Any man knows when he is justified, and all the wits in the world cannot enlighten him on that point. The murderer always knows that he is justly punished; but when a government takes the life of a man without the consent of his conscience, it is an audacious government, and is taking a step towards its own dissolution. Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong? Are laws to be enforced simply because they were made? or declared by any number of men to be good, if they are not good? Is there any necessity for a man’s being a tool to perform a deed of which his better nature disapproves? Is it the intention of law-makers that good men shall be hung ever? Are judges to interpret the law according to the letter, and not the spirit? What right have you to enter into a compact with yourself that you will do thus or so, against the light within you? Is it for you to make up your mind, — to form any resolution whatever, — and not accept the convictions that are forced upon you, and which ever pass your understanding? I do not believe in lawyers, in that mode of attacking or defending a man, because you descend to meet the judge on his own ground, and, in cases of the highest importance, it is of no consequence whether a man breaks a human law or not. Let lawyers decide trivial cases. Business men may arrange that among themselves. If they were the interpreters of the everlasting laws which rightfully bind man, that would be another thing. A counterfeiting law-factory, standing half in a slave land and half in free! What kind of laws for free men can you expect from that?

I am here to plead his cause with you. I plead not for his life, but for his character, — his immortal life; and so it becomes your cause wholly, and is not his in the least. Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain which is not without its links. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light.

The post I was going to write, until I got sidetracked, would have been prompted by the piquant comments IOZ incurred for declaring himself a radical but not a revolutionary. It would have cited Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience:

It is not a man’s duty, as a mat­ter of course, to de­vote him­self to the erad­i­cat­ion of any, even the most enor­mous wrong; he may still prop­erly have other con­cerns to en­gage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it prac­ti­cally his sup­port. If I de­vote my­self to other pur­suits and con­tem­plat­ions, I must first see, at least, that I do not pur­sue them sit­ting upon an­other man’s shoul­ders. I must get off him first, that he may pur­sue his con­tem­plat­ions too. See what gross in­con­sis­tency is tol­er­a­ted. I have heard some of my towns­men say, “I should like to have them or­der me out to help put down an in­sur­rec­tion of the slaves, or to march to Mex­ico, — see if I would go;” and yet these very men have each, di­rectly by their al­le­giance, and so in­di­rectly, at least, by their money, fur­nished a sub­sti­tute.

. . .

As for adopt­ing the ways which the State has pro­vided for rem­edy­ing the evil, I know not of such ways. They take too much time, and a man’s life will be gone. I have other af­fairs to at­tend to. I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad. A man has not ev­ery thing to do, but some­thing; and be­cause he can­not do ev­ery thing, it is not nec­es­sary that he should do some­thing wrong. It is not my busi­ness to be pe­ti­tion­ing the governor or the legislature any more than it is theirs to pe­ti­tion me; and, if they should not hear my pe­ti­tion, what should I do then? But in this case the State has pro­vided no way: its very Constitution is the evil. This may seem to be harsh and stub­born and un­con­cil­i­a­tory; but it is to treat with the ut­most kind­ness and con­sid­er­ation the only spirit that can ap­pre­ci­ate or de­serves it. So is all change for the bet­ter, like birth and death which con­vulse the body.

. . .

How­ever, the gov­ern­ment does not con­cern me much, and I shall be­stow the few­est pos­si­ble thoughts on it. It is not many mo­ments that I live un­der a gov­ern­ment, even in this world. If a man is thought-free, fancy-free, imag­i­na­tion-free, that which is not never for a long time ap­pear­ing to be to him, un­wise rulers or re­form­ers can­not fa­tally in­ter­rupt him.

The post I would have written if I hadn’t gotten sidetracked would also have cited Albert Jay Nock on Isaiah’s Job:

The prophet’s career began at the end of King Uzziah’s reign, say about 740 B.C. This reign was uncommonly long, almost half a century, and apparently prosperous. It was one of those prosperous reigns, however – like the reign of Marcus Aurelius at Rome, or the administration of Eubulus at Athens, or of Mr. Coolidge at Washington – where at the end the prosperity suddenly peters out and things go by the board with a resounding crash.

In the year of Uzziah’s death, the Lord commissioned the prophet to go out and warn the people of the wrath to come. “Tell them what a worthless lot they are.” He said, “Tell them what is wrong, and why and what is going to happen unless they have a change of heart and straighten up. Don’t mince matters. Make it clear that they are positively down to their last chance. Give it to them good and strong and keep on giving it to them. I suppose perhaps I ought to tell you,” He added, “that it won’t do any good. The official class and their intelligentsia will turn up their noses at you and the masses will not even listen. They will all keep on in their own ways until they carry everything down to destruction, and you will probably be lucky if you get out with your life.”

Isaiah had been very willing to take on the job – in fact, he had asked for it – but the prospect put a new face on the situation. It raised the obvious question: Why, if all that were so – if the enterprise were to be a failure from the start – was there any sense in starting it? “Ah,” the Lord said, “you do not get the point. There is a Remnant there that you know nothing about. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society; and meanwhile, your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set about it.”

That’s a thin reed indeed, and in fact I see no separation whatsoever. Anarchy prevails betwixt the governments of the world. What is an individual laying claim to a house and a yard but a little government? My prescription for what ails the world: balkanization (all the way down to that schlub in his castle) and confederation mediated by Georgism.

As for the kind of legal “systems” such balkanized confederacies should form, I’m partial to John Hasnas’ argument in The Depoliticization of Law:

Advocates of the privatization of law often assume that unless law
springs from some act of agreement, some express or implicit social
contract by which individuals consent to be bound, it is nothing
more than force. In this Article, I argue that this is a false dilemma.
Although law is rarely grounded in consent, this does not imply that
law necessarily gives some individuals command over others. Law
can arise through a process of evolution. When this is the case, those
subject to law are indeed bound, but not by the will of any particular
human beings. Although this depoliticized law is inherently coercive, it
is not inherently a vehicle for domination. This Article argues that such
a system of depoliticized law is consistent with the ideal of the rule
of law, and, in fact, is free market law, when that phrase is properly
understood.

So says IOZ.

UPDATE: And how did I miss this?

I do not even admit to the occasional necessity of war, but even if I did, war would nevertheless and perhaps even more so always, always be wrong, always a failure, always a crime.  If Hitler himself arises from the grave tomorrow and directs an immense army against all the other peoples of the world, we are nevertheless obliged not simply to lament the necessity of fighting him, but to atone for it.  If necessity may sometimes suspend temporarily that which is actually right and just, it never abrogates it.  And in any case, this is not the case.  Hitler has not risen from his grave; our victims are no less human than we are; “those loyal to Qaddafi” are also people; it is not our place to determine that the average “Taliban fighter” deserves to die, less yet to go out and kill him.

(Read the whole thing for the full flavor.)

The difficulty is removed, however, if we recognize with Meister Eckhart that God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves, and indeed, that God is more us than we are ourselves. (If a strictly philosophical rather than theological “proof” of this proposition is wanted, I suggest it might be found as well in Platonism as anywhere else.) I commend to you the The Cherubinic Wanderer by Angelus Silesius, from which the title of this post was taken, which was influenced by Jacob Boehme (who also strongly influenced William Law) and especially by Eckhart, and which (surprisingly enough) received the imprimatur of the Roman Catholic Church when it was published.

God does not so much exist as insist.

In this light must be understood the denial of “Self” also preached by these same Christian mystics. Who we really are can’t be anything that can be taken from us by robbers, or thrown in prison, or lost in old age to dementia, or buried in the ground along with our corpse. How might a person who recognizes his essential Oneness with the Divine live his life? He would see his neighbor as God sees him, as a child of God like he is a child of God, not through the blinders of Self, and thereby be capable of Justice. He would judge by the Word within what others tell him about God and God’s Will. I suggest he might live and die as Jesus lived and died:

Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am.

Then took they up stones to cast at him: but Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple, going through the midst of them, and so passed by.

Why, again, have I felt it important to mention these things on a blog titled “People v. State”? Because the outer Freedom at which anarchism aims is but a shadow of the inner Freedom at which true religion aims, and because the propagation among people of this inner Freedom is the surest foundation for that outer Freedom.

What’s This Day of Rest Shit?

Ascribery

The Youkranian Famine

IOZ

Justin Raimondo