The World Is F*cked—So What's Your Solution? Part 3

"There is a policeman inside all our heads. He must be destroyed." — as quoted in The Century of the Self

Humanity faces seemingly insurmountable challenges, but there are countless ways to help dissolve the old paradigm while building a new one.

As Part 1 of this article explored, tangible, material solutions can directly undermine the authority of the old system by helping people become less dependent on its services and decentralizing power. Part 2 highlighted the importance of turning inward to take responsibility and hold space for our human emotions so we are less susceptible to fear-mongering, propaganda, and false promises from people in power.

These two solutions are imperative to successful efforts to transform the world. However, they will amount to Sisyphus eternally pushing a boulder up a hill without one more solution: dissolving our conditioned acceptance of the system’s violent authority, which has wreaked havoc for thousands of years.

When your only tool is a hammer

The State’s violence is sometimes overt, like brazen instances of police brutality against unarmed or handcuffed suspects. Even more overt is war, “the health of the State,” as author Randolph Bourne described it. These are easy to identify.

But violence, or the threat of it, also tinges every State command, law, order, and dictate. It is the defining feature of political authority. This is true across all forms of government.

If that sounds like an outlandish claim, consider taxation. Some people may voluntarily choose to pay taxes, believing (misguidedly, in my view) that doing so contributes to the health, protection, and well-being of others and “society.” Most others pay to avoid the punishment for abstaining.

If someone would rather not pay, government authority dictates that they cannot simply “opt out.” They will likely be met with threatening letters from the IRS warning of further fines, jail time, or confiscation of property if the person does not cough up the money. Should they still refuse to pay, State threats will escalate. Should they resist the theft of their property, for example, enforcers will be dispatched to secure that property and punish the person should they resist the confiscation…and we all know what happens when you resist arrest—even peacefully.

This ladder of coercion is present at all levels of government.

Fail to pay your vehicle registration fee? You will be fined, threatened, and possibly robbed of your property should you dare to use it without paying a tithe to the State. Believe you own your home in full and decline to pay property taxes? Same routine. Miss a court date for a speeding ticket? The process begins again.

Even “the law,” which is considered the bulwark against barbarism and chaos, can only be enforced through violence. This is where police officers, or “law enforcement” come in, wielding, batons, guns, tasers, and other weapons to uphold the government’s rules. We are expected to submit to their commands, and if we don’t, whatever they do to us in response is considered our fault.

These dynamics are starkly different from the voluntary relationships we choose to have in every other realm of our lives. We can choose to purchase goods and services (or not), opt out of purchasing them (or not), and support causes (or not). There is no such option when it comes to funding or obeying the government—not without potentially violent consequences.

(This is not to say services the government currently provides—like road construction—are worthless. Rather, it is because they are valuable that most people would choose to pay for them voluntarily even if they weren’t forced to do so.)

Aside from the moral deficiency of using violence to manage “society,” this dynamic discourages accountability. What incentive do State employees have to serve people when they hold the firepower and when mass perception accepts this monopoly on violence as moral? Why would they bother to allocate resources efficiently, get corporate influence out of politics, or respect civil liberties, for example, when the masses are forced to fund their subpar services and egregious encroachments all the same?

Conditioned compliance and “consent”

Unfortunately, most people can’t see the violence inherent to government because the media, politicians, and civics textbooks and classes tend not to acknowledge it. Most of the people working in media and government and those writing said textbooks and teaching said classes likely don’t recognize it themselves. The collective belief that governments uphold civilization is deeply ingrained because we have been taught as much for generations.

Adding to this disparity between programming and reality is another aspect of traditional civics education: the beliefs that “we are the government,” and “your vote is your voice.” These sentiments keep people sincerely trusting that voting is the best way to express their values and intentions. They cultivate and feed the belief that our individual human identity is inextricable from government.

But when violence is at the root of State authority, the aspirational rhetoric around representative government falls apart. Most people seem to have at least an unconscious understanding of the force inherent to statism, or they wouldn’t be so concerned about the ‘wrong’ people getting elected. Partisans of all flavors fear that if their opponents take power, rights will be violated and abuses inflicted.

As 19th-century abolitionist Lysander Spooner articulated of the average citizen:

“He sees…that other men practise this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, be finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave.”

Spooner rejected the Constitution in part because no one alive in his time consented to its imposition roughly a century earlier. Further, only a tiny minority of people who were alive when the Constitution was written and ratified were asked if they consented or wanted to participate in the new system. This amounted to a tiny handful of people imposing a new ruling apparatus, and in the end, it failed to limit government as intended. In the end, the constitutional system still rests on the State’s monopoly on violence.

Moral dissonance

The coercion of the system is fundamentally at odds with human moral sensibilities. Educational institutions teach students about civics, democracy, and representative government at the same time children are also learning that it is wrong to kill, hurt, or steal from others.

This creates a collective cognitive dissonance where most people understand that they don’t have a right to harm others, whether through violence or theft, but also unconsciously believe they can delegate that “right” to people they elect or who otherwise work in government. But it remains that we are all just mortal people, whether citizens or members of the ruling class, and you can’t delegate rights you don’t have to other people who also don’t have those rights.

Despite this, most people believe bowing to those with guns, badges, robes, and other symbols of authority is the moral thing to do. Many believe ‘we need government because people are bad and stupid’ so someone else must shepherd and control humanity. But if people are bad and stupid, how are they qualified to vote to select other people to be their shepherds?

From both a moral and logical standpoint, violent authority is illegitimate.

“Do something”

The conditioned belief that it is our ‘duty’ and ‘privilege’ to ‘take part in government’ by voting is not only false but also spurs inaction in day-to-day life. Many (though not all, of course) people view voting as sufficiently ‘doing their part.’ They take little to no other action because they believe they’ve already participated.

When someone says they don't vote, the kneejerk reaction is to suggest that person would rather ‘do nothing.’ We have been so programmed to let people in power ‘fix’ our problems and ‘save’ us that not engaging in the system sounds like ‘doing nothing’ when, in fact, there are countless things to do.

The problems continue to mount as the population gives away their power and agency to politicians and bureaucrats who are happy to take it—usually with very little return on the voters’ investment.

What’s your solution?

We can have all the practical, technological, and strategic solutions we like, but without a change in consciousness around the fundamental coercion and violence inherent to the system, these solutions can only do so much to move the needle. Coercive institutions will continue to attract those least deserving of authority—those who seek power over others—and people will continue to go along with it because they know no other way.

When the dominant power exerts authority through violence, is it any surprise that there is such chaos, aggression, and suffering in the world? When we are taught from childhood that obedience to this authority is a virtue, is it any surprise that people continue to submit to and empower the institutions inflicting so much harm? After thousands of years of governments ruling the world, is it really that extreme to consider alternatives?

The discussion in this article and its two previous installations is one of fundamentally incompatible ideas: self-ownership and voluntary relationships versus top-down authority and control. So long as we are conditioned to believe someone else has the right to order us around, has a claim to our bodies and the fruits of our labor, and that ruling through force can cultivate peace and freedom, humanity will continue its cycle of conflict, division, violence, and authoritarianism.

This statist machinery may seem impenetrable, but as author Larken Rose has said:

“I'm not scared of the Maos and the Stalins and the Hitlers. I'm scared of the thousands of millions of people that hallucinate them to be ‘authority,’ and so do their bidding, and pay for their empires, and carry out their orders. I don't care if there's one looney with a stupid mustache. He's not a threat if the people do not believe in ‘authority.’”

While it may take time to achieve a critical mass of people who no longer buy into the myth of violent authority and government, I believe this is key to achieving a more peaceful, harmonious world. It is also part of human history’s natural progression away from central authority. Democracy was a step toward decentralization from monarchy, and that trend can continue down to communities and individuals.

All of this leads me back to the question, "What's your solution?" In the context of this article, it’s disrupting people's belief in the false legitimacy of violent authority so they can imagine and experience better, more peaceful ways to live and coexist.

More broadly, while it's an important question, it highlights the widespread tendency to wait for someone else to solve our problems. We have been so conditioned to defer to those in power, leaving them to act and decide for us, that many of us cannot answer this question for ourselves.

We turn to others as an authority when the true solution lies within ourselves: in reclaiming our minds, bodies, and spirits and cultivating the ability to think for ourselves and act and work together accordingly. This is radically different from what we have been taught, but to me, breaking free of this disempowering programming holds the key to achieving a truly free, peaceful, and grounded path forward.