Government Malpractice

Mankind Versus The State

By Robert Klassen

Copyright ã 2001 Robert Klassen

Pretend this is a movie. We see a jungle path in the early morning twilight. An animal runs past, we can’t quite make out what it is. Then a naked man appears, his skin painted in designs. He carries a blow-gun. Then another one appears, carrying a bow and arrow. Altogether, six painted men sneak down the path. Are they hunting the animal?

The scene switches to another jungle path, down which six naked men are running, shouting, and laughing. They also carry weapons, but their skins are not painted. Two men carry a dead animal tied to a spear.

Suddenly, a painted man jumps into the path, levels his blow-gun, and fires a poisoned dart into the back of an unpainted man. That man falls to the ground and all of the other men flee.

Now it is night. We see men dancing around a fire, celebrating a victory. Their stick and mud huts are in shadow, but we also see women and children huddled there, cheering the men on. We switch to another village, where men also dance around a fire, shouting in rage. The women and children are wailing. What do you suppose will happen next?

Please note, everybody in this story is under the age of thirty-five; the majority are teen-agers. For evidence of the truth of this scenario, I would first refer the reader to Homer, then query any search engine on primitive culture.

Mankind has its roots in this kind of social organization. Bands of a dozen up to four-dozen people lived in temporary camps and eked out a living from whatever plant and animal food happened to be available in their region. When the food supply ran low, they moved on. The use of physical force to get food and to retain control of food producing territory was, and still is among living hunter-gatherer tribes today, unremitting. Personally, I believe that the use of force to get what we want is natural to mankind and is, possibly, hard-wired into our nervous system. Today, however, this natural tendency may bring mankind to self-extinction, thanks to the modern political state.

The origin of the political state remains hidden in unrecorded history. There are many hypotheses, but the one that makes sense to me would place the beginning in the early agricultural revolution, when food supplies began to stabilize and people didn’t need to move around as much. This would tally with archeological discoveries at Susa, Jericho, and Troy, possibly the first city-states in history. In Homer we find early city-states vying for regional dominance, although appearing not much different in organization from bands of hunter-gatherers, repeating the ancient pattern of human social behavior. By the time we get to the battle at Marathon in 490 B.C., the political state is an established human institution and its monopoly on the use of force is set in tradition for all time to come.

I think the time has come for us to examine the validity of the political state as a conceptual model for the organization of human society. One could argue that the state is valid as an historical precedent, that is, there has never been an alternative that worked. One could argue that the monopolization of force by the political state is necessary to prevent violent social chaos, or a reversion to the hunter-gatherer example of social behavior in my opening scenario. Or one could argue that only the political state can provide security and justice in human society. I think these arguments are specious and false.

The alternative model of human organization has been maturing before our eyes for two centuries. It is the private business corporation designed to create and sell products for a profit without the use of force. Academicians in favor of the state have recognized the potential threat of the corporation model to their cherished traditions since Karl Marx. Thanks largely to them, the corporation model of government has been throttled by the state monopoly on force from the outset.

Political state apologists of all stripes have described the private business corporation as the source of violent social chaos since the late Nineteenth Century. In verifiable fact, this is a lie. The true source of violent social chaos has always been, and still is, the state and its monopoly on the use of force.

Throttled private corporations have provided security and justice to whatever limited extent they were permitted by the state from their beginnings. Although researching or even thinking about insurance and banking corporations apart from state rules and regulations is nearly impossible, considering the potential of these private corporations is not impossible. Insurance and banking could provide the kind of security and justice people demand if they were allowed to do so (like making theft prohibitively expensive to the thief).

Now that Western Civilization and its respected social institutions have been attacked by Dark Age prophets and their henchmen, we are menaced once more by the foremost argument in favor of the state, total war. Who can imagine private corporations in the 21^st Century protecting us from murderers out of the 10^th Century? I can. Our private corporation airline personnel were disarmed by our state. They still are. I believe that private airlines could have done better without the state. But instead of secure private defense, we rely on our 21^st Century state to bomb a 10^th Century country into the Stone Age. I don’t believe that total war is necessary or desirable to anybody except to the state.

Mankind’s worldwide reaction to the WTC attack was twofold: some people danced around the campfire in celebration and some people danced around the campfire in rage. These reactions are natural to our species and so is the glower of hatred we express toward our enemies, whomever they may be at the moment. The state thrives on this reaction. But if we allow our states to escalate this posturing to the level of nuclear holocaust, then the survival of our species becomes at risk once more. As some members of my generation may recall, that was the issue throughout the Cold War. Now what?

Who would put Space Age technology into the hands of Dark Age warriors? Who armed these primitives? Who provoked them? The short-term imperatives of political governments always defeat the long-term intentions of civilization. Why do we endure this nonsense?

First, because it’s a habit. The political state model for human social organization has been around forever, while the private corporation model has only been recognized as a viable alternative within the last fifty years. Second, because human technology has changed everything except human nature. Thanks to technology, human living conditions in the civilized world have never been this good, while political government has never been this dangerous to the survival of our species. Third, because the desire to use force for whatever reason that appeals to us at the moment lies deep within every human person. We dance around this fire.

Human nature might change in three or four million years of living in different circumstances, but it isn’t going to change soon enough for us to avoid the collision that clearly lies ahead between our Space-Age technology and our Dark-Age philosophy of government. We must somehow find a way to make the use of force unprofitable, undesirable, and unthinkable to individual people and to our institutions of social organization, security, and justice. The private corporation model of government could do just that.

For further information about the corporation model of government, please read:

Citadel, Market, and Altar, by Spencer Heath, Yale University Press, 1957. Although out of print, this book may be available at: http://www.wepin.com/why/products/cmaa/cmaa.html

The Art of Community, by Spencer Heath MacCallum, Institute for Humane Studies, 1970. This book is available at: http://www.laissezfairebooks.com.

The Discovery of Freedom, by Rose Wilder Lane, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, Fox and Wilkes, 1993. This book is available at: http://www.laissezfairebooks.com.

Sic Itur ad Astra, by Andrew J. Galambos, The Universal Scientific Publications Company, 1999. This book is available at: http://www.laissezfairebooks.com.

Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, by Robert Klassen, iUniverse Publishing Company, 1997. This book is available at: http://www.nugvdigm.com.