What Unites Us: First Principles

And a possible first rule? (DN 2.12)

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

Chapter 2.12
Principles and Protocols, 2

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In order to be a nation, a dispersed population must cohere around something. An identity. A common purpose. A shared belief.

Can a shared belief in natural law, on its own, provide sufficient cohesion for a distributed nation?

Perhaps we need more. But one thing is for sure: natural law must at least be the starting point. Frankly, it ought to be the foundation for any culture. And you can be danged sure it’s gonna be for ours.

This law of nature, being co-eval with mankind and dictated by God himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times: no human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this.

—William Blackstone, 1765

Without a doubt, human beings want and need order. With the obvious exception of tyrants, psychopaths, and thugs, no one wants chaos and insecurity.

The general presumption is that order is produced by government officials creating and imposing laws. Yet much of the evidence actually challenges this assumption.

Most human interactions unfold and remain peaceful not because of manmade laws, but because of natural law. Most behavior is regulated not by the thought, “This is illegal,” but by a deep emotional, intuitive, and moral understanding: “This is wrong.” Order is, first and foremost, an emergent phenomenon—seen in the billions of peaceful interactions that take place every day with no central direction or guiding authority.

Yes, there are bad actors who are not restrained by the moral considerations of natural law. But natural law has a solution to deal with them as well: protective force.

Here too, the general presumption is that a small group of people calling themselves ‘government’ must arrogate a monopoly of authority to the ‘legal’ exercise of that protective force. That same cadre of government officials even have the nerve to limit your natural right to protect yourself—in some places to the degree that they would actually prefer that you die, or be robbed of all your possessions, than defend yourself.

Natural law says otherwise. There is no reason why there need be a single entity exercising a monopoly on the ‘legal’ exercise of protective force.

And the fact that that same entity, in order to enforce its monopoly, daily initiates coercive force against peaceful people…well, that ought to tell you all you need to know. Government (even the mythical unicorn called “limited government”) does not secure natural law. It makes a mockery of it.

The means by which protective force can be exercised, and order maintained, without traditional governments is a subject we will discuss later in this work. William Blackstone and the other natural lawyers began to see the first glimmers of it.¹ Two centuries later, Lysander Spooner and others carried those glimmers out to their logical conclusions. And a century after that, modern anarchists and voluntaryists began producing detailed descriptions of how it can actually work.

It all begins with a simple notion: nature has already provided all the laws we need.

We are so accustomed to manmade law, and so fearful of chaos, that it is difficult to let go of this notion that we must have manmade laws imposed upon us. Instead of making a clean break, we scramble to make marginal changes. We switch the source of our laws from kings to congressmen. From bureaucrats to technocrats. We suggest tweaks to the way laws are made or enforced, or how long they will last. We try to create other structural limitations.

All of this is just rearranging deck chairs on a sinking vessel. If we empower some men to write laws in hopes that they will secure and enforce natural law, those same men will eventually start writing laws that violate it. Every single time.

We do not need laws imposed from above. We just need to enforce the simple rules that nature has already provided.

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.

—Thomas Jefferson

At first, describing what natural law is, and exactly what it says, feels like trying to catch a butterfly. You can see it. You can feel its beauty. You know it’s there. But it is hard to capture it precisely.

That is, and has been, the experience of just about every human who has ever lived. We know it. We observe it in our daily lives and induce intuitive principles from those observations. We feel it in the moral impulses of our emotions. Even toddlers have an innate sense of it.

Natural law is everywhere. Natural law is constantly sending us messages.

Yet we have another tool at our disposal to help us refine our understanding of these universal moral truths: reason. Using a deductive process, we can hone our intuitive understanding of natural law into specific principles.

Throughout chapter 1, we sought to accomplish exactly that.

Using logic and syllogisms, we took the brute facts of nature and converted them into a set of solid moral conclusions. That way, when we talk about natural law, we’re not chasing butterflies or dancing on the head of a pin. Instead, we can say exactly what we mean.

Namely,

• THAT each and every individual human is, as an ineluctable fact of nature, a person—a separate, unique, irreplaceable being with the independent capacity for a theoretically infinite range of thoughts, choices, and actions;²

• THAT personhood is a natural quality that cannot de facto be unmade by any act of nature or man, and is thus inalienable;

• THAT each and every individual human person has exclusive, dispositive decision-making authority (self-ownership) over his own life, body, and being; and

• THAT no person, or order of persons, has any automatic, ontological, or birthright authority over any other.³

There is only one way for authority to be imposed upon the unwilling: through the initiation of coercive force. Since no one has ontological authority over any other, it thus follows that

• No one has the ontological authority to initiate coercive force upon the unwilling.

Thus, in essence, we proved the nonaggression principle.

We can define authority as the license to compel actions, choices, or experiences—effected by force, the threat of force, or any action that impedes the exercise of individual choice.

We know that, ontologically…

• No one has such authority,

• No one may initiate force upon the unwilling, and

• You, and you alone, have dispositive decision-making authority (self-ownership) over your own life, body, being, and property (since property is an ineluctable and necessary extension of self-ownership).

The logical conclusion of these facts is that no one has any ontological right to do anything to you without your permission. You must consent before being subjected to any force, authority, or reciprocal transaction. And in order for that consent to be genuine, and to fulfill the requirements of natural law, it must be voluntary, explicit, informed, transparent, and revokable.

Combining all of these first principles together, we can derive a first rule of sorts:

No person may be subjected to any transaction, initiation of coercive force, or imposition of authority to which he does not provide voluntary, informed, explicit, transparent, and revokable consent.

All of this leads to the concept of rights.

Each of us has absolute self-ownership, which means we each have complete license to engage in any thought, choice, action, or experience we wish. These our rights, and they have but one exception: that we may not impose any nonconsensual transaction, initiation of coercive force, or imposition of authority upon any unwilling person.

In other words, you have a right to do whatever you want, so long as you do not violate the first rule.

Indeed, the only way that anyone else can, without your permission, disrupt the exercise and enjoyment of your rights is by imposing some violation of the first rule upon you.

As we can see, rights exist. They are a just moral claim emanating from natural realities.

Of course, a just moral claim needs teeth, and natural law provides those teeth in the form of protective force. And thus, in chapter 1, we also we deduced that

• The individual has the right to deploy protective force in response to, and to defend against, any nonconsensual transaction, initiation of coercive force, or imposition of authority.

Everyone knows it’s true, intuitively. A little kid is expressing it when he says, “Hey, he hit me first.” It’s the obvious and necessary corollary to the first rule…but we deduced it anyway.

Of course, the absence of ontological authority means an absence of ontological inequality, which presupposes and necessitates the ontological equality of all human beings. This, of course, leads to another obvious conclusion; namely, that

• Each and every human person enjoys equal claim to all natural rights and the enjoyment thereof.

Thomas Jefferson deemed this among his “self-evident” truths, and it fairly is. But we deduced it too, just so everything crystal clear.

We then spent some time unpacking the notion that there is no moral alchemy by which what is forbidden to an individual person somehow magically becomes allowable when a group of people calling themselves ‘government’ do it.

Morally, they cannot arrogate authority that no person is allowed to have. And you cannot cede to them rights that you yourself do not possess. Not even by voting.

For brevity’s sake, the upshot is this:

1. No involuntary governance is morally permissible.

2. Democracy does not solve #1.

3. A constitutional republic does not solve #2.

And so it is that we find ourselves in this place. The existing model is obsolete and cannot be reformed. We must build something new.

But we also want to be free without having to run anywhere. To be free where we are.

And so we must somehow create an archipelago of sovereign people and sovereign spaces. (An anarchipelago, if you will.⁴) Not some sort of top-down system, but a bottom-up nation of people united by the most important principles of all. The principles that make us free. The principles of natural law.

Can it be done?

There’s only one way to find out.

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1. Hat tip to David Jäkle for a recent timely reminder of the Blackstone quote.

2. I am aware that there is a school of thought that fears the use of the word “person” because they believe it has some dispositive legal meaning among some particular set of overlords, who are following some particular legal code of their own device. And that if we use the word ourselves, we are somehow legally surrendering something.

Please allow me to be clear about two things:

First, those psychotic overlords will abuse us no matter what words we use, or do not use. Second, we will not allow them to steal the use of a word from us—out of fear of their legal mumbo jumbo, or any other of their wicked devices. 

When we say “person” here, the only legal meaning is that conferred upon it by the law of nature. A person is a unique, sovereign being of infinite depth and preciousness, not some commodity in their weird system.

Our psychotic would-be overlords do not tell us what a person is. WE. TELL. THEM.

3. Parents and children are a separate case, which we will address later.

4. Hat tip to The Starfire Codes for the term “anarchipelago.”