The State is the Devil
You made the whip with which you are flogged
For all their suffering in the 20th century, Germans have learned nothing. It should have been blindingly obvious that the source of wars, famine, genocide, forced labour, forced conscription, psychological warfare, and systemic mass rape that these people endured were not due to a specific brand of centralised government, but the very existence of centralised government itself.
Why?
Because war and tyranny are inalienable, detachable characteristics of the state. It needs these to stay relevant and thus to survive.
In just a century, Germans lived through feudalism, monarchy, fascism, communism, and the scam of democracy with its various parasitical manifestations, such as the Weimar Republic and EU neo-imperialism. They’ve seen the full spectrum of the state’s rebranding and reconstruction, with minor flavour changes just to provide a false hope that “this time it’ll be different”, but it never is.
Are Germans better off now than they were in the 1940s? Yes, for now, but they aren’t as better off as they were in the 1930s. My point is that relative and temporary “prosperity” is not an indication of one system’s superiority over another’s. At best, this is an association fallacy triggered by circumstantial geopolitical factors.
Where was I going with this?
Selling your soul to the devil is an allegory for government. Your soul represents your self-ownership, the devil is the state, and your wishes to the devil are inconsequential nonsense you deviously assume you’ll get for free from him (things you could have achieved yourself without him). And in the end, in a bout of tragic irony, you end up with neither the things you sold your soul for, nor your soul. In the end, we tend to (while not always) get what we deserve.
When you look to the protection mafia of the state to solve your problems for you (problems you erroneously assume you can’t solve yourself, but you can), then you essentially sell your soul to the devil needlessly. And you do this because you are either too dumb, too lazy, too morally corrupt, or all these together. What else can it be when you conclude that your best course of action is to willingly surrender your self-ownership to a bunch of sleazy, unaccountable, power-hungry psychopaths, with zero incentive or accountability towards you? How does your submission, which empowers only psychopaths, leave you better off than where you were without them? The answer is, it doesn’t.
The ultimate straw-man fallacy of the state is that, since people are inherently bad, we somehow need government to protect us, right? But this cannot be anything but psychotic. If people are bad, how does empowering only a few bad people with absolute unaccountable power help us? People see the relative “order” we have around us, and presume that it is due to the existence of the state. I am here to tell you that this relative order is not BECAUSE of the government, but DESPITE the government. If we can still have some order despite the anarcho-tyranny of every centralised, unaccountable monopoly of violence — the state — then we’d have much more order in a decentralised, self-governing society without any form of state, where everyone is equally accountable and vulnerable to each other. Instead, today we get structures of state power that deliberately create casts and corporate monopolies through lobbying, creating untouchable degenerates that commit corruption, embezzlement, genocide, and pedophilia without any possibility for retort.
The state is the devil.
This is the essence of Faust’s predicament, the man who sold himself to the devil, due to his foolish and devious naivete of wanting things for free. But nature (or divine justice) punished him with having to pay dearly for those things in the end. In the end, when you play with fire, you get burned.
No one is innocent in selling our souls to the state. We want a centralised, threat-based government, not because we desire social order; that’s just the excuse. The real reason we want the state is that we prefer a power structure in place in hopes of us getting to exploit it for special privileges at the expense of others. This is what voting is; enforcing via threat of violence your policies on others, as if numbers give you moral primacy. But in the end, this meat carriage of government tramples on us all, even the the state’s greatest beneficiaries.
When you dance with the devil, expect hell.
Recommended reading
‘Chaos Theory: Two Essays on Market Anarchy’ by Robert P. Murphy
‘No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority’ by Lysander Spooner
‘For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto’ by Murray N. Rothbard
‘Power and Market: Government and the Economy’ by Murray N. Rothbard
‘Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market’ by Murray N. Rothbard
‘The Enterprise Of Law: Justice Without The State’ by Bruce L. Benson
‘The Machinery of Freedom: A Guide to Radical Capitalism’ by David Friedman
While I get the allegorical, the state = the devil, I don’t believe in the devil or accept the concept of one. Christians, who literally invented the devil, whom they incorrectly call Satan, would probably say that if you just believed in Jesus, you wouldn’t need government, then would quote Romans 13:1. Moreover, most people won’t accept the allegory because, “not all governments are bad, or governments do some good.” You can probably only get 50% at a time, because as long as their guys are running things, it’s all good.
Religious kults too some very dangerous low li