These Cages Are Only For Beasts (The DRO debate continues…)

After my first article ‘The Stateless Society’ (www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/molyneux1.html) was published, I was asked to explain how a society without government would deal with violent crime. Lew was kind enough to publish my article on ‘Caging the Beasts’ (www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/molyneux2.html) which provoked quite a flurry of positive and negative (though never unkind!) responses and requests for clarifications, which I will provide here.

To summarize, ‘Caging the Beasts’ described the measures that private Dispute Resolution Organizations (DROs) could take against violent criminals – measures many readers found more soul-crushing and repressive than life under the current government!

I am always eager to improve arguments for freedom, and so heartily thank those who took the time to write in – and will do my best to clarify how life in a truly free society will not turn into a repressive web of petty regulations run by fascistic and heavily-armed insurance companies.

For those new to the debate, DROs are private insurance companies whose sole purpose is to mediate disputes between individuals. If you and I sign a contract, we both agree beforehand to submit any disputes we cannot resolve to the arbitration of a particular DRO. Furthermore, we may choose to allow the DRO to take action if either of us fails to abide by that decision, such as property seizure or financial penalties.

So far so good. However, a problem arises if I have no DRO contract, and turn to a life of theft, murder and arson. How can that be dealt with? In ‘Caging the Beasts’, I suggested that DROs would simply band together to deny goods, services and contracts to violent criminals. DROs could also pay informants to track the whereabouts of such predators, and would hound them out of a social and economic life to whatever degree they could.

This last point is where a good deal of my readers and I parted ways – and I recognize that in my zeal to deal with criminals, I painted a rather horrifying picture of DRO powers. DROs paying informants and threatening to drop contract support from anyone who sheltered or aided murderers – all this gave the impression that a stateless society was one which replaced a single central state with a suffocating net of tyrannical DROs.

Let me try to make the case a little clearer. By describing how a stateless society deals with murderers, I was describing an extreme situation, not everyday economic and social relations. A doctor might say: if a patient has an infected leg, and you have no antibiotics, amputate the leg. This does not mean that he advocates cutting off limbs in less serious circumstances! When I say that DROs will track violent criminals and try to deny them goods and services, I do not mean that DROs would be able to do this to just anyone. First of all, customer choice would make this impossible. A store owner can ban anyone he likes – but he cannot do so arbitrarily, or he will go out of business. Similarly, if people see a DRO acting unjustly or punitively, it will quickly find itself without customers.

The most important thing to remember is that DRO contracts are perfectly voluntary – and that hundreds of DROs will be constantly clamoring for our business. If we are afraid that they will turn into a myriad of quasi-police states, they have to address those fears if they value us as customers.

How will they do that? Why, through contractual obligations, of course! In order to sign us up, DROs will have to offer us instant contractual release – and possible cash rewards – if they ever harass us or treat us arbitrarily. As a matter of course, DRO contracts will include a provision to submit any conflicts with customers to a separate DRO of the customers’ choosing. All of this is standard fare in the reduction of contractual risk.

In other words, every person who says, ‘DROs will turn into dangerous fascistic organizations,’ represents a fantastic business opportunity to anyone who can address that concern in a positive manner! If you dislike the idea of DROs, just ask yourself: is there any way that my concerns could be alleviated? Are there any contractual provisions that might tempt me into a relationship with a DRO? If so, the magic of the free market will drop them right in your lap! Some DROs will pay you a million dollars if they treat you unjustly. (And you can choose the DRO that makes that decision!) Other DROs will band together and form a review board which regularly searches their warehouses for black helicopters and robot armies. Other DROs will fund ‘watchdog’ organizations which regularly rate DRO integrity.

If none of the above appeals to you, then the DRO system is clearly not for you – but then neither is the current State system, which is already one-sided, repressive and dictatorial. And remember – in a free society such as I describe, you can always choose to live without a DRO, of course, or pay for its services as needed (as I mention in ‘The Stateless Society’) – as long as you don’t start stealing and killing.

For those who still think DROs will become governments, I invite you to take a look at a real-world example of a DRO (hint: it’s one of the world’s largest ‘employers’). Currently, over 300,000 people rely on it for a significant portion of their income. Most of what they sell is so inexpensive that lawsuits aren’t cost-effective – in other words, they operate in a stateless society. So how does eBay resolve disputes? Simply through dialogue and the dissemination of information (see http://pages.ebay.com/help/tp/unpaid-item-process.html). If I don’t pay for something I receive, I get a strike against me. If I don’t ship something that I was paid for, I get a strike. Everyone I deal with can also rate my products, service and support. If I get rated poorly, I have to sell my goods for less, since, everything else being equal, people prefer dealing with a better-rated vendor (or buyer). If enough people rate me poorly, I will be out of business, because the risk of doing business with me becomes too great. There are no police or courts involved here – thefts are simply dealt with through communication and information sharing.

Thus eBay is an example of the largest DRO around – are we really afraid that it is going to turn into a quasi-government? Do any of us lie awake wondering whether the eBay SWAT team is going to break down our doors and drag us away to an offshore J2EE coding gulag?

Of course any system can be abused – which is why governments are so abhorrent – and so checks and balances are central to any proposed form of social organization. That’s the beauty of the DRO approach. Those who dislike, mistrust or fear DROs don’t have to have anything to do with them, and can rely on handshakes, reputation and trust – or start their own DRO. Those whose scope prohibits such approaches – multi-million dollar contracts or long-term leases come to mind – can turn to DROs. Those who are afraid of DROs becoming mini-States can set up watchdog agencies and monitor them (paid for by others who share such fears, perhaps).

In short, either the majority of human beings can cooperate for mutual advantage, or they can’t. If they can, then the stateless society will work – especially since millions of minds far better than mine will be searching for the best solutions. If they can’t, then no society will ever work, and we are doomed to slavery and savagery by nature.

Therefore, I stand by my thesis in ‘Caging the Beasts’ – if you mug, rape or kill, I for one will support any social action that thwarts your capacity to survive in society. I want to see you hounded into the wilderness, refused hotel rooms and groceries – and I want your face plastered everywhere, so that the innocent can stay safe by keeping you at bay. I abhor the thug as much as I abhor the State – and it is because such thugs exist that the State cannot be suffered to continue, since the State always disarms honest citizens and encourages and protects the thugs.

The Stateless Society Fights Back: Life without a state? Really? Answers to common questions.

My recent articles on the stateless society have generated some fascinating feedback. Questions, issues and criticisms rained heavy on my inbox – here are some of the more challenging queries I received, and my responses.

Question #1: Mass Pollution

In my own discussions with friends and such about anarchy, there is one sticking point where I have had trouble finding the anarchic solution, so I wonder if you might have an idea about it. I guess you could call it distributed pollution. There are many examples of pollution where each polluter does not contribute much to the total, but there are enough polluters that the total pollution is a problem for everyone.

Cars are an obvious example here: it’s cheaper for everyone to pollute individually, but collectively we all suffer. There are two solutions to this problem; one economic and the other social.

The economic answer is that in a stateless society, people will take out insurance against ailments such as asthma, cancer and so on. Thus any air pollution which causes illness will increase the costs for insurers, since they will have to pay out for treatment and life insurance. If pollution-related health problems are projected to cost insurers $100 million over the next ten years, they can spend up to $99.9 million on reducing air pollution – in other words, they can pay car manufacturers/gasoline companies/road owners up to $99.9 million to reduce pollution and still make come out ahead. (Of course, they can also refuse to pay out claims, which will put them out of business pretty quickly!)

The most logical approach would be to allocate the costs of reducing air pollution to those who generate it. DROs (Dispute Resolution Organizations; private insurance mediators) would likely charge drivers and manufacturers for the costs of reducing air pollution – and would structure the contracts so that it would be cheaper to simply reduce pollution than for the DRO to pay for its consequences. Also, remember that car pollution is currently high because road use is ‘free’ to the user, which increases consumption. If car users have to pay for all the costs of driving (roads, pollution etc), use will decline.

If that answer doesn’t satisfy you, no problem – in the free market, there are as many solutions as there are interested parties! Here’s another. Let’s say that for some reason DROs didn’t care about the rising costs of air pollution. The first thing I would do is start a Clean Air Company (CAC), which would, for a fee, guarantee air quality in certain neighborhoods. How would I achieve that lofty end? Simple: emotional advertising and social pressure. First, I would start running ads showing kids and grandmothers keeling over from asthma. Then I would offer bright yellow ‘clean air’ stickers to anyone who signed up for my program – and for cars which met certain low-pollution guidelines. That way, anyone in a neighborhood who didn’t sign up for my clean air program would be highly visible – all their neighbors would know, and social pressure would do the rest.

Don’t believe me? I have two proofs. The first is the fact that waiters are almost always tipped – despite the fact that everyone who doesn’t tip is a ‘free rider’. If you think the ‘tipping’ example requires face-to-face contact, what about tsunami charities? Billions raised, and almost none of those who gave will ever meet the recipients of their generosity.

Finally, governments don’t deal effectively with pollution anyway. The Canadian government eradicated the Newfoundland cod population through subsidized over-fishing. The most polluted lands in the US are owned by the government. Logging is a problem because the government won’t sell the land outright, just the timber harvesting rights, which provides little incentive for renewal. Public property is always taken care of badly – and in the stateless society, there is no such thing as public property, since there is no such thing as a government.

So – DROs would pay to reduce pollution, drivers would pay the full costs of driving, and a clean air company would use powerful and proven social pressures to make sure money was available for pollution reduction. Is it ideal? Perhaps. Could it be better? Sure – those are just my ideas. In a free market, thousands of the best minds will be working to solve the problem of ‘free rider’ pollution. If the problem can be solved, it will be. If it can’t, let’s stop using the government to pretend that it can!

To sum up: if people care about mass pollution, it will be solved. If they don’t, then those same people will also be in the government – and so it won’t be solved by the state either.


Question #2: Invasion

I liked your article, but the practical reality is that under anarchy, the few "evil" men would band together and plunder the "good" majority. How many well-armed, coordinated thugs would it take to ravage an unprotected populace – a few thousand? The good people simply go about their business, then one day, 2,000 armed evildoers sweep into an area, and have their way with it. Even if the general populace were armed, they could hardly stand up to a trained group like this. (BTW, this is what the gun lobby doesn't seem to understand – if the government goes after them with 10,000 soldiers, a "well-armed militia" has not the ghost of a chance.)
Eventually the good group might eliminate the evil group through sheer weight of numbers, but the former would probably lose men at a ratio of 10 to 1, since they will always be caught by surprise and fighting is not their stock-in-trade. This would be repeated constantly and is obviously unacceptable. Isn't this what Genghis Khan, and the Vikings, etc. were – essentially wandering thugs who plundered "good" civilizations?
A private security force would be irresistibly tempted to assume the "evil group" role, I'm sure, so this is no solution.
Believe me, I detest all governments; I just feel that there is one valid role for government to play, and that is to protect its citizens.

The idea that roving bands of thugs will ‘take over’ a stateless society is a surprisingly durable notion, given the disasters we see every day in Iraq. The simple fact is that military invasions are never profitable unless subsidized by the taxpayers of the invading army’s government. From a mere financial standpoint, Iraq is a fiscal disaster – which proves that even invading one of the most oil-rich countries in the world doesn’t pay! Iraq was invaded only because the costs of the invasion are entirely borne by taxpayers – which allows billions to be siphoned off to the military, state agencies and private corporations. The same is true for all occupations in history, from the British and French Empires to the Eastern Bloc to the Iraq occupation. Taxpayers are forced to pay with money and blood, while billions are stolen through subsidies and contracts. The real target in any war is not foreign troops, but domestic taxpayers. War is a means to an end: the end being the pillaging of the public purse.

Free trade is profitable; in the absence of a state, war is not. In a stateless society, DROs will constantly work to defuse the criminal element and ensure that crime does not pay – and it won’t, since an honest income will be so much higher than it is now! Thus the argument that bands of thugs will take over a free society has no basis in economics, logic or history. The worst possible case in a stateless society is that a band of thugs will set up shop locally and demand cash ‘protection’ from honest citizens, like the Mafia. However, that situation is still preferable to the current system, since the Mafia need to ensure that their citizens remain relatively happy in the long run – unlike governments, which drive entire societies into war, bankruptcy and dictatorship.

Another basic fact of war is this: political leaders only invade other countries if they themselves are in no danger. If a politician can stay far behind the lines, make stirring speeches, strike noble poses, hand out contracts and watch his popularity soar, war seems like a pretty good deal. If, however, declaring war threatens him personally, suddenly it doesn’t seem so attractive. The simple proof of this thesis is that no country possessing WMDs has ever been directly threatened with war. (In fact, the best way to logically deduce that Iraq had no WMDs was that the US was prepared to invade it!)

Personal threats against warlike foreign leaders always dissuades invasion – so, what is the best way to threaten the lives of such criminals? So far, the only answer has been the proliferation of WMDs. In a free society, cheaper and less dangerous methods will surely be discovered – and here are some possibilities.

Suppose Canada wanted to invade a government-free US. The Canadian PM starts making threatening speeches and massing troops along the border.

How could the stateless society respond? Well, DROs are the agencies most threatened by invasion, because if the Canadian government takes over, they will be the first to go. So let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a group of worried DRO leaders. What would we do?

First, we would get to the root of the problem, which is that the Canadian PM is the person responsible for fermenting war. Given this fact, we would avoid threatening Canada’s troops or its general population, who are not the problem, and have no power to prevent the invasion. If we threaten the troops, we’ll make them more belligerent – and if we threaten the general population, we’ll make them more supportive of the war.

So how can we defuse the situation? Here are some ideas (in escalating order):

1. Offer the foreign troops sanctuary, property and jobs if they lay down their arms, desert and cross the border peacefully.


2. Declare that, if the troops are not disbanded, no offensive action will be taken against soldiers or civilians, but instead political leaders will be targeted.


3. Arm everyone along the US side of the border with any weapons they liked – for free (In Switzerland, for instance, every household has to have a gun – and the Swiss have not been involved in a war in 800 years, despite being right in the middle of Europe!).


4. If the threat continues to escalate, offer $100 million in gold to anyone who can convince the Canadian PM to demobilize his troops (using whatever methods work the best).


5. Drive all politicians underground by putting massive bounties on their heads.


6. Kidnap the PM’s family and hold them hostage until the troops are demobilized.

Naturally, things can escalate from the above in ways that are easy to imagine – although I am sure that the problem would be dealt by the first one or two items.

Why are these approaches so effective? For one thing, in a stateless society, there is no single target such as the White House or the Pentagon. Authority is diffused, decentralized, like the Internet, and so cannot be struck at directly. Thus DROs can target foreign leaders, but foreign leaders cannot target DROs – and so the advantage lies with DROs.

Let’s suppose, though, that none of the above works, and foreign troops end up invading the stateless society. Remember that, in such a society, there are no legal limits on the weapons that private citizens can possess. (It is likely that DROs, though, would refuse to represent those who possessed certain weapons – a limit that would doubtless be lifted in the case of imminent invasion!).

Thus the invading army cannot tell which citizens have which weapons. This raises a significant ‘fog of war’ problem. The US felt safe invading Iraq because the general Iraqi population had been legally disarmed by Saddam Hussein, and so could not retaliate. If the US could not determine which people had which weapons – impossible without legal disarmament – they would never invade. Even now, when they are nominally in charge of the country, they face constant attrition from guerilla fighters. Now that the Iraqi population has access to arms, they have the upper hand even in the face of overwhelming US military power. (The main reason for this is that the US military has developed the capacity to blow away armies standing out in the open – with the inevitable result that no army ever opposes the US by standing out in the open, but instead uses guerilla tactics and a war of attrition. It’s as if Vietnam never happened! But that’s inevitable – state armies are not designed to protect citizens, but to create conflict and spend money, and “big thump” weapons are far more expensive than guerilla training.)

Last but not least, if invasion seems close, DROs will hire mercenaries to repel the invaders. In the unlikely event that DRO combatants do actually engage government troops, it will be a case of private incentives versus government inefficiencies – FedEx versus the Post Office. Does anyone believe that a government-run army – which is just the Post Office in fatigues – can beat a private army?

Finally, can anyone out there show me any examples of a government successfully defending its population from violence? Russia in 1917? Germany in 1933? France in 1940? England which, after winning the war against national socialism, imposed socialism on its own population? America, which currently has more than 200 troop bases around the world stirring up anti-US sentiment? What about the Civil War, which murdered 600,000 Americans without even effectively freeing the slaves? The First World War, which caused the Second? Did America emerge from the Cold War more free or less free? (Hint: taxes and regulations!) Did Korea or Vietnam end the Soviet regime? Of course not – the inefficiency of central planning did. What about World War Two? In 1950, more people lived under dictatorships than in 1939 – despite 40 million murdered! So how can anyone say that governments protect their citizens? Violence begets violence. All states do is wage wars, raise taxes and enslave their populations with debts and regulation! Knowing that governments murdered 170 million people during the 20th century, we can all be forgiven for a little skepticism when we hear the argument that governments protect their citizens. It is blind, dangerous nonsense!

There is one final response that, in my view, disposes of the ‘armed gang’ objection. If large numbers of people want to impose their will on others through force, then armed gangs do pose a risk to a stateless society. However, they are still less of a risk than a centralized state! If an armed gang runs roughshod through your neighbourhood, you can choose to fight, pay tribute, or flee to a freer locale. No such choices exist with a government. In other words, if people are generally peaceful, we don’t need a state – and if they are generally violent, we can’t allow a state to exist, because giving violent people a monopoly results in the destruction of civil society.


Question #3: Inertia

People often prefer the evil they know to the evil they don't know. Even though being ruled by the state is awful, it is possible that the alternative is worse. Even if the probability that alternative is worse is small, people do not want to risk what they have for something else, at least not until what they have is so bad as to be unendurable. This is a facet of human nature that the evil in our world exploit on a daily basis. They continue to make things worse slowly in the hopes that people will simply go along with it because they do not wish to risk the alternatives. I know this is bad logically, but most people are ruled by emotions rather than reason and act accordingly. The fear of the unknown is one of the most powerful emotions. Fear is why people continue to support the state even though they acknowledge that it is evil.

I agree with the above – it is usually easier to live with a tolerable (and well-armed!) evil than risk opposing it. However, I have two arguments against this kind of passivity. First of all, government power grows continually, becoming more and more brutal, until it utterly destroys the host society. This was the case in Ancient Greece and Italy, in Germany, England and France after the Middle Ages, in Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and China in the 20th century – and is currently the case with all Western governments. In every single historical case, governments grow until they destroy society. In most cases, governments run out of money, which causes violence to erupt from those dependent on state handouts – resulting in martial law and a general dictatorship. Thus the idea of ‘living with a tolerable evil’ is like ‘living with a tolerable hunger’ – it is only tolerable in the short run. In the long run, the growth of state power murders millions and destroys everything that makes life worth living.

Secondly, there is absolutely no reason to risk one’s life or remaining liberties opposing state power. The state survives on propaganda, and thus can only be opposed in the realm of ideas. Writing, reading and arguing are the most powerful activities in the service of freedom, since all general social decisions are made on the basis of perceived virtue (i.e. state welfare is ‘good’ because it ‘helps the poor’). Change the perceived virtues, and you change the world.

Question #4: No Gun Control At All?
You can’t have everyone having any weapon they want! People would just nuke each other!

Naturally, most people are disturbed by the idea that anyone can have any weapon he wants – does that mean that my neighbor can build a nuke in his basement?

Those who are getting the hang of the stateless society already know the answer to this objection: if enough people are troubled by this problem, someone will find a solution for it!

Here’s an example: I buy a tract of land and build a community on it. I then only lease the houses to people who are willing to sign a contract that they will not build nukes in their basement. (This could extend to any sort of weapon ownership, and is an extension of standard condo agreements.) Presto, I have a completely voluntary society with no nukes in the basement – or no handguns at all if I choose. No need for a government, policemen or the NRA. This way, everyone gets to live with the social rules they want – and the most efficient societies will flourish, just as companies in the free market do now. There is absolutely no reason why social rules should not be subject to the same market forces as everything else in the economy – everyone benefits through a multiplicity of choice and the principles of efficiency!

Question #5: How Do We Win?

This question, of course, came up a lot, and requires a separate article, which I am working on. I won’t mention any details here, except to say that we can win, and it requires no violence – but you’re probably not going to like the answer!

Caging the Devils: The Stateless Society and Violent Crime

After Lew Rockwell was kind enough to publish The Stateless Society (http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/molyneux1.html), I received many emails asking the same question: how can violent criminals be dealt with in the absence of a centralized government?

This is a challenging question, which can be answered in three parts. The first is to examine how such criminals are dealt with at present; the second is to divide violent crimes into crimes of motive and crimes of passion, and the third is to show how a stateless society would deal with both categories of crime far better than any existing system.

Thus the first question is: how are violent criminals dealt with at present? The honest answer, to any unbiased observer is surely: they are encouraged.

A basic fact of life is that people respond to incentives. The better that crime pays, the more people will become criminals. Certain well-known habits – drugs, gambling, prostitution in particular – are non-violent in nature, but highly desired by certain segments of the population. If these non-violent behaviours are criminalized, the profit gained by providing these services rises. Illegality destroys all stabilizing social forces (contracts, open activity, knowledge sharing and mediation), and so violence becomes the norm for dispute resolution.

Furthermore, wherever a legal situation exists where most criminals make more money than the police, the police are simply bribed into compliance. Thus by increasing the profits of non-violent activities, the State ensures the corruption of the police and judicial system – thus making it both safer and more profitable to operate outside the law! It can take dozens of arrests to actually face trial – and many trials to gain convictions. Policemen now spend about a third of their time filling out paperwork – and 90% of their time chasing non-violent criminals. Entire sections of certain cities are run by gangs of thugs, and the jails are overflowing with harmless low-level peons sent to jail as make-work for the judicial system – thus constantly increasing law-enforcement budgets. Peaceful citizens are legally disarmed through gun control laws. In this manner, the modern State literally creates, protects and profits from violent criminals.

Thus the standard to compare the stateless society’s response to violent crime is not some perfect world where thugs are effectively dealt with, but rather the current mess where violence is both encouraged and protected.

Before we turn to how a stateless society deals with crime, however, it is essential to remember that the stateless society automatically eliminates the greatest violence faced by almost all of us – the State that threatens us with guns if we don’t hand over our money – and our lives, should it decide to declare war. Thus it cannot be said that the existing system is one which minimizes violence. Quite the contrary – the honest population is violently enslaved by the State, and the dishonest provided with cash incentives and protection.

State violence – in its many forms – has been growing in Western societies over the past fifty years, as regulation, tariffs and taxation have risen exponentially. National debts are an obvious form of intergenerational theft. Support of foreign governments also increases violence, since these governments use subsidies to buy arms and further terrorize their own populations. The arms market is also funded and controlled by governments. The list of State crimes can go on and on, but one last gulag is worth mentioning – all the millions of poor souls kidnapped and held hostage in prisons for non-violent ‘crimes’.

Since existing States terrorize, enslave and incarcerate literally billions of citizens, it is hard to understand how they can be seen as effectively working ‘against’ violence in any form.

So, how does the stateless society deal with violence? First, it is important to differentiate the use of force into crimes of motive and crimes of passion. Crimes of motive are open to correction through changing incentives; any system which reduces the profits of property crimes – while increasing the profits of honest labor – will reduce these crimes. In the last part of this essay, we will see how the stateless society achieves this better than any other option.

Crimes of motive can be diminished by making crime a low-profit activity relative to working for a living. Crime entails labour, and if most people could make more money working honestly for the same amount of labour, there will be far fewer criminals.

Those who have read my explanation of dispute resolution organizations (DROs) (http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/molyneux1.html) know that stateless societies flourish through the creation of voluntary contracts between interested parties, and that all property is private. How does this affect violent crime?

Well, let’s look at ‘break and enter’. If I own a house, I will probably take out insurance against theft. Obviously, my insurance company benefits most from preventing theft, and so will encourage me to get an alarm system and so on, just as occurs now.

This situation is more or less analogous to what happens now – with the not-inconsequential adjustment that, since DROs handle policing as well as restitution, their motive for preventing theft or rendering stolen property useless is higher than it is now. As such, much more investment in prevention would be worthwhile, such as creating ‘voice activated’ appliances which only work for their owners.

However, the stateless society goes much, much further in preventing crime – specifically, by identifying those who are going to become criminals. In this situation, the stateless society is far more effective than any State system.

In a stateless society, contracts with DROs are required to maintain any sort of economic life – without DRO representation, citizens are unable to get a job, hire employees, rent a car, buy a house or send their children to school. Any DRO will naturally ensure that its contracts include penalties for violent crimes – so if you steal a car, your DRO has the right to use force against you to get the car back – and probably retrieve financial penalties to boot.

How does this work in practice? Let’s take a test case. Say that you wake up one morning and decide to become a thief. Well, the first thing you have to do is cancel your coverage with your DRO, so that your DRO cannot act against you when you steal. DROs would have clauses allowing you to cancel your coverage, just as insurance companies have now. Thus you would have to notify your DRO that you were dropping coverage. No problem, you’re off their list.

However, DROs as a whole really need to keep track of people who have opted out of the entire DRO system, since those people have clearly signaled their intention to go rogue, to live off the grid, and commit crimes. Thus if you cancel your DRO insurance, your name goes into a database available to all DROs. If you sign up with another DRO, no problem, your name is taken out. However, if you do not sign up with any other DRO, red flags pop up all over the system.

What happens then? Remember – there is no public property in the stateless society. If you’ve gone rogue, where are you going to go? You can’t take a bus – bus companies won’t take rogues, because their DRO will require that they take only DRO-covered passengers, in case of injury or altercation. Want to fill up on gas? No luck, for the same reason. You can try hitchhiking, of course, which might work, but what happens when you get to your destination and try and rent a hotel room? No DRO card, no luck. Want to sleep in the park? Parks are privately owned, so keep moving. Getting hungry? No groceries, no restaurants – no food! What are you going to do?

Obviously, those without DRO representation are going to find it very hard to get around or find anything to eat. But let’s go even further and imagine that, as a rogue, you are somehow able to survive long enough to start trying to steal from people’s houses.

Well, the first thing that DROs are going to do is give a reward to anyone who spots you and reports your position (in fact, there will be companies which specialize in just this sort of service). As you walk down a street on your way to rob a house, someone sees you and calls you in. The DRO immediately notifies the street owner (remember, no public property!) who boots you off his street. Are you going to resist the street owner? His DRO will fully support his right to use force to protect his property or life.

So you have to get off the street. Where do you go? All the local street owners have been notified of your presence, and refuse you entrance. You can’t go anywhere without trespassing. You are a pariah. No one will help you, or give you food, or shelter you – because if they do, their DRO will boot them or raise their rates, and their name will be entered into a database of people who help rogues. There is literally no place to turn.

So, really, what incentive is there to turn to a life of crime? Working for a living – and being protected by a DRO – pays really well. Going off the grid and becoming a rogue pits the entire weight of the combined DRO system against you – and, even if you do manage to survive their scrutiny and steal something, it has probably been voice-encoded or protected in some other manner against unauthorized re-use. But let’s suppose that you somehow bypass all of that, and do manage to steal, where are you going to sell your stolen goods? You’re not protected by a DRO, so who will buy from you, knowing they have no recourse if something goes wrong? And besides, anyone who interacts with you will get a substantial reward for reporting your location – and, if they deal with you, will be dropped from the DRO system.

Will there be underground markets? No – where would they operate? People need a place to live, cars to rent, clothes to buy, groceries to eat. No DRO means no participation in economic life.

Thus it is fair to say that any stateless society will do a far better job of protecting its citizens against crimes of motive – what, then, about crimes of passion?

Crimes of passion are harder to prevent – but also present far less of a threat to those outside of the circle in which they occur.

So, let’s say a man kills his wife. They are both covered by DROs, of course, and their DRO contracts would include specific prohibitions against murder. Thus the man would be subject to all the sanctions involved in his contract – probably forced labour until a certain financial penalty was paid off, since DROs would be responsible for paying financial penalties to any next of kin.

Fine, you say, but what if either the man or woman was not covered by a DRO? Well, where would they live? No one would rent them an apartment. If they own their house free and clear, who would sell them food? Or gas? Who would employ them? What bank would accept their money? The penalties for opting out of the DRO system are almost infinite, and it is safe to say that it would be next to impossible to survive without a DRO.

But let’s say that only the murderous husband – planning to kill his wife – opted out of his DRO system without telling her. Well, the first thing that his wife’s DRO system would do is inform her of her husband’s action – and the ill intent it may represent – and help relocate her if desired. If she decided against relocation, her DRO would promptly drop her, since by deciding to live in close proximity with a rogue man, she was exposing herself to an untenable amount of danger (and so the DRO to a high risk for financial loss!). Now both the husband and wife have chosen to live without DROs, in a state of nature, and thus face all the insurmountable problems of getting food, shelter, money and so on.

Now let’s look at something slightly more complicated – stalking. A woman becomes obsessed with a man, and starts calling him at all hours and following him around. Perhaps boils a bunny or two. Well, if the man has bought insurance against stalking, his DRO leaps into action. It calls the woman’s DRO, which says: stop stalking this man or we’ll drop you. And how does her DRO know whether she has really given up her stalking? The man stops reporting it. And if there is a dispute, she just wears an ankle bracelet for a while to make sure. And remember – since there is no public property, she can be ordered off any property such as sidewalks, streets and parks.

(And if the man has not bought insurance against stalking, no problem – it will just be more expensive to buy with a ‘pre-existing condition’!)

Although they may seem unfamiliar to you, DROs are not a new concept – they are as ancient as civilization itself, but have been shouldered aside by the constant escalation of State power over the last century or so. In the past, desired social behaviour was punished through ostracism, and risks ameliorated through voluntary ‘friendly societies’. A man who left his wife and children – or a woman who got pregnant out of wedlock – was no longer welcome in decent society. DROs take these concepts one step further, by making all the information formerly known by the local community available to the world as whole, just as credit reports do. There are really no limits to the benefits that DROs can confer upon a free society – insurance could be created for such things as:

- a man’s wife giving birth to a child that is not his own
- a daughter getting pregnant out of wedlock
- fertility problems for a married couple
- …and much more.

All of the above insurance policies would require DROs to take active steps to prevent such behaviours – the mind boggles at all the preventative steps that could be taken! The important thing to remember is that all such contracts are voluntary, and so do not violate the moral absolute of non-violence.

So in conclusion – how does the stateless society deal with violent criminals? Brilliantly! In a stateless society, there are fewer criminals, more prevention, greater sanctions – and instant forewarning of those aiming at a life of crime by their withdrawal from the DRO system. More incentives to work, fewer incentives for a life of crime, no place to hide for rogues, and general social rejection of those who decide to operate outside of the civilized worlds of contract, mutual protection and general security. And remember – States in the 20th century caused more than 170 million deaths worldwide – are we really that worried about hold-ups and jewelry thefts in the face of those kinds of numbers?

There is no system that will replace faulty men with perfect angels, but the stateless society, by rewarding goodness and punishing evil, will at least ensure that all devils are visible – instead of cloaking them in the current deadly fog of power, politics and propaganda.

Disproving the State: Four Arguments Against Government

Two objections constantly recur whenever the subject of dissolving the State arises. The first is that a free society is only possible if people are perfectly good or rational. In other words, citizens need a centralized State because there are evil people in the world.

The first and most obvious problem with this position is that if evil people exist in society, they will also exist within the State – and be far more dangerous thereby. Citizens are able to protect themselves against evil individuals, but stand no chance against an aggressive State armed to the teeth with police and military might. Thus the argument that we need the State because evil people exist is false. If evil people exist, the State must be dismantled, since evil people will be drawn to use its power for their own ends – and, unlike private thugs, evil people in government have the police and military to inflict their whims on a helpless (and usually disarmed!) population.

Logically, there are four possibilities as to the mixture of good and evil people in the world:
1. that all men are moral
2. that all men are immoral
3. that the majority of men are moral, and a minority immoral
4. that the majority of men are immoral, and a minority moral

(A perfect balance of good and evil is statistically impossible!)

In the first case (all men are moral), the State is obviously not needed, since evil cannot exist.

In the second case (all men are immoral), the State cannot be permitted to exist for one simple reason. The State, it is generally argued, must exist because there are evil people in the world who desire to inflict harm, and who can only be restrained through fear of State retribution (police, prisons et al). A corollary of this argument is that the less retribution these people fear, the more evil they will do. However, the State itself is not subject to any force, but is a law unto itself. Even in Western democracies, how many policemen and politicians go to jail? Thus if evil people wish to do harm but are only restrained by force, then society can never permit a State to exist, because evil people will immediately take control of that State, in order to do evil and avoid retribution. In a society of pure evil, then, the only hope for stability would be a state of nature, where a general arming and fear of retribution would blunt the evil intents of disparate groups.

The third possibility is that most people are evil, and only a few are good. If that is the case, then the State also cannot be permitted to exist, since the majority of those in control of the State will be evil, and will rule over the good minority. Democracy in particular cannot be permitted to exist, since the minority of good people would be subjugated to the democratic will of the evil majority. Evil people, who wish to do harm without fear of retribution, would inevitably control of the State, and use its power to do their evil free of that fear. Good people do not act morally because they fear retribution, but because they love goodness and peace of mind – and thus, unlike evil people, they have little to gain by controlling the State. And so it is certain that the State will be controlled by a majority of evil people will rule over all, to the detriment of all moral people.

The fourth option is that most people are good, and only a few are evil. This possibility is subject to the same problems outlined above, notably that evil people will always want to gain control over the State, in order to shield themselves from retaliation. This option changes the appearance of democracy, of course: because the majority of people are good, evil power-seekers must lie to them in order to gain power, and then, after achieving public office, will immediately break faith and pursue their own corrupt agendas, enforcing their wills with the police and military. (This is the current situation in democracies, of course.) Thus the State remains the greatest prize to the most evil men, who will quickly gain control over its awesome power – to the detriment of all good souls – and so the State cannot be permitted to exist in this scenario either.

It is clear, then, that there is no situation under which a State can logically be allowed to exist. The only possible justification for the existence of a Stare would be if the majority of men are evil, but all the power of the State is always controlled by a minority of good men. This situation, while interesting theoretically, breaks down logically because:
a) the evil majority would quickly outvote the minority or overpower them through a coup;
b) because there is no way to ensure that only good people would always run the State; and,
c) there is absolutely no example of this having ever occurred in any of the dark annals of the brutal history of the State.

The logical error always made in the defense of the State is to imagine that any collective moral judgments being applied to any group of people is not also being applied to the group which rules over them. If 50% of people are evil, then at least 50% of people ruling over them are evil (and probably more, since evil people are always drawn to power). Thus the existence of evil can never justify the existence of the State. If there is no evil, the State is unnecessary. If evil exists, the State is far too dangerous to be allowed existence.

Why is this error always made? There are a number of reasons, which can only be touched on here. The first is that the State introduces itself to children in the form of public school teachers who are considered moral authorities. Thus is the association of morality and authority with the State first made, and is reinforced through years of repetition. The second is that the State never teaches children about the root of its power – force – but instead pretends that it is just another social institution, like a business or a church or a charity. The third is that the prevalence of religion has always blinded men to the evils of the State – which is why the State has always been so interested in furthering the interests of churches. In the religious world-view, absolute power is synonymous with perfect goodness, in the form of a deity. In the real political world of men, however, increasing power always means increasing evil. With religion, also, all that happens must be for the good – thus, fighting encroaching political power is fighting the will of the deity. There are many more reasons, of course, but these are among the deepest.

It was mentioned at the beginning of this article that people generally make two errors when confronted with the idea of dissolving the State. The first is believing that the State is necessary because evil people exist. The second is the belief that, in the absence of a State, any social institutions which arise will inevitably take the place of the State. Thus, dispute resolution organizations (DRO’s), insurance companies and private security forces are all considered potential cancers which will swell and overwhelm the body politic.

This view arises from the same error outlined above. If all social institutions are constantly trying to grow in power and enforce their wills on others, then by that very argument a centralized State cannot be allowed to exist. If it is an iron law that groups always try to gain power over other groups and individuals, then that power-lust will not end if one of them wins, but will spread across society until slavery is the norm. In other words, the only hope for individual freedom is for a proliferation of groups to exist, each with the power to harm each other, and so all afraid of each other, and more or less peaceable thereby.

It is very hard to understand the logic and intelligence of the argument that, in order to protect us from a group that might overpower us, we should support a group that has already overpowered us. It is similar to the statist argument about private monopolies – that citizens should create a State monopoly because they are afraid of monopolies. It does not take keen vision to see through such nonsense.

What is the evidence for the view that decentralized and competing powers promote peace? In other words, are there any facts that we can draw on to support that idea the a balance of power is the only chance that the individual has for freedom?

Organized crime does not provide many good examples, since gangs so regularly corrupt, manipulate and use the power of the State police to enforce their rule, and so cannot be said to be operating in a state of nature. A more useful example is the fact that no leader has ever declared war on another leader who possesses nuclear weapons. In the past, when leaders felt themselves immune from retaliation, they were more than willing to kill off their own populations by waging war. Now that they are themselves subject to annihilation, they are only willing to attack countries that cannot fight back.

This is an instructive lesson on why such men require disarmed and dependent populations – and a good example of how the fear of reprisal inherent in a balanced system of decentralized and competing powers is the only proven method of securing and maintaining personal liberty. Fleeing from imaginary phantoms into the protective prison of the State will only ensure the destruction of the very liberties that make life worth living.

Learning the Lessons of WWII

So now that it’s the 60th anniversary of the Second World War, it’s time for what you might consider a truly shocking argument. We are constantly told that WWII was fought against tyranny, in order to secure our own freedom. However, like almost all assertions that come from the State, it is put forward without any kind of definition.

The great enemy was Nazism, of course. Very well. What was it about Nazism that was so objectionable? It was an expansionistic dictatorship, we are told. And what did that mean? Well, that the Nazi government had too much power, and invaded other countries. Very well. Thus, if the Nazi government was evil because it had too much power, and we were fighting for freedom, then surely the power of our own governments should not have grown during the fight against government power.

This is only logical. If you are fighting against State power, then your own State should not grow in power during that conflict. If it does, then you have lost the fight before you have even begun.

(During this essay, I will use the term ‘State’ for the Allied governments, and ‘Nazi’ for the German government.)

Given that the power of the State grew enormously during WWII, it can hardly be said that State power in itself was the enemy. What was the problem with the Nazis? Was it that they killed their own citizens? Given that the Western States all instituted the draft during WWII, that argument seems extremely hollow. Do you fight arbitrary power by enslaving men and forcing them to kill and die? Of course not. That’s like fighting cancer with murder.

Did the Nazi genocides so offend the Allies? Impossible, since the Holocaust was not confirmed until very late in the war, when the Allies were rolling across Germany. Also, if genocides were so terrible, then why did the Western governments not declare war against the Turks for their murders of the Armenians? And what about Stalin’s mass starvation of his people in the 1930s? What about the slaughter of the Chinese by Mao after the war? Why ally with Russia at all during WWII, if genocidal dictatorships were so evil? On what possible principle could Stalin be considered ‘better’ than Hitler?

But let’s cast these objections aside for the moment, and look at the true growth and destruction of Hitler’s power. Initially, he overran smaller and weaker countries – and then was stopped short in the West by the Channel in 1940. After losing the Battle of Britain, he gave up on England, and turned to Russia. Once he sent his forces into Russia, he was doomed. He faced growing revolts at home, and decimation of his forces in Russia. After 1942, what long-term threat could he have been? He might have lasted another decade, perhaps, but his empire would have fallen, as all brutal empires in history have always fallen, because they destroy the free market, and so consume their wealth quicker than it can be replenished. They kill the goose that lays the golden egg, then eat the goose – and then starve. The Soviet empire eventually committed suicide – and China is currently liberalizing itself without requiring fire-bombing and nuclear bombs.

We need to look at what was occurring before and after WWII, so that we can understand the real effect of the war. However, for reasons which will become clear later, we shall look at the post-war period first.

So – what happened after the war? Well, the Soviets took over almost all of Eastern Europe. Millions of people fell into the abyss of communist slavery. Poland – which England originally entered the war to liberate – was caught in Stalin’s grip. Sure, some Western European countries were freed from Nazism – but the millions then enslaved by Russia more than made up for everyone who was freed. And China soon followed.

And what of the Allied governments? Well, during the war they gained the power to withhold taxes from their citizen’s income – the end of any possible control citizens might have over tax increases. The State had experimented with price controls, rationing, deficit financing, the forced internment of naturalized citizens, and many other totalitarian tricks. The US government, for instance, was many times larger in 1945 than it had been in 1939 – even after the New Deal expansion of the 1930s. And it was about to embark on the great reeducation of the masses through the GI bill.

Two other cultural shifts occurred during WWII – the first was that the State was now considered the first port of call for solving social problems – after all, if it could defeat the Axis powers, surely it could solve poverty! The second was that Western staggered under a massive injection of relativism. Hitler was bad, Stalin was good – fascism was bad, communism was bad, socialism was good, government power was bad (national socialism), government was good (state control of the economy) – who could make any sense of that? Absolutism was utterly broken, and ‘flavours’ of government power became fashionable. The intellectuals’ embrace of communism in the 1930s accelerated.

The onset of the Cold War coincided with the creation of massive aid programs to Russia – which made no sense. If Hitler was bad, and we had to fight him, then why were we giving wheat and money to Stalin? As we had seen from Eastern Europe, Stalin was even more expansionist than Hitler.

(The real difference, of course, was that Stalin soon had nuclear weapons, which can kill Western leaders – and so they had no interest in provoking a war.)

Finally, throughout the Western world, government power increased radically throughout the post-war period. Now, on the 60th anniversary of WWII, we have about half of our income stripped from us, and labour under hundreds of thousands of petty, dangerous and claustrophobic regulations. Is this the freedom our fathers died for? Of course not.

Ah, but aren’t we more free than the Germans under Nazism? Of course we are – but that’s irrelevant. If you fall off a cliff, the fact that you haven’t hit bottom yet is scant comfort. The fact of the matter is that we were far more free at home before we began fighting tyranny overseas.

The final – and perhaps most important – question is: what is the state of our society relative to the pre-Nazi period in Germany?

The Weimar Republic was characterized by massive expansion of State power, spending and deficits. Regulation, trade-unionism, protectionism, cronyism and corruption were rampant throughout the vaguely-civilized civil war that defines a ‘mixed’ economy. The tearing collapse of social norms that always accompanies unlimited majority rule was a key factor in catapulting Hitler into power. Thus it is hard for us to say that we have won the battle for liberty, when by radically expanding State power, WWII helped push us off the cliff into our current free-fall toward dictatorship.

If we look before WWII, into the black abyss of WWI, we can get an even surer sense of how the expansion of State power further feeds the expansion of State power – whether victor or vanquished. How was WWI possible, given that it was so horrendously expensive? Why would not a tax revolt simply have shut it down? Well, WWI was possible because Western governments had created a State-controlled central bank, which allowed the massive deficit financing that wars always require. Now that governments could easily borrow against the future taxes of their citizens – especially the new income taxes – fiscal restraint and voter control of the State became a thing of the past. This allowed for wars of massive destruction to occur, which formerly would have proven impossibly expensive. Once governments have the power to print money, they can hire all the goons they want to terrorize the rest of the population – and pay the soldiers abroad to boot. Voters no longer have any say in a war, since governments no longer have to go to them for war money – and so a tax revolt will not end the conflict. Two developments in the 19th century – government education of the young, and the introduction of government-run banking, set the stage for the horrors of the 20th century. From such innocuous beginnings does Hell itself spring.

Finally, if the US had not entered WWI in 1917, the unbalanced and inflammatory peace of Versailles would have been impossible, since the existing combatants were fighting themselves to exhaustion. Thus the expansion of State power in the US helped set the stage for WWII.

What does all this mean for today? We now have a War on Terror that is directly deploys the imagery of WWII. The current war in Iraq is paid for through deficit financing, since State-run banking has lifted all fiscal restraints. State education has taken care of the ‘story’ (Hitler = evil), and propaganda has taken care of the connection (Hussein = Hitler). The end of the Soviet Union has taken care of the direct nuclear threat to the leaders, and so there is no further barrier to endless war. In fact, the only chance that we have of seeing an end to the current War on Terror is for the terrorists to start targeting Western leaders and their families – which would quickly end all foreign interventions, invasions and occupations. Sadly, however, that will never happen, since terrorists need the War on Terror as much as the Western leaders do.

What can we learn from the lessons of WWII? If there is ever to be an end to war – the greatest boon that real freedom could ever grant mankind – then the steps are largely dull, undramatic, and pedandtic. First, a tax revolt must break the desire of investors to lend to governments. Second, parents must start opposing the propaganda of State schools – and third, economists must strenuously make the case for the end of the government-run banking system. From such innocuous beginnings does Heaven itself spring.

New Orleans

So New Orleans is underwater, and hundreds are dead, and everyone is wringing their hands about how everything should have been handled better...

Really, people, it’s time to wake up to reality. The government will never handle anything better, since it has no interest in doing so. What will the results be of this latest disaster?

Hmm, let’s see. Slipping on the psychic data helmet, I see…

- Increased funding for government disaster relief agencies…? Why yes, I think I can see that!

- Wait – what’s that? A new department of Homeland Disaster Relief? In charge of all the other alphabet agencies? Yeeees, there it is!

- Cries for accountability, followed by promotions for all the guilty… Naturally!

- Ah – ah! – my eyes water from the constant blurring of evidence and facts. It was a category four hurricane! (No, it was a category two when it tangentially hit New Orleans). The dykes could only handle a category three! (No, they weren’t even breached – the water just slopped over the rim and washed away the foundations on the far side.) It would have cost billions to make the city safer. Let’s say 1.5 billion dollars – even though I bet that the private sector could do it for one tenth that amount – over 500,000 inhabitants, that’s, oh, $3,000 per resident, over twenty years, that’s about $200/year with interest. Worth it? Of course! If the free market had been allowed to operate, market forces would just have automatically deducted that cost from the cost of housing, as an incentive for people to come and live in New Orleans..!

- Oh, and last but not least, let’s try wading through the river of cash that the Army Corps of Engineers will now be getting to reinforce other cities at risk. And will they be efficient? Well, imagine if tomorrow they found a way to reinforce a city for a tenth of the cost they claimed New Orleans required. The result? Outrage! Oh, no, I think we can with confidently predict that flood-proofing other cities will turn out to be far more expensive than what was even claimed for New Orleans.

How much does the government care? Well, they found all the money in the world for a war in Iraq. But for saving US citizens? Sadly, there’s just no money for that! Let’s get the private sector and charities involved!

The fact that people respond to incentives is the first law of economics. Every time a government department screws up, it gets additional funding. 9/11 came completely out of the blue – and intelligence funding went up exponentially. When crime increases, police get more money. When drug use goes up, the DEA gets more money. Students doing badly? Let’s shovel more money at the DOE!

If you pay a salesman for losing deals, or a doctor for worsening illnesses, how do you think they will perform? More importantly, what kind of workers prefer negative incentives? The competent ones?

Naturally, the general public will remain blind to all of this. They will get angry at individuals, roundly attack certain policies and loudly demand that funding be increased. And more and more people will die, in terrorist attacks and natural disasters, until people’s eyes open.

A war to be proud of..?

(a response to Christopher Hitchens's artcle - http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/news/issuesideas/story.html?id=88b9506a-c155-4dd3-829b-bd8b43a936b2)

The reality of war is so often obscured by abstractions. Let us take a closer look at Mr. Hitchens’s obfuscating language and get to the meat of the matter.

War is organized murder, pure and simple, just as dictatorship is. Mr. Hitchens can proclaim that the murder of tens of thousands of Iraqis – who had done nothing to threaten the United States – was worth it, but he does not explain just how he achieved the exalted position of determining the value of other men’s lives. A man living under a dictatorship may choose to risk his life resisting it – or he may choose to live with his circumstances. We know for certain that the vast majority of Iraqis preferred to live under Saddam rather than risk their lives resisting him – since before the US invasion, that is exactly what they did. The tens of thousands who have been killed for the sake of ‘regime change’ would have far preferred to live, and that is not a decision that can be made for them.

Mr. Hitchens also says: “Anyone with the smallest knowledge of Iraq knows that its society and infrastructure and institutions have been appallingly maimed and beggared by three decades of war and fascism…” This is of course true. What is pointedly not mentioned is the fact that Saddam Hussein was armed and helped into power by the United States government in 1963. Or that the majority of his war crimes were committed while he was receiving support from the US government. Or that the US sanctions against Iraq – which did nothing to topple Hussein – caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, mostly children. Imagine a neighbourhood where people suffer terribly because the local police arm and aid the Mafia – are these same people then expected to support the police when policy changes, and policemen kick down doors and spray random bullets in the hunt for their former friends?

What is also conspicuously absent from all justifications for the invasion of Iraq is that the war was justified solely on the grounds that Iraq had WMDs and was going to use them against America. (The mere possession of WMDs – and support of terrorism – is not enough, since the US supports – among many such states – Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.) Changing justifications after the fact does not turn falsehood into truth. The invasion of Iraq was justified by the threat that Iraq posed to America. Iraq, in fact, posed no threat to America. Thus the war is unjustified. It really is as simple as that.

Last but not least, I am utterly out of patience with armchair philosophers who sit in air-conditioned offices thousands of miles from the terror and slaughter and write articles about the benefits of war. Mr. Hitchens informs us that invading Iraq was a responsibility “that no decent person could shirk”. I am sure that we can then assume that, as a decent person, he is going to Iraq to help with the fighting. No? Is he too old? Well, then he must be lecturing his own sons and daughters that they must go and fight for Fallujah, or be condemned as indecent. No? Well, perhaps he has no children. Ah, then he must be selling everything he owns in order to send gifts and guns to the soldiers. Is he doing any or all of these things? If not, then he should take a long look in the mirror and ask himself exactly why others must murder and die for the sake of his beliefs. If you are not willing to lay down your own life – or the lives of your children – then you have no right to demand that others do so.

A brief history of tomorrow…

How did we get to where are today? How did we get to economic stagnation, the slow strangulation of liberties? How did we get to where we will be tomorrow, with economic collapse and the war of words of all against all?

Here is a very rapid tour through the destruction of rationality.

We start with the ancient world, with Greece and Rome and Carthage. We start with all the hero-worshipping poetry of mass murderers such as Achilles and Hercules. The age of heroism, it is called, with all of its self-mutilating fetish for blood and swords and spilling intestines. The age of heroism is always entwined with the age of magic and gods – and also with the age of rape, where beautiful women, pursued by warriors, dragged off and pillaged. The basic poem is: ‘fight and fuck’, ‘fight and fuck’, and all must worship these Darwinian machines as they knife and rape in service of the creation of a more perfect murderer – these bronzed apes of bloody fantasies. Ulysses will forever be spoken of by stuttering academics as a metaphor for some sort of spiritual quest, as if he is not in fact a sociopathic hired killer turned loose on the world to murder for his master. (A more recent example is that of Macbeth – who the wonderfully corrupt Shakespeare shows slaughtering a hundred innocent peasants without blinking an eye – and then sinking into self-loathing for knifing the head of his criminal ruling gang.)

The age of heroism is also the age of the death cult. Life is portrayed as pain; tortured souls stride the stages, and comedians giggle and spit at the same time. Only three professions are portrayed as noble: the priest, the soldier and the politician. In other words, those who justify murder, those who perform it, and those who profit from it.

The highest goal of the age of heroism is the roar of the crowd, the command of armies and the murder of the innocent. The age of heroism is also the age of liars, since murder must be transformed into honour, cowering youths into murderous demons – and blood-spattered politicians into noble orators.

The age of heroism is always the age of stories, since only in stories can murderous lies be made to glow and roar. It is the age of martial music, false tears and sudden rages. It is the age of incoherence, of ink spilled in water to hide the bodies of children. It is, of course, the age of pomp and manipulation and lies that dwarf cynicism.

Finally, the age of heroism is always worships blood. Family loyalties trump all considerations, since there are no ethics in a world of lies. Fantasies take the place of solid eyesight. Countries, armies and souls rise up to swallow simple humanity. Men vanish in a cloud of blood, replaced by categories and raging labels.

In this age, the merchant is scorned as a coward, since he has not succumbed to the nightmare of a full commitment to self-destruction. The merchant is the man who wants a family, a profession, and a comfortable house. He wishes to trade, not invade. He is bourgeois. He has no spirit. He wishes for nothing but comfort. His love of life and desire for comfort and material success is scorned by the sneering nihilist, who lives only to lie and kill and rape and die. The nihilist supports war and the police and the military and government programs and violence in all his subtle symptoms – and then says that one must be afraid of advertising and voluntary exchange.

Thus Carthage, the trading society, is burned down by the Romans. Thus the false dichotomy between Athens and Sparta arises. Athens is considered rational because its politicians have invented longer words for shorter swords. Sparta is considered martial because they wage war openly – in armour, not robes – and give warning to those they will attack, and do not demand they be disarmed beforehand, as politicians do.

The self-destruction of the heroic societies is always follows the same pattern. The first is that the nihilist needs the producer, but cannot restrain the raging expansion of his own nihilism. The nihilist pillages the farmer until the farmer becomes a nihilist, and then all lay down to starve. The demon of violence, once unleashed, must run its course – often of centuries – until it has bitten the through the flesh of the people and finally broken the bones and lies of their sick imaginings. Only then can the rebuilding begin. In other words, the producers are consumed by the nihilists, so that both die – and then, with the nihilists dead, the honest begin to produce again, only to draw the hungry nihilists back to pillage them, to start the whole cycle once more. (Thus do we get the myth of the vampires who, after consuming the totality of their victims, go to sleep until the victims replenish themselves once more.)

Rome’s self-destruction came from enslaving young men into military service lasting a decade or two – and crippling taxes that, due to transportation limits, could only be levied on those living in towns and cities. Naturally, many young Roman men found the pleasures of city living not worth the price of enslavement and endless theft, and so fled to the country. And so the politicians found themselves with fewer conscripts, and so had to hire more mercenaries – which meant raising both taxes and the length of conscription. This vicious circle grew until, finally, the politicians ran out of money – at which point the ‘barbarian’ mercenaries returned to Rome in search of their paychecks and, finding the coffers empty, sacked the place. The nihilists destroyed another society, and the world returned to a more limited and peaceful existence. During the Dark Ages, men elevated themselves from Roman serfs of war to Christian serfs of agriculture – and, due to Christianity’s hostility to slavery (growing as it did as a religion among slaves), labour-productivity gains could occur without threatening the investment that the ruling classes had in their human chattel.

Then, through improvements in agricultural technologies – shoulder harnesses that did not choke, crop rotations, land consolidation through the Black Death etc. – cities grew again, and so of course did interest in Roman law, since the late Roman war of all-against-all had been forgotten. Laws are the future mirror of society, and yet little critical examination was given to laws which directly resulted in the death of the Republic, and so all the logical contradictions – always exploited by nihilists – were left firmly in place.

The discovery of the value of the scientific method – the true beginning of the Industrial Revolution – by Francis Bacon in the 16th Century marked the death knell of the universal Christian church. The printing press transmitted both the curiously logical rants of Luther and the growing desire to cast aside spurious fantasy for empirical observation.

All this, of course, culminated in the great desire to leash the murderous State and set it to work for the benefit of its traditional victims – to turn the voracious vampire into a placid cook. The growth of mobile capital in the 17th and 18th centuries undercut the traditional power of military might, since gold could be moved and smuggled at will, and did not need or respect the power of the sword. At any given time, only one person can really own a piece of land, and it requires great slaughter to assert and maintain that claim. Gold, however, is fluid, and passes easily under lowered swords. Taxing merchants soon became more profitable than taxing feudal Lords – and traders were far less of a martial threat to boot! Thus laws began to swing to the favour of the merchants, and since the power of the State corrupts everyone, even honest traders, the system which resulted was mercantilism.

Mercantilism was the standard ‘murder for profit’ scheme that always results from the existence of a State. Merchants bribed Kings, who then bribed the military to ensure exclusive trading territories for merchants. The brutal costs were diffused among silent, poverty-stricken and starving consumers, and the gains accrued, as always, to the murderous few.

This all began to die with the birth of the new world, wherein life could begin without the blood-crusted layers of historical slaughterers. The fact of the matter is that healthy people never even think of the need for a State – they are always provoked into surrendering their freedoms by the taunts and provocations of the nihilists, and because it is always their great-grandchildren who pay the most for their failures of integrity.

And then – and then, the nihilists were faced with a true horror, which was that through the success of the new world, it became abundantly clear that the State governed best which governed least. And so – why need a State at all?

And of course the American experiment was fatally flawed, in logic, reality and morality. If all men are equal, who can hold violent power over another? How can a State logically exist at all? The failure of the Founding Fathers to close this loop left it open for constant picking and mocking from the State-fed intellectuals of the Old World.

The slow widening of this logical hole resulted in the two great triumphs of governments in the 19th century. The first was the founding of State education, and the second was the creation of government banks. The first produced State slaves, while the second created a near-bottomless funding mechanisms for State wars.

Thus were the horrors of the 20th century produced. Wars need both money and men – the State banks produced the first, and the State schools the second. Nihilism ran rampant. The First World War achieved everything that was intended – a new class of war profiteers, a clear demonstration of multi-state genocides, and State-dependent women, children and wounded veterans.

And then?

Well, then, women got the vote. Women are many wonderful things, but political economists they are not. Women want food and shelter for their children, and don’t really care about abstract rights. Women have not had the direct experiences of war that men have had, and so did not fear the State to the same degree. The granting of female suffrage was followed within a few years by the creation of the welfare state – more accurately known as bribery politics. This was also made possible by the creation of paper currency and the expansion of State banking powers.

Now that the State could borrow against future multi-generational tax receipts, there was no possibility of preventing the inevitable collapse. Tax revolts were impossible, because the State had trained the children to believe that murder was virtue, and deductions-at-source masked the threat of murder at the root of taxation. The State now owned the poor, the sick, dependent women and children, unions, subsidized businesses, the military, farmers and a thousand other social groups. The average individual now has no chance to stem the growing tide of parasitism and the resulting spread of nihilism.

That is the quick tour – for those with the patience to sink deep into sentences, there is a lot to be gained from review. The source of our current misery and coming collapse is violence, of course, but it is a gang of smiling villains that holds our leash – and they will continue to smile as long as we obey. No society in the history of the planet has ever thrown off nihilism when it has advanced so far – and if anyone doubts this, they should remember that we are now in the terminal stages of our self-destruction, since we have finally entered the age of heroism. Not convinced? Read about the War on Terror and in Iraq, and then reread the first few chapters of this essay. The end is always in the beginning.

A moral journey...

I am always striving to follow the dictates of reason, and not falter from the consequences of logical premises. The path of pure reason has been a challenging, grueling, startling and joyous adventure, since it turns out that just about everything I have ever been taught – or imbibed through modern culture – is pure fantasy. Reason can be utterly counterintuitive, just like physics. Sensually, we experience the world as flat, the sun as the same size as the moon and both as rotating around us. I grew up believing that we need a government, the police and armies. However, none of this is so.

Morality is like science and medicine, in that it is both incredibly powerful – and completely optional. We do not have to be moral, just as we do not have to be rational, scientific or follow healthy habits – but rejecting morality always results in misery and failure. If we fail to follow the dictates of science, the physical world remains a deadly mystery to us – and if we fail to follow the dictates of morality, the social world remains a deadly mystery to us.

Any system of rational thought requires that principles are derived from entities (‘gravity’ from an apple), and then extrapolated to all related entities (all objects with mass). Empirical validation and theoretical consistency must go hand in hand.

Thus if there are any preferred forms for human behaviour (i.e. negotiation versus violence), then they must be preferred for all people. Morality does not change for a man just because he puts on a uniform; theft does not become moral just because it’s called taxation. Calling the sun ‘the moon’ does not make it stop burning.

The principle of non-violence must be at the root of any system of morality, since all human interactions are based on either violence or non-violence. Violence and violence are opposites, like attraction and repulsion. In the realm of gravity, objects with mass either attract or repel one another – they cannot do both simultaneously. Thus any principle which describes an interaction cannot approve both one action and its opposite at the same time, for the same entity.

Morality describes the ideal methods of human interaction. Either human beings should deal with one another through violence, or through reason – both cannot be condoned, since that would be blatant contradiction, and so both illogical and anti-scientific.

Any moral theory must then either be for violence, or against violence. If a moral theory is against violence, it must be against violence under all circumstances. There can be no situation under which violence is an acceptable solution to human interactions.

The principle of self-defense raises no problems; since violence is evil, it must be opposed. Self-defense has the same relation to violence that surgery does to random stabbing. If health is the goal, destruction (e.g. amputation) may be the means under certain circumstances. If a person has declared himself cancerous by attacking those around him, he may be retaliated against.

Through my articles, I explore the logical consequences of a morality which bans any individual from using violence – as well a scientific epistemology which forbids any elevation of concepts above instances. What the latter means is that if the principle of gravity is derived from the observation of physical entities, no principle of gravity can contradict the properties of any single physical entity it describes. Concepts, in other words, are always derived from tangible instances. In any conflict between the properties of physical objects and a theory which describes them, the theory must always give way. If your theory says that all apples fall down, and one apple falls up, your theory must be amended, or rejected.

What does this mean in the realm of morality? Well, if morality is a principle, it must be absolute and universal – just as scientific theories are. Morality must be derived from the desired actions of individuals, and then abstracted to apply to all individuals. In other words, if you do not use violence in all of your interactions with others, you must choose which path to take – should you use violence or non-violence in all your interactions with others? You can continue to ‘mix and match’, but you cannot claim morality as your justification, just as no pseudo-scientist can claim the support of the scientific for his contradictory and unverifiable claims.

If you choose non-violence as your moral absolute, then all human beings must be subjected to such morality – with no exceptions. Since concepts are always derived from instances, no aggregate of people can escape the moral absolute of non-violence – any more than a bushel of apples can escape the gravity that each individual apple is subject to.

What does this mean in practice? Here is where things get really fascinating. Since concepts such as ‘government’, ‘army’, and ‘police’ do not exist in reality – just as a ‘bushel’ does not exist – then all individuals these concepts describe are subject to the same moral absolutes as everyone else. The only alternative to this view is to say either (a) that all people should have the same rights as government representatives, or (b) there are no moral rules whatsoever. In either case, creating special rules for certain people is both illogical and immoral.

This brings us to the following principle: whatever is allowed to one, is allowed to all. Whatever is disallowed to one, is disallowed to all.

Are individuals allowed to carry guns? If one person is, then all are. If one person is not allowed, then none are allowed. If no one is allowed to carry guns, then policemen and soldiers cannot carry guns. If policemen and soldiers are allowed to carry guns, then everyone is allowed to carry guns.

(Although it is not essential, the argument from absurdity does help here. If the police are not allowed to carry guns, how are they supposed to arrest armed criminals?)

What about nuclear weapons? Remember: there is either only one moral rule for all individuals, or there is no morality at all, and everything is whim, fancy and brute short-term desire. Since there is no such thing as the ‘government’, if you say that the ‘government’ can own nuclear weapons, then what you are really saying is that individual ‘A’ (some leader) can own nuclear weapons, but that individual ‘B’ (some citizen) cannot own nuclear weapons. Why? How can two rules exist for the same species? It’s like saying that one apple is subject to gravity, but another is not.

A corollary of the rule that what applies to one must apply to all is that whatever judgments are applied to one, must be applied to all. If you say that some apples are fruit, then all apples are fruit. If you say that gun use must be restricted because people are hot-tempered and will shoot people indiscriminately, then your judgment also applies to policemen, since policemen are people too, and you have not solved the problem. Similarly, if you believe that governments must regulate businesses because businessmen are greedy and destructive, you must then accept that government bureaucrats will also be greedy and destructive – and with the power of the police and army to boot! Again, you have not solved the problem.

Regarding property rights, again, it is a simple binary proposition. Either property rights exist, or they do not. Since property rights regulate the use of physical objects, this means that either physical objects can be used, or they cannot be used. If no property rights exist, the no one has the right to use property of any kind – including food or shelter – since any use requires ownership. If property rights do exist, then all individuals possess them. Since aggregates do not exist, no aggregation of human beings can possess the ‘right’ to violate the property rights of any other individuals. Taxation, therefore, is immoral – the unholy combination of theft and propaganda. The very concept of ‘government’ also becomes immoral and illogical, since it is a conceptual entity which claims ‘rights’ for certain individuals which are not possessed by other individuals. I can call an apple a pear, but changing its name does not affect its nature and properties. I can call a man a ‘policeman’, but that does not change one atom of his being. The act of putting on certain pieces of clothing does not eject a man from objective reality and his common humanity.

Does this mean that all policemen are evil? Well, to the degree that policemen act to support the self-defense of others, they are moral – but they are no more moral than any other individual who performed the same actions. And if they perform any other actions, they are as immoral as anyone else. A policeman who drags you off to jail for tax evasion is as immoral as a Mafia thug who breaks your legs for failing to pay ‘protection’.

This should be enough to give you a good understanding of the nature and content of my articles. There is only one other aspect of my writing which I should warn you about, however, since gaining a true understanding of morality is not for the faint of heart – as anyone who knows the story of the life and death of Socrates can well appreciate.

Those who advocate separate ‘moralities’ for different groups of humanity are corrupt – even more so than those who advocate prayer as the only effective treatment for cancer, since those who advocate prayer do not demand that those who disagree with them are shot. If those among your friends and family advocate violence in any form – support for the State, taxation, social programs, the military, wars etc. – then you are duty-bound to exclude them from your lives. This is often the hardest pill to swallow from a personal standpoint, so I wish to warn you fairly up front. Living with integrity is not easy, since we are all social beings, but it is the natural and logical conclusion of rational morality. If you are committed to opposing violence, you can make the case to your friends and family, but if they continue to resist your arguments without reason or evidence, then they must be discarded, since a moral man’s loyalty must first and foremost be to rationality, truth, morality and the health of his own soul.

We cannot ask the world to reject irrationality in general if we are not prepared to reject it in our own lives. It is a hard road – as both my wife and I can testify – and all we can say is that there are near-inexhaustible joys on the far side! The truth is the greatest challenge – and the acceptance of it the greatest reward that life has to offer.

I wish you all the best, and look forward to hearing from you. Enjoy.

Stefan Molyneux
Sunday, July 31, 2005
6:03:53 PM

Ahh, the media...

So I read an enjoyable – but terribly predictable – book this weekend called ‘Weapons of Mass Distraction’, about how the media ‘dropped the ball’ on Iraq. Naturally, the writer was shocked and appalled, and hinted at dark conspiracies regarding the FCC, and its impending liberalization of the media marketplace. The networks were expecting to lose $200m in their war coverage in Iraq, he glowers, and so were expecting the FCC to open up the markets so they could recoup their profits after the war. The guy heading the FCC was the son of the guy heading the military – Mr. Powell Jr. – and that media ‘liberalization’ after the war was payback for its positive war coverage and this was all terrible and so on and on.

And what did the author advocate as the solution? All the old left-wing chestnuts that will absolutely amount to jack-shit. ‘Grassroots activism’. Right. Grass is what people walk on. Letter-writing campaigns. Community participation. Argumentative distractions. The appearance of doing something – which is far worse than doing nothing. All such a load of blind, self-righteous nonsense.

Don’t get me wrong (though I admit that that’s rather easy to do!). There’s nothing wrong with speaking out and arguing passionately. In fact, it is essential! But life is short – and so, for the sake of all that is holy stop wasting your precious time! The more powerful your enemy is, the more you have to undermine the very roots of its power! Nagging the buds will never uproot the tree.

Why is the media so complacent about the government? Why, because almost everyone in the media has been educated by the government. This is at the root of it all. It’s really not so very complicated. I mean, how would critics approach the media’s portrayal of GM if every child in the entire country world was educated at GM schools? What they’d say is that the first thing you had to address was the fact that GM spent fifteen years straight pouring its shall we say limited perspective into the delicate brains of impressionable children!

Let’s say next that everyone was forced to buy a new GM car every year. What would the result be? Poor service, of course, and crappy cars. Would intelligent critics say that the solution for this was to write letters to GM demanding more quality and then go and picket GM dealerships appealing for a more positive customer experience? Of course not! They’d say: the problem, my fellow citizens, is that we are being forced to buy a new GM car every year. Get rid of that stupid rule, and GM will reform of its own accord. We won’t have to lift a finger. In other words, voluntary taxation is the only way for citizens to control the government.

The second major problem is that the media must be licensed by the government – licenses which must be re-approved every year. In other words, if you operate a radio or television station without permission from the government, you will be shot. Sure, there are rules about keeping your license, but who cares? If the government yanks your license and gives it to someone else, you’ll be out of business before your lawyer even returns your panicked message. Remember – the government has made it impossible for all but the largest institutions to use the court system, which is exactly what large institutions (and the government) want. Monopolies aren’t granted by ‘single charter’ any more – they grow like cataracts – through slow, rising, chilling misty layers of evil laws. Licenses are first among them.

The third major problem is that there are so many stupid and corrupt laws that the government can make absolutely anyone’s life a living hell. Feel like being audited? Want a health and safety inspection of your home or business? How about being implicated in a drug bust? Can the cops find something in your car or home if they really want to? No one wants to piss of the government, because you just never know where it might end up. There are swarms of mean little civil servants out there with time on their hands and bile in their hearts. So who’s really going to piss the government off? Why take the chance? So if you’re a reporter, ask the easy questions, or attack specific policies – never anything important, like the income tax or any form of media regulation.

Which brings us to – government regulation of the media. All the FCC crap. Of course government regulations end up serving the powers-that-be. What do you think the government creates regulations? To help you? To protect you from the media? I mean really! Turn it off if you don’t like it. Try that with the tax man.

No, media regulation only serves to ensure that the government will grant operating licenses to those outlets which praise it the most. And like all unholy deals, not even a whiff of it will ever make the airwaves. Not even a hint. Everything runs smooth as silk. Broad smiles and hearty cheer. Concern over things going wrong. Tough questions, drinks together afterwards. All the plump self-indulgence of the pretty and the amplified, leaning slightly forward and explaining everything to you.

All that violence requires is what Ayn Rand called ‘the sanction of the victim’ – the cloaking of civility over the sword. They force you, but they want you to believe that you have chosen.
Forget it. No salvation will come from the media, so forget about nagging it. It is owned and operated by the State. If you’re interested in freeing the media from the clutches of violence, then you must advocate the following:

1. abolishment of State education
2. abolishment of the FCC
3. abolishment of the income tax
4. and, eventual abolishment of government

Which media critics will take on the above? Only those who wish to join me in the lonely wastes of the Internet’s ill-visited corners – the crannies farthest from the mirage of power, but closest to the sun of truth.

Why Write..?

So. Interesting weekend. I lazed around a good deal, and read ‘Into the Buzzsaw’, which is a fascinating look into the world of self-censoring news organizations. To every Libertarian, this is standard stuff – i.e. why do the important questions never get asked? – but it also gave me food for thought in a few areas that I rarely deal with.

The first is the realm of lawsuits. Everyone knows that lawsuits are largely foolish, but reading this book this weekend really helped me understand the degree to which large organizations use lawsuits to keep smaller organizations from disseminating unpleasant facts (particularly in England, which has no constitutional protections for the freedom of the press).

The sad and funny aspect to all this is that journalists who get sued invariably end up taking those who sue them to court as well. In other words, those who are abused by bad laws end up trying to use those bad laws to avenge themselves. Of course, it never works.

It also helped me with another personal agony that I’m sure all Libertarians face – the feeling that I should be doing more to help ‘the cause’, but feeling that nothing I do will ever really change anything. Take Harry Browne – a great speaker, and strong thinker, and an excellent writer. Been hacking at things for decades. Nothing. Not a scrap. Not even a tiny part of the national debate. He takes his stabs where he can, but the fact of the matter is that the State is a closed, self-healing system. Nothing lasts, everything goes down the memory hole in a blinding rush of absence. Iraq has no WMD’s – change the story. Prisoners get tortured? Next story. Foreign aid a catastrophe? More foreign aid! The minds of the citizens are crippled by brain-busting, droningly dull education, and then distracted with celebrities, empty whiz-bang movies, false seriousness and sentimental throat-lump patriotism.

So old Harry didn’t get much done – and neither did Rand, or Rothbard, or any of the other major activists for liberty. I’ve read, written and argued for over twenty years, and all I’ve noticed is that people don’t fight back any more – not because they’ve becoming convinced, but because they just really don’t care. They know the deal. Our society was dead before we were even born. Our society died in the First World War – the age of the Fed, the income tax, and the rise of pensions. The Libertarian experiment lasted just over a hundred years. By the time I was born – 1966 – the government controlled nuclear weapons, education, old age pensions, energy, the poor, the farmers, the media – and many corporations to boot. Getting upset with the government is like trying to apply a defibrillator to a corpse from the 19th century. It’s all done and gone. There is no rescuing our societies as they are, as they stand. It has never been done in the past, and it will not be done now. You can’t fight the degree of violence that our society has descended to. Billions of dollars, millions of guns. You can never fight violence with words. You can only expose violence with words – and if that does not galvanize the population, then the society is dead. We’ve been decapitated – all that remains now is the final, spasmodic dance.

So why am I writing? Why, for the same reason that Winston Smith did. Not for me. Not for now. For those who come after.

All that is required, really, is just to hate violence. Just hate it. That’s the one thing that drives me more than anything. Violence is the furnace at the center of my fire. I grew up in a violent family, and I know how destructive and corrupting violence is. I know how no one ever survives using violence. I must have been a pacifist in the womb, since I never retaliated, and have never hit anyone in my life – the very idea makes me nauseous. I have a wonderfully peaceful and loving relationship with my beautiful wife, and have worked hard to get all the crazy people out of my life, both personally and professionally. That is what is required if you are to really oppose violence. You have to ditch the crazies. I have no contact with my family any more, and couldn’t be happier for it! (My wife is the same way.) I can’t do anything about the State, except write and think and talk, and I can’t do anything about the casual violence, instability and unreliability of the average person (read: almost everyone). The only think I can do is live my life as strongly, passionately and peacefully as possible, and say to everyone who will listen that I truly hate violence, and that they should to.

If that’s the only drumbeat of mine that reaches out of this current jungle into the future, beyond the ruins of what is to come, then that is worth everything to me.