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.