Brainpolice : Education

Why The State Can't Discriminate

Brainpolice — Tue, 13 May 2008 00:23:00 GMT

My position on racial discrimination and segregation is essentially based on the following premises: (1) on a personal level, I'm opposed to racism (2) however, if an individual legitimately owns a given piece of property, they have the liberty to exclude other people from using that property (3) that being siad, in terms of hiring employees and a buisiness owner's relationship with customers, racial discrimnation and exclusion in general is suicidal in the long-term if said buisinesses are in free competition with non-discriminatory or less exclusive buisinesses (4) therefore, a free market process itself will tend to weed out the racists over time and (5) the proper solution to the issue is social or economic and should be persued through more direct action - civil disobedience, social pressure, education, mass-boycotts, out-competing the racists, the discriminated groups forming their own organizations, and so on.

However, this is only in the context of discrimination of members of the lay public. What about discrimination or exclusion by the agents of the state? Should the exact same logic be applied to the state? I'm compelled to say "no" because the limited principled defense of the liberty of the discriminator is predicated on the requirement that they justly own the property to begin with, and the state does not legitimately control the territory. If the state is exclusive or discriminates, it would be doing it with stolen resources, what are in fact the very resources of the victims of the exclusion or discrimination. To try to come up with a libertarian defense of state discrimination would be to make the error of treating the state as if it were a legitimate private property owner, which would legitimize nationalism. I'm not sure if this error should be considered a manifestation of "vulgar libertarianism" or if it deserves another term in its own right.

If the state enforced discrimination as being mandatory within the territory or discriminates over who is allowed to use state property and services, what we would have is institutionalized segregation. The state would be asserting control over how other people use their own property and excluding people from use of what is actually not justly owned by the state agents or possibly even what is really partially the product of what was stolen from the person being excluded. To varying degrees, this is more or less what the individual states did during the period of blatant institutionalized segregation in America. The state did much more than defend private owner's right to be exclusive, since the state was exclusive itself and widened discrimination into community-wide and state-wide legal precedents which essentially established discrimination as a norm.

Of course, when institutionalized segregation gave way at least partially to intstitutionalized integration, the federal government started acting as a discriminator in other respects. It started creating and enforcing precedents making it mandatory to be inclusive and also to start to be more exclusive towards other groups. To some degree, some non-racist people have ended up being persecuted by anti-discrimination or forced integration laws, which has merely added fuel to the fire and made people more sympathetic towards racism. And affirmative action is mandated discrimination all the same, only geared towards different groups. Anything remotely resembling a racial quota is discriminatory and in fact racist to the core.

Immigration controls and political border enforcement are essentially institutionalized segregation, though not always based strictly on race. Some people try to defend a closed border policy on the basis of private property rights and by comparing the nation to a home. But such an analogy is fallacious and highly misleading. The state's agents do not justly control the entire territory. And the entire nation is not "ours", we each own individual plots of property within it. While an individual who justly owns a given piece of property may legitimately exclude others from use of it, they do not have the legitimate authority to demand that their neighbor do the same. Noone can legitimately exclude people from other people's legitimately aquired property. And this is precisely what the state would be doing by trying to exclude someone from entering the entire "nation" and effectively outlawing individual owners from allowing others to use their property. It also would constitute a barrier to entry to unused/unowned property.

The implications of treating the state as a legitimate private property owner are very totalitarian when it comes down to it, and of course such a view inherently legitimizes the state. If the entire territory is legitimately controlled by the state, then everything within it can be used and distributed however state agents want, and everyone within it may be treated as pawns. But the fact of the matter is that state institutions are a product of the mass-expropriation of land (which eventually manifests itself in the coercive territorial monopoly) and intergenational extortion (which eventually manifests itself as taxation). In a certain sense, the state is merely a gigantic and institutionalized case of absentee landlordship. Everyone within the territory produces everything while the state claims a piece of their production and excercises control over everything as if it were the legitimate ownership of the entire territory.

This is why the state must be treated as a criminal organization, a criminal organization that has stolen everything that it controls. The only difference between the state and other criminal organizations is that it is highly centralized, enjoys a massive territorial monopoly and has an ideological cloak of legitimacy. In order for justice to truly be served, the victims of this criminal organization have every right in the world to take back what was stolen from them and their ancestors. Such a criminal organization should not be defended as if its agents are at liberty to determine how stolen property is used, and as a consequence it is absurd to try to legitimize such a criminal organization excluding people from using what was stolen from them or what currently has no legitimate owner at all.

How The State Thrives, How The State Falls

Brainpolice — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 02:08:00 GMT

Foreward note: inspired in part by "The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude" by Eteinne De La Boetie.

How the State Thrives

How does the state maintain itself? It is true that to some extent all states initially derive from conquest through devices such as war and land theft. However, once a state has been established, and once many generations have passed, it need not rely on such overt violence in order to maintain its rule. Instead, it relies on the mechanisms of propaganda, of buying out intellectuals and aristocrats within the public, and by providing bread and circuses. Ultimately, the most powerful factor keeping a state in place, once one has been established, is the compliance of the populace, driven fundamentally by ideology. For ideology is a far more dangerous weapon then any guns or bombs. The only thing truly keeping the state in place is the people's ideological support for it and the state's exploitation of any ideologies that they may adhere to.

This does not mean that everyone consents to the government. Indeed, people may have gripes with much of the various things that the government does. However, what keeps the state in place is ultimately people's passive resignation to its existance and their ideological acceptance of the notion that there is a need for one in the first place. They may strongly disagree with many policies of the government, but they have simply been born into the system and have been given the impression since birth that the government is good, necessary and inevitable, and that the only alternative to its rule would be absolute chaos and destruction. For ideological support for the state is fundamentally based on the hobbesian notion that human beings are inherently evil and conflicting when left to their own devices, and therefore they need to be ruled in order for their allegedly inherently chaotic natures to be kept in check.

In short, the state essentially dupes the bulk of the populace into believeing that, despite whatever gripes they may have with it, they benefit from its rule. The state may bolster this impression by providing various public services, ranging from the essential to the trivial and things of mere entertainment-value. In anchient Rome, this took the form of gladiator's arenas and aquaducts and booty for soldiers. Today it may take the form of anything from national healthcare to farm subsidies to federal funding for the arts. This gives the people the illusion that the state is benevolent and giving. Little do the people realize that they are only being given back a small portion of what was initially stolen from them and their ancestors.

The state is more maintainable when its subjects are dependant on it rather then self-reliant. A self-reliant citezen simply has no need to depend on the state for their well-being, and therefore the state has an incentive to create an institutional framework in which self-reliance is discouraged. Consequentially, the state has an interest in maintaining and expanding a class of people who are dependant on it for their very survival. This may be called the welfare class. The state may very well, both purposesfully and by unintended consequences, bring about circumstances that lower people's well being, therefore creating a reason for it to step in and provide relief and security.

In a sense the state thrives and grows based on a cycle of interventionism. That is, the state itself creates a problem, and then uses the problem as a reason to intervene to cure the problem and expand its powers, which then leads to more problems and the cycle keeps repeating itself. It may exploit the oppurtunity in order to blame the problem that it created on some inherent flaw in society so that the rulers can claim that the state's power is all the more necessary in order to fix the problems of the people. Intervention breeds more intervention.

An important aspect of the maintenance of political rule is the collusion between private interests and the state. A small band of individuals from within the public recieve special privileges from the state beyond what the average person can access in exchange for their services and loyalty to the state apparatus. This group forms an intellectual class of apologists for the state's rule, who gain control over the flow of ideas within the society. It creates a symbiotic relationship by which private interests such as religious organizations, the media, buisinesses and unions gain patronage and protection in exchange for their political support. In medieval times this took the form of the union of church and state and the economic system of fuedalism. Today it takes the form of the union of buisiness and state, central banking and union cartels.

In order to thrive, it is important for the state to buy out the intellectuals within a society. For the most intellectual people possess the most potential to challenge its authority, so they must be brought to be on the side of its authority. As Thomas Jefferson very well was aware of, a well educated populace is the most dangerous thing to the state's power. Therefore, the state tried to incorporate as many of the most educated people in a society as possible into its apparatus. Economists, scientists, inventors and technologists are all made as dependant on the state as possible and are employed by it to serve its purposes.

Critical to the state's reliance on ideology for its support in modern times is the provision of public education. For public education provides the state with an indispensible means by which to control the ideas of the people. What better way to create a passively obedient populace then to control their education from birth? Indeed, in public schools children are essentially instilled with a sense of nationalism and are spoon-fed what amounts to fairy tales about their government and leaders from times past. The history and social studies books are predictably written to portray the government in a positive light, and any blunders the government may be responsible for are blamed on the people in some way. And this control even extends to college, where vocational priorities and oppurtunities are predetermined and professors are disproportionately biased.

The state's control of the flow of ideas in a society of course does not stop once one graduates from school or finishes college. In our modern age it extends to the mass media. The state regulates the airwaves. In order to make it into the mainstream media buisiness, one must be licensed, and with the licensing comes a load of requirements for fitting state-determined criteria for content and ettiquiette. While many countries may not have state control of the media to extent that a communist country in which the state literally runs the media itself does, the patronage between the private media buisiness and the state, and the amount of regulation involved, produces a close enough effect.

There is a profound sense in which the state thrives on conflict. There are two ways in which this is true. On one hand, the state thrives by pitting the people against eachother. On the other hand, the state thrives by uniting the people against a common and external enemy. In both cases, the main emotions to be exploited are fear and distrust. Rich are pitted against poor, labor is pitted against capital, religious is pitted against secular, nation is pitted against nation and ethnicities are pitted against eachother. Pick any two opposing personal preferances and there is a potential conflict to be created by the state in exploiting them. Some of the conflict is over patronage with the state, while in other cases it is simply in the name of dominance. This encouragment of conflict functions as a distractionary device as well as a means to get people to support state power in the persuit of such conflicts.

The state is constituted by self-interested individuals just like any other institution. These individuals have every reason in the world to try to maximize their own revenues. However, if a parasite sucks too much from its host, it eventually kills its host, and dies itself in turn. Therefore, some members of the state may try to maintain a balance by which they extract as much as possible from the people while still leaving them with enough to ensure that the plunder can continue. This is of course not to say that these individuals may be particularly good at calculating exactly where the cut-off point is, nor is it to say that there are not individuals who will wrecklessly try to extract as much as possible without any such considerations for sustainance.

Nonetheless, the master politician is he or she who is best able to determine where this point of balance lies. For plunder cannot be efficiently institutionalized unless it is made sustainable, and the state is the very incarnation of institutionalized plunder. It is a protection racket. The art of rule consists of finding ways to keep the plunder repetitive and sustainable. The common criminal pales in comparison to the common ruler. For while the common criminal may manage to plunder their victim once, it is doubtful that they will return to the same victim twice, let alone convince their victim that they are actually helping them and that they are a necessary part of the social order. But the sucessful ruler gets away with this, and much more.

How the State Falls

Based on our understanding of how the state thrives, it behoovs us to understand how the state falls. Afterall, there is no such thing as a permanent institution, and the state is not exempted from this fact. We live in a world of scarce resources with mortal beings and limited abilities. No matter how sucessful a state is at maintaining its rule, one day it eventually falls. One could very well think of it in terms of entropy in that all systems are ultimately reduced to their component parts. One way in which the state falls is merely by following its natural course, which is to say that it drains and damages the source of its supply to the point where it cannot thrive any longer. In a sense, all states seal their own fates by setting up economic conditions that eventually render them helpless. For there are many unintended consequences to the economic meddling that is required to maintain the existance of a state.

Viewed another way, there is a certain social evolutionary inertia at work that makes state control harder and harder to maintain over time. As technology improves and as information spreads and complexifies, it becomes harder and harder for the state to adequately plan anything and the market itself starts to provide functions more efficiently and more cheaply then the state can manage to. The state's provision of services starts to become progressively obsolete over time. No matter what a state may do to try to control a market, the market has its own inertia and a dynamically self-correcting nature that defies all attempts to control it. And as the amount of information in a society intensifies, the ability of a state to control public opinion and the prospects for power remaining centralized decreases.

There comes a certain point where the exploitive nature of the state becomes blatantly obvious to the public at large and the possibility of revolution enters the horizon. The instinct of people to be free can only be bottled up for so long. And information cannot be suppressed completely or eternally. Violent revolution is of course not the only possibility for the fall of states, and it is probably the most risky route that can be taken. But wether violent or not, some sort of rebellion becomes inevitable after a point. Iron curtains cannot be kept in place infinitely. Artificial divisions cannot be indefinitely maintained. Prohibitions can be defied almost as if they didn't exist at all. With enough effort, taxes can be resisted and avoided.

If we accept the premise that the state is fundamentally kept in place by ideology and passive resignation, another way by which the state may fall is by the mass withdrawl of consent by the populace. Mass civil disobedience has proven to be a surpisingly effective strategy for change in many instances. For as soon as people stop believing in the state, it essentially dissapears unless its members wish to resort to overt violence. And if it tries to resort to overt violence in order to maintain its rule, it risks delegitimizing itself even more in the eyes of the populace and facing what amounts to a domestic insurgency of the people, which can be a very tough thing to beat in battle. Civil war and domestic insurgency is hardly a desirable state of affairs for the members of the state.

The withdrawl of consent can also be manifested in terms of competition, even on black and grey markets. If people want to avoid the state schools, they may try resorting to home schooling or private and alternate methods of schooling. If people want to avoid the mainstream media, they may try opening up alternative media organizations and using the internet. If people are displeased with the government's courts, they may start resorting to private arbitration. If people are displeased with the police, they may start relying more on self-defense, engaging in limited forms of vigalantaism or even opening and patronizing alternative institutions for defensive purposes. If people resent ridiculous and archiac laws enough, they may simply start defying them in mass.

Never underestimate the power of a massive withdrawl of consent. It can potentially grind a political system to a hault within days, much in the same way that a massive enough boycott can eventually drive a company out of buisiness. A buisiness cannot survive without customers. And a state cannot survive without participants and dependants. It would be an interesting scenario indeed if on one election day noone showed up at the ballot box, or if large numbers of people decided to simply stop filling out their tax forms, or if soldiers and policemen and bereaucrats simply quit in mass. What a quagmire that would be for the top dogs!

For rulers are reduced to nothing but feeble individuals as soon as obedience is simply denied to them outright and in mass. They only constitute a tiny portion of society. They most borrow the eyes, ears and labor of their subjects to maintain their power. The lone ruler is truly powerless without the complicity of people willing to enforce their will for them. They do not directly enforce anything themselves or pay for anything out of their own pocketbooks. They are quite cowardly individuals. They do not fight their wars themselves. They do not do the paperwork themselves. They do not patrol the streets themselves. They have no more power over you then that which you lend to them by joining their ranks and directly participating in their institutional framework.

And therefore the key to dismantling their power is to simply stop participating in it.