Do We Stand? Or Do We Get Picked off One by One?

Being a part of something does not make you a traitor to classical liberalism. (DN 3.6)

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

Chapter 3.6
Organizational units, 4

Thomas Sowell, the world’s greatest living economist, is famous for making trenchant and accurate observations on a variety of political, philosophical, and economic topics. One of my favorites is the truism that “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.”

Anyone promising an easy road to a perfect solution is lying, or languishing under a bizarre delusion. Every project has its difficulties. The achievement of one desirable thing always comes at the cost of another desirable thing.

A quick examination reveals this.

Your marriage to Jane came at the cost of not being able to marry Sandra or Holly or any one of a couple billion other women. Your fit body came at the cost of not being able to eat whatever you want, whenever you want. Your ability to speak Japanese came at the cost of leisure time. To gain the benefits of having children, you must sacrifice being able to eat a meal at TGI Friday’s without having to wrangle an unruly toddler.

I had planned, for this installment, to continue our discussion of different ways that the (hopefully one day vast number of) members of the distributed nation can organize into groups of different sizes, for mutual benefit. The nuclear family is the first and most common of such groups. Individuals (and families) can of course form larger groups and cooperate for mutual benefit, and those groups might join with others to form larger units, and so on.

There are numerous benefits of this sort of organization, and we will continue discussing those in upcoming installments. But I want to take a slight diversion now to discuss and acknowledge some of the trade-offs involved.

Wariness of groups

A discussion yesterday with Angela Morris, and comments from Crixcyon and others, have reminded me of something that I know, but do not always keep forefront in my mind: people like us aren’t always the most group-oriented!

By people like us, I mean libertarians, anarchists/voluntaryists, and other classical liberals, and the small but ever-growing number of people who have awakened to some of the darker truths of this crazy world. These are the main types of people who will be early deciders in the kind of distributed nation we are herein creating.

We believe in natural law. Natural law begins with the rights of the individual. Governments pay lip service to those rights, but in practice, they violate them as a normal part of their operations. Government is the worst sort of collective.

The existence of government is, of course, aided and abetted by other sorts of collectives. People form collectives and demand that government “redistribute” resources. They demand that government “protect” them from the activities of individuals—even when those activities are well within our natural rights. Collectives efface the individual, turning him into a mere cell in a collective body. We have every reason to be skeptical.

Needless to say, observing the behavior of our fellow humans during the ‘pandemic’ certainly did not help. Could there possibly have been a more disturbing demonstration of herd behavior than what we saw in 2020-2022? The compliance. The ease with which people were programmed. The ease with which they demonstrated that what happened in totalitarian countries in the twentieth century could—and did!—happen here.

So here we are. Classical liberals. The lone defenders of the rights of the individual, standing against a howling gale of collectivism. Should it be any surprise that we are wary of groups?

And then there are the personality tendencies. I once saw a humorous Cartesian depiction of the political spectrum that placed “autistic Rothbard worshippers born with no capacity for empathy” down in the libertarian corner of the chart. This characterization is rude and overwrought, but like all stereotypes, it has a grain of truth. Libertarians and anarchists are more likely to include, among our number, people with an innate predisposition against joining groups of any kind.

Many conservatives are similarly oriented. Where Marx and Rousseau expressed the left’s general love of humanity in the abstract, but fear of individual humans, conservatives (Churchill, famously) tend to hold the opposite view: they like individual humans, but are skeptical of humanity as a whole. This leaves them more likely to display their own sort of curmudgeonly tendencies.

The benefits of groups

Right. So we are not hive people, and never will be. But there are drawbacks to remaining as atomized individuals, and there are numerous benefits to joining together with others in groups.

First, we have to acknowledge the natural reality that we are a social species. Some species live as isolated individuals; some live in groups. We are the latter. Yes, some of us are more comfortable being alone, and some are more highly dependent upon the company of others. But as a whole, we are a social species. Being totally alone tends to break us—emotionally, mentally, and physically. We see the results in feral children, prisoners in solitary confinement, and people marooned on desert islands.

Even group-skeptical introverts need people. (The fact that some of you are here now, speaking with others in online social groups, is evidence enough.) It is not healthy for humans to be completely alone.

This natural reality is thus closely tied to the emotional benefits of togetherness. We need love. We need support, compassion, and acknowledgement. What was it Mother Teresa said? “Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.” She was right.

The thought of people suffering through loneliness breaks my heart a little. And the thought of my people, my tribe—the people who defend, and try to live by, natural law—suffering through loneliness…well that breaks my heart even more. That is one reason, among many, why I am doing this.

Then there are the practical reasons. For a general picture of these, we might well begin with Thomas Paine in Common Sense:

[T]he strength of one man is so unequal to his wants, and his mind so unfitted for perpetual solitude, that he is soon obliged to seek assistance and relief of another, who in his turn requires the same. Four or five united would be able to raise a tolerable dwelling in the midst of a wilderness, but one man might labor out the common period of life without accomplishing any thing; when he had felled his timber he could not remove it, nor erect it after it was removed; hunger in the mean time would urge him to quit his work, and every different want would call him a different way. Disease, nay even misfortune, would be death; for though neither might be mortal, yet either would disable him from living, and reduce him to a state in which he might rather be said to perish than to die.

We could no doubt spend all day discussing the general benefits of groups: Economic specialization, cooperation, and trade. Collaborative intelligence and the ratchet effect of human knowledge. Mutual protection. Procreation. And much more. Yet let us narrow our discussion to some benefits more specific to our current situation, and to our shared endeavor of creating a distributed nation.

Building our independence

What is more likely to serve our goal of freedom and independence: working together or remaining as atomized individuals? Even if you only seek independence for yourself and don’t think about it much for others, you are still more likely to achieve that aim as part of a group working together towards that goal.

As I have made clear throughout this work, the distributed nation is not about control, hierarchies, or leaders. It is absolutely a voluntaryist enterprise, devoted entirely to natural law and the notion that human consent is the paramount value.

But that does not mean that we have to remain atomized individuals, hiding on our separate islands. It IS possible to work together, to be together, without (re)creating an oppressive state.

Indeed, as atomized individuals, we are more vulnerable. We are more easily picked on by oppressive states. And if things get really bad, we will be more easily picked off. There really is strength in numbers.

For far too long, we, as a species, have been subjected to top-down oppression at the hands of groups. It has left a bad taste in our mouths. But groups do not have to be that way. There are many other ways to organize and cooperate organically—as human beings living by the principles of natural law.

In order to support each other in difficult times, we need to form groups.

In order to work towards a future of true independence and freedom for the individual human person, we must form groups.

In order to gain the benefits of love and companionship, of fellowship and friendship, we need to form groups. (Even a group of friends is a group.)

In order to procreate—to secure the future for ourselves, and possibly to save the human species from demographic winter—we need to form the most important groups of all: couples and families.

I have no intention of defining the kinds of groups we must form, like some ruler imposing his will. But I will certainly be joining you in continuing to brainstorm the kinds of groups it might be good for us to form.

Whatever that ends up looking like, however, we must have some cohesion. As atomized individuals—hiding in separate spaces, in fear, mistrust, and anger—we are doomed.

Remember—it is not just my rights that are being violated, or yours, or any one person’s. It is everyone’s. Obviously there are a fair number of people who don’t care. People who participate in their own oppression. People who even seem to like and crave it. Maybe we cannot help them now.

But we can damn well help each other!

The unifying factor of the distributed nation is our belief in the principles and protocols of natural law. That is the first thing we have in common. But those principles are worthy of more than a bland, abstract, milquetoast adherence.

Those principles are worthy of the most fearsome and fiery passion! Violations of those principles are worthy of a furious and righteous anger. Can we not be fiercely loyal to those principles, and as such, be fiercely loyal to each other?

In the previous chapter, drawing in part on the work of others, I described such a people. Not a collective under the thumb of a ruler—just a people fiercely devoted to their own independence, and thus to the independence of their brethren and sistren who share that devotion.

We can be such a people.

Being a part of something does not make you a traitor to classical liberalism. Freedom and independence do not require atomization. Freedom and independence do not demand loneliness. We anarchists and voluntaryists believe it is possible to have rules without rulers. In the same way, it is possible to have togetherness without control.

If it helps, think in terms of a pack rather than a herd. Think of powerful people, collaborating to defend what is right…in contradistinction to the world’s many collectives of timid prey animals doing what is wrong. Human social nature is a source of tremendous strength, and, in its darker manifestations, the cause of terrible problems. We can be the masters of our nature, not its victims.

At the end of the day, we cannot just stand against tyranny. We must also stand for something.

We stand for principles. But we should also stand for each other.

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This cannot become a reality without your support.