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Monday, April 11, 2005

Another angle on this thing of ours...

Selling the Store? - by the always insightful Kevin Carson.

I would say that by taking the stated approach of always pointing out how the government is protecting the ruling class at the expense of the rest of us, in regards to any particular issue people care about, it will engender a sense of general non-legitimacy to the state, a skepticism that could undermine the security trap. If people stop believing in this legitimacy, the state's goose is rather cooked. Not that people will, en-masse, revolt or throw down their tools. People are too opportunistic and utilitarian for that. But the people on the margin right now will move closer to our position, and so on. They will continue to spread this general malaise. Malaise, under the conditions we live in right now, is just about the right attitude for the average non-ideologue to have. If it grows powerful enough, the boogey-men of the statists will no longer frighten people into clinging to Big Brother's shirtsleeve.
Lao-Tsu said "When rulers take lives so that their own lives are maintained, their people no longer fear death. When people act without regard for their own lives they overcome those who value only their own lives."

Of course the powers that be, having only a hammer, have moved on to the vague threat of torture in order to keep people in line. (see: Alberto Gonzales)
This may be why we were allowed to see the Abu Ghraib photos. "See what we will resort to?"

Perhaps the worst thing that could happen is for the next administration to be "soft tyrants". The Good Cop to the Bush Administration's Bad Cop. But that threatens to unleash a revolution of rising expectations. So it's a game of brinkmanship. Even with all of their Ivy League educated experts, they can't do the impossible, which is to rationally plan things from the top down in a way that does not eventually collapse. Planned societies are un-sustainable, economically and ecologically and sociologically. These things are not un-related. Economy is human ecology. Social Psychology is constrained by material conditions. (i.e. whether or not you have a "propensity to consume", you can't spend what you don't have. And having less will program you to consume less of it. People might be somewhat irrational, but we do learn.)

Personally, I think the one lever we should lean the hardest on, all of us, whether mutualists or rothbardians or anarcho-marxists or anarcho-empiricists, is that of Central Banking. It is the cause, directly or indirectly, of most of the evils of modern life. And this immediately cuts off the "but without the government, big business would crush us all" argument dead in it's tracks.
In a world of constantly falling prices, where credit bubbled upwards instead of downwards, there wouldn't be "big business" as we know of it.
It also answers the "social decay" arguments of conservative working class people. It is not that hard to demonstrate how monetary inflation creates moral corruption in society, both of the licentious type, and the empty consumer-culture type. Weimar Germany provides a beautiful historical example to use.
It is a great way to reach out to "ideological cousins" who just can't accept the whole consistent philosophy of anarchism. Let's get rid of central banking first, and then we can mop up the rest.

1 Comments:

Blogger 123 123 said...

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6:38 AM  

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