What is the one most important reason that made you into an opponent of the state? Is there one concept you could never given up, but realised is diametricaly opposed to statism? What is the one last line you could never cross, but saw the state demands you do? What angers you the most about the state? What harm the state does you resent it the most?Would it come to down either Jesus Christ or the state? Was it a natural law thing? Was it economic utilatirism? Was it the harm it causes enviroment? The brakes it puts on technological development? Did you just always hate taxes with a passion? Or was it the compulsory education? Or was it the traffic cops? Is it a philosphical thing? Is it a matter of principle? Is it a practical thing? Do you hate it the most for the moral deprivation it causes. Or for the hypocritial moralisation? Big buisiness cronysm? Or is it the Imperialism you resent it the most? Its elitism, or its egalitarianism?Why are you anti-state? What is the one last thing you could never forsake for the state?
Beauty.
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The egalitarianism of the whole thing and the process of decivilisation that has resulted from all state action.
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"
Bob Dylan
Anti-egalitarianism/logic.
-Jon
To darkness I condemn you...
For as long as I can remember, I've believed in the principle that aggression/coercion is wrong and that people should be free to the largest extent possible (meaning they shouldn't be allowed to harm others). Once I realized that even a minimal state must violate against someone to survive and that there was a better solution the choice was simple.
I reject the management of life and the disciplining of the physical body and the rise of the social.
http://aestheticbend.blogspot.com/
I live in Sweden. That should explain things. I've always wanted to have control over my life, which is pretty much impossible here.
I've always had an interest in systems and economics, but what truly spoke to me about anarchism was justice. I have always been for justice, even if I had a flawed or unclear definition of it. I have always hated wars, and saw nothing but failure in the destruction of life and property, but it took Ron Paul and Mises to really shake me into questioning how and why the state has claimed the authority to kill, which is a right that no individual holds in our so-called modern society.
Clearly a system which validates murder based upon majority authorization is flawed from an ethical, rational and moral standpoint.
If you find something evil that wobbles, push it. - Gary North
bad government is the primary cause of misery and death in the world.
I became anti-state for a some what austrian reason, before I even knew what austrian economics was. I saw how the state prevents people from acting to improve their lives.
I wish I could say that opposition to war caused me to oppose the state and not the other way around, but better late than never.
nazgulnarsil: bad government is the primary cause of misery and death in the world.
Bad government is a major cause of misery and death in the world. But its good government that is the primary cause.
i've always just been a natural target of the state for some reason. not on a personal level, but as a white middle class gay kid... i'm pretty much dead to the government. i'm just the guy who pays for everyone else and gets no say in it. it was just surreal to see other people arguing about whether or not I could get married. one day i looked at my pay stub and found that even though i would technically qualify for social security or food stamps like the customers i cashiered for (had my family not been middle class) i was still having it deducted from my paycheck. then i realized that eventually, i wouldn't get that money back anyway. furthermore, i was paying taxes, but couldn't vote then -- which just confused the hell out of me. then hurricane katrina happened -- enough said. when i'm doing more work (and better work) than the government, there's a problem with the system. the last straw came when my friends and I applied to colleges. my asian friend got into NYU with a super scholarship. i went to a SUNY school and payed full price. it's not her fault she's asian, it's my fault i'm white...i think. i'm pretty sure i'm a racist pig dog who deserved it (or else the FAFSA system is a lie)
during the whole time, i had been reading articles on mises because i heard about it from somewhere. the articles begat books. books begat rage. then one day, a liberal paster clued me into ron paul...which was a weird way to have that happen. ron paul begat more rage -- and from that point (about 2 years ago) it's just been cold, logical, discontent.
I realized that if people have different conceptions about how they want to live and what they want their society to look like, then we might not want a solution which gathers everyone together to vote on policies which are then imposed on everyone.
http://libertarian-left.blogspot.com/
No real easy way to sum up what is the one thing that makes me "anti-state"... the best I could give (for now, at least) is a retrospective history of my self with possible answers. I suspect this will be easier as I psychologically mature & progress (the brain technically doesn't get out of the puberty growth until 26, if I recall correctly). I could get into the meat of the journey I've made to become anti-state, but not without getting blog-worthy personal :p. I normally do not regard the event as life changing for me, but 9/11 was made me start watching political news in more than 3 min tidbits. Within a year of it's occurrence, I eventually realized I had been duped by government & the media, after consuming hours of Pundit TV, & eventually grew more radical in all spheres of my life; first, religion (I renounced my un-official agnosticism before it really began, & became athiest), then socially (high school crowds & the frowned upon activities etc.), & finally politically (I renounced vague centralism, became more Leftist, and by the time the '06 election came, I was a pretty hard Progressive & semi-populist, who shamed many a friend for supporting Kerry & not Dean or Kucinich in the previous election. 2007 saw me approaching where I am somewhat exponentially, the point where I had to consult wikipedia to find new labels for myself). So yea, somewhat odd road, when I consider all the stuff in-between. Defiance, skepticism, the search for truth (scientific at first, but eventually in all other areas), loads of cynicism, & a good portion of my life being that from an outsider and/or outcast perspective (or perhaps just too much individuality than average to begin with) most likely contributed; psychological self-assessments are more so a blog's realm, rather than here.
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The destruction of human potential.
One of the most fundamental things that makes me anti-state is that the state breaches equal rights by definition (otherwise it would not have any more inherent status than an individual) and it is a framework that inherently stands in the way of peaceful conflict resolution (since it monopolizes the means of conflict resolution and relies on conflict to perpetuate its existance). I see the state as an archiac remnant of the baser aspects of humanity that has not caught up with social evolution. It represents a sort of lag in the process of social evolution that is holding people back, disincentivizing the personal responsibility necessary to foster its obsolescance and standing in the way of the cooperative means of organizing and solving problems. It is categorically obsolete and yet socially accepted, and this social acceptance is a disgrace.
@marcbragh, I can empathize with the anger. It's not easy reaching the understanding that the game is stacked against you, and everyone around you seems content to live a lie.@JonBostwick, it wasn't just an opposition to war, but an understanding that co-operation is better than discord. Unfortunately, for a long time I believed the fallacy that the stick was an appropriate and necessary means to achieve co-operation. Obviously, I better understand that co-operation and coercion are two different things.This is a great thread. Reads sorta like an AA meeting.
Defenselessness. That you're a just a small piece of the state machine that can crush you at will and there's nothing you can do about it. And I don't think any western libertarians really know this feeling unless they haven't lived in a totalitarian dictatorship. The closest you can get is by reading Orwell's 1984. He got it right.
If I hear not allowed much oftener; said Sam, I'm going to get angry.
J.R.R.Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
For me, I hate statism because I love my people. Statism turns us into our own worst enemies. We used to be fierce and protective of our independence, but the state strangles all of people`s action to leave only room for obedience to it. Which is twice as catastrophic now that the state is actualy working for a foreign empire. It used to be quite a task to subjugate us, but this time all that was needed was to buy off the elites at the helm of the state. Our own government is passing on military secrets to the empire that attacked us and retiring any officers that did not disgrace themselves in that brief period that the state offered some token resistance. Soon we will be used as jannisaries by the empire to help robb some other people of their freedom. There is a bunch of other things, but this is the one last thing I could never let statism off the hook. If you`re not a republic, you can`t be made into a banana republic.
It's hard for me to say, because there are many reasons and they are all inseperable from one another in my mind. But I would say the Last Straw for me was that I'm a Christian, and I began to see the state as a false god. Even if I were not convinced of the ethical and economic predations of the state, that alone would be enough to lead me to oppose it with all my might.
Pro Christo et Libertate integre!
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