If the consequence of losing the vote for those who prefer option B is the forced compliance to option A, then there is no option B, since B merely amounts to A, via force. Further, there is no actual option A, either, since compliance with A will be forced, which makes A non-optional.
Category Archives: Voluntarism
Why a Political Candidate Asking For Your Vote is an Exercise in Logical Fallacy
A person cannot ask an individual (such as you or me) to vote for them for a position of authority (rulership) over a given collective (e.g. the “People”, the “Nation”) because:
1. Individuals are not collectives, they are not groups. What is good for the group (e.g. “common good”) can never simultaneously be good for the individual. Because the definition of “good” is utterly dependent on which metaphysical paradigm you are using:
a. The group as a direct function of the individual–which is rationally consistent and makes ALL interactions within the group voluntary and mutually beneficial, because the individual is recognized as the moral and epistemological Standard.
Or b. The individual is a direct function of the group–which is rationally inconsistent, and is the premise upon which ALL authority/submission models, like governments, are based. Individual will is subordinated to the group (again, the “common good”); and this always requires force because it renders individual will, and thus individual thought–which is in fact the moral and epistemological frame of reference all people necessarily possess–irrelevant. This nullification of individual will makes individual choice moot, which makes it necessary and incumbent upon the Authority (e.g. the State) to use force (violence and threats) to compel moral behavior…where again morality is defined according to the group (the good of the group, or again, common good); and where the “group” is necessarily defined by those who force the compliance of individual behavior to its promotion.
Why?
Because individuals cannot define it, because their minds and wills are antithetical to the group metaphysic (the individual as a function of the group). Thus, those in charge of forcing individual compliance to the group become those who define the group…essentially by default.
2. Force and Ideas are mutually exclusive. If an idea is to be implemented by threats and violence, then the idea itself–more specifically, its rationale (that which makes it true, and thus good, and thus efficacious)–is completely beside the point. Convincing someone of the efficacy and logic of your idea is irrelevant when your ultimate goal is to occupy a position of power by which you will give them no choice as to whether or not to comply with it. And this exclusiveness between force and ideas means that no candidate–no would-be agent of State FORCE– can give you an actual reason to vote for him. For the office he seeks denies the relevancy or even the possibility of your ability to understand and choose right and good things. And this being the case, how can this would-be agent of State force make a plea for your vote where he offers you an idea, which involves a rationale, which rests upon on the assumption that you can in fact understand and choose right and good things?
The answer? He cannot. It’s a contradiction. And there is no contradiction which can ever be effectively applied. Running for public office is about deception in order to acquire votes, and this to attain the power to do nothing more than receive a specious legal pass for doing violence, even for the most well-intentioned politician.
Force and Ideas are Entirely Incompatible
Your intellectual and/or moral agreement with an idea is entirely irrelevant if those who are not in agreement are forced to submit to it. Once force is used to implement an idea, the idea no longer matters. Force becomes the sole point and purpose, and death becomes the sole outcome. This is axiomatic. Force nullifies choice; and choice–between good and bad, and truth and falsehood, for instance–is the product of conceptualization, which is the root and efficacy of thought. And ideas are a function of thinking.
And thinking is how man defines Self, via his powers of conceptualization. And the definition of Self necessarily implies the relevancy and purpose of Self, which is thus the relevancy and purpose of the existence of the Self.
Therefore, use force, destroy ideas, which destroys the Self; that is, Humankind.
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The Ability of Men to Communicate Means that Force Must Mean Tyranny
If you intend to force your opponent to comply with your idea, you don’t actually need the idea, all you need is force.
You see, having an idea is fundamentally an appeal to reason–i.e. this is true because of this rationale, which also must be true because of this premise…etcetera, etcetera. And reason is a function of concepts men use in order to communicate with one another. Communication (or more precisely, the ability to communicate) then is proof that all men possess an equal and singular frame of reference by which communication is made relevant and efficacious: One’s Self. I. The I Am inside of each human being.
Therefore, to force men to comply with ideas is a contradiction in terms which inevitably turns rulers (those tasked with forcing compliance) into brainless killers, and the ruled into trenches full of ashes.
Aphorisms: On the underlying fallacy of governments
Apologetics for government begins with the right of the good man to be protected from the avarice of the evil. From this we can directly extrapolate the following equation:
The right of the virtuous to be protected from the non-virtuous = the vast majority of men shall be subject to the authority–that is, the coercive violent force–of a tiny minority of men.
This is a logical fallacy.
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To protect virtue by compelling all men through violence entirely wrecks virtue by nullifying moral and intellectual agency and is a contradiction in terms.
Which is why all governments are simply degrees of tyranny.
Obey or Die: The simple ideological foundation of ALL governments
Free Societies vs Tyrannies are Measured on a Bell Curve: Why all States are tyrannies at root
Force is both the ideological and practical root of government, which is why all governments are fundamentally tyrannical, with “free” vs “oppressive” states measured merely in terms of degrees of force. That is, the amount of violence applied to compel individual compliance to the necessarily subjective, and therefore capricious, dictates of the State is the rubric for whether or not a State is considered a tyranny, not the absence of violent coercion, which is the only actual measure, I submit.
Now, the lower the degree of force would seem to indicate the reciprocal: a greater amount of freedom. However, this is not really the case. “Freedom” in a state which uses less overt violence to compel obedience suggests not more freedom, but merely less overt forms of control. This can be anything from subliminal or implied violence which never manifests because of fear, or more effective thought control–that is, a greater prevailing assumption amongst the populace that they are somehow free, in spite of the object and obvious fact that government, by nature and by design, depends upon the exact opposite. (On a side note, having a “Constitution” which “guarantees” specific individual freedoms, which the ruling class and its witting and unwitting advocates can reference when the state is accused of mendacious largess, and which ostensibly integrates individual freedom with the force of government even though these are clearly mutually exclusive concepts, is very helpful in spreading the specious notion of a free society under the absolute auspices of violent coercion.) In addition, I suppose it’s possible that less overt force might simply be due to the fact that the state hasn’t yet fully evolved into the inevitable (and therefore ipso facto) tyranny of which the philosophy undergirding it demands.
But here is why tyranny, regardless of how it may be perceived by the great unwashed masses, is always categorical at an given moment:
Force, as a metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, and political basis–that is, the rank philosophical foundation of government–is absolute, and thus the underlying real degree of tyranny is always complete. For without absolute tyranny, which I define as the fundamental “right” to compel behavior by force (violence), there can be no such thing as government. Remove force, and people are not organized by command, but by cooperation. And cooperating is NOT the same thing as being governed.
Under government, all human actions can occur only when the government allows it. This is total tyranny. Period. And because the auspices of violence are absolute by virtue of the underwriting philosophy, all actions of people existing within a society organized according to governing principles, which are rooted in the power of the state to force, are necessarily absolutely violently compelled.
Unfortunately, as long as people confuse comfort, or even “relative freedom”, with freedom, there will be no freedom.
As long as freedom is plotted on a bell curve, there can be no such thing.
Voluntarism: A brief series of arguments for why government for man’s good is a contradiction in terms
The presumption behind all government is that men, absent the “fail safe” of forced compliance to moral behavior (which is a contradiction in terms, because force nullifies choice; and without choice there is no moral act) must necessarily act to exploit others because man’s–that is, the individual’s–root nature is base and mendacious. This assumption has many problems, not the least of which is that it does not explain how those in government get a moral pass on their own inherent depravity.
Further, it also implies and then forces a collective identity because all governments must exist for a “collective” or “common good”, which, being outside the natural context of the individual, must fundamentally be defined as an esoteric standard, available fully only to those in authority (governing officers, who are really a sort of a political priesthood) who claim to represent this Common Good as its messengers and ministers. However, the very fact that the collective good as a moral standard must elude the individual because of his inexorably and self-evidentiary singular existential and metaphysical context, means that the “common good”cannot possibly be manifest. Because of the singular nature of human existence, each person must decide for himself what is good or not, based upon a rational Standard of Good, which is the Individual, which means each person’s inexorable and absolute right to their ownership of Self. “Common good” must be forced upon the individual in object violation of their individuality, destroying them in favor of the new statist metaphysic: collectivism, as a function of the power (violence) of the State. This in turn undermines and eventually crumbles these governments which exist in service to “common good” because whether collectivists want to acknowledge it or not, without the individual, there is no public; there is no “common” society. Which means that there is no “common good”. Thus, all States founded upon such a moral standard are rooted in a contradiction which, beyond its label, can have absolutely no substance.
And there is no government which is not a function of collective identity, and thus “collective” or “common good”. Because such a government could only act and exist to serve the specific individual at any given moment. And there is nothing which can do that except the individual himself. In which case, it’s not a government, it’s free will; its cooperation; it’s voluntarism.
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The root problem of government is that it necessarily implies that men, absent force, cannot be expected to make moral choices; and therefore there is no moral standard that doesn’t ultimately rest upon violent coercion. This destroys man at his root metaphysic. It means that man must be compelled to morality, which is the corollary of Truth, in spite of himself. That is, in spite of his nature. That is, in spite of his existence. Meaning man cannot successfully exist unless the very substance of that existence, his nature, is destroyed. Man must cease to exist in order that he may exist.
And it is upon this terrible contradiction that all governments are built.
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The use of force to compel moral actions is an object contradiction in terms. Absent choice, morality is a nullified concept. And an outcome not based upon a free act of the will of the moral and self-aware agent is not a moral outcome. That which denies the individual his individuality–that is, his free agency–cannot be said to ultimately benefit any individual.
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On the one hand, those who argue the necessity and efficacy of government will assert that men are by nature lacking virtue–“ineptitude and vices of men”, as von Mises once said–and therefore cannot be trusted to engage voluntarily into a moral sociopolitical system. And yet government, which is a collection of those very same men men, is somehow not naturally lacking virtue.
How does one square this circle? How do we resolve the contradiction that says that men need government because they lack fundamental virtue; and yet government is comprised of men? How is it mere paradox instead of rank fallacy that individuals won’t naturally choose good, but collections (the governors and the governed) of individuals will?
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If it’s true that men, left to themselves, will necessarily dissolve into all manner of vice (murder, theft, deceit, and your basic general exploitation) then the last thing I would think makes sense is to give a minority of men the majority of violent, coercive power. You’d have to assume that those men could wield it righteously in order for good to be the rational outcome.
But of course as soon as you assume this you’ve undermined the fundamental moral (and metaphysical) argument for government in the first place:
That man left to himself, by nature (man qua man), will not act righteously.
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Absent the foundational and absolute right to violence to compel behavior, there is no government in any capacity. This being the case, force against man is not really minimized, as some minarchists argue is the benefit of government, it is absolute.
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I think we confuse the right of collective self-defense with the right to compel behavior by violence or threats of violence before any actual offense occurs.
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The idea that there is no free market absent the ever-present threat of violence, which I submit is itself a form of violence, seems a contradiction in terms. How is man either free or moral if he acts out of fear of violating the State and not because he understands it is wrong to violate another man? The State is not the moral standard, the individual is.
And I’m not saying the state is evil. I’m saying that forced morality is a contradiction in terms. Which means the state is neither evil nor good. It’s impossible because it is a contradiction.
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The moral do not need to be governed, for they are moral. The immoral will not, or cannot, recognize the State’s moral authority. This means that the only way for the State to “work” is if it threatens the first and neutralizes the second. And neither action equals freedom by any legitimate definition. So you merely get a State which exists for the sake of its own power; its own legal “right” to violence for the sake of violence.
Law Cannot be Moral: Why we need voluntarism, not a legal system
Truth and Punishment are Entirely Different Messages and thus are Born by Entirely Different Messengers
I submit that it is impossible to be the bringer of Truth and the Bringer of punishment, because these two things are mutually exclusive.
If your concern yourself with Truth, then you cannot concern yourself with FORCE, which is contrary to Truth. Speaking Truth to people is to accept that individuals possess their own Will, Moral Agency, and Self. Therefore, you can only seek to convince them, not to force them.
Punishment, forced coercion, threats, violence, destruction, death, hell…these things are the vestiges and vagaries of falsehood. Of lies, deception, manipulation, artifice, and deceit. Therefore, let evil liars employ these things to their own damnation.
You, as a rational being, as a messenger of Truth and Goodness, honesty and reason, should concern yourself with dialog, discussion, and categorical voluntarism.
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