outreach and the anarchist/statist divide

In the past, when I tried to communicate anarchy to people, I assumed that we agreed on basic moral principles. I assumed that they were also opposed to theft. I thought all I had to do was prove to them that taxation is theft and they'd immediately become anarchists. I was wrong. They want to be opposed to theft. At least, they want to appear to be opposed to theft, but they also want to be able to commit theft to further their own ends.

When I demonstrate that taxation is theft, they first try to argue that it isn't. They all bring up club dues. They all bring up expatriation. We go through their whole exhaustive list and I prove every argument wrong. If they make it this far, they agree that taxation is theft, but they continue to support it anyway.

They next try to argue that taxation is necessary to avoid greater injustice. They all invoke a Hobbesian nightmare. They all equate anarchy to chaos. They all ascribe god like civilizing powers to government force. So I ask them if they or any of their friends would kill and steal in the absence of government. They usually say no.  So I ask them what evidence they have to support their claim and who they think is going to be committing all these crimes. It's surprising how eager they are at this point to reveal their bigotry. Liberals will tell you that greedy capitalists and ignorant religious conservatives would be committing these crimes. Conservatives will tell you that greedy poor people and godless liberal atheists would be committing these crimes. These conversations never produced any anarchists. The only benefit that came of them was my own greater understanding of the depth of the fear of other people among statists.

So I changed the conversation recently. I've been trying to show people that theft is wrong for the same reason that rape is wrong. I figured that nobody would support universal rape, no matter how Hobbesian the world might be in it's absence. I've been using the argument that I made on this blog here. But, at least in person, nobody wanted to follow the logic of the argument. So instead, I started just asking people why they are opposed to rape. I figured that I would just keep challenging their reasons why rape is bad until they came to the non-aggression principle. This didn't work either. Here's a transcript of my most successful attempt.

Me: why is rape bad?

Her: Because it causes physical and emotional pain.

Me: What if you rape someone in a coma? It doesn't cause pain. Is it still bad?

Her: That's not the same thing.

Me: Raping someone in a coma isn't rape?

Her: I have to go.

I'm not having these conversations anymore either. They never produced any anarchists. The only benefit that came from them was my own greater understanding of how little statists care about moral principles. If I didn't have a good reason for a moral position I asserted, I wouldn't just be embarrassed; I'd be horrified. Nothing else would matter to me until I could answer that question. Statists genuinely don't care.

And this, I realize, is the real difference between statists and anarchists. Anarchists care about justice. They care about defining what justice is for themselves, about the process of self discovery that is necessary to achieve it, about the unobstructed intimacy that is the reward of it, and to building a society based on this standard above everything else. Anarchists are the kind of people who hold justice as their highest value. How many times have you heard an anarchist say that it feels like they were always an anarchist and they just didn't know it yet. Isn't that how you feel? That's certainly how I feel. Anarchy is the conclusion that we all came to, because it is the only logical conclusion you can come to, if you are passionately dedicated to defining justice.

Statists don't care about justice. They care about fear avoidance. Liberals are afraid of poverty. Conservatives are afraid of criminality. They're both so terrified of other people, that they're willing to support the universal threat of murder, even against the people they love most, to keep the monsters away. These people are cowards.

So I want to make the case for a new avenue for outreach. We've already recognized that the political process is a waste of time. I've become convinced that making both pragmatic and moral arguments is also largely a waste of time. They help the kind of people who hold justice as their highest value to come to anarchy more quickly, but they do absolutely nothing to convince statists to value justice over fear avoidance.

If we want to reach statists, we need to understand how people form their values. We need a fully integrated and fully elaborated system of logical deductions concerning the process of value formation. We need something like praxeology, if it isn't an extension of praxeology itself. To put it another way, we need an “Austrian” school of psychology. I don't know what that looks like yet, and I have no idea what it will tell us about how best to reach statists, but I've become convinced that it's the only way that we ever will. And we have to learn how to reach statists if we want to have any hope of achieving liberty in our lifetime.

The difference between principle and pretense

I once spent a year as a vegetarian for practical reasons.

Sidebar: I mean practical as in “not ethically motivated”. There was nothing practical as in “useful” about my reasons. I was a vegetarian because my Sat Sadh Guru told me that it would improve my daily karma which would help me hear the Shabd, which would lead me to the astral plane. Story for another time.

At the end of that year, I was developing conflicting values. I either wanted to dedicate my time to achieving full enlightenment, or getting sexy. I thought that I wouldn't have time to both meditate and lift weights. More importantly, I thought I was going to have to eat meat if I wanted to gain mass, which would throw a big karma coated wrench in my universal consciousness machine. Eventually, I decided that my six pack was more important to me than access to the akashic records, and I determined to start eating meat the following day.

But I couldn't sleep that night. Visions of enslaved and mutilated livestock danced in my head. The thought of killing an animal for food had become horrifying to me. After a few hours, I got up and I cried half the night over PETA propaganda films. I instantly became a vegan and I stayed that way for two more years. All the while, I preached compassion for the suffering of other sentient beings, and fire and brimstone against the non-human exploitation industry.

But questions started coming up pretty quickly:

1. What about honey? If it's immoral to benefit from the exploitation of oysters because they can experience suffering, then how could it not be immoral to benefit from the exploitation of bees?
2. What about vaccines? Don't scientists make those using chicken embryos? Is it immoral to kill baby chickens to save baby humans?
3. Why is my reaction to killing human beings infinitely more intense than my reaction to killing animals? If I were in a situation where the only options I had were to starve to death or kill and eat another human being, no matter how much of a self serving bastard the guy was, I'd probably choose to die. But if it came down to me or a cow, no matter how much of a doting, playful, docile, once-saved-a-kid-from-a-burning-building bovine hero she was, wouldn't I kill her?
4. Why should I respect the rights of species that lack the empathy or the intellectual capacity to respect the rights of others? The fact that animals have the capacity to experience suffering is insufficient. I have the capacity to experience suffering too, but the grizzly bear eating me alive doesn't really give a shit.
5. Actually, why do I have rights? Why does anybody have rights?

The answers were difficult to accept, which is why it took me two years to be able to say:

1. Fuck bees. They don't respect my rights.
2. Fuck chickens. Human life is more important than anything else ever.
3. Fuck cows. Killing a cow and killing a human aren't morally equivalent anymore than killing a cow and killing a fruit fly are morally equivalent. To say otherwise is to devalue the intellectual and emotional capacities of both species.
4. Fuck animal rights. They don't have any. If you physically lack the necessary hardware and software for universal empathy, then you don't get any rights. Sorry, animals. Rights are a two way street. Call me when the nano-swarm infects you with augmented consciousness.
5. I have rights because I have the capacity to respect the rights of others and have so far demonstrated my willingness to do so. This is why you lose your rights when and to the degree that you violate other people's rights. If you steal my car, not only do I get to use force against you to get it back, but I get to take more from you than you took from me, to compensate myself for the inconvenience. If you murder my child, you become my slave for as long as I choose to allow you to live.

This is the general pattern of principle building:

1. You have an emotional reaction to something. (like, killing an animal)
2. You assert a universal principle. (like, respect the rights of animals)
3. You follow the principle to an absurd conclusion. (like, respect the rights of fruit flies)
4. You assert a better universal principle. (like, respect the rights of those who respect yours)
5. Repeat steps 3-4 ad infinitum.

This process, I hope, stands in obvious contrast to the normal pattern of pretentious moralizing:

1. Have an emotional reaction to something.
2. Assert a universal principle.
3. Make exceptions.
4. Maintain the assertion irrespective of reason, evidence, contradiction or consequences.

Let's illustrate this process with guns.

1. Emotion: Gun violence is bad.
2. Principle: No one should be allowed to have a gun.
3. Exception: The government should use guns to take every one else's guns.
4. La la la la la I can't hear you.

Now let's do a comparison to really see how the models differ from each other. The principled process goes like this:

1. Emotion: violence is bad.
2. Principle: Don't use violence.
3. Absurdity: Don't use violence to protect someone you love from an attacker.
4. New principle: Don't initiate violence.
   3. Absurdity: Don't initiate violence to steal a car to drive a dying friend to a hospital.
   4. New principle: If you initiate violence, compensate your victim.

The pretentious process goes like this:

1. Emotion: Violence is bad.
2. Principle: Don't use violence.
3. Exception:  The government needs a monopoly on violence to protect us from violence.
4. Don't taze me, bro!

If you aren't questioning your principles, if you aren't following them to the point of absurdity, if you're making obvious exceptions, if you ignore reason and evidence, and if you get offended when I point these facts out, you're pretentious.

You can either give up asserting moral principles, or you can give up making exceptions to them. You can either begin an honest search for justice, or you can forfeit any right to appeal to morality, but you can't have both. Make a decision.

p.s.

I never did get sexy or achieve enlightenment.  But I did free myself from many of the chain rattling ghosts of childhood trauma. So that's cool.

Dear compulsory education advocates,

Whether you believe in compulsion by government or by parents, whether you believe in public or private or home schooling, I'm talking to you. If you've ever said, “I wish my parents would have forced me to learn [x]” I'm talking to you. If you think children are savages who have to be civilized, that they naturally eschew learning and socialization and must be forced to submit to formal education for their own good, that allowing a child to opt out of standardized education is an irresponsible act of neglect, I'm talking to you. 

I've got just one thing to say to you:

On behalf of every child whose initiative you have stolen, who can't set her own goals because you've always demanded she prioritize your goals first, who can't accomplish her own goals because she never had the freedom to play and develop the imagination required for entrepreneurship...

On behalf of every child whose self acceptance you have stolen, who can't measure her own success except by the letter grade approval of authority, who seeks out abusive relationships because you never respected her autonomy...

On behalf of every child whose ambition you have stolen, who prefers escapism to entrepreneurship because you made her reality a burden for your convenience, who can't remember the first subject she fell in love with because you beat it out of her with endless standardized tests...

On behalf of every child whose creativity you have stolen, who can't think critically because you expected her to obediently regurgitate, who would have invented new technologies, new theories, new art forms, new philosophies or new business models but didn't because she was shamed into mindlessly pantomiming the process of learning things she didn't care about rather than encouraged to explore her own interests...

On behalf of every child you have ever called lazy because she failed to adequately fain enthusiasm for the drudgery of your priorities...

On behalf of every child who ever jumped off a building rather than face the shame of your disappointment or the hopelessness of a lifetime without escape from enslavement to your priorities...

On behalf of all of them and more, I'd just like to say,

Fuck you.

Seriously,

Ansible

Dear Liberals,

When conservatives say things like:

“Allowing gay marriage will lead to the general moral decay of society.”

you know they have no idea what they're talking about. You know that morality has nothing to do with sexual orientation. You know conservatives are afraid to face their own unresolved personal issues related to sexuality and gender identity, and they're inventing disaster scenarios to justify it. And you know that withholding basic rights, like establishing custody and inheritance, from same sex couples is unforgivable. When conservatives say things like:

“Allowing the legalization of marijuana will lead to wide spread addiction to hard drugs.”

you know they have no idea what they're talking about. You know if you give them the statistical and biological facts about drug use, addiction and the medicinal properties of marijuana, they will reject it no matter how conclusive it is. You know that the threat of wide spread hard drug addiction is a delusional scare tactic, but the threat of unnecessary suffering from withholding medication from incurably ill people is real, immediate and dire. And you know that destroying families and communities by sentencing peaceful people to the rape rooms of government cages is unforgivable.

You know conservatives refuse to think seriously about their moral principles. You know their positions amount to frivolous bigotry. And you're right. You're 100% right.

But what you don't know is that conservatives know the same thing about you. Conservatives know that when you say things like:

“Allowing unregulated free trade will lead to the destruction of the middle class.”

you have no idea what you're talking about. They know that the middle class is a necessary byproduct of the unregulated market and that the most heavily regulated markets in history have always been the most stratified. They know that you're afraid to face your own unresolved personal issues related to poverty and efficacy, and you're inventing disaster scenarios to justify it.  They know that banishing poor and predominantly non-white children to a lifetime of poverty by removing the bottom rungs of the economic ladder is unforgivable.  When you say things like:

“Allowing unregulated private gun ownership will lead to a significant increase in violent crime.”

you have no idea what you're talking about. They know that if they give you the facts about how private gun ownership reduces crime rates, you will reject it no matter how conclusive it is.  They know that the threat of sudden increases in gang violence and school shootings is a delusional scare tactic, but that the threat of assault, home invasion, and rape in some communities is real, immediate and dire. They know that demanding that rape victims be disarmed is unforgivable.

They know that you refuse to think seriously about your moral principles. They know that your positions amount to frivolous bigotry. And they're right. They're 100% right.

Neither one of you has ever given a serious thought to moral principles. You call yourself a liberal, but what does that mean? What is the grand unifying concept from which all liberal positions logically follow? What is the guiding principle that connects being pro- universal reproductive rights with being anti- universal defensive rights? Until you can answer that question, until you can demonstrate a fully integrated system of values, you don't get to call liberalism a philosophy.

And maybe I can help both of you, because I see a pattern that fits both liberal and conservative positions. It goes like this:
                     

Allowing [natural rights] will lead to [bad stuff]. 

 

And I noticed another pattern in the way liberals and conservatives see each others positions.  It goes like this:

 [Violating natural rights] is unforgivable. 

 

Good luck,

Ansible

P.S.

Here's an example of a principle, in case you weren't sure what they look like.