http://archive.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard75.html
I think this is one of the best essays for a libertarian who writes articles to reread on a regular basis. What say you?
You must be logged in.
You must be logged in.
Do You Hate the State?
http://archive.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard75.html
I think this is one of the best essays for a libertarian who writes articles to reread on a regular basis. What say you?
Totally agree with you. Rothbard’s essay and Roy Childs Open Letter to Ayn Rand have had massive impacts on me in my education as a radical.
“Radical in the sense of being in total, root-and-branch opposition to the existing political system and to the State itself. Radical in the sense of having integrated intellectual opposition to the State with a gut hatred of its pervasive and organized system of crime and injustice. Radical in the sense of a deep commitment to the spirit of liberty and antistatism that integrates reason and emotion, heart and soul. Furthermore, in contrast to what seems to be true nowadays, you don’t have to be an anarchist to be radical in our sense, just as you can be an anarchist while missing the radical spark.”
I read the “founding documents” with dismay. How could they possibly think that the state could be limited? How can leviathan be bound? Everyone except no one will be corrupted by any amount of power; even one paid by voluntary subscription to rid society of thieves and murderers. Even a loving mother or father.
Yes!!! for me also. I cannot begin to fathom the sum total of human suffering that is directly attributable to the state…even if we limit it to our lifetime. And the monstrous moral contradiction that is the state is all the more loathsome for all the propaganda it spews forth about its goodness and self-characterized great achievements. On all sides we see Faustian bargain-making the norm. Knowing many of the reasons and factors for why this state of affairs continues on its path doesn’t justify it in the least for me.
I see it from a different perspective. For me, all of life is a struggle to be a vehicle for either love or power. Even in anarchy, life will always provide the struggle of power vs love. That struggle is inherent in the nature of humanity and is seen even in animals. The conflict of love vs power will always be with us. It’s simply that in a statist society, people seeking power will gravitate to the state. People seeking love will gravitate to positions that provide value for humans or animals. By their very nature they will have an uncomfortable aversion toward fighting the power seekers. However, the two forces must and will come into conflict. And the love seekers must fight. The founders knew that freedom must be reclaimed with the blood of its citizens from time to time. The legitimate function of government is to PROTECT the lovers from the power mongers. Any thing else is illegitimate power. Hate is too strong a word for me. I personally don’t go there. But I will defend my and your right to live in liberty and love.
Government cannot protect the lovers from the power mongers because it is the tool of the power mongers. They will always find a way to wield it, which is why it must be destroyed.
True at this time, not true in all of history. The pendulum always swings. The founders knew that freedom must be reclaimed with the blood of its citizens from time to time.
That is my point. The pendulum will always swing unless we break it.
And my point is that we are imperfect humans. Even without a state we will still be imperfect humans, some seeking love, some seeking power. Nothing is static. The pendulum will always swing.
I agree with you, Charlene, in all major respects. I can even agree that the legitimate function of government is to protect those who love humanity from the power mongers.
It is exactly when the government says that in order to do its job it must do the very things it is charged with preventing within its borders that such a government becomes illegitimate in my view and has no moral foundation upon which to stand. The mountain of utilitarian arguments on behalf of such governments holds no sway with me.
We seem to have no problem recognizing the ugliness of a proposition made by a bully on an elementary school playground: “I’ll protect you from all other bullies if you’ll just let me and my friends bully you once in a while. And by the way, we get to determine just how often that is.” Once we buy into the soundness of such a proposal, we have guaranteed victory to the bullies – either the ones “protecting” us or the ones they’re supposedly protecting us from.
The founders may have known that the tree of liberty must be nourished from time to time with the blood of its citizens…but they were operating within a worldview that accepted this very model of government that necessitates power mongers. Outside that paradigm, I do not believe this proposition is, by necessity, true.
What I do believe is necessary for a civil society to exist is a hatred for the initiation of aggression and a healthy dose of skepticism towards any bargain that says, “let me do evil to you and I’ll protect you from the evil of others” (and by the way, they don’t even do a good job once you sign up). But while I would never agree to such a bargain, I wouldn’t feel justified in using force to prevent others from subjecting themselves thereto – as long as their protector doesn’t try to pawn off on the rest of us the farce that we somehow automatically signed a contract to accept their offer and we can never renounce it.
We may think we live in a civil society today – and for 99.9% of all private interactions among the members of our society, I’d say that’s true. But I’ll say this – In my 44 years here on earth, I’ve been stolen from once in the private sector (an XBox apparently by movers who were packing my moving truck) but every dime we all make for 114 days out of this year is pilfered by the state (http://taxfoundation.org/tax-topics/tax-freedom-day) and that’s only the tip of the iceberg of the state’s criminality.
I truly hate the state precisely because I value and cherish our humanity.
I’m OK that we don’t agree on all points. That’s the beauty of freedom!
Absolutely 🙂 And I’m not saying everyone must hate the state like I do. I also agree that the absence of a state does not rid us of power-mongers.
One of the biggest pay-offs that I see for getting rid of the state is that it eliminates this gargantuan, ready-made, always-awake, pervasive weapon of mass moral destruction. In a stateless society, the structures in place for power mongers to co-opt for their purposes are much smaller in scope…and they wouldn’t have on their side the current prevalent attitude that we not only need power mongers but we also need to let them violate our rights for our own good.
But even while still under the rule of a state, we have lots of room to increase our freedoms.
Do you have any historical examples of a stateless society that worked and lasted?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stateless_society offers some information and examples. A cited authority in the article states that “for 99.8% of human history people lived exclusively in autonomous bands and villages…by 1000 BC, the number of such bands and villages numbered upwards of 600,000.” In some real sense, stateless was the norm.
The article goes on to give more examples:
The archaeologist Gregory Possehl has argued that there is no evidence that the relatively sophisticated, urbanized Harappan civilization, which flourished from about 2,500 to 1,900 BC in the Indus region, featured anything like a centralized state apparatus. No evidence has yet been excavated locally of palaces, temples, a ruling sovereign or royal graves, a centralized administrative bureaucracy keeping records, or a state religion—all of which are elsewhere usually associated with the existence of a state apparatus.
Similarly, in the earliest large-scale human settlements of the stone age which have been discovered, such as Çatal Höyük and Jericho, no evidence was found of the existence of a state authority. The Çatal Höyük settlement of a farming community (7,300 BC to circa 6,200 BC) spanned circa 13 hectares (32 acres) and probably had about 5,000 to 10,000 inhabitants.
The political state has been with us for so long, that it is viewed as a given by almost all. But history tells us that it is not an imperative that we have such a state. We’ve been innovating within the realm of social structure for millenia. What do we need the state to do for us that cannot be done privately?
Interesting, and worth applying some pertinent questions such as: 1) In what ways has the consciousness of humans changed since then? What difference has the written word made in our consciousness? How does instant worldwide communication change the picture? In what ways have weapons of mass destruction changed our world compared to their world? What other technologies have impacted our world compared to their world? How have education and career needs changed? What needs does the family unit experience today and how have those needs changed? And so on . .
In other words, what are the reasons that what worked then may or may not work now? Why hasn’t statelessness worked or lasted in modern history?
For me, blind faith to any ideal, even statelessness, is without value. The truth is somewhere in between what was and what is. It is a foundation based on current conditions and consciousness. We can’t go back to the stone age, but we must change what is. Intelligent discourse is a great beginning.
Yeah, this sounds like the way to go. Add a little modern technology and watch the fun!
Wars and power struggles in stateless societies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization
War Before Civilization: the Myth of the Peaceful Savage (Oxford University Press, 1996) is a book by Lawrence H. Keeley, an archeology professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who specializes in prehistoric Europe. The book deals with warfare conducted throughout human history by societies with little technology. In the book, Keeley aims to stop the apparent trend in seeing civilization as bad.
Summary
Keeley conducts an investigation of the archaeological evidence for prehistoric violence, including murder and massacre as well as war. He also looks at nonstate societies of more recent times — where we can name the tribes and peoples — and their propensity for warfare. It has long been known, for example, that many tribes of South America’s tropical forest engaged in frequent and horrific warfare, but some scholars have attributed their addiction to violence to baneful Western influences.[citation needed]
Keeley says peaceful societies are an exception. About 90-95% of known societies engage in war. Those that did not are almost universally either isolated nomadic groups (for whom flight is an option), groups of defeated refugees, or small enclaves under the protection of a larger modern state. The attrition rate of numerous close-quarter clashes, which characterize warfare in tribal warrior society, produces casualty rates of up to 60%, compared to 1% of the combatants as is typical in modern warfare. Despite the undeniable carnage and effectiveness of modern warfare, the evidence shows that tribal warfare is on average 20 times more deadly than 20th century warfare, whether calculated as a percentage of total deaths due to war or as average deaths per year from war as a percentage of the total population.[citation needed] “Had the same casualty rate been suffered by the population of the twentieth century,” writes Nicholas Wade, “its war deaths would have totaled two billion people.”[1] In modern tribal societies, death rates from war are four to six times the highest death rates in 20th century Germany or Russia.[2]
One half of the people found in a Nubian cemetery dating to as early as 12,000 years ago had died of violence. The Yellowknives tribe in Canada was effectively obliterated by massacres committed by Dogrib Indians, and disappeared from history shortly thereafter.[3] Similar massacres occurred among the Eskimos, the Crow Indians, and countless others. These mass killings occurred well before any contact with the West. In Arnhem Land in northern Australia, a study of warfare among the Australian Aboriginal Murngin people in the late-19th century found that over a 20-year period no less than 200 out of 800 men, or 25% of all adult males, had been killed in inter-tribal warfare.[4] The accounts of missionaries to the area in the borderlands between Brazil and Venezuela have recounted constant infighting in the Yanomami tribes for women or prestige, and evidence of continuous warfare for the enslavement of neighboring tribes such as the Macu before the arrival of European settlers and government. More than a third of the Yanomamo males, on average, died from warfare.
According to Keeley, among the indigenous peoples of the Americas, only 13% did not engage in wars with their neighbors at least once per year. The natives’ pre-Columbian ancient practice of using human scalps as trophies is well documented. Iroquois routinely slowly tortured to death captured enemy warriors (see Captives in American Indian Wars for details). In some regions of the American Southwest, the violent destruction of prehistoric settlements is well documented and during some periods was even common. For example, the large pueblo at Sand Canyon in Colorado, although protected by a defensive wall, was almost entirely burned, artifacts in the rooms had been deliberately smashed, and bodies of some victims were left lying on the floors. After this catastrophe in the late thirteenth century, the pueblo was never reoccupied.
Charlene, this article is not about wars and power struggles in “stateless societies”, it’s about war before “civilization” (whatever that means), which is not the same in my understanding. If those tribes “before civilization” had authorities or religion, they were not stateless. What’s more, in my understanding a stateless society will work better when it is market based. The free market is a result of natural law and it is self regulating by nature. Government is not needed. Let me suggest to consider reading “The Market for Liberty” by M & L Tannehill, and “Precondition for Peace and Prosperity” by R & E Perkins.
How could I not hate the most immoral thing in the history of mankind, that is not merely an impractical institution, but rather an institution which threatens the very survival of the human species?
Just consider this definition of government:
“Government is a coercive monopoly which has assumed power over and certain responsibilities for every human being within the geographical area which it claims as its own. A coercive monopoly is an institution maintained by the threat and/or use of physical force—the initiation of force—to prohibit competitors from entering its field of endeavor. (A coercive monopoly may also use force to compel “customer loyalty,” as, for example a “protection” racket.)
Government has exclusive possession and control within its geographical area of whatever functions it is able to relegate to itself, and it maintains this control by force of its laws and its guns, both against other governments and against any private individuals who might object to its domination. To the extent that it controls any function, it either prohibits competition (as with the delivery of first class mail) or permits it on a limited basis only. It compels its citizen-customers by force of law either to buy its services or, if they don’t want them, to pay for them anyway.
Government is, and of necessity must be, a coercive monopoly, for in order to exist it must deprive entrepreneurs of the right to go into business in competition with it, and it must compel all its citizens to deal with it exclusively in the areas it has pre-empted. Any attempt to devise a government which did not initiate force is an exercise in futility, because it is an attempt to make a contradiction work. Government is, by its very nature, an agency of initiated force. If it ceased to initiate force, it would cease to be a government and become, in simple fact, another business firm in a competitive market. “
Theory is useless without an understanding of human nature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_warfare Prehistoric warfare refers to war conducted by stateless societies without recorded history.
http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html#SECTION_G007
The Law by Frédéric Bastiat
Self-preservation and self-development are common aspirations among all people. And if everyone enjoyed the unrestricted use of his faculties and the free disposition of the fruits of his labor, social progress would be ceaseless, uninterrupted, and unfailing.
But there is also another tendency that is common among people. When they can, they wish to live and prosper at the expense of others. This is no rash accusation. Nor does it come from a gloomy and uncharitable spirit. The annals of history bear witness to the truth of it: the incessant wars, mass migrations, religious persecutions, universal slavery, dishonesty in commerce, and monopolies. This fatal desire has its origin in the very nature of man — in that primitive, universal, and insuppressible instinct that impels him to satisfy his desires with the least possible pain.
What changed from prehistory? Duh, history changed. Before history, tyrants could just invent precedent. Even now, prehistorians use self-serving invention to create whatever they think (wish) might have happened to make whatever claims they find useful. The only truthful thing I have seen regarding prehistory is that people back then we likely very much as they are now. Written history, provided it was written sufficiently long ago is regularly creatively rewritten.
I have seen several mis-uses of a partial quote above that indicates that somehow some people’s deaths nourish liberty. The whole quote, from one founder, Thomas Jefferson, (a long way from some founders) was, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Why not just the blood of tyrants? And, anyway, where is this tree of liberty? Why not nourish it with the blood of his slaves? I’m all for a little poetic license, but real blood for a mystical tree?
Getting back to ‘before written history,’ at least one story, which presents itself as historical, has it that the first murder was in response to a religious disagreement, at a time when there were only four human beings on the entire planet. I can find no reason to call that ‘historian’ historically inaccurate. The story fits exactly with more modern understanding of human nature. Neither overcrowding nor scarcity of resources could be used to explain it.
“If, as some would lead us to believe, man was aggressive by nature, any attempt to curb his aggressiveness would be quite futile and senseless, because it would be an attempt to force man to act in contradiction to his nature. If man was aggressive by nature, then aggression should be fostered, not curbed, because all living entities survive by acting in accordance with their natures.”
I agree that theory is useless without the understanding of human nature. That’s exactly what statists and self styled builders of societies have been doing for ages: they haven’t even considered that man could have a specific nature. Plus, the last thing I would do is base any type of philosophical conclusions on Wikipedia definitions.
Besides, as much as I admire Bastiat and his great book “The Law”, there’s no reader that can agree with all its concepts. I find his view on the nature of man to be completely wrong, and obviously so.
……
Here is text I view as interesting and worth considering:
“One of the common misconceptions we have encountered in our discussions with people on the nature of man, is the assumption that man is by nature, aggressive. Presumably this is to “explain” the fact that throughout the history of man, there have always been some men who acted aggresively. This reasoning, however, ignores the fact that similarly, there have always been many men who acted non-agggresively! Evidently many people have observed that primitive man engaged in tribal conflicts, and they observed modern man still engaging in warfare, and they conclude that man is by nature, aggresive.
Primitive man can be compared to man in his infancy; to man growing, learning, and expanding his knowledge. Man has no automatic knowledge of how he should act in order to survive. He must discover and learn this. Notice that an infant is wholly dependent; he kicks and screams at times, and has not yet acquired the knowledge that two plus two equals four. Can we conclude therefore , that man must continue to be wholly dependent; continue to kick and scream, continue to remain in ignorance, since during his infancy he acted that way? Even though man has, in the main, scarcely outgrown his primitive habit of conducting warfare, even though he has abandoned the club and replaced it with a “government”, it would be inconceivable to claim that aggression is the nature of man. Why? Because the facts prove otherwise.
How can we determine the essence of anything? The nature of an existent is that which makes it diffeent from all other kinds of existents. Change or remove the nature of a thing and it no longer is the kind of thing which it formerly was; it becomes something else. The nature of an entity is identified by observing its essencial characteristics; the one it is common to all and only such existents, and makes a thing the kind of thing which it is.
…
Aggression is not the nature of man. It does not make a man human! Aggression makes a man anti-human. Many men act aggressively, but they do so by choice, not by nature. All men are capable of choosing non-aggression, but not all men are willing to do so. Also, a great many are forced to support (financially) the aggressive activities of governments.
If, as some would lead us to believe, man was aggressive by nature, any attempt to curb his aggressiveness would be quite futile and senseless, because it would be an attempt to force man to act in contradiction to his nature. If man was aggressive by nature, then aggression should be fostered, not curbed, because all living entities survive by acting in accordance with their natures.
There is a unique nature that man does not share with any other kind of living entity. This nature is rationality. Man is a rational animal. Man arrives at rationality by a specific unique mental process. This mental process is called his reason.
Reason is the volitional action of the conceptual level of consciousness when it functions to identify fundamental cause, and its effects. If we ask “what is the reason for his behaviour?” we are attempting to determine the cause of his behaviour.
Rationality is the capacity (latent ability) of a being, to base his actions on his reason. Hence a human individual is a rational being. By “man” we mean individual human adults, male or female. In considering the definition of a human, one is considering an individual lifespan. Thus, even though a human infant is not yet able to exercise rationality, the essencial characteristic which distinguishes him from a baby calf or infant monkey, is that individual capacity for rationality which is being developed.
…
There is a strict casual relationship between rationality and man’s survival. Remove man’s rationality entirely, and he would not survive as a human. Man’s rationality involves other distinguishing characteristics. It implies that man is a conceptual animal; he can integrate percepts into concepts and ideas; he can generate these ideas into actions and can project them by means of volitional consciousness.
Since earliest times it has been man’s rationality, however limited, that has ensured his survival. Primitive man engaged in many irrational types of conduct. He praciced cannibalism, which was aggression, and he also sacrificed himself in many ways – all of which threatened his survival. However, it is readily observable that even primitive man had to exercise somerationality in order to survive. Had he consistently practiced aggression or sacrifice, none of us would be here now, because the human species would have ceased to exist.
…
As man became more intelligent, he began discovering more and more natural laws and using them as guides to his conduct. By observing these laws of nature he was able to discover better ways of prolonging his existence and making it a more comfortable one. But the most important natural law has thus far eluded the majority of men.
Without the knowledge and observance of natural moral law, his knowledge of the other natural laws will not suffice to protect his survival. Because he has institucionalized aggression in the form of governments, he violates moral law and mankind is brought closer to the brink of non-survival.”
…
Excerpt from:
“Preconditions for Peace and Prosperity” -by Richard & Ernestine Perkins.
Chapter III: “Man: Aggressor-Slave or Rational Being?”
(October 1971)
Yep, man for sure is an enigma, an interesting mixture of right and wrong, good and evil. The rest is all theory. Let me know what your thoughts are when you’re an old man, after a lifetime of observing human behavior. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.
Justice in the life and conduct of the State is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens.
Plato
Was Plato right before or after the state killed him? Or was he right at all?
The state has no heart or soul. I wish I knew how long justice can survive a state. I also wish I knew whether or not justice can revive after the state kills it. For, all there is of justice is a faint memory. The wish for a just society may be only a wishful thought.
http://www.richardmaybury.com/books-5justice.html
“Whatever Happened to Justice?” by Richard Maybury introduces the Two Laws:
1) Do all you have agreed to do, and
2) Do not encroach on other persons or their property.
This is, I believe the legitimate basis of law, and of acceptable human behavior.
The problem, as I see it, is not the state. The state is only a symptom. The problem is human nature. How do you fix that?
I’m inclined to suspect by the way you speak of human nature, Charlene, that you must be a part of a very interesting social circle 🙂 In all seriousness, though, I think it is highly likely that you could list hundreds of people you personally know who have never initiated any aggression to your knowledge. To take it further, they in turn could very well do the same. Same thing with my father – he knows hundreds of people in the small town of his residence and has nothing to fear from any of them. And yet, in all of my discussions with him on liberty and economics, he continually brings forth the ghastly specter of pure evil striving to sally forth from everyone’s heart – as if that’s reality. I think human nature would greatly benefit from the lack of an example such as the state’s which on a minute-by-minute basis commits uncountable injustices in wide crisscrossing swaths against all of society.
Late last year driving home from work one night, I noticed a police car with its motto written on the back, “Solve the problem.” You mean the motto isn’t, “Protect and serve?” In this instance, definitely not. One sure way – as we are frightfully and constantly reminded in the news – to bring out the dark side of human nature we deplore is to give people weapons, badges, titles and permission to initiate aggression in pursuing and enforcing the state’s values.
This >>> The wish for a just society may be only a wishful thought.
But it is a good thought, worth striving for . . My thought, I can’t fix anybody else, only myself. It begins with me.
>Theory is useless without an understanding of human nature.
and
>The problem, as I see it, is not the state. The state is only a symptom.
>The problem is human nature. How do you fix that?
@Charlene
I think you are correct that the state is a symptom, because it is only realized through the actions of people, which in turn is a function of how people think. However, human nature varies, depending on the group of humans observed. Just about every conceivable behavior has been prevalent in one human society or another in history. So what is human nature? What you perceive as human nature is what is common, or perhaps obvious or intrusive, within your realm of experience. I believe the only quality that can be described as human “nature” is adaptability. By far the majority of humans exhibit behaviors that they have developed in adapting to their environment. Change the environment and “human nature” changes. To achieve a peaceful stateless society and maximum liberty, people must experience a non-violent environment and liberty themselves. In order to get there, we must change how people think. Most importantly, we must change how we raise children, but schools are completely antithetical to the goal of non-violence and growing worse. Compulsory education has been almost exclusively a tool of the state throughout history.
I see a problem with the statement, ” we must change how we raise children.” They are not our children to raise. To assume any authority to “raise children” takes away the parental role and puts “raising children” into the hands of the nebulous “we.” This is simply replacing one authority with another rather than reinforcing individuality. That is not how I define Liberty.
I believe “we” should empower parents to raise their own children and offer alternative education choices as well as home schooling. Some will raise more peaceful children than others.
@Charlene
>I see a problem with the statement, ” we must change how we raise
>children.” They are not our children to raise.
Wow! Though I did not specify that the changes must be made voluntarily by we, as individuals and families, you concluded that I was suggesting empowering the state, an organized body, or even a third party. Even my final comment about schools being “tools” of the state throughout all of history did not deter you from arriving at a conclusion that I did not intend or expect. In fact, my beliefs promote completely the opposite of abdicating or “farming-out” the raising of children by their families.
As home schooling parents, my wife and I have recently been getting into the works of John Holt, who many consider to be the father of “un-schooling.” Though Holt’s experiences as a teacher confirmed many of my beliefs, Holt denounced schools, forced education, and even the concept of curricula by the end of his life.
So there is noting wrong with my statement–at least if you take it as coming from an anarchist who believes in the NAP! 😉 They are “our” (as individuals) children to raise as best we can and as we believe they should be raised–at least until they no long require our guardianship. However, Holt said that you can’t really teach children anything. They learn on their own. Of course we can provide them with learning opportunities, but they will find many on their own regardless, if adults just get out of the way and let them! Holt rhetorically asked, do we teach children to walk? No. They learn to walk on their own.
>I believe “we” should empower parents to raise their own children and offer alternative education
>choices as well as home schooling.
I also agree the we (as individuals not using force) should do this, but people will be “empowered” as more of their own minds change. The free market can offer far more alternatives than you’ll ever get as a result of government monopoly and force.
> Some will raise more peaceful children than others.
I wasn’t talking about raising peaceful children. I was talking about raising children in a non-violent environment. The more organized and centralized the control of the environment, the more violent it becomes. Compulsory environments are the worst. As Stef Molyneux noted in a recent YouTube video, Boy Scouts and church groups tend to have far less bullying than government run or controlled schools. However, my biggest criticism with government controlled schools is they are prisons, which is the root cause of the bullying and a lifelong list of other personal maladies as well as perpetual social maladies.
