Religion is not the problem

We are living in the century of militant atheism. People who have realised religion has harmful effects have taken it upon themselves to spread the word against God. So far, I have no problem. However, millions of the same people are willing to use the state to initiate violence against others. They have no problem with the growth of the state, as long as they have control over it to marginalise religion. Is that wise?

Bill Maher made an authoritative list of his problems with religion: “most wars, the Crusades, the Inquisition, 9/11, arranged marriages to minors, blowing up girls’ schools, the suppression of women and homosexuals, fatwas, ethnic cleansing, honor rape, human sacrifice, burning witches, suicide bombings, condoning slavery and the systematic fucking of children”. (I would add religious dogma that denies science.) Let us go through this list and see if we are attacking the root of the problem.

-First, most wars, the Crusades and the Inquisition. Wars are started because powerful men want to expand or maintain the territories and the people on them they consider their possessions. In the past, religion was indeed used frequently to justify going to war, and the Crusades are only the most obvious example. But we need to distinguish between wars that religious people take part in (which is most or all, since most of the world’s people can be considered religious) and wars started by invoking religion. Nowadays, religion has been largely replaced by nationalism as the source of appeals to go to war. Nationalism is far deadlier in the present moment, and it is no less a religion than Christianity. Conflicts between groups that seem to be of different religions, say in Israel/Palestine, are often colonial, racist and nationalist in nature.

Moreover, the War on Drugs has killed more people than any religious conflict going at the moment. It is a war that could be ended with the stroke of a pen. Religion takes centuries of education to eradicate. Why would we not concentrate on the former if we wanted to help people?

Condoning slavery is the same. Scripture gave religious justification for slavery, of course. Slavery is a very old institution. Any books written thousands of years ago and used to control people will include slavery. It is possible the reason it took so long to eliminate slavery was religion. But systematic slavery has been wiped out in much of the world and the religions continue to exist. That is because, contrary to what religious and irreligious people believe, religions change with time. Certain parts are emphasised at different times and places. If we still believe slavery is wrong, why not work to end debt slavery?

The deadliest religious conflict going at the moment is probably the fighting between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria. Nigeria is a very poor country with a poor education system. While poor education itself does not cause conflict, it facilitates manipulating people into attacking each other. When education is controlled by a corrupt state, it is the state who is to blame for poorly-educated citizens. Of course, the conflict is more complicated than I am making it out to be. I merely wish to point out that religious differences do not necessarily lead to violence.

-9/11 was probably the work of religious fanatics who had pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden. But was it religion that led them to destroy those buildings? People who make this claim have only Osama’s pronouncements from the Quran to back them up. But a closer look at the evidence reveals the attacks as what is often called “blowback”, or revenge for US foreign policy. To say Islam is what flew 19 men into two buildings begs the question, as it does not explain the millions of Muslims who denounced the attacks or the 1.5b Muslims who have never committed any act of terrorism.

-Arranged marriages to minors, blowing up girls’ schools, the suppression of women and homosexuals, honour rape, human sacrifice, burning witches and suicide bombings are not institutions of religion. Bill might have added male and female circumcision to this list. They are things that take place in some religious societies and some societies with different religions. Many anti-theists do not take the time to research the different cultures that comprise “Islam” and “Christianity”. If they did, they would see beyond the lenses their cultures provide to the fact that it is ignorance, not religion, that unites these practices; and while religion keeps us ignorant, so do state schools and propaganda. Many religious people would find all of these practices abhorrent and can point to places in the scripture to justify their positions. War is human sacrifice, and religion is just as likely as atheism to make someone oppose war.

Suicide bombing, in particular, has little to do with religion. We tend to see it as something justified by Islam, but only if we do not look at the reasons behind it. Robert Pape has done comprehensive research into this field, having looked at every suicide bombing that has taken place. He has concluded that, while religion may be a recruitment tool for suicide bombers (even though the irreligious Tamil Tigers were the pioneers of suicide bombing), nearly every such attack has had the same causes: an indigenous population feels under threat from occupation by an illegitimate foreign military, nearly always that of a democracy, and suicide bombing is an effective tool for making the foreigners withdraw. It is not a phenomenon of Islam, or religion, but merely a weapon of war. If we want to end it, we should end foreign occupation, not religion.

-Fatwas are religious legal opinions and are non-binding. Until the scholars begin enforcing their fatwas with police, the rule of law should be the target of all who are against arbitrary violence initiated to protect the elite. Or is ending religion is more important?

-Seeing ethnic cleansing on the list makes me wonder if Bill (and Richard Dawkins in the God Delusion) is clutching at straws. Any differences in identity, whether religious, ethnic or national, can be the reason we claim for committing acts of violence. But how does religion actually cause it? The problem here is the politics of identity. I am just as opposed to religious identity as I am to any other form of collectivism. People commit acts of ethnic cleansing in the name of their group, whatever the group. We should not be more or less opposed to it when religion is the excuse.

-The rape of minors by priests is indeed a problem and we are right to oppose it. However, it is a problem with a specific part of a specific religion. If it were possible for priests to get married, it is unlikely children would suffer anymore. Religions can be reformed, as time has shown us, and enough pressure on the Vatican could end this vile practice in our lifetimes. Someone who works against the priesthood for raping children but remains silent or approves of drone strikes that kill children is a hypocrite.

My main problem with religion is its emphasis on scripture, rather than science, as the method for ascertaining truth, and providing certainty where there should be mystery. All that means is humans, with their capacity for both fantasy and reason, should emphasise the latter over the former. That goes for the militant atheists as well. The question I pose to them is, what is truly important?

We see places like Saudi Arabia and Iran, where religious people have taken over, and we see the excesses of the state in forcing people to act in certain ways, and we blame religion. But if they had no power to force people, what would be the problem? People could still practice their religions and yet would not harm others. Any ideology can be warped when it is used by the state for legitimacy.

I liken the hatred of religion to the hatred of communism. In its time, communism needed to be opposed for the sake of freedom. Today, it is no longer a worry. The truly dangerous ideas of today are statism, the rule of law and nationalism, which millions of people claiming to be atheists hold in awe. If they have principles besides merely ruffling feathers, they should end their religious views of politics and oppose all violent ideologies.

Illusions of a nationalist

You can usually tell which ideas the elites benefit most from by observing what non-elites will defend most vehemently.

My original post on nationalism (expanded in my book) dismantles many of the basic misconceptions of nationalism and its euphemism, patriotism, and exposes it as the dangerous delusion it is. But the phenomenon persists. Apparently, it is a force more powerful even than this blog.

Nationalists and patriots are full of illusions. I come bearing inconvenient truths, but the sooner people understand them, the sooner they can see the world for what it is.

You do not have a country of your own. You do not have any control over it. A few powerful people own the territory within the colonial boundaries you live in, and you are not one of them.

Nationalists hold romantic dreams of an eternal spirit of their countries. But that is because they have no historical perspective. Your country does not have a destiny, and what you think is its history is largely based on myth. The idealised depiction of war is the clearest example. Nationalists believe their side has always been righteous, perhaps fighting for God but always fighting only in self defense. But the people who came from nearby where you come from who fought in wars were not fighting for you. They have nothing to do with you. They were fighting because they were told to, and because they would be killed if they did not.

Do you think there is something better about the people who inhabit your corner of the globe? Are they more virtuous than others? If you believe they are, you undoubtedly have superficial, stereotyped views of people in other places. Nationalists see their people as individuals making up a glorious whole and people from other countries as undifferentiated masses that are somehow more threatening than locals. Such stereotypes engender the belief that, while our elites are bad, at least they are not FOREIGN.

The FOREIGN is, of course, to be feared or at least not fully trusted. For this reason, most nationalists want to limit immigration. They worry their compatriots will one day run out of land, or the culture will change. As such, they are willing to use violence to stop the wrong kind of people from entering their country. That is called racism.

Yet, change is constant. Cultures and countries and ethnic groups change. Your country and culture are not eternal. They will change, their values will change, and they will end, like everything does.

For religious people who think your country is the best and is superior to all others, you may want to consult your holy books and see what your god says about idols.

For non-religious people who believe in their countries and sacrifice for them and attack others for criticising them, surprise! You are part of a cult of worship as well.

If you want to believe in something bigger than yourself, how about all of humanity? Or all life on Earth? Or love, or kindness, or peace? Or, if you want to keep it simple, your family and friends? If not, please do not expect my sympathy for your racist exclusion of other humans.

Freedom to reach our potential

The reason I advocate freedom, in whatever forms seem both ideal and possible, above just about everything else is because it is the single most important thing for realising humankind’s potential. In today’s world, freedom is ebbing away. States are getting bigger and bolder. Propaganda is getting more sophisticated. More people are coming to depend on the state for more privileges and services, and the state is coming to seem more necessary than ever. People are willing to give up their freedom instead of taking responsibility for the most important things in their lives: security, health, education and where a sizeable proportion of their income goes. The following outlines the benefits of freedom and the basis for my claim that freedom is how humankind can reach its potential.

What is our potential, anyway? Psychology, anthropology and history can provide us answers, as we can see what has been done and what can be done if people decide. As individuals and societies, we have the potential to be responsible for ourselves and those around us, to take care of each other. We can have egalitarian societies. We can have peaceful societies. We can reach untold heights of technological advancement and material progress. We can wipe out diseases. We can solve ancient mysteries. We can adapt when systems break down. We can be happy, healthy, wealthy, wise and at peace. This is our potential. But how do we get there? By concentrating power? Enacting laws and regulations? My answer is to build a free society.

What advantages would a stateless, voluntary, anarchic society have in realising our potential?

Art. As many of the people reading this will be used to freedom of expression, they may not appreciate its value. Art is a way of exposing and mocking oppressors and violent people, of communicating things we all know are wrong on a deep level. In a free society, it would still have the power to expose wrongdoing and bring people together, while providing a necessary outlet for all forms of self expression. In addition, art is an expression of life and adds to our enjoyment of it.

Economy. Free and open economies, meaning ones with unhampered freedom to do the work you want, move where you want to do it and keep the full product of your labour means more prosperity more equally shared. I have gone into this elsewhere, so please follow these links. On why regulation is not protection but crony capitalism, see here. On what the free market really means, why it would reduce inequality and why it means a smoother business cycle, see here. Finally, two studies (Hamilton and Whalley 1984; Winters et al. 2003) find that fully liberalising labour markets, which means letting anyone move anywhere to work, could add forty trillion dollars to the global economy. Freedom of movement would also unleash the various benefits of diversity. Freedom facilitates exchange (whether of goods, services or labour) among those optimally positioned to make the most of it.

Health. At present, we are chained by laws that limit what we can put into our bodies, while subsidies and regulatory handouts to large agribusiness and chemical corporations (and whatever Monsanto is) distort the market for food, making processed and GMO foods competitive with fresh, local produce. State regulators often miss dangerous things, whether by negligence (since they pay no price for being wrong) or corruption (since many of the people who make dangerous things are put in charge of regulatory agencies, Monsanto again the clearest example). Regulation per se is not wrong, but it is better handled by the wisdom of the crowd. That is why we have so many websites (and before the internet, books and magazines) by and for consumers to make the best choices for their health. (Find more here.)

Education. For over a hundred years now, the state has controlled education nearly everywhere with public education whose curriculum only those in power can approve. The result is not the best education for everyone, as we were promised, but the indoctrination of every generation in the state’s values: obedience, nationalism, the glory of military service and how to get a job in the modern corporate economy. What could education be like? There are so many possibilities, only one of which involves spending most of one’s childhood at a desk in a classroom. Giving parents and children their freedom would mean far more experimentation in education.

Justice. Our system of positive law, with the state creating, interpreting and enforcing laws, as well as controlling the court system, is necessarily biased in favour of the state. Justice only comes through the state system if the result does not concern those who control the state. But a system of privately-produced, or polycentric, law could serve the average person far more effectively and efficiently.

Peace and security. With no criminalisation of victimless pursuits, there would be far fewer criminals and no violent black markets. With no taxation to force the costs of war onto the masses, a major incentive for war is gone. With no ability to wage widescale war, feuds may take place but none of the worst horrors we have seen can occur. With no indoctrination into nationalism, free people will likely unite to defend each other, given their shared interest in collective security, but will not be forced into supporting a cause they have the choice to opt out of. They will form organisations to keep the peace, anything from neighbourhood watches to militias, depending on what kind of threat they perceive; and dispute resolution will always be available because there will be no monopoly of it.

Happiness. Fewer people’s lives torn apart by the state, whether put in jail for a victimless crime or killed in a war, means more happiness. Inequalities, a source of stress, illness and violence, would be lower (non-existent in communes). The uncertainty of wild economic mood swings, the unemployment that is an inevitable part of a highly-regulated market, the continual threat of violence for something one did not even know was a crime—all would be gone. Not all sources of unhappiness would evaporate, of course; one should not expect miracles. But there is reason to believe we would be happier.

All these things are possible because free people can advance their lot through trial and error. You know so if you have lived in a society that is free in any given way. If the state pays little attention to science and technology, there has probably been enormous such progress in your lifetime. Humans are natural scientists. Progress is inevitable in any area they put their minds to—provided, of course, it is not blocked by the powerful.

How does freedom get us to where we could be?

Imagine the strictest totalitarian state, perhaps like the Soviet Union, or even along the lines of 1984. All the human potentials listed above are absent. Now, imagine if the unfettered freedom to move to new places was somehow introduced to society. Not only would people have the chance to better their material circumstances; they would have the chance to see how people in other places lived and worked. They would learn different ideas and beliefs. The same could be true if the people could consume whatever media or art they chose, or if the state played no role whatsoever in education or science. One person would realise he or she should be allowed to say and do what he wants, and most importantly to think differently, and would spread the word to others. If the idea of liberty caught on, it could bring the edifice of all forms of oppression crashing down. The idea of freedom liberates minds that are receptive to it.

Now, imagine a society six months after having eliminated all forms of oppression, including indentured servitude, feudalism, social hierarchy, debt and wage slavery, taxation, laws and central planning. If people made the conscious choice to end these things, their society would not collapse into chaos. The first six months would be a trial period for them, as they attempted various forms of ownership of production, mutual aid and reciprocal exchange. They would be taking uncertain steps, and some people would attempt to set up governments, gangs and other vehicles for concentrating power. The free people would need to act in concert to reverse such attempts.

How about after five years? After five years of maximising spontaneous order society would likely be bursting with energy. The people would have come to certain conclusions based on the past years of trial and error, and certain norms would predominate. A culture that valued freedom would put it into practice in all of its institutions. There could be voluntary institutions for everything that needs to be done collectively, such as infrastructure, education, health care and security. Some would be provided through mutual aid, while others would be available for purchase.

A currency would probably have been decided on, as free people usually come up with a currency through a process of elimination. That said, there might be competing currencies, even in the same place, which would protect against inflation because people can use the alternatives whenever one currency is debased. There would also probably be communities with various systems of moneyless exchange, such as a local exchange trading system, or LETS.

Communities would have various rule systems based on contracts. Many rules would be uniform across geographic spaces, as they are today. Norms spread but they usually do not spread everywhere except by force (think of the global spread of liberal democracy). Even five years into a revolution of spontaneous order, people would still be testing and developing their rule systems, and would be learning from best practices shared by other communities.

This society is possible. It requires not a leap in nature but merely a shift in mindset. People need to unite, organise to achieve their goals, and stay vigilant to protect their freedom and their security.

Spontaneous order as an alternative to imposed order

I think tearing down the state would be one of the best things humanity could do for itself. I know most people disagree, but I wonder if that is partly because they don’t know much about spontaneous order.

One of the main reasons we still have the state is humans have a bias toward needing to feel in control. We believe not only that we can control our surroundings but that we should. Control means order, right? The more control we have–over the whole world, ideally–the safer we are. The theory of spontaneous order demonstrates the shortsightedness of this argument (as does the incredible damage the state has done to the world since its inception).

Spontaneous order is one of the most powerful forces in the universe, but most people do not know it by name. Spontaneous order, or self-organisation, has been used to explain the expansion of the universe and the movement of celestial objects, the evolution of life on earth, the formation of snowflakes and crystal structure, the activities of cells, ant colonies, beehives, flocks of birds, language, culture, markets and cities. It is the order, contrary to what we tend to expect, that arises when we stop trying to control things and let them be. A single ant could not direct an ant colony; a beehive is not run by a committee of bees. Likewise, central planning fails miserably while free people build wealth for themselves.

When people are freed from whoever is constraining or oppressing them, the norm is not rioting and Hobbes’ war of all against all. It is people peacefully cooperating to do what they agree is important. Look at what happens during revolutions. Look at what happens during wars. When all law and order break down, to the extent they can, people often work together, because they need each other. Spontaneous order is the phenomenon that explains it. Never mind humans; when anything, particularly life on earth, is left alone by outside or artificial constraints, it tends to flourish.

As far as we know, the idea dates back to ancient China. Here is something Laozi said over 2000 years ago.

The more laws and restrictions there are,
The poorer people become.
The sharper men’s weapons,
The more trouble in the land.
The more ingenious and clever men are,
The more strange things happen.
The more rules and regulations,
The more thieves and robbers.

Therefore the sage says:
I take no action and people are reformed.
I enjoy peace and people become honest.
I do nothing and the people become rich.
I have no desires and people return to the good and simple life.

Statism is just one idea for organising society. The state is very good at fulfilling its purpose: concentrating power in the hands of a few people: once kings and courtiers but now politicians, top bureaucrats, heads of the security apparatus and corporate clients. But it is not good at leaving people alone to reach their potential.

When we are free, economies thrive, because individuals are far more empowered and responsible. Science and technology speed ahead. The most free and open complex societies in history are the ones that made all the most important advances in knowledge and the arts—not China in its days of oppression but in its days of openness. Not in today’s Middle East with its corrupt dictatorships but in the Middle East that advanced mathematics, astronomy and medicine and saved all the books the Europeans had thrown out as blasphemous. Not that Europe; the Europe since the beginning of the Enlightenment. But not the Europe of today, either, with its seemingly endless regulations, bureaucracy and welfare state. Europe used to consist of many small states with little power to regulate their societies. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe puts it,

Contrary to orthodoxy, then, precisely the fact that Europe possessed a highly decentralized power structure composed of countless independent political units explains the origin of capitalism—the expansion of market participation and of economic growth—in the Western world. It is not by accident that capitalism first flourished under conditions of extreme political decentralization: in the northern Italian city states, in southern Germany, and in the secessionist Low Countries (Netherlands).

People all around the world have so much wealth in their communities that, if they could own and transform however they like, could lift them out of poverty. Instead, they either do not have freedom to own and defend their property so they cannot use it, or are told not to work for themselves but to come and pick up a cheque so they can remain part of the wider economy. Their potential is still there, though. The benefits of freeing people from artificial constraints demonstrate the amazing power of spontaneous order. It is something voluntaryists and other freedom-minded people should help others understand better in order to make their case.

Regulation

“Corporate capitalists don’t want free markets. They want dependable profits, and their surest route is to crush the competition by controlling the government.” – RFK, Jr.

It is often claimed in “progressive” and “liberal” circles that we need more regulation to curb the influence and power of big business. This belief is based largely on a misconception as to the origin, purpose and result of regulations.

During the period between the end of the American Civil War and roughly the 1890s, business in the US tried to cartelise but found it could not. In general, cartels can only control a market when force is introduced. During this period, every attempt to form a cartel and raise prices led to new competitors that realised they could undercut the cartels. In response, big business began lobbying the government to pass laws “in the public interest” (as all laws are claimed to be) that would enable them to keep competitors out. It worked. (Find a large amount of research on the subject here.)

Today, regulations and other laws protecting business include corporate personhood, accounting standards, safety standards, environmental standards and intellectual property. In addition, there are subsidies (“corporate welfare”), amounting to perhaps $98b a year, selective tax breaks and contracting. In each of these categories, government and industry have made a variety of laws enabling large firms to eliminate competition. As such, they are a kind of tax taken from consumers who would pay lower prices and entrepreneurs who would be able to make their livings doing what they want. The tax is given to business owners who would be forced to lower prices or improve services in a free market. The Small Business Administration in 2005 estimated the total cost of these regulations at $1.1 trillion.

Accounting standards are widely considered necessary to prove a firm is not cooking the books. But in the absence of state regulation, concerned investors would find a way to insure against this possibility with audits. An example of the enormous and unnecessary complication of accounting standards is the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, passed in the wake of the Enron accounting scandal and failure. The Act made accounting more complicated. Implementing it costs a firm millions of dollars. Millions of dollars is pocket change for a big corporation, but prohibitively expensive for new and small businesses that could otherwise rival them. As a result, fewer businesses are created, and wealth and power are concentrated in the larger firms. We now have a complex tax code that could not be implemented by less than a team of accountants. The same is true of the legal code. The modern legal code was designed so that teams of high-priced lawyers can get away with murder and people without money see no justice.

Sarbanes-Oxley is, of course, but one law in a sea of other laws. Those who say the 2008 financial crash was caused by a lack of regulation may do well to realise there were thousands of lines of financial regulations already. They often cite the repeal of parts of the Glass-Steagal Act as the only incidence of deregulation they can think of, but this change did nothing to enable banks to make bad loans. A look at the facts indicates very clearly that regulation was the main cause of the bubble that caused the massive destruction of wealth for all but those whose ties to the state got them trillion-dollar bailouts.

Negative externalities, which seem to be the reason people beg the government to get involved in the market, are easily externalised in a statist society. The same big corporations pollute and break the law repeatedly. They are sued by the government, they pay the government, which means it gets another legal donation from an interest group, and then they are allowed to continue business as usual. The lawsuits are a bone thrown to voters and the corporations shake them off like lice. But they give the appearance that justice has been done. The corporations nonetheless retain all the benefits they get from the state in the form of legal personhood, subsidies, tax loopholes, intellectual property and regulatory barriers to competition. The state does not protect us against negative externalities.

Intellectual property enables firms to monopolise virtually anything they create. Consider the effects of IP laws in the pharmaceutical industry. Kevin Carson explains that drug patents are unnecessary to recoup expenses and develop the most effective drugs.

First of all, there has been a dramatic shift away from fundamentally new kinds of blockbuster drugs, because it’s much more cost-effective to put money into tweaking the formulas of drugs whose patents are about to expire just enough to qualify for repatenting them—so-called ‘me, too drugs.’ Second, a great deal of the basic research on which drug development is based is carried out at government expense in publicly-funded universities. Around half of the overall cost of drug R&D is taxpayer-funded. And in the United States, under the terms of legislation passed in the 1980s, the patents on drugs developed entirely at taxpayer expense are given away—free of charge—to the drug companies that produce and market them. Third, most of the actual R&D cost for developing drugs comes, not from testing the version of a drug actually marketed, but from securing patent lockdown on all the other major possible variants.

Generic drugs do not get developed, or get banned as soon as they are, because they are competition. The poor people who need them most do not get them. Intellectual property, Carson concludes, is murder.

We can divine the purpose of regulation from its results. We now have giant, multinational corporations straddling the Earth, with no government willing or able to oppose them, with the exception of a few populist, anti-imperialist holdouts. Large corporations’ alliance with the state has enabled the two to control natural resources and all manner of other markets. Consumers thus have fewer choices and higher prices than in a market freed from regulation. But freedom is always preferable to laws and regulations imposed by the state. Freedom allows economies and the arts to flourish. It means scientific advances and technological innovation. And it forces responsibility on those able to handle it while still allowing for us to help each other.

The solution to the control of markets by cartels is to free them. That would make customers the true regulators. If they decry a firm’s practices, they can stop buying from it and start buying from its competitor. If you abhor business, you are free to start and join one of the thousands of cooperatives in the world or simply produce and give to your neighbours. But demanding more regulation to prevent big-business malfeasance is akin to shooting oneself in the head to cure one’s headache.

Egypt’s economy is collapsing. Don’t blame yourself.

Egypt’s planning minister, Ashraf El Arabi, said this week Egypt only had enough foreign exchange reserves for another three months. Given how dependent Egypt is on imports, that means the economy will collapse soon if drastic changes are not made.

I hope Egyptians understand when the economy collapses whose fault it is. It’s not Egypt’s fault. It’s not your fault. It’s the state’s fault. It takes your money and spends it without asking. It borrows money and forces you to pay for it. You are the economy. When you pay for the state’s actions, which you do every day, it’s the economy that suffers.

The economy as a whole would not be on the point of collapse if not for all these ridiculous economic policies. Gas would cost more but there would not be shortages, except for individuals who could not afford it. Business would be free to operate and create wealth for everyone. And you would not have to worry if the central bank has enough money to cover what you want to buy. But that is not the way the “national economy” works. When the state screws up, the people suffer.

In this way, we can see the state is, among other things, a vehicle for eliminating responsibility from the powerful and passing costs on to the weak. They will never tell you that, of course. Look at how former finance minister Hazem El Beblawi put it. “[T]he real problem is that Egypt lacks the domestic resources that would allow the government to deal with anticipated shortfalls.” Egypt does not lack domestic resources. It is being strangled by economic policies. Why would we want the government to deal with “shortfalls”? When an individual makes a mistake, he or she pays the price. If the government takes control over something and it goes wrong, the entire country suffers.

But that is the system we live under. The state confiscates and destroys wealth, and you pay.

The only hope for the economy is to secure more loans and raise taxes, which will simply suck more money out of the pockets of the people. But ideally, the economy will die and be replaced by freedom.  Let black markets and mutual aid reign. Secede from this system like the people in Mahalla El Kobra. End your dependency on the state and stop paying for the elites’ crisis.

The revolution of consciousness

The next revolution must be a revolution in consciousness. Our time has seen revolutions from Iran to Egypt fail the very people who started them with such hope. Why did the revolutionaries fail? Because, though they may have liberated the people, the people did not liberate themselves.

The Rule of Freedom aims to reverse that process. It does not propose violence; the state has mastered the means of violence. It does not advocate imposing a certain way of life on the people; the state has already done that. It has failed to bring happiness and meaning to the masses. Instead of educating and caring for people, statism has instead turned individuals full of promise into tools of the ruling class.

This book and blog are designed for one aim: to brighten the minds of those who want to understand the world around them. Can we even envision a free world in the time of big government and perpetual war? Until we understand the nature of power and the state, how can we prevent the recurrence of tyranny? Until we know what it means to be free, how do we achieve freedom?

This book is the first step. If you take it, you will spread your understanding to others. Only then can we effect the revolution.

Find the Rule of Freedom: the Manifesto of the Sovereign Community here.

Civil war in America? You will lose

Many anarchists and others have speculated a civil war is looming in the US. I do not know if or when it will happen. Regardless, I do not believe a rebellion against the strongest police state in history has a chance of winning.

After millions of Americans have been poisoned, harassed, spied on, locked up and had their lives destroyed by their rulers, the state continues its merry way. It gets worse with every law, as we have seen in Barack’s executive orders, indefinite detention, assassination of US citizens, and so on, which themselves are merely a continuation of the Patriot Act and other crimes against freedom. What was once a republic has become an empire desperate to grab every last scrap of power it can, all over the world. How can such things have carried on with no one to stop them?

The first answer is, in general, Americans do not know what is going on. Even most well-informed people do not understand the implications of the rising authoritarianism of the US government. They brush it off–these things have happened before and we’ve always survived. I believe in the system! But the system is against you, my friend, and the sooner you realise that, the sooner you will liberate yourself.

But they are not interested in liberating themselves. The well informed fight about which candidate is best to rule them, and whether gays should be allowed to marry. The uninformed majority fights about whom should be kicked off the island. Millions of Americans are on brain-numbing pharmaceutical drugs. They do not want to read about unpleasant things like the drone wars, the militarisation of the police, brazen crony capitalism, and so on. The mainstream media, the pharmaceutical industry and the schools have left most Americans without a clue and content that way.

Americans are simply not ready for a revolution. They have been led to believe the state protects their rights, freedoms and lives. They will believe what they are told–that rebellious militias (or even peaceful protesters) are terrorists and must be locked up, tortured and killed. When violence comes, they will cling ever more firmly to the state, begging it to save them from the bad guys. They do not understand that the state is at the root of society’s problems, and they put their fingers in their ears when someone tries to tell them.

So, who is left to join you in your second revolutionary war? How many angry young men will you be able to scrape together to form a militia before they get arrested? How many libertarians and anarchists will actually pick up a gun to defend their beliefs when they matter most? Will more than 1% of the police, military and other security forces actually leave their posts? Will the Oathkeepers join you? The very existence of the Oathkeepers is a sign enough people who have sworn that oath will not uphold it.

I promise you I do not wish to gloat; in fact, I sympathise; but there will be no rebellion. It will be crushed by thousands upon thousands of bombs, bullets and missiles. The state will continue its march to totalitarianism and you will be expected to fall in line.

We are the true anarchists

My fellow anarchists, please stop this yellow-red, ancap-ancom, East-West-rap feud nonsense. You have nothing to lose but your chains.

Many anarcho-capitalists (and voluntaryists) and anarcho-communists (and mutualists) claim to be the only true anarchists. This claim is unhelpful, divisive and unfair. They claim the ideas of the other side would lead to a mere rearranging of capitalist property relations or rehashing old, failed communist policy. These claims are unlikely to be true, as, whether you can admit it or not, all anarchist theories are revolutionary. If you do not see that, it is unlikely you have spent much time trying to understand them.

This feuding is, in fact, typical of people who do not expect to succeed in their missions. The main political parties in any country work together, at least on some issues; the weakest are constantly bickering among themselves. It is possible governments place agents provocateurs among anarchists and other minorities to keep them divided. I do not know how to tell such a person online. Suffice to say, it is easy to make a guy feel he is right and you (and your whole team) are wrong: just dismiss his argument without appearing to consider it. We can resist these divide-and-conquer tactics by committing to unity of principle and purpose while encouraging diversity of opinion. But it tends not to work that way in practice.

Stupid anarcho-communists still don’t understand that we have to have property rights to have a free society. Damn anarcho-capitalists want to maintain hierarchies and classes by allowing property and bosses. They are not even anarchists! Anarchists are what I say they are. Well, are you against rulers? Then you are all anarchists. The debate rages, while the stateless society is still a glint in the revolutionary’s eye. Is there nothing more laudable on which we could be spending our time? Many anarchists spend hours a day arguing over the minutiae of what a stateless society should look like. They get angry and fall into disunity over questions that do not matter at present. The common goal is the removal of the state. The target is clear. It does not matter how many feathers are on our arrows. Work together. It is not as hard as you are making it.

I have a problem with anarcho-capitalists who claim a kind of absolute right to property. What if some people do not have anywhere to stay and want to squat on land you have claimed? What if they want to drink from a river or a part of a river you call your own? Anarcho-communists would say that is aggression. They also point out there is possession, distinct from property, which means you can hold on to something. But simply because you had more money or got there first is not a good reason that you have permanent and complete power over it.

Green anarchists would also point out though homesteading may not mean stealing from another human, it may destroy the environment and steal from other living things. Build homes, but do not shoot anyone who steps on your lawn. Build farms and factories, but not so big they flatten the landscape. At an extreme, property is illegitimate to someone who believes aggression is immoral.

My problem with anarcho-communists is the likelihood that a society without any ownership at all leads inevitably to the tragedy of the commons. Not all property is legitimate, nor does it need to be in the hands of individuals when it could be held by communities; but it seems necessary to me that someone consider it their property in order to take care of it. Property is useful because in a world of scarcity and anonymity, all resources are contestable and many of them will be contested. We can assign property to the person and people with the best link to the resource, thus making conflicts far easier to resolve. See chapter 3 of my book for further discussion of property in a stateless society.

So I disagree with you but I disagree with everyone on something. That does not mean I am not the right kind of anarchist and should be insulted and cast aside. It means I have something different to contribute.

Until you convince another few million people, your ideal society will be little more than a dream. You might need to work with others–especially those whose ideals are actually pretty similar to yours–to achieve it.

Are you a control freak or a pervert? The state is hiring!

The state’s monopoly on crime over a given territory makes it necessary to eliminate its agents’ responsibility for their individual crimes. How often we have seen police take the stands to defend brutality and then get let off with a slap on the wrist. The state thus incentivises all manner of anti-social behaviour. Here are some examples.

Politicians’ main task is to steal one person’s money and give it to someone else. Sometimes they steal overtly, such as through taxation, and give it away just as overtly, as with bank bailouts. Sometimes the theft is far quieter or concealed as benevolence, as when they pass laws favourable to a few corporations that help them control markets by force, while telling everyone the laws are necessary measures in the fight against whatever the public is anxious about.

Politicians want to garner votes for the next election, which is done by a) handing things out to interest groups and b) spending money to appear to get things done. A number of well-connected people can give them cushy jobs with huge salaries when they retire from serving the public (which goes for bureaucrats, too). Their job is, in fact, to represent those people, the elite, and make the public think they are serving everyone. They are chosen because they are so good at it.

The military engages in war, destroying homes, lives and ecosystems. No one holds the military accountable for its crimes, except occasionally when grunts are tried for crimes their superior officers encouraged, or the pressure of war made inevitable. In fact, not only is the military not made to pay for the damage it causes; people are led to believe it actually protects them from all the bloodthirsty foreigners who cannot wait to kill them. This lie makes the next war, or the perpetual struggle against evil, easier. (The state’s incentive to lie is so obvious I will not go into it here.)

Police have all kinds of distorted incentives. Their jobs consist in large measure of harassing, bullying, beating, kidnapping, spying and stealing. Many of them want to control people, which may be why they became police, or they may have acquired a thirst for it as they went about their duties. The War on Drugs has enabled them to break into people’s homes, steal money and drugs, and gun those people down. Even when the people had no drugs at all, the police do not get in trouble. Why not? Because the police did not find the police guilty.

The police in the US have begun to spy on people. The irrational fear of terrorism, encouraged by politicians, law enforcement and the media, all of which have something to gain, has legitimised spying on marginal groups. Muslims have been targeted in particular, as have activists. It is widely known (and statistically obvious) that police stop, frisk and frame racial minorities in huge numbers. Thus, the state legitimises racism—and gives it a gun.

Lastly, TSA agents can do nearly whatever they want to your body. It is unsurprising to hear women say they feel disproportionately targeted by airport security, or to see children being felt up by people with badges. Laws that permit eliminating the rights of the many and the responsibility of the few has given perverts and pedophiles a great career path.

I am not accusing all TSA agents of being perverts, just like I am not accusing all police of racism. I am accusing the state of incentivising and legitimising these activities, and stealing from taxpayers to fund them. Find fuller explanations of the state’s crimes and how to end them in my book, available here.