Just Ignore Them

Roderick T. Long
Praxeology.net
November 22, 2004

Here’s a cheery thought on this gloomy Tax Day: government is one of the few problems that can be gotten rid of by ignoring it. In this respect it compares favourably with such hardier ills as tornadoes, swarming piranhas, and male pattern baldness.

There’s a catch, of course. If only a few people ignore the government, it won’t go away; instead it will come down on those few people like a ton of CS gas. But if the number of people ignoring the government – treating its commands as one would treat the commands of some delusional street person – were to reach critical mass, the power of the state, resting essentially as it does on the complaisance of the governed, would melt away like butter in the Arizona sun. As Étienne de la Boétie wrote in his classic essay Discourse of Voluntary Servitude:

Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.

This is one of the advantages of anarchism as a political program. Those who seek to replace one system of governmental control with another cannot achieve this goal by ignoring the government; they have to take active steps to seize the reins of power, probably by violence. But not so for anarchists. Now if government leaders were Kryptonian superbeings, ignoring them would not be sufficient to achieve anarchy either; one would need to convert the rulers to anarchism or else start developing kryptonite-based weapons. But in fact government rulers are human, all-too-human, and do not command sufficient strength in their own persons to compel the obedience of their subjects. The rulers’ power consists crucially in the legitimacy granted to them by those they rule – what Ayn Rand called the “sanction of the victim.” Withdrawing that sanction reduces the rulers to the same status as everybody else – the strategy dramatised in Eric Frank Russell’s delightful satirical novel The Great Explosion and documented theoretically and historically in Bryan Caplan’s article The Literature of Nonviolent Resistance.

Hence one of the chief goals of anarchist political activity must be to help build a cultural milieu in which the inclination to ignore the government will be widespread enough to achieve critical mass.

(Such a set of cultural attitudes will also come in handy after the anarchist (r)evolution. Critics of anarchism often ask how the protective associations with which anarchists propose to replace government can be trusted not to abuse power themselves. I’ve argued before that such associations will have far less opportunity to abuse their power than do governments today, and I think those arguments are good ones; but it’s also worth noting that a populace that has rendered itself ungovernable by the state will be equally ungovernable by competing associations.)

Sponsors

Your Ad Here

IndyTruth
Education for Freedom

FAIR USE NOTICE. Many of the stories on this site contain copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making this material available in its efforts to advance the understanding of public policy, world events, human rights, economics, and health. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in Section 107 of the US Copyright Law. If you wish to use such copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: IndyTruth does not make legal copyright claims to its original content, on the principle that readers should be able to freely spread information for educational purposes. If you repost anything, please respect our hard work by crediting the author and linking to the original source.

Just Ignore Them

Related Content

Sponsors