This is the central dilemma. It appears that we have, mixed in with DNA that fosters a spiritual and loving outlook on life, other DNA buried deep inside us, left over from long-gone reptile ancestors, lurking, so that "The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” (Solzhenitsyn). What to do?
Ultimately we have power only over our own selves, and nothing healthy can come out of an unhealthy mind, so our first and primary task is to look inward in as deep as way as possible. That includes exploring the dark side of our nature, resisting the temptation to wall it off, which can lead to explosive releases just when calm is most needed.
Having achieved a good degree of mental health, the answer to how to deal with other people in matters necessitating force will be approached from the best possible perspective. One resulting observation: I am ultimately responsible for my own self-defense. Understanding this may be scary, but it leads me to avoid looking to some big powerful entity that promises to do the job for me, which, given human nature, will in fact enslave me.
Unless and until a large fraction of the populace understands these things, society will succumb to the seductive sirens of evil men and women, I think.
Markets generate states. It's simple supply and demand. In any sufficiently sized market there will be thieves. This will create a demand for market guards who prevent thieves, and punish those they do not prevent.
This will create a demand for an authority which can be appealed to when the guards are accused of abuse.
Needless to say, it happens a lot. However, there are multiple theories about the rise of the state, and I suspect that all of them are true to one degree or other, in different places, at different times, or in combinations. The notion that it rose in response to the need for protection is just one of them. There's also the notion that brigands found it easier to regularize their predations (in the form of taxes) upon a captive population who deems their predations legitimate, as opposed to having to rob and pillage people who might just fight back. (See Franz Oppenheimer, or Thomas Paine's "principal ruffian of some restless gang.")
We don't need a single theory. They can all be true at the same time. Generating numerous rival states vying for influence. It doesn't really matter because you end up with a state either way.
We do not need a single theory, indeed, for a single theory likely would not comprise all the different ways in which states have arisen and can arise.
And I agree that something is inevitable, but not necessarily the state per se. Protective force is definitely inevitable. Order is always the more stable form, and we will tend towards the production of order one way or the other.
The state has been the most likely form and source of that order, for the reason that two parties benefit. Average people just want order so they can go about their business. Exploiters love the vehicle for exploitation that the state provides.
The question is, can order be produced in another way—without the exploitation and the involuntary imposition of authority? Robert Nozick famously fell into the camp into which you appear to fall, holding that in a market-anarchic condition, one private protection agency would become dominant, and eventually would be a “state-like entity.” Others believe that market forces (especially once stripped of the distortions caused by the state) would serve to keep this phenomenon in check, allowing a healthy ecosystem of private agencies providing justice, security, and other services that maintain a protective order. The result, then, is order without the state.
I fall into this latter camp. Granted, there is much we do not know. We have the medieval/pre-medieval examples I mentioned in my other comment to you, but we do not yet have any modern examples at scale to point to. Which means that viewpoints on both sides are, to an extent, a priori speculation.
Since I know that the state is morally impermissible exploitation and violence, I err on the side of believing we ought to try another course.
“If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?”
Excellent Christopher! You Expose it all so well in an easy to understand way. But most markets are no longer "free" or have not been for many decades. They are controlled by the few artificial victors with Huge Government support and Black Rock or similar money so that cartels or one or two company's literally controls an entire sector or even industry. Examples include: Microsoft, Google, PayPal, Tesla, Walmart, Amazon etc. This would not happen in a True Free Market. How do we get there?
A problem is that the conversations around political philosophies is binary. It's not whether they work or don't it's how and where they scale. Anarchy works well at the lowest level but it doesn't scale up. Socialism is the same. Conversely Libertarianism doesn't scale downward well but works at the highest level. It's the superposition problem applied to politics but there's a lot more nuance.
- With my wife / friends I'm an anarchist
- With my family, friends, church unit I'm a socialist
- With my city I'm more of a Democrat
- With my state I'm closer to Republican
- With my country I'm a libertarian.
It all makes sense when you look at the scalability of political philosophies. More here:
I understand what you are saying. But I am reasonably well persuaded that anarchism—specifically market anarchism—is infinitely scalable.
Part of the reason for this is precisely because it not a totalizing system. Anarchism does not say, "You are now living in the Galactic Anarchist Imperium." Anarchism just says, "Go live." And market anarchism provides for infinitely scalable options for living.
It’s not scalable past Dunbar’s number without abstraction and that abstraction is what we call goverance. It’s clearly laid out in the article and I’ve read all the anarchists. The problem is it works for an individual who natigates structures, not an individual who navigates all other individuals.
It’s a romantic idea that works until it doesn’t but because it works well enough with enough people, anarchists say it’s infinitly scalable while never finding a single shred of evidence it ever scaled beyond Dunbar’s number.
“It’s the best way and infinitly scalable.” and yet exists nowhere and has never existed beyond small engagements. That’s why it’s a superposition problem and out of context. Your example from Chapter 12 rests on dozens of layers of governance and merely points out you don't need one more. Hell, even America was founded on the idea of a Benevolant Dictator.
Living in the South, I more often hear that religion is the only restraining factor, as though atheists all have people carved up and stored in their freezers. And it's always other people who need that rod to stiffen their spines, while the speaker gets to wield it against them. If there's a human condition, it's hypocrisy.
Just about all we can do is try not to be hypocritical ourselves, and surround ourselves with people who are trying to do the same. We can send out messages to try to improve things, knowing that they will have some impact, perhaps, but will not change the human condition writ large.
Thank you, and I respond in kind! I don't normally read such long pieces (not for lack of desire, but for lack of time), but I read every word of yours, including the footnotes. Excellent work!
Most of my stuff could be fairly characterized in that direction. My main focuses are political ecology/history (which is how I arrived at a very amarchcic bent), maker stuff (build projects), and "personal anarchy" (essays on the art of cultural transmission, independent living, aesthetics, etc.).
So, I almost always touch on it, but rarely directly addresses it. I have found that leading people to think os often more productive/effective for my communication style than is advocacy.
Frederic Bastiat said it so well almost 200 years ago:
If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind? The organizers maintain that society, when left undirected, rushes headlong to its inevitable destruction because the instincts of the people are so perverse. The legislators claim to stop this suicidal course and to give it a saner direction. Apparently, then, the legislators and the organizers have received from Heaven an intelligence and virtue that place them beyond and above mankind; if so, let them show their titles to this superiority.
No, anarchism cannot work because humans are biologically and spiritually wired for hierarchy. It is both in our genes, and our souls. Anarchy would be equally impossible in an unfallen world as it is in this one.
I know that many classical liberals make the argument that we need the state because we are savages, but who cares what they think?
I understand where you are coming from, and that is of course a very common outlook.
But private-law societies have already proven themselves—for 1,000 years in Brehon Ireland and for centuries in the Hanseatic League. Granted, these were incomplete and medieval/pre-medieval examples, but they were more than enough to prove aspects of the model.
The modern world offers numerous ways to do a private-law society more completely and effectively. If you have not read some of the corpus of work on the subject, I highly recommend it. I felt the same as you, but once I dove into that corpus, the lightbulb really went off.
The market provides the best services at the lowest cost. It is a tragedy that, even in our fundamentally capitalist systems, very important aspects of our lives (e.g., security, transportation, water supply & sewage, schooling (in some countries to a larger degree than in others)) are executed by the state, because “they are too essential to let free enterprise supply them.“
Well, democracy was intended so that people will vote for the best people. I agree that it ended up voting for the worst people, because a viable candidate must climb and be part of a political machine.
I would support the James C. Scott version of anarchism, which would be encouraging people to withdraw from the system, act outside of the system, form communities a second economy, preferably a gift economy.
But anarchism-as-utopia suffers from the same problem as every kind of utopia: only people with immense amounts of power are able to change society radically. So basically every utopia has a Stalin problem.
"withdraw from the system, act outside of the system, form communities a second economy, preferably a gift economy."
—That's definitely a good start.
"But anarchism-as-utopia suffers from the same problem as every kind of utopia"
—I am not sure what you mean by "anarchism as utopia." If you mean anarchism somehow applied (forced on!?) to everyone living in a huge area, then I agree with you. But I am not sure if you mean that. (No one I know claims that anarchism will produce utopia in the paradisiacal sense.)
I don't disagree. The thesis is sound. But. You leave out something fairly crucial. What's happening when a few score people hatch a plan to murder a lot of people, & then implement it with the help of millions 'just going along?'
What does that suggest? For me it suggests there is metaphysical evil, separate & apart from us, not really of us, waiting for its chance. What of our individual imperfections? Can they escalate so a social order hellscape? Yes, I believe so. What would prevent that? A core silent majority who turn to metaphysical good. A polity as you describe, lacking a core silent majority who 'believe' unequivocally in the agency of a 100% metaphysical good, lacking that a society would succumb to the moral chaos that now engulfs the West.
My conclusion is there's no solution to our Western state dilemma, given its current overwhelmingly atheist/agnostic condition. Note in passing how the BRICS nations (excluding the PRC) are all societies that believe in the need to acknowledge metaphysical good, & its evil opposite.
(Side note about BRICS: Though I have not been paying super-close attention, I think Brazil's government seems just about as evil as ours.)
Good point about metaphysical evil. This book won't go too far down a particularly religious road, but I do think the answer does lie is goodness. So we will have to make that something we look at in Part II
There is absolutely no one from government that can make any statement about me personally other than to create some mountain of lies. So I'm rotten...at least I am not a murderer, a coward and a bigot.
I remember the episode well. One of the earlier seasons, IIRC.
So, IIUC, you are pointing out the the choice humanity keeps making is to assume there is only one option? Stuck in that one response, the way the other Picard was?
The difference, is the other Picard truly believed or was in a delusional state of mind.
The people defending the existence of a police state (the is what we have today), many of them know, like predictors with full malice aforethought that free humanity would be better without them.
They will persecute us for his (Jesus') name sake, at the moment they call us “bitter clingers” and “domestic terrorists“ that soon will be changed to “kill all Christians, and anyone who don't take the mark”.
This is the central dilemma. It appears that we have, mixed in with DNA that fosters a spiritual and loving outlook on life, other DNA buried deep inside us, left over from long-gone reptile ancestors, lurking, so that "The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” (Solzhenitsyn). What to do?
Ultimately we have power only over our own selves, and nothing healthy can come out of an unhealthy mind, so our first and primary task is to look inward in as deep as way as possible. That includes exploring the dark side of our nature, resisting the temptation to wall it off, which can lead to explosive releases just when calm is most needed.
Having achieved a good degree of mental health, the answer to how to deal with other people in matters necessitating force will be approached from the best possible perspective. One resulting observation: I am ultimately responsible for my own self-defense. Understanding this may be scary, but it leads me to avoid looking to some big powerful entity that promises to do the job for me, which, given human nature, will in fact enslave me.
Unless and until a large fraction of the populace understands these things, society will succumb to the seductive sirens of evil men and women, I think.
But we must find a way also to help defend those who cannot defend themselves. That's why I like market-anarchic solutions as a part of the answer.
Right. Nothing I've said is meant to preclude charity or other forms of cooperation with others.
💯
A market-anarchic scenario would encourage far more self-reliance…while also producing solutions for those who need them.
*A single, solitary tear runs down Albert Jay Nock’s smiling visage.*
🤣❤️
Markets generate states. It's simple supply and demand. In any sufficiently sized market there will be thieves. This will create a demand for market guards who prevent thieves, and punish those they do not prevent.
This will create a demand for an authority which can be appealed to when the guards are accused of abuse.
Bam. Now you have a state. Happens every time.
Needless to say, it happens a lot. However, there are multiple theories about the rise of the state, and I suspect that all of them are true to one degree or other, in different places, at different times, or in combinations. The notion that it rose in response to the need for protection is just one of them. There's also the notion that brigands found it easier to regularize their predations (in the form of taxes) upon a captive population who deems their predations legitimate, as opposed to having to rob and pillage people who might just fight back. (See Franz Oppenheimer, or Thomas Paine's "principal ruffian of some restless gang.")
We don't need a single theory. They can all be true at the same time. Generating numerous rival states vying for influence. It doesn't really matter because you end up with a state either way.
I agree to an extent…
We do not need a single theory, indeed, for a single theory likely would not comprise all the different ways in which states have arisen and can arise.
And I agree that something is inevitable, but not necessarily the state per se. Protective force is definitely inevitable. Order is always the more stable form, and we will tend towards the production of order one way or the other.
The state has been the most likely form and source of that order, for the reason that two parties benefit. Average people just want order so they can go about their business. Exploiters love the vehicle for exploitation that the state provides.
The question is, can order be produced in another way—without the exploitation and the involuntary imposition of authority? Robert Nozick famously fell into the camp into which you appear to fall, holding that in a market-anarchic condition, one private protection agency would become dominant, and eventually would be a “state-like entity.” Others believe that market forces (especially once stripped of the distortions caused by the state) would serve to keep this phenomenon in check, allowing a healthy ecosystem of private agencies providing justice, security, and other services that maintain a protective order. The result, then, is order without the state.
I fall into this latter camp. Granted, there is much we do not know. We have the medieval/pre-medieval examples I mentioned in my other comment to you, but we do not yet have any modern examples at scale to point to. Which means that viewpoints on both sides are, to an extent, a priori speculation.
Since I know that the state is morally impermissible exploitation and violence, I err on the side of believing we ought to try another course.
I agree with all of that!
“If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?”
― Frederic Bastiat, The Law
Bastiat had a lot of great insights.
Yeah, I should have added Bastiat in with Rothbard and Hoppe. Great quote!
Excellent Christopher! You Expose it all so well in an easy to understand way. But most markets are no longer "free" or have not been for many decades. They are controlled by the few artificial victors with Huge Government support and Black Rock or similar money so that cartels or one or two company's literally controls an entire sector or even industry. Examples include: Microsoft, Google, PayPal, Tesla, Walmart, Amazon etc. This would not happen in a True Free Market. How do we get there?
How do we get there? Good question.
Slowly, from the ground up, is the only way I can think of.
Eagerly awaiting to hear more of how that ground up is going to work.
I have some ideas, but I am going to need your help too!
Looking forward to sharing in whatever way I can.
Collaborative intelligence is the way to go!
It’s very scary now what is going on with the Haitians eating peoples pets and all the ducks in the pond. How are we ever going to fix this?
Separation is the fix that seems most likely to work.
Yes, that’s true, it can be done
🔥
Even when we are lucky enough to elect an "angel" to public office, most are corrupted by the siren call of money and power.
Yep. And even angels should not have nonconsensual power over others.
Since I have never personally met an angel, I completely agree.
A problem is that the conversations around political philosophies is binary. It's not whether they work or don't it's how and where they scale. Anarchy works well at the lowest level but it doesn't scale up. Socialism is the same. Conversely Libertarianism doesn't scale downward well but works at the highest level. It's the superposition problem applied to politics but there's a lot more nuance.
- With my wife / friends I'm an anarchist
- With my family, friends, church unit I'm a socialist
- With my city I'm more of a Democrat
- With my state I'm closer to Republican
- With my country I'm a libertarian.
It all makes sense when you look at the scalability of political philosophies. More here:
https://www.polymathicbeing.com/p/quantum-superposition-and-politics
I understand what you are saying. But I am reasonably well persuaded that anarchism—specifically market anarchism—is infinitely scalable.
Part of the reason for this is precisely because it not a totalizing system. Anarchism does not say, "You are now living in the Galactic Anarchist Imperium." Anarchism just says, "Go live." And market anarchism provides for infinitely scalable options for living.
Have you perchance read Hoppe or D. Friedman?
Chapter 12 here is great for explaining how it can scale up: https://ia801508.us.archive.org/14/items/911-material/Pdfs/Democracy%20The%20God%20That%20Failed.pdf
It’s not scalable past Dunbar’s number without abstraction and that abstraction is what we call goverance. It’s clearly laid out in the article and I’ve read all the anarchists. The problem is it works for an individual who natigates structures, not an individual who navigates all other individuals.
It’s a romantic idea that works until it doesn’t but because it works well enough with enough people, anarchists say it’s infinitly scalable while never finding a single shred of evidence it ever scaled beyond Dunbar’s number.
“It’s the best way and infinitly scalable.” and yet exists nowhere and has never existed beyond small engagements. That’s why it’s a superposition problem and out of context. Your example from Chapter 12 rests on dozens of layers of governance and merely points out you don't need one more. Hell, even America was founded on the idea of a Benevolant Dictator.
https://www.polymathicbeing.com/p/benevolent-dictatorship
Living in the South, I more often hear that religion is the only restraining factor, as though atheists all have people carved up and stored in their freezers. And it's always other people who need that rod to stiffen their spines, while the speaker gets to wield it against them. If there's a human condition, it's hypocrisy.
https://www.dan.sperber.fr/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/MercierSperberWhydohumansreason.pdf
Just about all we can do is try not to be hypocritical ourselves, and surround ourselves with people who are trying to do the same. We can send out messages to try to improve things, knowing that they will have some impact, perhaps, but will not change the human condition writ large.
*Standing applause*
Dovetails well with my article A World of Warlords, where I look at WHY Hobbes is popular and how natural disasters show how wrong he was.
Keep up the amazing work, Mr. Cook!
https://jdanielsawyer.substack.com/p/a-world-of-warlords
Thank you, and I respond in kind! I don't normally read such long pieces (not for lack of desire, but for lack of time), but I read every word of yours, including the footnotes. Excellent work!
Do you frequently write on anarchist topics?
Most of my stuff could be fairly characterized in that direction. My main focuses are political ecology/history (which is how I arrived at a very amarchcic bent), maker stuff (build projects), and "personal anarchy" (essays on the art of cultural transmission, independent living, aesthetics, etc.).
So, I almost always touch on it, but rarely directly addresses it. I have found that leading people to think os often more productive/effective for my communication style than is advocacy.
I'm gonna message you…
Frederic Bastiat said it so well almost 200 years ago:
If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind? The organizers maintain that society, when left undirected, rushes headlong to its inevitable destruction because the instincts of the people are so perverse. The legislators claim to stop this suicidal course and to give it a saner direction. Apparently, then, the legislators and the organizers have received from Heaven an intelligence and virtue that place them beyond and above mankind; if so, let them show their titles to this superiority.
Bastiat was the man!
They lie.
They sure do!
No, anarchism cannot work because humans are biologically and spiritually wired for hierarchy. It is both in our genes, and our souls. Anarchy would be equally impossible in an unfallen world as it is in this one.
I know that many classical liberals make the argument that we need the state because we are savages, but who cares what they think?
Thank you for commenting!
I understand where you are coming from, and that is of course a very common outlook.
But private-law societies have already proven themselves—for 1,000 years in Brehon Ireland and for centuries in the Hanseatic League. Granted, these were incomplete and medieval/pre-medieval examples, but they were more than enough to prove aspects of the model.
The modern world offers numerous ways to do a private-law society more completely and effectively. If you have not read some of the corpus of work on the subject, I highly recommend it. I felt the same as you, but once I dove into that corpus, the lightbulb really went off.
The market provides the best services at the lowest cost. It is a tragedy that, even in our fundamentally capitalist systems, very important aspects of our lives (e.g., security, transportation, water supply & sewage, schooling (in some countries to a larger degree than in others)) are executed by the state, because “they are too essential to let free enterprise supply them.“
Yep. The term "market failure" was invented by people in power, and by intellectuals who like to suck up to people in power.
Well, democracy was intended so that people will vote for the best people. I agree that it ended up voting for the worst people, because a viable candidate must climb and be part of a political machine.
I would support the James C. Scott version of anarchism, which would be encouraging people to withdraw from the system, act outside of the system, form communities a second economy, preferably a gift economy.
But anarchism-as-utopia suffers from the same problem as every kind of utopia: only people with immense amounts of power are able to change society radically. So basically every utopia has a Stalin problem.
"withdraw from the system, act outside of the system, form communities a second economy, preferably a gift economy."
—That's definitely a good start.
"But anarchism-as-utopia suffers from the same problem as every kind of utopia"
—I am not sure what you mean by "anarchism as utopia." If you mean anarchism somehow applied (forced on!?) to everyone living in a huge area, then I agree with you. But I am not sure if you mean that. (No one I know claims that anarchism will produce utopia in the paradisiacal sense.)
I don't disagree. The thesis is sound. But. You leave out something fairly crucial. What's happening when a few score people hatch a plan to murder a lot of people, & then implement it with the help of millions 'just going along?'
What does that suggest? For me it suggests there is metaphysical evil, separate & apart from us, not really of us, waiting for its chance. What of our individual imperfections? Can they escalate so a social order hellscape? Yes, I believe so. What would prevent that? A core silent majority who turn to metaphysical good. A polity as you describe, lacking a core silent majority who 'believe' unequivocally in the agency of a 100% metaphysical good, lacking that a society would succumb to the moral chaos that now engulfs the West.
My conclusion is there's no solution to our Western state dilemma, given its current overwhelmingly atheist/agnostic condition. Note in passing how the BRICS nations (excluding the PRC) are all societies that believe in the need to acknowledge metaphysical good, & its evil opposite.
(Side note about BRICS: Though I have not been paying super-close attention, I think Brazil's government seems just about as evil as ours.)
Good point about metaphysical evil. This book won't go too far down a particularly religious road, but I do think the answer does lie is goodness. So we will have to make that something we look at in Part II
There is absolutely no one from government that can make any statement about me personally other than to create some mountain of lies. So I'm rotten...at least I am not a murderer, a coward and a bigot.
We’re not rotten. But a lot of them are. Because government = power and power attracts the rotten.
“Without government, we would be overwhelmed with violence. All would be chaos.”
Whenever I see a statement like that, it reminds me of a line from Star Trek the Next Generation, when there are 2 Picards.
P2: I have to leave. There's no other way.
PICARD: There must be.
P2: One. But it would never work.
PICARD: What is it? What would never work?
P2: I have to leave.
PICARD: What was the other choice? We can't fight, we can't escape, we can't go forward.
P2: No. No, we can't go forward. That would destroy the Enterprise.
I remember the episode well. One of the earlier seasons, IIRC.
So, IIUC, you are pointing out the the choice humanity keeps making is to assume there is only one option? Stuck in that one response, the way the other Picard was?
The difference, is the other Picard truly believed or was in a delusional state of mind.
The people defending the existence of a police state (the is what we have today), many of them know, like predictors with full malice aforethought that free humanity would be better without them.
That makes them worse.
Well said. We will have to think big if we are to overcome these obstacles.
I think this has already happened. The most rotten, subversive, satanic, immoral, already have all the power and $$$.🤔🤔🤔
That is a problem that needs to get solved. Separation seems to me to have the most promise.
They will persecute us for his (Jesus') name sake, at the moment they call us “bitter clingers” and “domestic terrorists“ that soon will be changed to “kill all Christians, and anyone who don't take the mark”.
They may find us less tractable than they hope.