Imagine we wake up one morning to find ourselves free. No government, no public law, a populace convinced of the virtues of true liberty and a world firmly grounded in the principles of Natural Law and private property. Everyone, or so it seems, is firmly onboard, convinced that government is no longer the answer to their problems, but the cause of their problems.
But then, something insidious happens. The people begin to forget how bad it used to be, and a few (or maybe many) ne'er do wells, hellbent on advancing their own agends using the "political means", band together and launch an all-out media blitz to convince the lazy and complacent that what they really need is a return to some form of government. Little by little, minds are indoctrinated, brain-washed and corrupted. Frightened and disillusioned, the people abandon freedom and submit themselves once more to the yoke.
My question is this. On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being most likely), how likely is this to happen to a free society? Once achieved, is a free society able to maintain itself, or is it inherently unstable? Would the free market, especially the free market for hearts and minds, ensure that the virtues of freedom remained a top priority for a sufficiently large number of people such that the scenario I outlined wouldn't happen? Or is the reverse true? Is this scenario a constant danger? If it is, should anything be done to prevent it?
leonidia: My question is this. On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being most likely), how likely is this to happen to a free society? Once achieved, is a free society able to maintain itself, or is it inherently unstable? Would the free market, especially the free market for hearts and minds, ensure that the virtues of freedom remained a top priority for a sufficiently large number of people such that the scenario I outlined wouldn't happen? Or is the reverse true? Is this scenario a constant danger? If it is, should anything be done to prevent it?
Based on historical evidence, we should conclude that it's quite likely that this would happen, since almost every region of the world has a government. But this means that the risk of freedom is that a government might develop - certainly cannot be made into an argument against anarchy, although many try to do that. This is just an argument for vigilance, and for overthrowing it each time it happens.
10
As Bertrand de Jouvenel noted, Power always appeals to the envy of the common folk to rise up against their betters, so that the state has no social competitors. If we allow people to tend to these feelings of envy, then it is almost certain that the state will be restored. However, if one were to institute a policy of strict social sanction and ostracism against anyone who promoted leftist/socialist ideology, then a free society would be self-sustaining. (And yes, ostracism would be a part of a free society. The 'right' to free speech is merely part of a bundle of property rights. One can refuse others the power to say whatever they want on your property, or refuse to transfer your property to those who advocate socialism. In fact, to deny one's private property to those who do not believe in private property is only fitting.)
A lot of relevant quotations come to mind...
"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." --Wendell Phillips (or Thomas Jefferson)
"The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." --Edmund Burke
"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people." --John Adams
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free...it expects what never was and never will be." --Thomas Jefferson
Historically, the idea of a free society being self-sustaining has apparently not been very common, to say the least.
In the words of Professor Bernardo de la Paz, "concepts such as 'state' and 'society' and ‘government’ have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals". Government is just something that exists in our minds. If statist idealologies are erased and and replaced by ideas of freedom, then government will cease to be, as you mention. But the same works in reverse as well. No ideology can survive being simply erased and replaced by another.
If libertarians are right, though, and the state devours wealth and costs lives, then shifts back towards more and more statism will ultimately be unsuccessful. If a society does regress, like the USSR did and Venezuela is, eventually it will have to give way to stronger societies. With the rise of the Internet, I think this process will be much, much quicker than it was with the USSR.
If we are supposing a society whereby no one is forced to contribute anything to any central authority, then it would be somewhat difficult for a media blitz to convince anyone to start doing so. On what basis could it be done? "Give 10% of your money to me and I will use it to boss you around"? Sure, you could always get some suckers to do so, but then their subsequent impoverisation would be a piece of natural selection as well as a warning to others.
The small government Libertarian certainly has to cope with the problem of continual pressure toward big government. They have let the thin edge of the wedge into the argument, so there is no principle stopping it from getting bigger and bigger. The full free market solution is not so handicapped. (I don't use "anarchist" - I think that is the most dreadful piece of self-branding imaginable).
leonidia:But then, something insidious happens. The people begin to forget how bad it used to be, and a few (or maybe many) ne'er do wells, hellbent on advancing their own agends using the "political means", band together and launch an all-out media blitz to convince the lazy and complacent that what they really need is a return to some form of government. Little by little, minds are indoctrinated, brain-washed and corrupted. Frightened and disillusioned, the people abandon freedom and submit themselves once more to the yoke. My question is this. On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being most likely), how likely is this to happen to a free society?
My question is this. On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being most likely), how likely is this to happen to a free society?
I'd rate the probability of people forgetting the bad old days and listening to demagogues promising an illusion of security through obedience to authority at 8. Perhaps matters would be different in a society without government run schools that take real boys and girls and turn them into puppets, but I don't think that humanity has learned the lessons of Stanley Milgram's experiments concerning obedience to authority.
An additional thought that comes to mind:
The original question posits the scenario that we all wake up in the morning and find the state gone. If that happened, then I can guarantee you a new state would be formed very quickly. But unless you're counting on divine intervention, that isn't a realistic scenario. If a stateless society is ever achieved it will be as a result of human action and a pro-freedom, anti-state mentality among a substantial portion of the people. Given those conditions as a starting point, I would say the prospects for maintaining a free society seem somewhat better - at least as good as the prospects for establishing one in the first place.
I don't think the danger is that a few "ne'er do-wells" get together to impose a state. The risk is that the natural elites (in the Hoppean sense - those to whom economic and social influence will naturally accrue in a free society), choose to use their resources and influence to establish a state for the purpose of further enriching themselves at the expense of the rest of society. This temptation would likely be greatest among the heirs of successful entrepreneurs, who have become accustomed to a level of wealth that they find themselves unable to maintain under free competition.
Historically, I think this is how most (or all?) states have actually been established - not by a few outlaws who are barely capable of keeping themselves alive, but by people who were already well-respected by society.
Some number higher than 5.
"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."
"I cannot prove, but am prepared to affirm, that if you take care of clarity in reasoning, most good causes will take care of themselves, while some bad ones are taken care of as a matter of course." -Anthony de Jasay
Free will means that we are free to repeat the same mistakes, but you ask the wrong question. What you must ask is would you and your children ever submit to another state? If the answer is no, then you shall remain free. Others may enslave themselves as they please.
The fallacies of intellectual communism, a compilation - On the nature of power
tgibson11:Historically, I think this is how most (or all?) states have actually been established - not by a few outlaws who are barely capable of keeping themselves alive, but by people who were already well-respected by society.
This is why I think that human nature must change before individualist anarchism can become practical. As long as people are willing to put aside their own judgment and listen to others because of their status, then we will have the state, we will have war and taxes, and we will have tyranny. As long as people are willing to obey other people, freedom remains threatened.
Stranger:What you must ask is would you and your children ever submit to another state? If the answer is no, then you shall remain free. Others may enslave themselves as they please.
Then why does a state exist now? Or do you hold, as I sometimes do, that anarchy is really a state of mind?
JAlanKatz: Stranger:What you must ask is would you and your children ever submit to another state? If the answer is no, then you shall remain free. Others may enslave themselves as they please. Then why does a state exist now? Or do you hold, as I sometimes do, that anarchy is really a state of mind?
A state exists because you obey it and have not constituted an alternative.
Stranger: A state exists because you obey it and have not constituted an alternative.
A state exists because I obey it? If I were to disobey it, it would still exist, and I would be dead or jailed. The same applies to your original claim:
If those around me or my children enslaved themselves, as you say, by forming a state, and my children or I did not submit to another state, we'd be killed, not free.
Parsidius:As Bertrand de Jouvenel noted, Power always appeals to the envy of the common folk to rise up against their betters, so that the state has no social competitors. If we allow people to tend to these feelings of envy, then it is almost certain that the state will be restored. However, if one were to institute a policy of strict social sanction and ostracism against anyone who promoted leftist/socialist ideology, then a free society would be self-sustaining. (And yes, ostracism would be a part of a free society. The 'right' to free speech is merely part of a bundle of property rights. One can refuse others the power to say whatever they want on your property, or refuse to transfer your property to those who advocate socialism. In fact, to deny one's private property to those who do not believe in private property is only fitting.)
Where people don't believe they can get distributive justice in the economic realm they will get in the political realm.
Freedom by definition means having the ability to do as you wish. The freedom to kill, to steal as well as to love and to work together. Having acted, one of two criteria will be met. what is done will either work or it wont. Collectivised actions will tend towards what works, since what works supports survival, whereas what doesnt work threatens survival. There is nothing insidious about gathering together once one has been granted such freedom to act. Governments exist because the instituitions work. We obey governments for the same reason. To abandon the instituitin arbitrarily in the name of freedom seems naive. Given that even in nature such structures are observed however different from our own behavior.
tgibson11:I don't think the danger is that a few "ne'er do-wells" get together to impose a state. The risk is that the natural elites (in the Hoppean sense - those to whom economic and social influence will naturally accrue in a free society), choose to use their resources and influence to establish a state for the purpose of further enriching themselves at the expense of the rest of society. This temptation would likely be greatest among the heirs of successful entrepreneurs, who have become accustomed to a level of wealth that they find themselves unable to maintain under free competition. Historically, I think this is how most (or all?) states have actually been established - not by a few outlaws who are barely capable of keeping themselves alive, but by people who were already well-respected by society.
Spot on! This is a left-libertarian (mutualist Kevin Carson) analysis. That in a system of free and open competition with no barriers to entry, prices get driven to cost and no profits are possible. This is an inherently unstable situation for owners of capital so they turn to the state's privilege granting/regulatory burden abilities to actually raise barriers to entry and cartelize industries while shifting risks/costs onto society (negative externalities).
To read more:
http://mutualist.org/id4.html
We obey governments for the same reason. To abandon the instituitin arbitrarily in the name of freedom seems naive. Given that even in nature such structures are observed however different from our own behavior.
Abandoning it in the name of freedom is not 'arbitrary' at all. Neither will 'it works' serve to justify it either. Slavery 'works' too. So what? If a pure free market can achieve more, why not opt for it?
Civilisation is organised. Who organised it, we did. Whatever the result. There is no invisible hand doing this, we are doing it. WE.
That said, any real discussion would include an actionable model. Not a criticism of the status quo.
One anarchist presented to me the follow theory:
Throughout human existence, we've had government get bigger and bigger and bigger until revolution happens and it shrinks. Then it grows bigger and bigger and bigger, but never as big as it had been previously. Again, a revolution happens, and government is left even smaller than it had been after the previous revolution.
Government gets bigger and bigger, boom! Magna carta.
Government gets bigger and bigger, boom! American independence.
With that last one, we came very close to statelessness.
But then government got bigger and bigger. Now here we are.
In his opinion, the next time a revolution takes place, the whole thing will be scrapped.
Although, if we are to apply his theory more consistently than he did, then we would have to say that after we achieve statelessness, there will be calls for a return of government. It will return, will at first be minarchist, and will finally grow too big for minarchists, at which point it will fall and we'll be left once again with statelessness, but this time also with a civilisation who realises it is ready for it.
But, I'm not convinced that the government is on a long slope downward. A world of warentless wiretaps and no Habeas Corpus does not seem all that more free than the Oriental despotisms of the past to me.
Still, I wouldn't be surprised if A) statelessness is the result of the next great revolution (since these past two centuries the idea has definitely blossomed in a way that it had not at the time of the American revolution), and if B) we relapse for some length of time into a governmental system.
allixpeeke:One anarchist presented to me the follow theory: Throughout human existence, we've had government get bigger and bigger and bigger until revolution happens and it shrinks. Then it grows bigger and bigger and bigger, but never as big as it had been previously....
Throughout human existence, we've had government get bigger and bigger and bigger until revolution happens and it shrinks. Then it grows bigger and bigger and bigger, but never as big as it had been previously.
...
I like this theory :) If only because it is cause for some hope. I think that maybe part of the cause of this pattern (assuming it is correct ;) is that as information becomes more freely available, economic truth spreads and wrong theories find it harder to stick around. Every piece of evidence of the harm of the state gets replicated thousands of times over. When information is controlled, lies are more convincing, but the internet is the ultimate out-of-control information stream. Even states that try to censor it have a lot of difficulty doing so. Nobody else in history has anything like Mises.org, and now all this knowledge is available almost anywhere in the world.
JAlanKatz:A state exists because I obey it? If I were to disobey it, it would still exist, and I would be dead or jailed. The same applies to your original claim:If those around me or my children enslaved themselves, as you say, by forming a state, and my children or I did not submit to another state, we'd be killed, not free.
Ghandi and Nelson Mandela were not killed. They forced the state to go to war on them, and won, because they offered an alternative focus of loyalty for the people.
If you want to become free, you have to force the state to go to war on you. It may be sad to say, but this is the kind of fight that you win by suffering.
Civil disobedience is one way, but you need to have conscience on your side. Just disobedience simply because you disagree is not enough. Once conscience is identified, the issues have to be discussed in detail in order to create an objective viewpoint. Since no one has the complete view, even the opposing side might have something relevant to say.