The Most Tragic Misunderstanding in History

Voluntaryists, consentists, and 'anarchists' are guilty of the worst communication approach in history

Miscommunicated arguments against the state keep entrenching statists further into their cherished beliefs. And I don’t blame them.

Why people still prefer statism

For the vast majority of humans, the state represents order. Even if they acknowledge its faults, for them, a tyrannical hegemonic stability is better than a Mad Max-style free-for-all — this false dichotomy. Thus, if you make any argument against the existence of the state, they will foremostly assume you are promoting disorder. So any anti-state argument you present, whether appealing to morality, efficiency, or logic, will fall flat. People will never give up their sense of social order — rightfully so.

Communication restrategising

But here’s the kicker, or the plot twist, if you will…

In fact, those of us who believe the state is an unnecessary evil don’t truly oppose the practice of government. We also want government, just better government, and yes, more government, and cost-effective government. And just like any valuable good or service, you get more of it and a better quality of it when it is offered by competing providers, not a central monopoly — always, absolutely without any exception ever.

Competition always favours consumers more than monopolies (in the long run, competition also favours providers, because it’s better to be a competitor in heaven than a monopolist in hell. And monopolies destroy a society’s economic potential. Being a king of a wasteland is inferior to being an equal in a world that thrives; this is what power-hungry psychos don’t seem to get.

We all want government

We also want governance, just not centralised. We also want government, just not the government, or a government. That’s the only difference. Call it competing government providers or self-governance. Self-governance is evident in much of industry, and even in dealings between nations — no overlying government is required to dictate who does what. Hell, even corrupt dealings between government officials are conducted without any single-government supervision, and they work smoothly and efficiently. And I don’t understand why mainstream statists have a problem with the term “self-governance”; isn’t the whole philosophy of ‘democracy’ self-governance?

We all want order, just by slightly different means. Some statists want social order from a fanatic Middle-Eastern theocracy; this is what their overall culture understands and wants. Other statists want their social order to come from a fascist/socialist dictatorship; it’s all they know. And other statists look for social order in the circus of democracy, this dictatorship with extra steps that maintains the illusion of choice and ownership.

Regardless of flavour, statists want social order from a centralised source that is unaccountable. Yes, politicians are unaccountable because “low in the polls” is not punishment for bad policy. And you see how blatantly and audaciously corrupt they are, and you still can’t punish them.

Instead, social order from decentralised systems of self-governance provides accountability in that, if you don’t offer or keep good policy, you will be punished by the relentless and unforgiving free market, which means you will be out of business or ostracised, or worse.

In statelessness, you have skin in the game because you have to put your money where your mouth is. In statism, those who act and speak generally put someone else’s skin in someone else’s game.

Regardless, anti-state people still want government, just not from the state. We want governance, not from an artificial, violence-driven monopoly of governance, but from competing vendors.

And because most people can’t fathom how governance can come from different competing sources simultaneously, I’ll just share sources on how self-governance works, since it is beyond the scope of this article.

Why statism persists regardless

Statism — the monopoly of governance — is everywhere because it’s an appeal to tradition. It’s what people know; it’s all they have known since prehistory, and they will thus need much time and healing to get over this autistic-level inflexibility of being fixated on the state as somehow the only source of social order. For most of human history, child sacrifice, slavery, and the belief that the earth was flat were normal. Hopefully, one day soon, the religious belief in the false god of “the state” will also be outgrown.

Monopolies are inefficient

Just like any monopoly, the state as the single source of public goods is inefficient, ineffective, unmotivated, and corrupt. The state is like an inefficient combustion engine, with the absolute max efficiency it can produce being 28% compared to the electric motors with roughly 99%. And before a smartass tries to debunk this analogy by bringing up the inefficiency of lithium batteries, I’m only talking about the motor, not the energy source. If fuel didn’t happen to hold so much energy, or if a breakthrough in battery technology changes the playing field, the combustion engine would be seen for the totally inefficient Rube Goldberg machine that it is. Similarly, this is statism versus statelessness: unaccountable and inefficient centralised governance over accountable and efficient decentralised governance.

The true culprits: anti-statists

Imagine how many lives could have been saved had we, the anti-state people, adopted a more empathetic communication strategy sooner, given how corrupt and hazardous the monopoly of the state is.

Call them anarchists, voluntaryists, consentists, Austrian-Rothbardians, or simply the anti-state people (me included)…

We argue over morality, efficiency, and philosophy, going on and on about the non-aggression principle (NAP), about consent, incentives, human action, eternally debatable “rights”, etc. Do we hear ourselves how we sound to someone whose only interest is social order and stability for the sake of safety for their family? Are we so unempathetic? Aren’t we hypocritical when we show so little compassion, when we pride ourselves on being morality-first, and against utilitarianism?

We miss the obvious fact: that our intended audience doesn’t care about the what nor the how, but the why. Why do we want statelessness, self-governance, and freedom from monopolies of violence (aka, the state)? Why do we want these things? What do they serve? What’s their purpose? Their purpose is still governance, just decentralised governance, which in many cases can be more stringent and austere than centralised governance. For example, speeding is something that can be much better controlled under decentralised governance than a useless centralised government. What is speeding other than an increase in risk, better mitigated by an increase in insurance premiums or a ban on using specific privately owned road networks?

The true discussion is not freedom against the state, but rather, centralised government versus decentralised government.

Centralised versus decentralised

The only difference between centralised and decentralised government is that, due to the accountability element inherent in competition, decentralised government more accurately represent what people want, how much they want it, and who is entitled to want it; only those with skin in the game (who put their money and hide where their mouth is) get to make decisions over how they are governed). Another difference is that decentralised government is more responsive, since you vote every time you decide to spend or not spend your money, and where you decide to spend it, this way pressuring the right government services towards the right direction every single day (not every few years with unaccountable middle-men politicians who are all identical and serve their lobbyists more than you). If anything, the fact that politicians serve lobbyists more than voters proves that decentralised government works. Centralised government is self-governed through decentralised government. And no, this doesn’t mean that without centralised government, only the rich would be able to influence government. If anything, it is because of centralised government that the wealth gap exists in the first place. Taxation is the wealth gap. There is no such thing as taxes for the rich. Not only do the rich find and lobby for legal ways around taxation, but they also get government funding, which means the poor subsidise the rich. This would never be possible under decentralised government.

Self-accountability

The Spiderman axiom ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ isn’t exactly correct. The true version is ‘with great responsibility comes great power’. When you see where you play a role in your failings, you see where you had the power to avoid them, and where you still have the power to avoid failure, and even to succeed.

If I hold you responsible, it means I want to empower you. I don’t blame; I simply recognise where you had the power to prevail. This is what holding someone accountable means.

I hold us voluntaryists responsible for failing to promote true statelessness, with our flawed messaging and lack of empathy for statists. And by empathy here, I mean our ability to understand people’s mindsets, motivations, feelings, and reasons why they choose to believe what they do.

Because whenever you talk about the abolition of the state without making it clear as to why, people assume you want disorder. Because to them, the state equals order. Going on about rights and morality isn’t a strong enough why. Principles aren’t a goal; they are the means to get there. But the goal is the same as the statists’: social order, and more social order, for that matter.

We also want social order, just not from a monopoly of governance, but instead from a free market of governance.

And here’s a thought: Decentralised government is more stringent where it needs to be, and more lax when it needs to be. Why? Because the feedback mechanisms of what people want, who and how many of them want it, how much they want it, how accountable they are willing to be to get it, and how they go about getting it without forcing unwilling others to get it too, remain intact. With a centrally planned government (the state), these feedback mechanisms are distorted. Voting between identical, handpicked candidates with vague promises they don’t have to pick every few years isn’t an effective way for the people to show what they want.

How we should communicate

First

We should stop mentioning freedom as our ideal. Freedom, for most people, is almost synonymous with chaos. You can’t change that. And freedom isn’t even our end goal; our aim is a better functioning society. Freedom is just a means to get there. And let’s face it, “freedom” is subjective because one can perceive it as the “freedom” to oppress. If freedom were objective, we wouldn’t need dispute resolutions. And most people fear freedom in others just as much as they fear freedom in themselves. First, they need to be told what to do for structure, and they need others to be limited in what they can do. So, when most people see the state as the only source of warranted limitations on freedom, and you come along bringing up absolute freedom as an ideal, then they see you as a threat to their stability. And then you wonder why our messaging fails consistently.

Second

We don’t want the state, but we still want order and rules to keep people from acting like animals. If anything, this can be achieved better without the state. But this social order must come from different providers who need to pay nicely with their customers (us) and with each other, otherwise they go out of business. This isn’t the case with the state (centralised government), this vast monopoly of public goods, which we delude ourselves into believing we control by casting a meaningless vote in a suggestion box leading nowhere, since politicians and voters are unaccountable.

We want order too, just a better order, a more organic order, a more efficient order, without the chaos that centralised government (the state) creates.

Third

We should stop promoting the notion that our desired social structure will come after a violent revolution, or a single act of tax-revolt and defiance, or a major calamity and collapse of the state. Of course, this deters people, and we owe statists an apology for our bad messaging. Our desired world cannot come from violence or disaster. Stateless self-governance will come from free-market solutions emerging despite the existence of the state, so much so that these solutions render the state irrelevant, and it will thus shrivel and fade into nothingness.

Open letter to statists

Dear statist,

I know you want order, and you want humans to have a limit to their freedom. To be honest, I don't want anyone to have absolute freedom, because that would encroach on mine, and vice versa. And then, absolute freedom would be impossible for all.

I know that you agree that, just like any good or service, public services are optimised when there is competition in their supply. An artificial monopoly, a dictatorship of exclusivity to perceived “authority”, is the problem with centralised government, or the state. Democracy is a scam. Most people in a country disagree with most laws of that country. If we ran referenda for each and every single law, we’d find that democracy was lacking, because selling your vote to identical and already-chosen-for-you candidates brings zero accountability, zero reward and punishment, zero market feedback as to what people want, how much they want it, and how many who actually have skin in the game want it.

This is where decentralised government comes in. I want government, too, just better. I know humans are creatures of habit; when the first indoor toilets were introduced, people were hesitant: “Shit inside my house? This is preposterous! It’s disgusting and unhygienic. It’s healthier for everyone to shit in the street outside.” This is how they thought. Until they didn’t.

Similarly: “Social order without the centralised rule of violence of the state? How could we ever have order based on incentives, competition, and the deterrence of FAFO?”

People should get in one day, I hope.

I hope you can see that we don’t want chaos or disorder. We want social order just like you, and we believe we can achieve much better, much cheaper, and more organic social order via competing suppliers of governance, rather than a single monopolist.

I hope one day you will see this too.

Kind regards,

A non-statist.

Conclusion

We all want social order. It just so happens that statism consolidates power into the hands of the few, and we thus get anarcho-tyranny, which is peak disorder; chaotic, unaccountable authoritarianism.

We, the proponents of statelessness, also want more order, less crime, less pollution, less war, less resentment, and less social decay, just like statists want these things. We want the same, which is why we want decentralised governance to displace centralised government. Once we open our position with the why, we’ll see that we have more in common with statists than we thought. And only then can we perhaps start seeing eye to eye.

The art of communication is not knowing what words mean; it’s knowing what they mean specifically to your audience. If “government” holds a secondary value to your listener, and that value is “order” and “safety”, then, in the ears of your audience, when you deny government, you also deny something else without even realising it. You indivertibly deny something that you also value.

---

The truth is, we who prefer a stateless society also recognise authority, but not the arbitrary authority endowed to emperors without clothes. The only universal authority all sentient beings recognise is our incentive to be on good terms with those around us, due to our reluctance to motivate those around us to ostracise us or directly harm us. That’s it. There is nothing beyond that. These principles are what statism is founded on, too. The only difference is that the vast majority of people, being creatures of habit, still cling to the false notion that “social structure must come from a single source of public goods”, like children expecting their parents to have the final say about who gets what in the house. We are an infantilised species; blame state schooling for that.

With helpless children, yes, centralised governance is ideal. With self-respecting adults, it isn’t. Democracy was a good first step towards decentralised self-governance in that, at least, it recognised the reality that no monarch or oligarch has any moral superiority. Thus, no centralised “authority” can make arbitrary rules enforced by a monopoly of violence, all with the tolerance, justification, and complicity of a demoralised populace. But democracy failed because it still led to a single source of violence-driven government. It just added the extra step of toothless voting, which doesn’t work, since voters (and candidates) are unaccountable, and nobody puts money where their vote is. For true decentralised government, we need true market-feedback dynamics, which means there must be a cost-benefit relationship to whatever opinion we express regarding public goods.

And that’s how, I hope, true statelessness is achieved.

Empathise with those you perceive are your enemies, and perhaps, you’ll see that you never were enemies to begin with.