Why we want government

Borrowed collectivist glory

Ultimately, we want government because we need to feel part of a winning team - a team that wins over others; brutalizes them if need be. We assume that government -our government - is the all-powerful tribe for us: us, the imagined collective, a contrived group defined by arbitrary, vague, and meaningless criteria.

Supporting government is the exact same psychodynamic as the fanboyism of spectacle sports, political ideology, and even religion. It’s not about the support of a sports team that stands for no values, or representation, and isn’t even made of the same people each season. It’s not about an ideology’s moral principles or technical benefit to society, or even the individual. It’s not about how ethical or factual a religion is.

No.

It’s all about being part of a collective of needy will-less pawns, bereft of individuality, self-ownership, and the dignity to maintain self-determination. It’s all about filling our inner void of worthlessness by associating with a convenient group that happens to be near us; a tribe that either was, is, or will be powerful enough to dominate other tribes (in our minds, at least). And this is what traumatized people want: to dominate and traumatize others the same way they were traumatized.

We want government because government is the contrived apparatus by which “our team” gets to dominate others, and by deluded extension, we will indirectly dominate them too.

This is why statists become critical of government when “the other side” wins an election, but make every excuse in the book for the same things they criticize the other side for when “their side” wins.

Generic political parties segment government into micro-teams to give us the illusion that we have a dog in the fight, and someone in our corner; a tribe just for us. Then, we hope that one day our micro-team will be in charge of the whole, and THEN we’ll be on top of others. That’ll show them! Right?

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Government always wins because we - the vast majority of us, at least - are so weak and desperately insecure that we surrender our self-sovereignty to arbitrary collectives led by people we treat as our betters, only to somehow feel stronger by proxy through a collective. How absurd is that?

Government always wins because we (the vast majority of us) carry unresolved trauma from past abuse, especially childhood humiliations and indignities that foster resentment against ourselves more than against our abusers. This means that we’d easily side with the abuser than the victim, and that we’d rather be an abuser than a victim.

We believe in this villain-or-victim false dichotomy, because we could never see how it’s possible to be neither. This is because we are weak from all that internalized humiliation, so we lack the strength to be strong without needing to victimize others. We only see strength as abuse, and we only see kindness as vulnerability.

We can’t be strong and kind at the same time. We can’t be humble without compromising self-esteem.

So, we erroneously assume that, if we can’t victimize others, then they will victimize us. This is the core of statist mentality: the hope of using the omnipotence of the state apparatus in our favour at the expense of others; as long as we relinquish enough of our freedoms and dignities to the state, and as long as we vote as hard as we can the “right” representative whom we desperately need to believe.

We then decide to collectively relinquish our freedoms to the concept of “the state,” assuming that it’s something more than a group of opportunist aristocrats pretending to give a fuck about their naive constituents. To be fair, if I were a politician, I’d also loath the people who so easily fall for my deceptions.

The bottom line

When we can’t see ourselves worthy as individuals, we rush to borrow perceived “glory” from a collective. This “glory” is completely imagined, the same way this “glory” transfers to the collective’s members by association or by undignified fealty.

Yet, this collective identity is enough to make good people into monsters, and justify the unjustifiable; the atrocities committed in the name of government.

We don’t need government because it’s moral (we know it’s not); we want government because we aren’t moral either.

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Recommended reading

• ‘Chaos Theory: Two Essays on Market Anarchy’ by Robert P. Murphy

• ‘The Market for Liberty’ by Morris and Linda Tannehill

• ‘Democracy: The God That Failed’ by Hans Hermann Hoppe

• ‘The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production’ by Hans-Hermann Hoppe

• ‘The Private Production of Defense’ by Hans-Hermann Hoppe

• ‘The Privatization of Roads and Highways’ by Walter Block

• ‘Defending the Undefendable I, II, & II’ by Walter Block

• ‘No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority’ by Lysander Spooner

• ‘Let’s Abolish Government’ by Lysander Spooner

• ‘Anatomy of the State’ by Murray N. Rothbard

• ‘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 Ethics of Liberty’ by Murray N. Rothbard

• ‘Human Action’ by Ludwig von Mises

• ‘The Enterprise Of Law: Justice Without The State’ by Bruce L. Benson

• ‘The Machinery of Freedom: A Guide to Radical Capitalism’ by David Friedman

• ‘The Most Dangerous Superstition’ by Larken Rose

• Essays on voluntaryism by Sotiris Rex