hygienic dark retreat

captive

We need freedom to live. But a universal mistake about government holds us captive. This essay shows how to escape. And it explains how to reverse the conditions in which we made the mistake in the first place.

mistake

Here is the mistake: “A state is centralized.”

This mistaken assumption is as old as civilization. Everyone has made it, from Ancients to Moderns, kings to anarchists. Some want to build it up, others, 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 one possible organizing principle. A state could also be distributed: seated at the individual level, with no central bodies or delegation of power.

This essay describes the distributed state and its elements of thought, feeling, and action. We will begin with politics, identifying its natural basis. We will examine the fatal 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 being: the nature of reality, 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 and prosperity. It achieves universal justice. If used in offense, force 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. It recognizes the existence and rights of the individual, and individuals as the political unit or agent of a society. Individualist society is characterized by self-government and benevolence.

Collectivism is idealistic (fantastical, nihilistic), mystical (irrational), altruist (self-sacrificing, suicidal), tyrannical, and ugly. It regards individuals as rightless cells of a collective “organism”, which it regards the political agent of society. Collectivist society is characterized by central control and fear.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.

Here is America’s problem. We have an individualist politics and way of life. But we have a collectivist form of government: a 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 collectively make decisions that are binding on 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.

It also undermines the principle of equality before the law. One who delegates his power gives away his most precious value. It decreases his power and renders him less than a man, a non-equal. Collective decisions bind him disproportionately and unfavorably. Delegation is a contemptible act. It implies a wish for slavery and death and, ultimately, obliges politicians to fulfill this wish. (Historically, monopolized, debt-based currency, with its dire consequences, has neatly served this purpose.)

A centralized state laces any individualist ideas it handles with collectivism. The poison accumulates, ultimately killing the individualist core of the way of life. It damages its people and keeps them dependent on it.

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 necessitates corruption, conspiracy, tyranny.

solution

To solve this problem, we need:

1. an individualist form of government
2. a refined politics
3. a strategy to apply it

form

Identifying another kind of state only takes a little logic. The collectivist form of government is a centralized state. It mirrors the idea of man as a particle in a blob.

The opposite, individualist form of government would be the distributed state. It mirrors the fact of man’s separate, distributed nature. It formalizes the natural government of a society: the simple actions people take to keep the peace in it. It is the real and living state eternally among us, the great political secret invisible till now, which we can finally discern and recognize.

(America’s system, for example, is between a centralized and decentralized system. The federal level share power with the states and counties, and the three separated branches share it at all levels.)

The distributed state retains the essential functions of government: legislation, defense, and adjudication, but in self-governed form. Everyone keeps his power, not delegates it. He makes his own laws in the form of contracts. He defends himself and settles his own disputes.

He gets help as needed from others—friends, family, neighbors—and looks out for them in return. He hires and fires legal counsel, guards, and arbiters in more difficult and complex situations.

Contracts quickly standardize and nest. Insurance companies combine these services with coverage and help coordinate large-scale defense. All these individuals and voluntary groups together comprise a distributed state, an individualist form of government.²

Anarcho-capitalists gave us this idea. But they do not consider it a state due to the absence of involuntary taxation and monopoly on force. Objectivist capitalists have taken them at their word. But funding and division of labor are non-essential (non-defining) characteristics of a state. They are operational issues and optional. Function is essential.

Identifying this arrangement as a state, not just a set of market actors meeting demand and coordinated by price, connects it to philosophy and history. It becomes approachable to political thinkers and something to take seriously. People in it can connect to it and to each other imaginatively, morally, and emotionally. A system of government needs this context to endure.

In a distributed state, law is based on precepts: a brief collection of statements of man’s nature and social nature. They regard the philosophy of individual rights to life, liberty, and property; the crimes that violate them; and the means of protecting them.

The precepts are open source, simple, and fit on one page. A four year-old can understand them. Traditional maxims of law embody or elaborate them. Legal precedent can inform them, as well.

The precepts are matter of fact. They state how things are with man, whether anyone or any government recognizes it or not. Man has rights. He does exercise them. He does defend himself by every means available. So respect him or suffer the terrible consequences, sooner or later, directly or indirectly.

In a distributed state, we have a common idea about how to use force, not centralized control of it. Virtually everyone holds everyone accountable. Virtually everyone is vigilant and available to keep the peace.

In a distributed state, everyone a criminal sees is a legal expert, warrior, and judge. Every property line is a guarded border. Every building is a castle. Every worked-upon thing is owned, requiring someone’s permission to touch it.³

That which no one has “mixed his efforts with”⁴ is unowned and available for the taking, especially land. The fraud of the Enclosure Laws, which led to collective ownership of unused land, is finished, along with the nation states it enabled.

All 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 ends disturbances of the peace. The state keeps 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 does. It includes noise, vibration, light, and electromagnetism in addition to poisonous fumes, liquids, and solids. Pollution is primarily an affront people, not the environment. 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. It’s enough to inspire normal people to become sympathetic to revolutionaries and dictators.

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 in centralized states. Fortunately, the idea of the individualist distributed state can be derived by logic. It formalizes natural government and invokes it.

We recover natural government with a three-point, assymetric strategy:

1. learn enough philosophy, law⁵, and self-defence to function.
2. recover personal, living power through healing from trauma through hygienic dark retreat
3. 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 is self-supporting. It does not run candidates for centralized leadership or try to influence centralized policy. Assymmetry means focusing on factors the centralized system has difficulty controlling.

The first strategic point, learning, is common. The second and third need explanation.

living power

Freedom requires power. A freeman is powerful, a slave, powerless.

There are two kinds of political power. The commonly understood kind is external, mechanical power arising by will: discipline, military, popularity, money, technology, and propaganda. Mechanical power is widely available but weak. It must be concentrated in few hands to work. It imbalances society and inspires awe or fear.

The rarer, less understood kind is personal, 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. It is calming. Anyone who has it is irresistible. Virtually everyone today is short of it and desperate for it, tyrants most of all.

We lost most of our living power millennia ago when a global catastrophe caused mass-scale trauma and mass psychosis. Mechanical power became stronger than living power. Assembling into large hierarchical societies was the only way to survive. But such social organization retraumatizes us. It perpetuates individual incapacity, dependence, and poor thinking, leading to mistaken assumptions.

The natural means of healing from trauma is now known: deep, concentrated, extended rest in total darkness. Health and vitality return. With them come joy, power, and genius at levels known only in legend. Palpable personal presence and irresistible influence result.⁶

The world system, based on weak, mechanical power, cannot suppress people like this. On the contrary, its awaits them, too. Ten such people can turn the tide of the world, freeing billions to take care of themselves again.

Living power is the felt element of a state organized by the distributive principle. The other main elements are the preceding ideas and the following actions.

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 (liquid, solid), electricity, heating, transportation. Infrastructure, not defense, is the biggest, most pervasive activity of the centralized state, the cause of its persistence, and its greatest life-and-death power over us.

So we use our restored intelligence and power to replace centralized infrastructure with autonomous infrastructure.⁷ It is onsite, simple, maintainable without political compromise.⁸ Likewise, we replace the system’s soft services: money, education, medicine, communication, etc.

Restored capacity obviates things and actions. Latent ability, knowledge, and skills emerge. All reinforce independence.

The centralized state shrinks gradually as fewer people depend on it. Society remains stable through the transition.

conclusion

The centralized system is fragile. It depends on complete control. Its commanding grip loosens with even a slight unplanned alteration of conditions.

Most elites support centralized control for lack of a serious 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 of our ancient political problem, a solution, and a strategy to apply the solution. 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 problems on every scale going back over 10,000 years. It restores peace in the world, and man to his place in it.

See notes on individualism for elaboration and more sources.