Your Stateless Society Needs YOU!

By the wonders of the interwebs I was chatting on Facebook with a friend from school I hadn’t been in touch with for more than quarter of a century last night (that does make me feel old!). We had discovered via a Facebook alumni group that another of our number is an ex Royal Marines colonel and Special Boat Service chief and now “head of global security” at a private security and defence contractor and I made a comment about him maybe being a good person to have known when we finally reject coercive government and become a private law society.

My friend quickly replied that he had read Hans-Herman Hoppe, who has made “Private Law Society” his signature phrase to describe a stateless society (i.e. one based on the private competitive production of law and security rather than the monopolistic state legislative law), and we got chatting off the group for a while. Needless to say I was delighted to find someone else, and one of my best friends at that back in the day, thinking along the same lines as me.

And as we were chatting about whether, and how, we might one day be rid of coercive government, we got stuck on just how we could get from here to there. And whilst I suggested a few possible approaches that I’ll get onto, we did I think conclude that there is no one way, and that the process of delegitimising the violent state and building new civil society (or “Freed Market” as I prefer it) institutions to take over some current functions, would take the work of all sorts of people with many different skills, interests and motivations.

Not everyone, for example, who takes us a step toward eradicating the state from our lives need have that ultimate aim in mind. They need not share my belief, say, that however much some state intervention may be well-intentioned, and even though some of it might do a little good, those goods cannot outweigh the bads the monopoly of force causes in other areas.

They may simply believe that they can see a way of doing one thing better than the state in one area of life that particularly interests them. One might hope, though, that if they believe this about their pet policy area, they may accept that other people with a background in other areas might also be right. In other words if they expect the rest of us to accept their professional judgement in one area, they might at least reciprocate that belief when someone in another area proposes something.

Yes, there are what we might call “big ticket items” like political philosophers delegitimising the democratic political state as much as possible, economists discrediting (what an appropriate pun!) the fraudulent and destructive money system, but it also means novelists spinning yarns about possible futures; technologists building mechanisms to get round state intrusion in our lives or platforms in which new forms of society can develop; entrepreneurs and lawyers developing less confrontational and monopolistic arbitration systems.

It means educators learning from their own experiences and developing new pedagogies and curricula fit for people who may very well live well into the twenty-second century; creators of knowledge and art finding ways to make money out of their workwithout handing a big share to media oligarchs. And it means people in neighbourhoods and communities up and down the land telling bureaucrats that they can take responsibility for their own local affairs.

And what that all means is that everyone potentially has a part to play in achieving a stateless society. To use an old and perhaps tired analogy: how does one eat an elephant? Well, maybe it’s not one bite at a time but that one gets a lot of other hungry people round to help!

Is it just the line of least resistance that we continue to vote for and so legitimise politicians who to most of us appear to be useless at best and venal liars at worst when they tell us they can achieve these things better that we can if we just give them our support?