People v. State

I recently came across this article at the Center for a Stateless Society by Anna Morgenstern, with which I generally agree. I particularly agree with the following explication of terms from the article:

So why the pretense? Why go through this ruse of “public” and “private?” Well that’s it. That’s the state. The state IS the ruse. The state … is a social fiction. It is the myth of legitimacy. This myth is the thin black line that separates “the government” and its “private sector” attachments from any other Mafia. The fact that people believe that “the government” is legitimately allowed to kill and steal, and that when it does so, it represents something good and just, is what has allowed it to dominate the earth. And despite the secondary myth that the government exists to fight crime, it is the very existence of the government that allows the lesser Mafias to thrive.

In the past this myth of legitimacy was carried out through religion. As various religions were the “private sector” beneficiaries of government, they would preach that the state was the secular arm of their organization, devoted to enforcing “the lord’s will” on Earth.

While bunk in and of itself, at least they admitted the connection.

Nowadays, a new religion, that of “democracy,” legitimizes the state by claiming that it is “the people’s will” that they are charged with enforcing. (Even when the people seem to be quite against what the government is doing, ala the recent bank bailouts) Other flatulent high sounding ideas like “social order,”  “tradition” and “public goods” are also used to weave this magic spell in people’s heads.

So now that we know what the state is, we know what Anarchism is. Anarchism, truly, is simply the understanding that the state is merely a social fiction and has no legitimacy. When you live that truth, you will not follow the law simply because it is the law.  You will let your conscience be your guide. At that point you are no longer being ruled, though you might have crimes committed against you by the “government” and its lackeys. When the Mafia forces someone to pay protection money, that guy isn’t being ruled, he’s being robbed.

So what then is liberty? Liberty is the absence of crime. Real crime, crime that has a victim. Crimes that all persons’ conscience would acknowledge as such. A libertarian then, is someone who wishes to abolish (or more realistically) minimize crime.

Not all anarchists are libertarians (some Stirnerites come to mind), but most are, at least to some extent.  But all anarchists understand that no one has any special authority to commit crimes that no one else has.

All political theories involve some level of crime. Someone is getting victimized for someone else’s benefit. The “liberals” (as we know them today) tend to favor a very mild, safe plutocratic regime — one that seeks to round off all of lifes sharp corners for the sake of making us all viable economic resources to exploit. The “conservatives” have a more dog-eat-dog approach in which the workers are set up to fight over ever more scarce resources; a Darwinian approach to maximizing our productivity. Ultimately, these are just differing livestock management techniques.

I suspect that even a highly authoritarian but also highly intelligent SCOTUS Justice like Antonin Scalia, who cited Lysander Spooner in his Heller opinion, recognizes in his heart of hearts the truth of anarchism, as set forth by Spooner with irrefutable logic in the first chapter (titled “What is Law?”) of the work cited by Scalia and in his No Treason: The Constitution of no Authority.

But I further suspect that Scalia, like Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, is of the opinion that “We the People” are better off believing this fiction than living that truth.

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