Voluntary Obsoletism: A Step Closer to Liberty

(This post was originally published at https://sevvie.ltd/uncategorized/voluntary-obsoletism-a-step-closer-to-liberty/)

This will be my first essay on the subject of Voluntary Obsoletism, a sociopolitical philosophy of individual change that can ease the world closer toward removing the necessity of governments. To quote a man to whom I admire greatly, with a quote I have quoted before: perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favour; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it the superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

And while the long and violent abuse of power by members of a society demanding a more or less-empowered State rings fresh in my mind after witnessing a rather tame demonstration and counter-protest in Portland today, in comparison to the violent clashes in Portland, Berkeley, and Charlottesville which came before it, there is no shaking the impression that such conflict was, and is, inevitable. It will remain inevitable for some time, perhaps hundreds of years. For while the internet has granted us an acceleration in communication and dissemination of ideas, this acceleration has not been imbued to our genetic and sociological developments; we are still chained to the limitations of our mortality and generations, which only give us, as individuals and members of a society, a limited time to not only accomplish development and change, but to pass the wisdom and technical knowledge of those developments to the next generations.

And it is for this reason that, for all its purity of liberty, the stateless society cannot be yet accomplished, and why for those same reasons the philosophy of it must be carried on to the next generations while acknowledging the necessary evil of the State, in the here and now.

Refactoring the State

This is not a message of acquittal. In observing the current state of political conflict, the reasonable conclusion is that even in the best of situations, those who could even begin to consider life without the influence of a State are in the starkest minority. And while we are in that minority, a compromise must be made. This compromise must not be absolute; one must not discard the dream that one day, our children, or our children’s children could exist in a world in which a tyrannical force who maintains control over society is but a distant memory, if not that which could be impossible to imagine.

Instead, the compromise should be that, instead of discarding the State all at once, it should be dismantled, tiny piece by tiny piece, over the span of generations until, like our ancestors who threw off the shackles of monarchy, we look back upon our history scarcely even able to imagine what it had been like to live under such conditions. In order to do this, we must first acknowledge the State for what it is, wholly and entirely; not merely sufficing to be so crass as to reduce it to its most violent elements, nor its most giving elements, but to instead see it as collections of people — flawed, imperfect, selfish yet family- and community-loving people who exist as walking contradictions just like any of us. The only difference that exists between them and us is that they hold a power that corrupts absolutely, and we would be remiss to think that, had the circumstances been different, we would not have been equally corrupted.

The State was once the Crown, a single man or woman, and through revolt and protest, violence and negotiation, sacrifice and shared interest that what was embodied by a single person came to be distributed across many fiefdoms, and then collected in Senates and Parliaments, and further and further refined until we had created the Republican and Representatively Democratic societies we see today. It took millennia, at first, and then centuries, and then generations — but we have yet to reach a point in which our society could accomplish the immense change necessary to even accomplish further in mere decades.

The Natural Rights of People

After all, we can scarcely agree on what a person’s natural rights truly are. Some would say the truest are only those enshrined in the Bill of Rights, while others would take issue with those rights individually. Others would argue that those ten enshrined rights go nowhere near far enough, and would seek to include elements of the results of modern wealth and understanding that did not even exist a century ago.

But lacking a better explicit definition of the rights of a person, the Bill of Rights gives us a decent place to start.

A person has the right to freely express themselves, and associate with those of their choosing. They have the right to defend themselves from those who would seek to violate their rights, or force them to act at the threat of violence. Furthermore, they have the right to not sacrifice their land and resources to the necessity of a violent force in need of shelter. One’s land, resources and self are not subject to another’s prying eyes, nor can they be taken by an external force at whim. Imprisonment or other punishment cannot be put upon them lest they are met by the agreement of their peers, and punishment should be executed justly, impartially, and fairly. A person should not suffer undue fines which could make them slaves to debt held by a violent force. And the defining of these rights should not stand to limit or deny those rights unwritten to be upheld, for those rights yet unwritten are held in the power of the person who exercises them.

These are, in loose interpretation, the ten core rights as understood by the United States and defined at its inception. And dare I say, I do believe the founding fathers of this country clearly delineated lines which the State, the violent force of which I speak in each of those descriptions, should never cross.

The Nature of the State

And yet, cross them they have. So often, the blurred lines of interpretation are used to assert that, for the security of the State itself, these rights must be infringed; we’ve seen it as recently as the debates pertaining to technologies such as the 3D printer or the DSA encryption algorithms, but such arguments were made even in the Revolutionary War itself when Washington took food from entire towns to feed his army, despite the interest in assuring a government which would protect against undue search and seizure. The State, by its very nature, exists in conflict with society, people, and their rights, but paradoxically exists to serve the interests of people and their rights at the same time.

And yet there are those who would wish it to have more authority and power, more strength and reach. They say that the government should act as an insurance agency, paying out due adjustments for the damage that comes from merely existing; those adjustments may include healthcare asserted as a human right, or what they call basic income. Others say that the government should repay for the damages it has inflicted on its people, as though the paradox of extending the theft of taxation in order to give money to one privileged group or another will not result in the same matters which brought our country to declare Independence in the first place. But to give the State these powers and responsibilities is to sacrifice our own responsibility, and further enslave ourselves.

At this point I imagine that many would be shouting for it to be abolished entirely, as so many in the smallest majority at the fringes of philosophical thought seem to do. But to do so would require voluntary action from all nations at once, all States at once — and those who hold power scarcely stand to give it up that easily. Even the most libertarian societies of the world, today, maintain structures of government, and those who live comfortable lives off the tax dollars demanded to maintain that government would see no reason that their livelihood should change. They represent you, they say, and this responsibility is grand and difficult.

The Nature of Representation

But the hermit who lives on his own land, and earns a modest wealth through his works enough to trade for what he needs to sustain himself cares little for someone to represent him, until his ability to remain a hermit comes into question. The family which educates their children at home and sustains themselves off private enterprise has little need for representation until their enterprise is determined to be standing in the way of someone else’s interests. Only then, when they are involuntarily thrust onto a larger stage, posed against actors of whom they were previously unaware, do further involuntary interventions take place. A by-pass must be built here; or a purported injustice enacted by one’s ancestors unrelated to you must be redressed there. Slowly but surely, in this way, one’s private life becomes entangled with a political life, and all involved are poorer for it — all but the criminals who speak as though they act in good intentions for someone’s best interests, and shave wealth, land, and individuality away for themselves in the process.

After all, the road to Washington, DC, is paved with good intentions. And with every passing day, good intentions are transformed into bills, bills into laws, and laws into means by which another hermit’s hermitage is called into question, and another family’s enterprise is found to be in violation of another’s desires. The State grows in power, by asserting this is good for one constituency or another, at the expense of all its constituencies.

If we, therefore, cannot maintain a State without it exceeding itself and infringing on natural and individual rights further and further, nor we can discard of it at once (as this would lead to violent chaos by those unwilling to operate voluntarily, and those who are unwilling to give up their power), what then can we do?

Unplanned Obsolescence

The only conclusion which I’ve reached is that of identifying what is obsolete, and doing away with it, until all that is left is individuals interacting voluntarily and freely. Centralized banks, for example, are unnecessary with the existence of blockchain networks maintained by networked communities. The dissolution of central banking systems, not by violent overthrow but rather voluntary adoption of a blockchain which meets one’s needs and connects them with their clients and customers, would make everyone more free, less dependent on structural power which finds itself accountable to no one. Distributed networking, therefore, would follow; again, not by violent overthrow of the central fibre-optic network holders but rather maintaining the hardware necessary to serve as a node within a distributed network in your community, connected through radio antennas or cables run from your property to your neighbors’, in an agreement made between yourself and each individual with whom you directly connect. These are technological solutions, and only in two examples, but many more examples exist.

Some would call this “Voluntaryism”, but voluntarism is merely the philosophy behind it. For it to function in the world, and result in the desired eventuality of displacing the state, controlled obsolescence is necessary, and as such I will refer to this as Obsoletism.

But all things cannot be obsoleted in the immediate just because we would wish them to be; it is a heavy responsibility with Obsoletism, to carefully determine what one is capable of doing at any given point, and whether or not implementing the replacement of obsolete political philosophies and institutions will result in affecting those around us. Likewise, the technologies and methodologies we adopt in the process of obsoleting others must be judged with keen scrutiny, to assure they do not become tools which can control us through our adaptation of them or involvement with them, nor make us act in a coercive or violent manner against others, as the State has against us. Much like the contractualism which connects two individuals in Voluntaryism, we must make contract with ourselves to learn and understand the impact of the technologies changes we make in our own lives, and how they might affect us and those around us.

The State will eventually be obsoleted entirely. Until then, however, we must make small but revolutionary changes, to assure we are not taking part in vestiges of its violence and power. Liberty will not come in a day, or a year, or possibly even in our lifetimes. But it can come, if we let go of that which binds us unncessarily, because it has always bound us.