Losing Patience with Statists

This article will be a combination of a “mea culpa,” an apology, and advice—advice that I should take myself more often—having to do with being impatient, nasty and insulting towards statists.

Now, I do want to make a distinction here. Because I do think that people who believe in freedom should talk and act as if statists condone immoral violence, because they do. Would it be good for someone to talk to an actual Nazi like this?: “Well, I understand that you want to violently dominate—and maybe expel or murder—a bunch of people, and I respect your opinion, and it’s perfectly valid; I just have a slightly different viewpoint.” Or should people condemn, even verbally attack people condoning mass evil? For the same reason, I don’t think statists should be allowed to remain comfortable and content with their advocacy of the violent subjugation of humanity, even if they have good intentions.

However……..

I do have, and have had, a tendency to be rather impatient with a lot of statists in online discussions, where it doesn’t take me long to not only condemn their beliefs, but call them idiots, morons, boot-lickers, state-worshipers, and so on. Even when a lot of the people I talk to actually are those things, I still shouldn’t be so quick to get personal and hostile towards them. And for that, I actually apologize. No, really. ... No, really, damn it! On a lot of occasions I’ve been too caustic and abrasive, too insulting and condescending, and too quick to call people names.

I might as well explain why I do that—not why it’s okay that I do that (because it’s not); just why I do it. I became an anarchist in 1996. For the first several years of trying to explain voluntaryism (before that word existed) to a world of devout statists, the number of fellow anarchists I knew could be counted on one hand (without using binary, even). I spent day after day essentially “screaming at the world,” trying to get people to see how they had been deceived, manipulated, indoctrinated, and tricked into betraying their own values and principles. Most people paid no attention. Of the few who paid any attention, most responded with condemnation, ridicule, insults and/or threats. For many years that was my experience: trying to tell people that they should be free, and having them tell me how evil, stupid and dangerous I was, and how I should probably be caged, or killed, for not bowing to the state.

If you’ve recently become a voluntaryist, and think it’s frustrating now trying to explain non-aggression and self-ownership to others, you should have experienced what it was like twenty years ago. Actually, I’m glad, for your sake, that you can’t experience that. To say that it was stressful and frustrating would be a massively huge understatement. I felt like one tiny advocate of freedom in an endless sea of devout statists, which included friends, family, neighbors, pretty much everyone. I kept saying what I believed, kept trying to explain the idea, and kept getting barraged by open hostility from the true believers in the cult of “government.” Day after day, year after year.

And it didn’t exactly help my temperament and patience that in 2005 a jury of twelve state-worshiping imbeciles (yes, they deserve that label) declared me “guilty” of not bowing and kissing the royal ring, and as a result I spent a year in federal prison, even if it was only a “minimum security” cage. (Misdemeanor “willful failure to file”—not sending pieces of paper to the IRS—was the charge, in case you wondered. And no, I wasn’t even guilty of that “crime.”)

So yeah, all of that might have made me a tad irritable towards state-worshipers. Just a tad. … Okay, more than a tad. (Whatever a “tad” is.) Nonetheless, I really need to remind myself that whichever statist I talk to today probably isn’t one of those self-righteous authoritarian assholes I talked to ten, fifteen or twenty years ago. And I especially need to remind myself that I myself was a statist, for a very long time, and would have been one of those self-righteous authoritarian assholes. The proper response today is not to be a self-righteous anarchist asshole, which I admit I’ve probably been on many occasions.

So yes, I genuinely apologize for being so quick to insult people on a personal level, even when people say things that really are quite stupid—as all statists do, and as I did when I was a statist. I need to keep reminding myself that that stupid crap they spew is the equivalent of a parrot repeating noises it doesn’t understand, because it was trained to. What statists believe is not the result of objective, rational reasoning; it is all faith-based nonsense that has been drilled into their heads for all of their lives. So when trying to help them “deprogram,” I need to be more patient and understanding, even when what they are saying really is profoundly moronic.

Another thing that makes it difficult is that statists continue to support things that are genuinely evil and destructive. For example, I see people proudly pontificating about how they “support the troops,” and I see those “troops” committing mass murder, and it makes me want to smack the boot-licking flag-wavers upside their heads. And to some degree, I still think I should. I still think evil should be identified as such, and condemned as such. But I shouldn’t be quick to condemn the motives, and the core goodness, of the poor schmucks who were duped into believing the nationalistic bullshit—the same bullshit I believed for years. The ideas needs to be attacked, condemned and destroyed. The people need to be understood and helped. Sometimes I’ve had trouble keeping that distinction in mind.

I’m not even against shaming and guilt-tripping those who continue to personally advocate authoritarian aggression. I think that serves a valuable purpose, precisely because if people never have their indoctrinated assumptions challenged, they will probably never question them. However, along with the message of, “Your beliefs make you the enemy of humanity,” should always be the message of, “Who you really are should be defending humanity from this.” Because yes, even most Nazis meant well. Most fascists think they’re doing something good. Most authoritarian communists think they are serving humanity with their ideas. But their combination of good intentions on the one hand, and a drastic misunderstanding of reality on the other hand, results in horrendously evil effects.

Nonetheless, it is my New Year’s Resolution (a month late) to try to be more patient, less personally insulting, and less rude—without being any less principled or direct—when talking to all those people who haven’t yet escaped the authoritarian indoctrination they were subjected to. (If you're at all like me, you might want to do likewise.) And I’m sorry for being nastier and more caustic in the past than was necessary or helpful.