Paul_Atreides

Well, commerce, trade, voluntary contracts, rest on the threat of violence. Now, that does NOT mean that commerce or voluntary contracts are violent. They are, in fact, the opposite of violence. But for these non-violent interactions to take place, they need to happen within a framework of rules which everyone must follow. And I'm not even talking about the crazy regulations that modern States have created, I'm talking about the most basic, minimal infrastructure of laws necessary to compel individuals to respect the freedoms of other individuals and to honor their part of the contracts they have voluntarily signed. In other words, there needs to be a system of well-known rules so individuals will be able to operate in a climate of trust, and they can rest assured that other individuals' temptations to unilaterally break a contract will be corrected by such rules. It is true that very often the incentives to honor your side of a contract are very high. Let's imagine a Viking town that trades with with some Byzantine village. The Vikings arrive at the port of the Byzantine village and notice they outnumber their trading partners, and are stronger and better prepared to fight. So they might feel tempted to slaughter everybody and take all the goods for free. They don't do it, however, because they expect to continue their commercial relationship for much longer. They defer gratification. Being peaceful is advantageous in the long run. There are many other situations, however, where individuals might find that keeping their side of the deal is clearly disadvantageous, either because it's objectively disadvantageous or because they're not smart enough to understand it. In such cases, bad things can happen in the absence of a predictable system of rules. About the last thing you said, yes, I am curious but at the same time I have my own opinions. I am open to anyone proving I am wrong. I am a staunch libertarian (believe me, I have had big discussions with friends in my country, Spain, and some mockingly call me the 'anarchocapitalist'), but as of late I have been brooding about this issue and reading different theories, and I am having serious difficulties just wrapping my head around how a stateless society could be achieved. I am a computer science guy and in my field it's all about implementation and feasibility. I stand with the majority of libertarians, who defend a minimal State whose basic tasks will be to prevent individuals from initiating force against other individuals and from not respecting the contracts they have agreed upon. However, notice that these rules, however minimal, can only be enforced... through the threat of the initiation of force.

Exactly. Wanting to abolish the State equals wanting to abolish power. And power and the pursuit of power are inherent parts of Human nature. Knowing this, our pursuit as libertarians should be to create States where measures are implemented to restrict the power of the State. But how? Ahhh... Stefan put it very well in his video "The Story of your Enslavement"... The State (the people that live off it, the Parasites) will do everything in its hand to ensure it survives... I am a pessimist.

Well, historical examples are useful in as much as they show us how humans tend to operate. Also, if we want to figure out the origin of the State, where else are we going to look into if not history? This is not an original theory of mine. The origin of the State is appropriation and predation. Groups of humans appropriate some territory and tell other groups of humans that, from now on, said territory is theirs. Actually, that sounds familiar. You can already find forms of proto-States among the higher apes. Bands of chimps appropriate parts of the forest, and you better not know what they do to intruders. In some cases (I had to say it, why not) they mutilate the genitals of breaching chimps... and then leave them alive. So, once you understand that the State is just a sophisticated, glorified form of these rudimentary proto-States that you can find among the great apes, or, at least, that the biological foundation of the chimps' proto-States and our States is one and the same, how can we possibly aspire to avoid the State? If the State is an inevitable result of the combination of certain territorial and predatory human instincts + a swollen frontal lobe, how can you possibly think that you can avoid the State? This is an ideal for a species different from ours. Even if a subset of humans managed to operate without a State, that is, if they managed to form an extended order where there was no centralized power, how could they ensure that humans OUTSIDE their stateless society would also share their principles / instincts? As said, they would be absolutely defenseless against a powerful State that formed in a different part of the world. And if they organized to defend themselves against that State, then it would have to be through the creation of a State. If a society organizes to defend a territory against foreign powers, how do you call that but a State? You cannot avoid the State insofar as you can't change the human species into something it's not.

First of all, hello to everyone. I'm glad to be a member of this community. I like to define myself as an anthropological libertarian, and by that I mean that the principles of libertarianism have been intuitive and absolutely inescapable to me since I was a child. I remember once going for a walk with my mother as a small kid. It was getting close to 20:00, which is the time when all shops close in Spain. I asked her how come all businesses decided to close exactly at 20:00, to which she replied that they had no choice, that it was what the law dictated. I remember feeling shocked and furious at this new information. To this day I do not understand how anyone can possibly defend the morality of telling someone what to do with their property. I suspect, though, that the State, as an institution, is absolutely inevitable, which does not mean that we must view it as benign. We libertarians recognize the predatory nature of the State. That's the main thing that separates us from classical liberals, who sometimes have a rather naively positive view of the State, or socialists, whose understanding of the State verges on the mythical and the religious. The State is appropriation and force. Certain groups or bands of people settle on a given territory and declare that it is theirs. The examples in History are endless. We have the case of France, which is called France and not Gaul because it was conquered at some point by a Germanic tribe known as the Franks. The Franks took the reigns of a set of territories which had absolutely nothing to do with them linguistically or racially. Why? Because they could. They had the force to do it. German tribes also established the kingdom of Hispania after the collapse of the Roman Empire, and in the year 711 they were overthrown by the Muslims. The Muslims occupied the positions of power and decided that from now on Spain was their property. As in the case of France under the Franks, the Moors were elites sitting on a heavily Romanized population that had very little to do with them. Having said this, the pursuit of a stateless society seems to me like the pursuit of a society where there is no force and no appropriation. Is this even possible? Let us imagine an atomized society of free individuals who act in cooperation with each other. The order uniting this society is a distributed kind of order. Their is no coordinator. Like the ants, each individual possesses a set of principles of behavior, and it is from the large-scale combination of these principles that this peaceful society arises. Let us imagine now that a foreign power in the form of a State threatens to take over that land and impose its authority on it. What can those individuals do? Nothing. If the individuals stay where they are, the State will triumph. The foreign power will engulf them and the once free and peaceful society will have to live under the rule of Law (Law implies State and State implies Law, let's never forget about this!). But what if the individuals unite? Let's say they form an army. They also create a council where they will make important decisions on the allocation of resources. They will create a police which will persecute collaborationists and fifth-columnists, because it is perfectly possible that there exist individuals within that free society who favor the interests of the foreign State. Some laws will have to be passed, that's for sure. But how to finance all this? Most members of this free society are happy to give their money to pay for the new army and the police, but everybody has their own idea about how much money is enough. Some citizens are aggravated that they are giving a lot and others, nothing. Maybe, just maybe, this council decides every citizen will have to contribute with some amount of money at least. Finally, the citizens defeat the foreign State... But ironies of life, now they have created another State! The State is like one of those whirlpools that suck everything. No matter how fast you swim in the opposite direction, it always drags you toward itself. If the above mentioned free society does not enforce the principles of statelessness, then subsets of the population will ally and form a State. If, however, those principles are enforced through law and police, a State will be born. As long as there are Humans, there will be force and appropriation, and what is the State but a glorified version of these base tendencies of Humans? Should we attempt to minimize the State rather than abolish it?