The strongest economic, social, and political institutions are not those that possess the most compelling justification, but those that are so taken for granted that hardly anyone even thinks about whether they have a sound justification. Of all such privileged institutions, the state is by far the most important. We are all born into a world of powerful states whose apparatus of control and plunder pervades the whole of socio-economic life. We are taught about politics not as a matter of whether the state should exist, but only as a matter of how and by whom it should be operated. Dispensing with the state entirely is generally regarded as a preposterous idea, either childishly silly, heedlessly dangerous, or stupidly utopian. I regret to say that when I first encountered the idea of dispensing with the state as we know it, back in the 1970s, I dismissed the idea with nothing more than a quick reference to the economists standard concepts of apology for the state -- imperfect information, externalities, public goods, free riders. I needed decades of learning more about how states actually operate and of pondering how stateless societies might operate in order to arrive at the conclusion that states have no genuine legitimacy at all, but only an unthinking acceptance and toleration by the masses and an ill-founded set of excuses to which ambitious intellectuals and power-lusting politicians appeal in their quest for domination of their fellow human beings. Perhaps as in Euclidian geometry, the shortest distance between two points -- in this case, between somnolent acceptance of the state and full awareness of its evils and its dispensability -- is a straight line. For most of us who manage to make this transit, however, a long and winding road is the course we follow. Those who have not yet even begun this journey would do well to get under way immediately. Until enough of us have learned how to escape from or tear down the state, all humanity will remain at constant risk of total destruction.
Posted on: Thu, 04 Dec 2014 15:52:57 +0000
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