicability of the Pareto distribution to traits such as creativity, and it likely applies to imagination as well. And possibly even to the willingness to even consider imagining anything beyond what currently exists. Adam Haman and Bob Murphy also speak of the imagination problem here.

Sadly, I think the lack of imagination may have more explanatory value than we might like to believe. And I suspect it was just as much at work when we were beginning our last major transition from HumanGovernance 1.0 (monarchy) to 2.0 (democracy). What do you mean, something other than a king? There is nothing other than monarchy. How could there be?

Because that is how we keep order

This leads us directly to the next issue: What could 3.0 possibly even look like? How can we keep order without violating consent or initiating coercive force upon peaceful people. How can we keep order without a Hobbesian sovereign?

Here is where I must admit that while I have imagination and intelligence, I am not in the rarefied air at the top of both metrics. I don’t think I would have been able to free myself from the Matrix if David Friedman, Hans-Herman Hoppe, et al hadn’t blazed the trail and shown how 3.0 could work.

Now that they have, I can extrapolate and come up with new ideas, refinements, etc.—I have enough imagination and intelligence to do that. But it would have been a lot tougher to get here entirely on my own.

And that is just the point. If you want to be free and independent, if you want to have your right of consent truly respected, you are up against not only the state, but the majority of your fellow humans. People are terrified of chaos, and virtually no one can imagine order being produced in any way other than that with which they are familiar.

Because society

We have discussed this problem at length. Humans are ultra-social creatures, and our default assumption thus far has been that in order to “find ways to live together,” we must impose single-solution systems on large groups of people living in given areas.

Some of us have gotten over some of this. Here in the West, for example, we no longer believe that in order for everyone in a given area to get along, everyone in that area must be Catholic or Anglican or Puritan or whatever. A Methodist church can sit next to a Baptist church, and its respective parishioners can live side by side, without any problems. They can even join each other for backyard barbecues.

But virtually no one yet understands that this can tolerance can also be applied to governance.

As such, Bob’s reaction was predictable and entirely in keeping with this human pathology. This is how society does things, and only a sicko would go against society.

Society is society and no one gets to leave society. Leaving society just isn’t done.

Because everyone has to pay their fair share

The next normie conclusion follows directly from the rest: If this is the only possible way to do things, then everyone must be forced to pay for it.

This was indeed central theme we kept coming back to. We must keep order. We must live together. Therefore, we must pay taxes. And only a sicko would suggest otherwise.

This also produced the quote that formed the title of this article. Bob was presuming all of the above, and thus anyone not paying taxes is not only putting him at risk of chaos and social breakdown, but essentially stealing from him. He’s paying and they’re not. (And within his set of presumed premises, he’s right.) Thus, Bob wants to see non-taxpayers brought to “justice.”

I was trying to explain the fundamental immorality of taxation. Bob was not seeing anything past the system he knows—the only system he can imagine. As Carl Sagan noted in Cosmos, my efforts were like trying to describe the third dimension to a two-dimensional creature. Hey, Mr. Triangle, there’s this place called Up.

Mr. Triangle would simply not know what you are talking about. His only frame of reference is side-to-side. There is no up.

I am not saying that Bob, or anyone else, is unreachable. Indeed, people are being reached and minds are being changed every day. But it is going to be a long time before we start reaching large numbers. And in the meantime, we live in a world of frightened normies for whom “up” is simply not an option.

The lesson here is that we should act accordingly. And that will require patience and commitment.

I wanted to title this “Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid,” after everyone’s favorite quote from the 1980s version of The Fly. But as you know, I am all about hope and movement rather than despair and paralysis. Thus, I rejected that title as too grim.

Nonetheless, it is important to be clear-eyed about what we’re up against. Plenty of people would come around if they sat down for an extensive study of anarcho-libertarian principles and proposals. But few will do so, and in the meantime, to them you are weirdo or a threat—a society-hating freak who is inviting chaos and stealing from them because you are not paying your fair share of the bill.

This has huge implications for tactics and strategy.

If you think that most people will be happy to join in on whatever bloody revolution you are hoping for, think again. Most people will see the revolution, not the state, as the problem.

If you think we are going to reach a tipping point where huge numbers are convinced and we can change “the system,” think again. Most people cannot imagine anything other than what already exists. Most people cannot be bothered thinking past what they’re going to watch on Netflix tonight. And if you try to explain anything what we’re talking about, all most people will hear is Blah blah WARLORDS blah blah CHAOS blah blah WHO WILL BUILD THE ROADS blah blah blah.

In order to build the new world, we will need to build practical, working examples. And we have to build them without bloodshed. Indeed, we need to be extra-nice and non-scary.

Perhaps that sounds galling and frustrating…and also like it’s going to take longer than any of us would wish.

Yup. I wish I could tell you otherwise. For right now, it’s crabs in a pot.

The good news is that we have an opportunity to commit to something larger than ourselves.

Do you like the fact that you no longer have to bow and scrape to a king, or look down at the ground when a nobleman rides by (lest you be whipped for your insolence)? If so, you owe it to people who committed to something larger than themselves. People who imagined a future and worked towards it, knowing that they themselves might not live to see the full blossom of that future.

Those are the sorts of people we should aspire to be.

---

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 | 3.11 | 3.12 | 3.13 || Who: 4.0 | 4.1 | 4.2 | 4.3 | 4.4 | 4.5 | 4.XX | 4.XY | 4.6 | 4.7 | 4.8 | 4.9 | 4.10 | 4.11 | 4.12 | 4.XZ | 4.13 | 4.YX | 4.14 | 4.15 | 4.16 | 4.17 | 4.18 | 4.19 | 4.YY | 4.YZ