Some People Just Aren't to Be Taken Seriously - (from personal experience)

There’s a certain group (who are such radical individualists that even referring to them as a group insults them) that I used to identify with that operates under the assumption that when it comes to the State, politics, governance, etc., they have the solution to any problem as it relates to said organization and/or concepts. Whether you consider yourself to be on the left, right, or center of the political or cultural spectrum; everyone can agree that the government we live under has severe problems. I will continue to operate under this assumption without detailing or giving examples as to what concerns the left, right, and center find most pressing as specifics are not relevant to this Substack.

The one group I am addressing would, for the most part, tell you they exist outside of the trio of political categories I mentioned above. This group—who commonly go by the terms anarchist and voluntaryist—judges politics and any interactions within society (another word many of them would eschew) upon whether they are "moral" or not. Commonly, their opinion is that no person has the right to initiate force upon another; therefore, since the government taxes the individual—to use their most common example—the government’s very existence is immoral. The people who believe this are so invested in this belief that any words I type here to challenge that dogma puts me in the class of the oppressor, according to them. If you’ve ever encountered one of these anarchists/voluntaryists, (again, I used to be one of them), you were most likely left dumbfounded and unable to forget it.

I will again ask the question raised above: Is it immoral to initiate force against another person? My answer: I would have to say yes to every occasion in which this would happen. However, the qualification must be made that imposing violence or force upon someone whom you—being the only witness—just saw commit rape is not initiating force.

Making the argument that initiating force is always immoral while at the same time stating that self-defense or the defense of others is not immoral is injecting an exception into that absolute statement. The question then becomes, who decides whether the exception is just or unjust if there is no government? Here’s where the proponent of the proposal that "the initiation of force is immoral" starts to delve into pure theory. Both men, the man who saw the rape happen and the rapist, are hauled into a "Privately-owned Court" which will investigate the matter. Who is the one "hauling them into court?" The answer is whichever "Private Police Force" the community has hired to do that. What if they haven’t hired one? OK, then the "Private Police Force" of the owner of the property upon which the altercation happened will take them to court. What if the alleged rapist doesn’t want to go to court? What if the woman perished in the attack and now it is your word against the attacker?  What if the attacker accuses you of both the attack on the woman and himself? Aren’t the Private Police now initiating force against a presumably innocent man?

The fact is that a society based upon the maxim that "no person has the right to initiate force upon another" demands the need for an individual or group to judge whether force acted upon another by an individual or group is legitimate or not. If the act of force is indeed against someone who has damaged another’s person or property, that someone is a threat to order and must be brought to justice, otherwise chaos ensues. The people who would detain this individual (often referred to as ‘kidnappers’ by anarchists and voluntaryists) are commonly afforded immunity in the present dispensation, which all too often leads to abuse. When considering our present culture, thinkers such as "Mr. Libertarian" Murray Rothbard wrote, "Cops must be unleashed, and allowed to administer instant punishment, subject of course to liability when they are in error." Instinctively, I agree with Rothbard’s qualification that police must be held liable when they are in error. I also understand that we live in the most litigious age in history, and the threat of liability opens the door for every murderer, rapist, and thief to file lawsuits against those that apprehend them. An attempt to boil down the societal situation in which we find ourselves to black-and-white arguments is foolish. But there are still dangerous criminals out there, and, unfortunately, many of them are in law enforcement as well.

When I began to understand the concept of Chesterton’s fence—"the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood"—my instinct to respond to issues with definitive answers—ones that were untested and rested purely upon theory—went away. Suddenly I possessed the ability to respond to queries with, "I don’t know; I have to think about that more." I know that sounds logical to the rational thinker, but from personal experience, I can tell you that becoming possessed by an ideology whose adherents refer to it as "the most perfect" blah blah blah is a lot easier than calculating what works in reality. Add to that the fact that you get to ride the highest moral horse in the land, adherence to an ideology can be very appealing to a certain personality type.

We’ve been dealt a hand, and no one reading this has the ability to change the game or flip the table. Ideologies with “absolute” beliefs not grounded in the world we currently inhabit are not useful. To be individuals that can be taken seriously, we should be doing everything we can within our control to first get ourselves in a better financial and cultural position (get out of cities), and then, if it’s something that interests you, get involved in politics locally. Will it be easy? No. Will you fail? Probably often. But you will learn what politics is all about, and if you get your way only part of the time, you can make great strides. A day trader told me years ago that less than 50% of his trades were successful, but he did his best to minimize the risk on the losers, while maximizing his profit on the winners. When you think about it, that attitude describes life perfectly: not everything you do will be a success, but the mitigation of loss while you’re learning is what’s key.