diamonds and uranium in CAR) but economically underdeveloped former colonies of France. Despite 'decolonisation' in the 1960s France has maintained an extremely active role in these countries, installing and deposing tyrants whenever they deem appropriate. For example, France backed CAR's deranged dictator Bokassa until he became too mad to handle whereupon they helped replace him with current favourite Bozize. In Chad, the French backed president Idriss Deby has re-written the constitution in order to hold onto power indefinitely while banning freedom of speech for the opposition and arresting political opponents; in both countries French troops are fighting on behalf of the government regimes.I see that on the basis of some rather vague passing comments in her book Short Answers to the Tough Questions, Mary Ruwart is being accused (see here and here) of defending pedophilia and child pornography.
Well, she’s clearly not doing that. But her position is vague enough to be ambiguous among several different positions. (She does begin the section with the disclaimer that determining the correct libertarian position on children’s rights is a “hotly-debated issue†where libertarian theorists “need more definition.â€)
Let me first say what I take to be the correct libertarian position on these issues, and then take a look at what Ruwart says.
Consider the following three facts:
Fact 1: Consent is not genuine when a person’s capacity for meaningful consent (not just to sex but more broadly – e.g., to commercial contracts) is impaired, as it is in the case of immature mental/psychological development. (Thus some superficially consensual transactions are not genuinely consensual and so receive no protection from libertarian rights theory.)
Fact 2: Not everyone reaches maturity at precisely the same age. (Thus there’s no reasonable point at which to set an absolute universal cut-off without condemning some who are innocent and protecting some who are guilty.)
Fact 3: Nobody passes from immaturity to maturity overnight; the transition is always a gradual one. (The capacity to give meaningful consent to the sale of a pack of chewing gum surely emerges earlier than the capacity to give meaningful consent to a mortgage contract; likewise, given the asymmetries of power involved, the ability to give genuine consent to sex with someone a few years older arguably emerges earlier than the capacity to give genuine consent to sex with someone many years older.)
Fact 1 gives us a reason to favour some form of age-of-consent restrictions. Facts 2 and 3 give us a reason to make those restrictions sensitive to details of context rather than imposing a uniform limit across the board. For example, one way of dealing with Fact 2 is to establish an age limit below which the burden of proof shifts from the party claiming that the person’s consent was not consensual to the party claiming that it was. And one way of dealing with Fact 3 is to make the shift in burden of proof sensitive to age difference between the parties.
With regard to child pornography, I think criminalising the mere ownership or possession of it is legally incoherent, not just for the usual libertarian reasons (though those too) but on the grounds that the prosecutors of the crime would have to violate the very law they’re enforcing in order to maintain possession of the evidence needed to prosecute – unless of course prosecutors are exempted from the laws that apply to everybody else, but that would be hard to square with impartial justice. Moreover, if it were illegal to own photographic depictions of real-life rights-violations then all the news footage from wars, police beatings, etc. would have to be banned as well.
The real issue concerns the production of child pornography. If such production involves actual sex acts (as opposed to, say, digitally simulated imagery) by children below the age of consent (as defined above), then it’s rape and should be banned. If not, then there’s no direct victim, and so the production cannot legitimately be combated by legal force (though vigorous and systematic boycotts, protests, and shaming would be quite appropriate). (The argument that its production should be banned to protect indirect victims, on the theory that child pornography makes its readers more likely to commit child rape, would have no grounds for resisting the demand that all literature advocating and/or glamourising rights-violations be banned – which would deprive us of most of world literature.)
Okay, with those distinctions in hand, let’s turn to Ruwart. Here are some of the relevant passages, with my comments interspersed. (If you want to see more of the context and don’t own the book, go to its Amazon page and use the “Search inside†function; the section begins on page 41.)
Children have the same rights (and responsibilities) as adults, but normally exercise them with the help of a loving parent or guardian because they are physically incapable of assuming them at birth.
This passage recognises, properly, that children can have rights and yet, owing to immaturity, be unready to exercise those rights. Ruwart mentions only physical incapacity here; I would want to add psychological incapacity, but Ruwart here does not commit herself either to affirming or to denying this addendum.
A libertarian society would not have laws that discriminate on the basis of age.
In this section she’s talking not about sex but about things like the ban on selling alcohol or cigarettes to minors. I agree that those laws are silly. (My mother, when she was a child, regularly bought cigarettes and alcohol for her father; I don’t think anyone would claim the problems of underage drinking and smoking were more severe in the 1930s-40s than today.) And as Ruwart goes on to point out, if concerned parents wanted to organise a boycott against stores that made such sales to children they would probably be effective, since “parents are generally better customers than the children.â€
But do the age-of-consent restrictions I favour “discriminate on the basis of age� Well, sort of; but the real basis for the “discrimination†is not age per se but diminished capacity, of which immaturity is one but not the only cause; so I don’t know whether Ruwart is ruling out enforcement of age-of-consent restrictions as such. If she is, I definitely disagree with her (though I don’t regard such disagreement, if it be one, as being as fundamental as I would if I had greater confidence in coercive methods and less confidence in voluntary methods).
In practice, children’s rights are limited by their inability to take responsibility for their choices.
This is another passage that might look as though Ruwart is granting psychological as opposed to merely physical barriers to genuine consent. But the example she goes on to give is that “a child who wishes to work, but can’t convince his or her parents to provide the necessary transportation, will be unable to exercise that right,†which is a completely different issue; so the matter remains unclear.
Children forced to participate in sexual acts have the same rights and recourse as a rape victim. We can, and should, prosecute their oppressors.
Children who willingly participate in sexual acts have the right to make that decision as well, even if it’s distasteful to us personally. Some children will make poor choices just as some adults do in smoking and drinking to excess; this is part of life.
Ruwart’s critics seem to be assuming that she is attributing to children generally a capacity for meaningful consent to sex. In fact she doesn’t say that, though of course she doesn’t deny it either. Her reference to “children who willingly participate in sexual acts†says nothing about what the conditions for willing participation are, and her aforementioned disclaimer suggests she may not have a fully worked-out position on the matter. She clearly assumes that some children are capable of meaningfully consenting to sex under some circumstances, but hardly anybody denies that; see Fact 2. (No ages are mentioned, but given the legal context, “child†presumably means anyone currently regarded as below the age of majority, and so would include, say, a 17-year-old’s having sex with an 18-year-old, which surely can be consensual.)
When we outlaw child pornography, the prices paid for child performers rise, increasing the incentives for parents to use children against their will.
This is somewhat confusing. Does the phrase “outlaw child pornography†refer to outlawing possession or production? It seems to me that Ruwart is committed to banning (the typical case of) production by her earlier statement that when children are “forced to participate in sexual acts†(which is surely the typical case of production), they should be treated as “rape victims†and we should “prosecute their oppressors.â€Â So I presume that the phrase refers to outlawing possession. In that case, I agree with her conclusion – that possession shouldn’t be banned – but the argument is one which, if it’s good, would seem to tell against the banning of production as well. Now there may well be cases in which attempts to ban a genuine rights-violation can actually make matters worse (Spencer maintains, for example, that British attempts to ban the slave-trade made the conditions of slaves worse by motivating slavers to pack their victims into ships in greater numbers, and to dump them into the sea at the appearance of the British navy); but we should be very hesitant, I think, before deciding that no means of banning such rights-violation is viable.
The age of majority for marriage, work, etc. is most often established by custom of the society and will vary with the individual’s circumstances rather than being dictated by law.
Notably, Ruwart is evidently here endorsing, rather than rejecting, the concept of an “age of majority†– something one would never guess from what the critics have been saying. But it’s unclear whether Ruwart is rejecting legal enforcement of any and all age-of-consent restrictions in favour of custom-based pressure alone (in which case I disagree, as per Fact 1 above), or whether she is rejecting legal enforcement only of those age-of-consent restrictions that fail to “vary with the individual’s circumstances†(in which case I agree, as per Facts 2 and 3 above).
In any case, while Ruwart’s comments are certainly not fairly described as “defending†pedophilia or child pornography, they are admittedly ambiguous as to exactly what she thinks should or should not be banned by force of law. In particular, her position (if she even has a fully settled one) is ambiguous between the correct position (mine, of course) and various incorrect (un-Longian!) positions. Here’s hoping that the reportedly forthcoming revised edition will be less confusing on this issue.
(Note: No Agorist Demerits on this post because it’s about Ruwart’s political philosophy, not her campaign.)
In comments at The Art of the Possible, Jeremy asks:
And how come you get the country and I have to leave [in order to secure individual liberty from government coercion under majority rule]?
Well, as most people think democratic government is a good idea and it’s the idea we’ve used for a long, long time, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that your idea is better.
In logic, begging the question (sometimes known by its Latin name, petitio principii) is the fallacy of presupposing, in an argument, part of what you need to prove. There are lots of ways to spell out exactly what that comes to, and some interesting philosophical debate to be had. But one paradigm case of question-begging that pretty much everybody agrees on is the circular argument—a degenerate argument in which the conclusion supposedly to be proved is itself one of the premises. For example, when one argues that, all other things being equal, I ought to be ruled by a form of legal authority based on what most people want rather than based on my individual consent, because, regardless of whether or not I individually consent to it, that’s the form of legal authority that most people want.
Here is how statist modelize Anarchy:
Men are angels, no State: OK.
Men are angels, State: OK.
Men are not angels, no State: Not conceivable.
Men are not angels, State: Best conceivable.
Here is a more realistic model:
Men are angels, no State: OK.
Men are angels, State: OK.
Men are not angels, no State: Bad situation.
Men are not angels, State: Worse situation..
Defending the continued existence of the state, despite having absolute certainty of a corresponding continuation of its intrinsic engagement in robbery, destruction, murder, and countless other crimes, requires that one imagine nonstate chaos, disorder, and death on a scale that nonstate actors seem incapable of causing. Nor, to my knowledge, does any historical example attest to such large-scale nonstate mayhem. With regard to large-scale death and destruction, no person, group, or private organization can even begin to compare to the state, which is easily the greatest instrument of destruction known to man. All nonstate threats to life, liberty, and property appear to be relatively petty, and therefore can be dealt with. Only states can pose truly massive threats, and sooner or later the horrors with which they menace mankind invariably come to pass.
The lesson of the precautionary principle is plain: because people are vile and corruptible, the state, which holds by far the greatest potential for harm and tends to be captured by the worst of the worst, is much too risky for anyone to justify its continuation. To tolerate it is not simply to play with fire, but to chance the total destruction of the human race.
Most of the examples in today’s Picket Line can be found in greater detail in the book We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader.
A while back, I started looking for examples of ways tax resisters have organized mutual aid pacts to help diffuse the effects of government retaliation. In the course of doing the research, though, I started collecting examples instead of a larger variety collective projects resisters and their sympathizers have used in support of tax resistance.
Here are some of the examples I found:
For instance, the Breton Association in 19th century France, which organized to “form a common stock or fund… to indemnify the subscribers for any expense they may be put to by their refusal to pay any illegal contributions imposed upon the public.â€
Another example was the Association of Real Estate Taxpayers in 1930s Chicago, which formed a cooperative legal fund to fight an offensive legal battle against the tax.
American war tax resisters today can use the War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund to defray penalties and interest seized by the IRS. The fund is raised as-needed by asking subscribers to contribute an equal amount.
The oath of the Regulator tax resistance movement in the North Carolina colony bound its signers to “bear an equal share in paying and making up [the] loss†if “any of our company be put to expense or under any confinement.â€
Some tax resisters have formed mutual support communities. Whiteway Colony was founded to try to live up to Tolstoyan ideals. The members of the Bijou and Agape communities live below a taxable income so as to avoid paying taxes.
Some members of the Restored Israel of Yahweh ran a construction business and agreed not to withhold federal taxes from the wages of those employees who were fellow-members and who were resisting taxes.
Vivien Kellems refused to withhold taxes from her employees’ wages, saying: “They are all free American citizens, thoroughly capable of performing all of the duties and responsibilities of citizenship for themselves. And so, from this day, I am not collecting nor paying their income taxes for them.â€
Charles Kanjama recently urged Kenyans to begin a tax resistance campaign, and said that to foil pay-as-you-earn withholding, “participating employers and employees can enter into a voluntary contract to convert monthly employment into quarterly or half-yearly employment, thus effectively delaying tax liability for several months.â€
Earlier this year I recounted a dramatic and successful example of the American group “Peacemakers†blocking the sale of Ernest & Marion Bromley’s seized home.
British nonconformists and women’s suffrage activists a century ago also used this tactic. Auctions became rallies, with speeches and banners and crowds that could number in the thousands. Supporters would pack the auction house and refuse to leave their seats. On some occasions, violence broke out. In some cases, auctioneers refused to handle goods that had been seized for tax refusal.
Simply boycotting the auctions and refusing to buy seized goods is one way communities offer support. It was part of the Quaker “Discipline†to refuse to buy seized goods. When Valentine Byler’s horse was seized for non-payment of the social security tax, “no Amish came to bid on the horses and, due to a lack of bidders, they went for a good price, with the harnesses ‘thrown in’ by the auctioneer.â€
Jessica Ramer and a Claire Files contributor brought this idea up. If you pay in cash whenever you can, you give the recipient the opportunity to decide whether or not to declare the income.
Cash tips are easy to under-report. I asked about that recently and was told that most people pay with credit card/debit card and that the government now uses a percentage method for tips. They look at the charged meals, look at the number of total meals served, and then look at the charged tips to figure out how much cash tips you recieved.
(100 meals served. 50 paid with card, tipping 15%. the government calculates 15% from 100 meals even if cash tips are only 10%)
You can help out by tipping more when paying with cash or better yet, when you pay with card, put 1% tip on it and put the rest out as cash. I even leave a note for the server saying “this is your money, don’t tell your boss, or the government. share it with the buss boy if that is the policy.†This will help lower the average tip figures, but still give the nice server what they have earned.
Karl Hess found people willing to barter with him as he was dodging IRS seizures:
The other day I welded up a fish-smoking rack for a family in Washington, D.C. It will earn me a year’s supply of smoked fish. At about the same time, I helped a friend dig a foundation. He’ll help me lay the concrete blocks for a workshop. Part of my pay for a lecture at a New England college was the use of the school’s welding shop, to make some metal sculptures. Three such sculptures have paid my attorney’s fees in maintaining the tax resistance which is the reason barter has become such an integral part of my life.
Before the American Revolution, colonists who opposed Britain’s economic control boycotted British products and began to produce homespun cloth, alternatives to tea, and so forth. Gandhi’s independence campaign in India made the wearing and production of homespun cloth central to the opposition, and the Salt March was focused on the illegal production of untaxed, non-foreign-monopoly salt.
An example today is homebrewed beer (which beats the excise tax on alcoholic beverages).
One report from World War I-era America noted that this was a technique used by those who opposed the “Liberty Bondsâ€:
Efforts to prevent banks from handling the bonds have centered chiefly in Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Missouri and Oklahoma. The President of a Wisconsin bank has advised the Treasury that his depositors, mostly Germans, or of German parentage, have withdrawn many thousands of dollars from his bank because he aided the First Liberty Loan.
These depositors, he added, had taken their accounts to two rival banks on the understanding that those banks would not aid the second Liberty Loan. The two banks, he reported, were not aiding the loan in any way.
Many banks have felt the pressure of German influence in this propaganda, reports indicate. So pronounced was the movement that the States of Minnesota, North and South Dakota, and Montana recently decided that they would withdraw State funds from any bank which did not support the loan.
The people knew how to torment these officials of the Roman customs with the petty cruelty which ordinary people develop with irreconcilable persistency, whenever they believe this persistency to be due to their moral indignation. In consequence of the theocratic scruples about the duty of paying taxes, the tax-gatherers were declared to be unclean and half Gentile.… among the Jews the words “tax-gatherers and sinners,†“tax-gatherers and Gentiles,†“tax-gatherers and harlots,†“tax-gatherers, murderers and robbers,†and similar insulting combinations, were not only ready on the tongue and familiar, but were accepted as theocratically identical in meaning. Thrust out from all social intercourse, the tax-gatherers became more and more the pariahs of the Jewish world. With holy horror did the Pharisee sweep past the lost son of Israel who had sold himself to the Gentile for the vilest purpose, and avoid the places which his sinful breath contaminated. Their testimony was not accepted by Jewish tribunals. It was forbidden to sit at table with them or eat of their bread. But their money-chests especially were the summary of all uncleanness and the chief object of pious horror, since their contents consisted of none but unlawful receipts, and every single coin betokened a breach of some theocratic regulation. To exchange their money or receive alms from them might easily put a whole house in the condition of being unclean, and necessitate many purifications. From these relations of the tax-officials to the rest of the population, it can be readily understood that only the refuse of Judaism undertook the office.
At Philadelphia, the Heart-and-Hand Fire Company has expelled Mr. Hughes, the stamp man for that colony. The freemen of Talbot county, in Maryland, have erected a gibbet before the door of the court-house, twenty feet high, and have hanged on it the effigies of a stamp informer in chains, in terrorem till the Stamp Act shall be repealed; and have resolved, unanimously, to hold in utter contempt and abhorrence every stamp officer, and every favorer of the Stamp Act, and to “have no communication with any such person, not even to speak to him, unless to upbraid him with his baseness.†So triumphant is the spirit of liberty everywhere.
[W]hereas some men may be found amongst us, so far lost to every sense of virtue and feeling for the distresses of this country, as to accept offices for the collection of the duty:
Resolved, therefore, That in future we will consider such persons as unworthy of our friendship; have no intercourse or dealings with them; withdraw from them every assistance, and withhold all the comforts of life which depend upon those duties that as men and fellow citizens we owe to each other; and upon all occasions treat them with that contempt they deserve; and that it be, and it is hereby most earnestly recommended to the people at large to follow the same line of conduct towards them.
Tax collectors were tarred-and-feathered in America, both before and after the revolution — the violent expulsion of tax collectors was a frequent technique of the Whiskey rebels. Tax collectors have been the targets of violent reprisal at many times and in many places. Because of this, governments have often had to pay high salaries — or, frequently, percentages of the take — to convince collectors to take on the job, which only increases the resentment of those being collected from.
During the French Revolution and its aftermath, customs houses were burned by mobs, tax rolls were destroyed, excise collectors were made to renounce their jobs and then were run out of town — or in some cases killed.
The first Boer War was triggered when an armed group of Boers seized a wagon that was being auctioned after it was distrained for resisted taxes.
The Whiskey rebels threatened to destroy the stills of those distillers who complied in paying the excise tax.
If a tax resisting movement is large enough, it may be able to dissuade people from paying taxes through boycotts or social boycotts of people who are tax compliant. In Massachusetts, a group enforced a boycott of taxed British imports by declaring that
…we further promise and engage, that we will not purchase any goods of any persons who, preferring their own interest to that of the public, shall import merchandise from Great Britain, until a general importation takes place; or of any trader who purchases his goods of such importer: and that we will hold no intercourse, or connection, or correspondence, with any person who shall purchase goods of such importer, or retailer; and we will hold him dishonored, an enemy to the liberties of his country, and infamous, who shall break this agreement.
In mid-19th century Germany, the government attempted to break a tax resistance movement by offering to moderate its enforcement efforts against people who could show that they had limited means. Karl Marx, who was promoting the resistance at the time, saw this as a divide-and-conquer tactic:
The intention of the Ministry is only too clear. It wants to divide the democrats; it wants to make the peasants and workers count themselves as non-payers owing to lack of means to pay, in order to split them from those not paying out of regard for legality, and thereby deprive the latter of the support of the former. But this plan will fail; the people realizes that it is responsible for solidarity in the refusal to pay taxes, just as previously it was responsible for solidarity in payment of them.
The Quakers responded to persecution by keeping careful records of individuals who had suffered thereby. In the archives of Quaker meetings, you can find lists of people who had resisted militia taxes or tithes for establishment church ministers, and what property was distrained by which tax collector.
When the American Amish were trying to resist compulsory enrollment in the social security system, 14,000 of them signed a petition to Congress.
During the Vietnam War, public advertisements were taken out by tax resisters. In early 1968, for instance, 448 writers and editors put a full-page ad in the New York Post declaring their intention to refuse to pay taxes for the Vietnam War. The signatories included James Baldwin, Noam Chomsky, Philip K. Dick, Betty Friedan, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Goodman, Paul Krassner, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Thomas Pynchon, Susan Sontag, Benjamin Spock, Gloria Steinem, Norman Thomas, Hunter S. Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut, and Howard Zinn.
This year’s 2008 War Tax Boycott, Don’t Buy Bush’s War, and Pledge for Peace campaigns also have a public-signing component.
Protests, rallies, pickets, and the like have been a part of many large-scale tax resistance campaigns.
Some resisters who are vulnerable to property seizure find sympathetic friends who are willing to hold the resisters’ property in their names as a way of foiling seizure. Some war tax resister alternative funds function partially as “warehouse banks†that hold deposits of war tax resisters.
When a frustrated tax collector seized Ammon Hennacy’s protest signs as he was picketing the IRS office — claiming that he planned to auction them off to pay Hennacy’s tax debt — a friend of Hennacy helped him make new signs, each one marked “this sign is the personal property of Joseph Craigmyle.â€
After the press reported that Valentine Byler’s horse had been seized by the IRS as he was plowing his field, he got letters of support from all across the country.
Here there are too many examples to list.
When the Irish Land League launched its rent strike, it claimed that “The funds will be poured out unstintedly to all who may endure eviction in the course of the struggle. Our exiled brothers in America may be relied on to contribute, if necessary, as many millions in money as they have thousands, to starve out the landlords and bring the English tenantry to its knees.â€
The trick to supporting imprisoned tax resisters is to respect their real needs and desires. When “someone interfered,†as Thoreau put it, and paid his taxes in order to spring him from his night in jail, they thought wrongly that they were doing Thoreau a favor, “for they thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall.â€
Juanita Nelson tells of the support she received in jail, where she had been taken in her bathrobe from her home. Her supporters took the time to learn how to support her in a way that was appropriate to her resistance:
Two fellow pacifists, one of them also a tax refuser, had been permitted to come to me, since I would not go to them. I asked them what was uppermost in my mind, what they’d do about getting properly dressed? They said that this was something I would have to settle for myself. I sensed that they thought it the better part of wisdom and modesty for me to be dressed for my appearance in court. They were more concerned about the public relations aspect of getting across the witness than I was. They were also genuinely concerned, I knew, about making their actions truly nonviolent, cognizant of the other person’s feelings, attitudes and readiness. I was shaken enough to concede that I would like to have my clothes at hand, in case I decided I would feel more at ease in them. The older visitor, a dignified man with white hair, agreed to go for the clothes in a taxicab.
They left, and on their heels came another visitor. She had been told that in permitting her to come up, the officials were treating me with more courtesy than I was according them. It was her assessment that the chief deputy was hopeful that someone would be able to hammer some sense into me and was willing to make concessions in that hope. But he had misjudged the reliance he might place in her — she was not as critical as the men. She did not know what she would do, but she thought she might wish to have the strength and the audacity to carry through in the vein in which I had started.
And she said. “You know, you look like a female Gandhi in that robe. You look, well, dignified.â€
That was my first encouragement. Everyone else had tended to make me feel like a fool of the first water, had confirmed fears I already had on that score. My respect and admiration for Gandhi, though not uncritical, was deep. And if I in any way resembled him in appearance I was prepared to try to emulate a more becoming state of mind. I reminded myself, too, that I had on considerably more than the loincloth in which Gandhi was able to greet kings and statesmen with ease. I need not be unduly perturbed about wearing a robe into the presence of his honor.
When Gandhi was preparing the groundwork for a tax refusal campaign in India, he noted that the Indian National Congress “should undertake to feed the wives and families of those who may be imprisoned.â€
When Elizabeth Cady Stanton was contemplating a tax resistance campaign for women’s suffrage in the United States, she noted, “One thing is certain, this course will necessarily involve a good deal of litigation, and we shall need lawyers of our own sex whose intellects, sharpened by their interests, shall be quick to discover the loopholes of retreat.â€
Larry Rosenwald wrote, of this technique, “To sit on the Grants and Loans Committee of New England War Tax Resistance, and to dispense the interest on refused taxes to a youth group in Chelsea, a video for cable television on United States involvement in Central America, and a people’s garden in Roxbury is to be reminded of the ideal community, however blurred and fragmented, that war tax resistance is done on behalf of, in the hope of helping to make it clear and whole.â€
Can you think of any I’ve missed?
Clearly I spoke too soon. For anyone who’s had trouble accessing my blog (yet who is still somehow reading this), here’s a new bit of information: none of the pages on my blog will open unless one manually adds a “www†before the URL each time. (Does anyone with greater web-savviness than mine have any suggestions? Yahoo has thus far proven singularly unhelpful.)
Dear LazyWeb,
Jared Diamond makes the following claim in [his recent article on tribal blood feuds in New Guinea:
Without state government, war between local groups is chronic; coöperation between local groups on projects bringing benefits to everyone—such as large-scale irrigation systems, free rights of travel, and long-distance trade—becomes much more difficult; and even the frequency of murder within a local group is higher. It’s true, of course, that twentieth-century state societies, having developed potent technologies of mass killing, have broken all historical records for violent deaths. But this is because they enjoy the advantage of having by far the largest populations of potential victims in human history; the actual percentage of the population that died violently was on the average higher in traditional pre-state societies than it was even in Poland during the Second World War or Cambodia under Pol Pot.
—Jared Diamond, The New Yorker (2008-04-21): Vengeance is Ours
I don’t think that anything interesting about anarchism turns on where this factoid comes from or whether it’s true. (It’s not as if I’m suggesting personal vendetta or communal blood feud as the anarchistic replacement for state court systems. Anarchy as I understand it is an achievement for the future, not a recovery of the past.) But it is a very strong claim, which Diamond asserts without providing a citation to the source for these figures or an explanation of how they were calculated. Presumably he has a particular source, but I’m curious as to what it is.
Anyone know a likely anthropological source for this factoid, or for factoids in the general neighborhood? Help me out here.
Almost every Linux distribution contains the program “ddate”, which displays the Discordian date.
It’s true - I tried it and just found out that “Today is Pungenday, the 40th day of Discord in YOLD 3174.”
Someone asked me this the other day: why are people so ruthless and cruel? I think this is an interesting question that deserves some examination, more than I was able to do at that time. She was talking about oil companies, but the problem can apply to a lot of areas. We can talk about crime, religion, war, and a lot of other things.
In answer, I would like to propose a principle:
If you can make a “good person” believe in anything as moral, then you can make him commit any evil act.
Of course, in practice you can’t make people believe anything as moral. I don’t think you could convince most grown-up Westerners that, for instance, eating other people for a religious ritual is a good idea. But you can convince people of a lot of things simply by constant indoctrination from childhood, social pressure, and threats of violence. With this sort of power, you can convince a whole population that genocide is good, that arbitrary lines on a map make people superior and inferior, that certain people have more rights than others on the basis of a popularity contest, and that people in uniform can assault and kill with impunity.
I did put “good person” in quotes because I am using a turn of phrase. Factually, there is no such thing as a “good person” or a “bad person.” The manichean worldview, used by the State, revolves around these concepts, but they are nonsensical. In fact, any person, “good” or “bad,” can be indoctrinated into doing all sorts of atrocities. Various ruling classes have been successful in creating all sorts of mental mechanisms in their subjects without starting from childhood, so it’s not something that is that demanding anyway.
Our moral compass is malleable, the only difference being how malleable it is. Someone who has a weak will and little principles to begin with, will be far more easily to manipulate than someone who has a strong will and strong principles. Religious convictions, for instance, coupled with a strong will can make someone resist a system or regime that would cow most people.
Of course, the belief in “good people” and “bad people” is a boon for the ruling class because it makes us ignore the whole process that the State itself uses. If you believe a priori than the people who share your arbitrary borders are “good people,” then you will ignore the evil that they will perpetrate against your class interests. Just look at policemen and soldiers: even though they are obviously class traitors and have the power to hold innocent people here and all over the world under siege, we still dismiss their acts of violence and abuse as the work of “bad apples” and that “there are bad apples everywhere.” When a person is part of a system that perpetuates genocide or assault on a widespread scale, we should be way beyond the “bad apples” phase, but unfortunately this will not sink in because people are indoctrinated to believe that those are “good people”.
Collectivism is in the largest part the source of the problem. If we talk about statism, religion, corporatism, all of these modes of thought see the individual as a cog serving a greater whole, where your morality must be subservient to the good of that greater whole. Of course people are greedy, but we always feel the need to rationalize our actions when we would otherwise see them as “bad.” No sane human beings thinks of himself as “evil.” The incentives for crime, for instance, often come from communist class distinctions, and more vaguely, the belief that rich people are evil or undeserving, or that poor people are corrupt or deserve poverty, or that your kind of person (race, religion, age, whatever) brings victimhood and that the crime is one’s way of “getting even.”
Another connection that people often ignore is the connection between belief and actions. In fact, you sometimes hear calls for people who believe a certain way to ignore this or that belief in their actions. But this is incongruous. How else do we determine how to act but from what we believe about the world? What else is there? If you believe that the State is necessary for peace and order, even though the truth is quite obviously opposite, then you will do everything you can to preserve ruling class interests, even if that means killing innocents. As Anarchists, we have to understand how beliefs motivate action, how beliefs are acquired, and what we can do to instill doubt into this process.
Of course, the reverse is also true: the results of actions can also reinforce or break beliefs. This is why groupthink is such an ever-present danger, as we tend to follow people or things we agree with, which reinforces our beliefs as we observe confirmations of it. This is true for everyone regardless of position or belief, although of course the mainstream media, as the main channel of communication, tend to be a very strong reinforcer of statist beliefs. Fortunately the Internet is reversing that to a certain extent, as it is easy to find data about all sorts of beliefs, even though, granted, we don’t have to read them. This is the only reason why the Internet is really such a great tool of communication: because it breaks the statist dominance over what we are allowed to see and read.
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