hygienic dark retreat

(~2700 words / 11-minute read)

captive

We need freedom to live. But a universal mistake about government holds us captive. It is the assumption that a state is centralized.

This assumption is as old as civilization. Everyone has made it, from Ancients to Moderns, kings to anarchists. Some want to build up the state, others, to tear it down. But they all agree: a state is inherently centralized and can be no other way.

Actually, centralization is just one possible organizing principle of a state and a non-essential attribute. What a state does for people—function—is essential.

In this essay, we will use political philosophy to identify the function of the state. We will analyze the fatal flaws of centralized states. Then we will derive the alternative. We will describe it in thought, feeling, and action. And we will lay out a surprising strategy to attain it in a volatile world.

politics

Philosophy describes the fundamental facts and nature of reality—the world and oneself (in metaphysics), how it is known (epistemology), and what should be done about it (ethics). Philosophy stands on the peak of knowledge, surveying and directing it all. Philosophy is our most important science.

After the world and oneself, others are the next most important fact of reality. How to relate to them requires an entire branch of philosophy: politics.

One fact about people is so important, it defines politics. It is man’s great and terrible power to use physical force against others. Politics determines how physical force is to be used in society. It conditions everyone’s thoughts and choices. It saves or dooms millions on a daily basis.

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, motility, 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, and egoist (self-preserving). It is liberating, orderly, and beautiful. It recognizes the existence and rights of the individual, and individuals as the political unit and agent of society. Individualist society is characterized by distributed self-government and benevolence.

Collectivism is idealistic (nihilistic, fantastical), mystical (irrational), and altruist (self-sacrificing, suicidal). It is tyrannical, chaotic, and ugly. It regards individuals as rightless cells of a collective “organism”, which it regards as the political agent of society. Collectivist society is characterized by central control and demoralizing terror.¹

A society controls (governs) the use of force within it through institutions of law, defense, and court. These always exist in some form, acknowledged as such or not. Whatever forms they take, they comprise a society’s state.

Thus, there is always a state. Anarchy is impossible. Attempting it results in destruction, chaos, and dictatorship.

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 is the essence of collectivism. It 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. Personal power is the same as the power to live, one’s most precious value. One who delegates his power cripples and subdues himself. He becomes less than a man: unequal. Collective decisions bind him disproportionately and unfavorably.

Such delegation is a contemptible act. It implies a wish for subordination, slavery, and death. Ultimately, it obliges politicians to fulfill this wish. (Monopolized currency, with its tunable dire consequences, often serves this purpose.)

A centralized state laces any individualist ideas it handles with collectivism. The poison accumulates in its policies, ultimately overthrowing any basically individualist society. A centralized state damages people, keeping them dependent on it through their helplessness.

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 this vulnerability. Centralization leads to conspiracy, corruption, overthrow, and 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 just takes a bit of logic. The collectivist form of government is a centralized state. It mirrors the idea of man as a cell in an organism, a cog in a machine, a particle in a blob.

An individualist form of government would be the opposite: a distributed state. It mirrors man’s discrete, distributed nature. It is seated at the individual level, with no individual delegation of power to central bodies.

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

The distributed state formalizes the natural government of man: the relationships people normally form in peace and the actions they normally take to keep the peace. It is the real and living state eternally among us, whether visible and acknowledged or hidden and denied. It is the greatest political secret of all. We can rediscover and use it to escape our bondage.

The distributed state retains the essential functions of government: legislation, defense, and adjudication, yet in self-governed form. Everyone keeps his power rather than delegating it. He makes his own laws in the form of contracts on the basis of legal precepts. He defends himself and settles his own disputes, hiring and firing legal counsel, guards, and arbiters in difficult or complex matters. He gets help as needed from friends, family, and neighbors, looking out for them in turn.

Contracts in freedom 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 believe it only describes business: economic actors meeting demand, coordinated by price. They do not consider it a state due to the absence of involuntary taxation and, they say, monopoly on force.

Most people, including Objectivists, accept this odd definition by one non-essential and one non-distinction. Then they reject the idea because it claims to be anarchy and is thus impossible. To wit, funding is a secondary, operational issues with options. Only function is essential. And monopoly on force is inherent in every state, which every society has. How a state uses that monopoly is what matters.

Recognizing distributed government as a state finally makes sense of it, both in anarcho-capitalist theory, the daily life of everyone, and in indigenous social organization (long a mystery to the civilized). The distributed state becomes connected to philosophy and history and can be taken seriously. It becomes approachable to philosophers and intellectuals. People in it can finally see it. They can connect to it and to each other imaginatively, morally, and emotionally. A system of government needs this cohesive context to stand and to endure.

In a distributed state, law is based on precepts: a brief collection of statements of man’s nature. They regard the natural facts of an individual’s rights to life, liberty, and property; the crimes that violate them; and the means of protecting them. These are universals. No one likes being assaulted, harassed, captured, or robbed. Everyone responds with force somehow.

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 also inform them.

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 object and defend himself when violated. Respect him, or suffer the terrible consequences.

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

The causes and incentives of crime evaporate, and with them, most crime. Penalties for residual crime are monetary, paid to injured parties and adjudicators. Liberty of dangerous criminals is limited. They work to cover their costs and have opportunities to rehabilitate and retrain.² Any remaining criminals and detectives would become folk heroes. Social trapeze artists. But crime, not the state, would wither away.

A state is called a state because it is static. It is the unchanging foundation, the constant condition of society. Which 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

Legal traditions from Europe until 1900 were quite good. But industrialization and social breakdown necessitate better recognition of two rights and two corollary crimes.

The most common crime people suffer from is pollution. Day and night, detectable and harmful pollution touches the bodies of everyone around without permission. It violates the right to life no less than assault does. Besides poisonous fumes, liquids, and solids, it includes noise, vibration, light, and electromagnetism. It slowly crushes some and drives others mad, to the point of revolt. While destruction of nature is a shame and sometimes a violation of property, pollution primarily and directly offends people.

The second most common crime is harassment. Harassment is another’s unwelcome contact or presence when one is stationary. It violates the right to liberty, just as obstruction and capture do when one is in motion. Thugs exploit the loophole of harassment to terrorize entire populations. It’s enough to inspire normal people to become sympathetic to revolutionaries and tyrants alike. Most harassment will end when “public property” ends. Clarifying the point will end the rest—if only because people will understand they are justified in defending themselves.

strategy

Natural government is built into man’s conscience and sociality. It is always with us. But it becomes muted when we are ill and dependent, as we have been for millennia. It becomes inverted in psychopaths, who embody evil in society—and indicate its faults.

Fortunately, the idea of the individualist distributed state can be derived by logic. It formalizes natural government. Each of us can restore it by a three-point, assymetric strategy:

1. Learn enough philosophy, law⁵, and self-defence to function as a freeman
2. Recover personal, living power by healing from trauma through hygienic dark retreat
3. Recover material independence through autonomous infrastructure: off-grid and low-tech

An Individualist Party forms to advance the distributed state. It supports members in applying this strategy to improve their own lives. It publishes the precepts and other documents. It helps coordinates counsel, guards, arbiters, insurers, and their firms and associations to function in a distributed state in support of individual sovereignty.

Assymmetry means a focus on factors the centralized system ignores or can’t easily control. Very different party behavior results. It does not solicit donations, run candidates, or agitate socially. It does not try to influence the centralized state but make it obsolete.

Learning is a common point of strategy. But living power and autonomous infrastructure need explanation.

power

Freedom requires power. Power is the capacity for freedom, to control one’s life and social context. A freeman is powerful; a slave is powerless.

Politically, there are two kinds of power. The commonly understood kind is external, mechanical power arising by will: morality, discipline, knowledge, propaganda, popularity, the military, technology, money, etc. Mechanical power is weak. It must be concentrated in a few hands, ie, centralized. But this imbalances society and inspires awe and fear.

The rarer, less understood kind of power is internal, biological power. It is the power to live: to get out of bed, take food, and claim one’s place in the world and hold it. It is a form of vitality arising from health. The ancients called it virtue (strength and ability distinct from moral goodness). Living power is deep, strong, and palpable. It is calming and irresistible. Practically everyone today is short of it and desperate for it, oppressors most of all.

We lost most of our living power millennia ago when a global catastrophe caused mass-scale trauma and psychosis. Individuals lost most of their power. They had to collect what remained, assembling into large hierarchical societies to defend themselves. Mechanical power became a supplement. But it was never enough.

Such social organization is clumsy and manipulable. It retraumatizes us. It perpetuates individual incapacity, dependence, poor thinking—and false 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. From power comes palpable personal presence and irresistible influence.⁶ Brute force cannot withstand these things. Virtue restores everyone.

The world system, based on weak, mechanical power, cannot suppress people with strong living power. On the contrary, it secretly awaits them. Ten such people can turn the tide of the world, freeing billions to take care of themselves again, and freeing elites from their hateful burden.

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

infrastructure

Freedom requires material independence. But nearly everyone physically depends on centralized, often state-controlled 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” infrastructure: money, education, medicine, communication, etc.

Latent ability, knowledge, and skills emerge. Capacity replaces many actions and things. Independence results.

The centralized state withers away as fewer people depend on it. Society and its organic state strengthen through the transition.

conclusion

The centralized system is fragile. It depends on ever more abnormal controls. Its 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 will lose the will to hang on. We offer everyone peace. We offer a way to heal from the traumatic cause of the suffering that unconsciously drives us toward needless disaster.

This is an individualist analysis of our ancient political problem, a solution, and a strategy to apply it. One can start small, alone or with others. It is cheap, rational, and quick. It leads to 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 of all points and more sources.