(Source.)

1. Do you possess greatest executive control of your body and its faculties, conferred by nature/natural processes/biology?

2. Do you wish for others to override this capacity in yourself against your will/without your consent?

3. Further, do you realize that to override this capacity in others will likely result in this capacity being overridden/violated in you, by others?

4. Is a society of minimal violent conflict your goal, and do you hold life and its peaceful sustenance as a value?

IF YOU ANSWERED "YES," "NO," "YES," "YES," congratulations, you are a Voluntaryist. Continue reading for a full explanation.

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You are the executive when it comes to your body and mind. You think of reaching across the table for some mashed potatoes, and your arm immediately obeys. You decide to think of an ex-lover, and your mind conjures up the images. Nobody else can move this arm for you from the seat of executive control. Nobody naturally can make you think of this woman from the neurons in your mind. You blink, you think, you talk. Nature has given you, what for all practical intents and purposes, we anarchists call "self-ownership."

Force/Violence

It is true that somebody can move your arm for you. They can potentially, either with your consent or without it, move your arm by force using their executive powers over their bodies to put muscles into motion in the interest of moving your arm. When does this become violence/coercion? When it is not freely and voluntarily assented to.

Sex without consent is rape.

Payment without consent is theft.

Physical force being applied without consent is violence.

These are easy.

The Golden Rule

Why does the "golden rule" matter? Because it is a logical truism that is beyond reproach. If you want other individuals to not aggress against you, you should not aggress against them. If you aggress against them, they will defend against said aggression and "aggress" against you in self-defense, compromising your original self-interested goal of self-preservation/autonomy, and freedom. Can you see? There is nothing altruistic about the golden rule. It is an exercise in refined self-interest, which is the basis of all human good.

Voluntaryism is OBJECTIVELY THE ONLY WAY.

This seemingly ambitious claim is easy to prove.

1. People need resources to survive, and own themselves (read: possess nature-conferred executive power over their own bodies).

2. Resources are limited, and different individuals value different resources, and these value assignments are always in flux. This is called "economics." Often times, individuals end up valuing the same, scarce resource. Because of this, potential for conflict exists.

3. There must then be some foundational rule or grundnorm in dealing with the dissolution of these potential conflicts to the end of minimizing violent conflict/violent conflict.

4. This grundnorm must apply evenly across the population. If it does not, more potential for violent conflict is created, as individuals will argue and fight over who has "more right" to any given resource due to arbitrary factors such as family line, skin color, sex, etc. This could (and does, under the statist model) include the "right" to own/enslave/control others.

5. The only grundnorm that fulfills this criteria is the self-ownership axiom delineated above.

6. Definitions of property must be created via extrapolation from the immutable reality of self ownership. Gray areas will exist, and must be worked through, but a society based on self-ownership has the potential for greatest possible peace. The state model can never do this because coercion and violation of self-ownership are inseparable from its mechanisms. In short, anything not based on this least common denominator, smallest minority-based concept of self-ownership (a natural reality) must by default be based on some other coercive collectivist system that must by very defintion deny self-ownership (reality of executive capacity) to at least some individuals, regardless of whether they have committed any violent act, or not.

7. In short, self-ownership is universalizable. Coercive collectivism is not. It (self-ownership) can be potentially accepted by everyone, whereas statist systems never could, because they depend on violence against segments of the population up to and including execution/murder. Murder and violence are not universalizable because a number of the people that could potentially "all" accept them as norms would be dead or harmed, by very virtue of said acceptance. Even something as small as a speeding ticket is a violation of self-ownership, as the individual is stopped under the threat of force/violence.

8. Thus, if life is held as the prime value, statism objectively cannot work (to create a minimally violent society) because it depends on coercion, subjugation, and murder (the degradation of life) to exist. Finally, if someone doesn't hold life as a value, the argument is a meaningless one for said individual, and it would be an absurdity to even engage in such discourse with said insane person.

~KafkA

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Graham Smith is a Voluntaryist activist, creator, and peaceful parent residing in Niigata City, Japan. Graham runs the "Voluntary Japan" online initiative with a presence here on Steem, as well as Facebook and Twitter. (Hit me up so I can stop talking about myself in the third person!)