captured
We need freedom to live, but we are captured. A universal mistake about government holds the world in thrall, most obviously here in America. This essay opens the cage.
At least, it can for the freedom-loving, truth-seeking individualist it is written for, be you an Ayn Rand fan, Objectivist, libertarian, anarcho-capitalist, American patriot, disillusioned liberal, precocious conservative, admirer of America, or stubborn teenager, etc.
If you assume individualism means showing you are different from others or living in isolation; or that it must be tempered by duty, sacrifice, and submission to group demands, etc, this is not for you.
Lastly, this essay is intended to provide words for those who recognize what it describes, not to convince those who do not.
mistake
Here is the mistake: “A state is centralized.”
It is a mistake as old as civilization. Everyone has made it. The Ancients. Barbarian hordes. Philosophers, prophets, emperors, popes and kings. America’s Founding Fathers. Conservatives and Progressives today. Capitalists, communists, fascists, socialists, gangs, theocrats. Every kind of anarchist. Some want to build it up. Others want to tear it down. But they all agree: a state is a centralized state and can be nothing else.
Actually, a state is a state. Centralization is just an organizing principle. A state could also be distributed: seated at the individual level, with no central bodies. This principle organizes guiding ideas, a motivating feeling, and effective actions into a different kind of state.
This essay describes the distributed state and these, its elements. We begin with politics, identifying its natural basis. We will examine the problems of centralized states. Then we will derive the solution of distribution and a strategy to apply it in a volatile world.
politics
Philosophy describes the fundamental facts of reality: its nature, how it is known, and what should be done in it. Standing at the base of knowledge, philosophy is the most important science.
One fact of life is so important, a whole branch of philosophy is needed to handle it: man’s great and terrible power to use physical force against others. The philosophical branch of politics determines, by moral sanction, how force is to be used in society.
If used in defense, force frees people to live in peace, prosperity, and harmony. It achieves universal justice. If in offense, it deceives, robs, enslaves, and murders people and destroys the world. It achieves universal crime.
In effect, politics asks everyone a single question: freedom or slavery? Shall I live by right to life, liberty, and property—my body, movements, and possessions? Or shall I exist by permission, under legal compulsion, to be dispossessed, enslaved, and killed at the will of others?
analysis
The politics of individualism answers, “Freedom”; of collectivism, “Slavery”. Individualism is realistic, rational, egoist (self-preserving), liberating, and beautiful. Collectivism is idealistic (fantastical, nihilistic), mystical (irrational), altruist (self-sacrificing, suicidal), tyrannical, and ugly. Individualism recognizes the existence and rights of the individual. Collectivism regards individuals as rightless cells of a collective “organism” that has political primacy. Individualist society is characterized by self-regulation; collectivist society, by centralized control. 1
A society controls (governs) the use of force within it through institutions of law, defense, and court. Whatever forms they take, these institutions comprise a society’s state. Court could just be some old men in a tipi deciding a young man’s fate.
Here is America’s problem. We have an individualist politics and way of life. But we have a collectivist form of government: the centralized state, at federal, state, and local levels. The collectivist part of this contradiction causes our political and social strife.
In a centralized state, everyone delegates his power to representatives by voting or submission. Delegates meet in central bodies to make decisions collectively for everyone. This mixing of political and legal fate contradicts the individualist principles of independence, self-determination, and self-government by exercise of non-negotiable rights.
Decisions are applied to people according to their varying levels of power. One who delegates his power sacrifices what he most needs to live. It is a contemptible act, rendering him subhuman and minimally powerful. It implies a wish for slavery and death. It obliges politicians to take it as a command. Monopolized, debt-based currency is an efficient means of executing it.
A centralized state laces any individualist ideas it handles with collectivism. The poison accumulates, ultimately killing the individualist core of the way of life.
Small and set apart, a centralized state is a single point of attack on an entire population. Psychopathic and increasingly bold collectivists take advantage of it. Centralization guarantees corruption, conspiracy, tyranny.
solution
To solve this problem, we need:
- an individualist form of government
- a refined politics
- a strategy to apply it
form
Identifying another kind of state only takes a little logic. Just as the collectivist form of government is a centralized state, the individualist form of government is a distributed state.
In a distributed state, everyone keeps his power, delegating none of it. He makes his own laws in the form of contracts, defends himself, and settles his own disputes. He hires and fires legal counsel, guards, and arbiters to help him as needed. Insurance companies combine these services with coverage and help coordinate large-scale defense. 2
Some consider this to be anarchy due to the absence of involuntary taxation or monopoly on force. But these are non-essential attributes—and optional. Function is essential: legislation, defense, and adjudication. These remain in self-governed form. Together, they comprise a distributed state, an individualist form of government.
Law in contracts is based on the precepts: a brief collection of statements of inherent laws of man’s social nature. They regard individual rights to life, liberty, and property; the crimes that violate them; and the means of protecting them. They are open source, simple, and fit on one page. A four year-old can understand them. Traditional maxims of law embody or elaborate them. Anglo-American legal precedent remains useful as well.
We need one idea about how to use force, not centralized control of it. Everyone holds everyone accountable. Everyone is available to keep the peace. One in 200 people is insufficient and manipulable.
In a distributed state, everyone that a criminal sees is a legal expert, soldier, and judge. Every property line is a guarded border. Every building is a castle. Every worked-upon thing is owned and requires someone’s permission to touch it. What no one has “mixed his efforts with” 3 is unowned and available for possession, especially land. The Enclosure fraud is finished along with the nation state.
Most penalties for crime are monetary, paid to injured parties and adjudicators. Dangerous criminals are confined non-punitively. They work to cover their costs and have opportunities to rehabilitate and retrain. 2
A state is called a state because it is static. It is the unchanging foundation, the constant condition of society. Which is peace. The state of society is peace. People cannot associate and make war on each other at the same time. So the state keeps the peace. It ends disturbances of the peace.
refinement
Traditional Anglo-American politics is already quite good. But it does need better recognition of two rights and two corollary crimes.
The most common crime people suffer from is pollution. Day and night, pollution touches the bodies of everyone without permission. It violates the right to life like assault, maiming, and murder. It includes noise, vibration, light, and electromagnetism in addition to noxious fumes, liquids, and solids. Pollution is not primarily an affront to the environment, but people. It slowly crushes some and drives others mad, to the point of revolt.
The second most common crime is harassment. Harassment is another’s unwelcome contact or presence when one is in place. It violates the right to liberty, just as obstruction and capture do when one is in motion. Thugs exploit the loophole of harassment and terrorize entire populations. Normal people become sympathetic to revolutionaries.
strategy
Built into man’s conscience and sociality is natural government. It is always with us. But it becomes muted when we are ill and dependent, as we have been for millennia. Fortunately, the idea of the individualist distributed state can be derived by logic. It formalizes natural government and resurrects it.
We recover natural government with a three-point, assymetric strategy:
- learn enough philosophy, law, and self-defence to function.
- recover personal power through healing from trauma through hygienic dark retreat
- recover material independence through autonomous infrastructure: off-grid and low-tech
An Individualist Party helps organize these activities for members so they may better lead their own lives. It does not run candidates for centralized leadership or seek significant support. Assymmetry means focusing on factors less controlled by the centralized system.
The first point, learning, is common. The second and third need explanation.
living power
Freedom requires power. Freemen are powerful. Slaves are powerless.
There are two kinds of power. One is internal, biological power. It is the power to live: to get out of bed, to take food, to claim one’s place in the world and to defend it. It is a form of vitality arising from health. Living power is deep, strong, and palpable. Everyone is short of it and desperate for it, tyrants most of all. One who has it is irresistible. It is calming.
The other kind of power is external, mechanical power arising by will: discipline, popularity, propaganda, money, technology, and military. Mechanical power is widely available but weak compared to living power. It must be concentrated in few hands to work. So it imbalances society and inspires awe or fear.
We lost most of our living power millennia ago when a global catastrophe caused mass-scale trauma. Mechanical power became stronger. Assembling into large hierarchical societies was the only way to survive.
The natural means of healing from trauma is now known: deep, concentrated, extended rest in total darkness. Health and vitality return, and with them, power, genius, and joy, at superheroic levels known only in legend. Palpable personal presence and irresistible influence result.
The world system, based on weak, mechanical power, cannot suppress people like this. Indeed, it awaits them, too. Ten can turn the tide of the world, freeing billions to take care of themselves again.4
Living power is the felt element organized by the distributive principle. The preceding ideas and the following actions are the other main ones.
autonomous infrastructure
Freedom requires material independence. But nearly everyone physically depends on state-controlled, centralized infrastructure. Infrastructure consists of basic life support systems: water (supply and runoff), waste, electricity, heating, transportation. Infrastructure, not defense, is the biggest, most pervasive activity of the centralized state, the cause of its persistence, and its life-and-death power over us.5
So we use our restored intelligence and power to replace centralized infrastructure with autonomous infrastructure. It is onsite, simple, repairable, replaceable without political compromise. In general, restored biological capacity replaces artifacts and action, reinforcing independence. Likewise, we replace the system’s secondary services: money, education, medicine, etc.6
The centralized state shrinks gradually as fewer people depend on it. Society remains stable through the transition.
conclusion
The system is fragile and depends on complete control. Its commanding grip loosens with even a slight unplanned alteration of conditions.
Most elites support centralized control for lack of an alternative. As they switch to ours, others lose their will and power to stop us. We offer everyone peace and a way to heal from the cause of the suffering that drives us toward needless disaster.
This is an individualist analysis, solution, and strategy to solve our problem. One can start small, alone or with others. It is cheap, rational, and quick. Properly understood and applied, it solves or enables solutions to all mass-scale problems going back over 10,000 years. It restores peace in the world and man’s place in it.
See individualism for elaboration and full sources.