From the White-PillBox: Part 50

A great example of how advocates of freedom can transform the despair of being Black Pilled into an inspiring White Pill.

A recent Substack piece by Ace is entitled “The Long Defeat”. Here he reviews how many are turned off by the fight for liberty because it is perceived as an impossible goal. They conclude anarchists are essentially utopian, chasing a dream that will never materialize in the real world. Their fight is that of a martyr: well-meaning, but doomed.

Ace’s essay provides an excellent overview of various examples in literature of the idea of “The Long Defeat”…the idea that despite occasional victories, the hero is destined to fail because failure is, so to speak, written in the fabric of reality. I would encourage you to read Ace’s essay for the fine examples from Greek mythology, “The Lord of the Rings” stories, and so on.

The defeatist would love nothing more than for reality to indeed be the endless, hopeless struggle of Sisyphus (the Greek character condemned by the gods to push a giant boulder uphill, over and over again, as it falls back before he reaches the top.)

But Ace makes clear there is something more than the cards dealt to us - something we do have control over. Namely, how we think about and respond to the conditions we face in life. It is here that heroism reveals itself. In their own way, those struggling to promote liberty show this heroic quality, precisely because the challenge has no guarantee of success.

This is one of the White Pills we can find in (what appears to be) an impossible struggle.

But the White Pill can be taken further

We also have within us the ability to question, to the root, the assumption that government will always be with us…that the attempt to achieve a stateless society is doomed to failure.

Here too we can challenge our perspectives. In fact, anarchists are precisely the ones best positioned to mount a challenge. For we question the very assumption that government is legitimate at all.

The unnatural State

Advocates of a stateless society understand that the State is unnatural. We are not saying the State can sometimes be merely misguided; nor a system whose details “need tweaking”.

It is unnatural, plain and simple.

The State is the institutionalization of crime.

It is society saying that crime is bad, unless a certain class of people do it.

This is a perversion of civilization itself. Man is not meant to be victimized. It should therefore be plainly evident that man is not meant to be victimized wholesale, by social sanction.

Yet this is exactly what we have…what we have had for centuries. An unnatural condition, set in stone.

It should be no shock, therefore, that things do not work out well. And paradoxically, while the State is too dangerous to tolerate, it is perceived as legitimate nonetheless.

. . .

We return to the idea that the struggle for liberty seems hopeless. We can understand why it seems so. As a society we have dug our own grave. We’ve tried to put into practice an unworkable idea, impossible to implement, with unimaginably destructive results.

Sand in the engine

An analogy for the State is the idea of sand in the engine.

Suppose you arrive in a land just like ours, with one strange exception. Here, all motor vehicles must have sand poured into the engine. When they roll off the assembly line, sand goes into the engine. After any mechanical service, sand goes into the engine. No one may remove the sand from the engine, ever.

Like the legitimacy of government in our world, this world never questions the practice of sand in the engine. They accept it as part of the background of life.

This world simply deals with motor vehicles that are hampered this way. They come up with a thousand ways of living with this insane, unworkable idea. Some people simple pull their cars around manually. Some place them on trailers and have horses pull them along. Some actually try to get them to run mechanically, using various complicated and Rube Goldberg-like methods.

An obvious outcome of this silly rule is the astounding waste it causes. Waste of physical resources, money, capital investment, human labor, etc. Not to mention the tangential effects that compound the waste to an incalculable degree.

In our world, politics (with all its details and dynamics) is the counterpart to the sand in the engine…an accepted condition that is unworkable. And wasteful beyond imagination.

The inhabitants of this imaginary world are not ready to hear an obvious truth: sand in the engines is a bad idea. So they are not ready for the obvious solution: end the bad idea.

And most people in our world are not ready to hear the obvious truth: the State, as an unnecessary parasite on society, is a bad idea. And the obvious solution: end the bad idea.

Are bad ideas unstoppable?

The question pertinent to this discussion is this: do we assume that ending the belief in the State is an impossible struggle, doomed to defeat?

It certainly seems hopeless at the moment, and no one knows how long this ridiculous belief will persist.

But to assume it is written in the stars that a bad idea has the strength to persist eternally, seems as absurd as the idea itself. Indeed a bad idea is quite vulnerable, at the mercy of a harsh fact of reality: abandoning a bad idea eliminates its bad consequences.

Stop putting sand in the engine, and the engine will work better.

Stop believing your abusive spouse is justified in “getting angry and lashing out”, and your life has a chance to improve.

Stop believing the cult leader, and you escape the cult.

Stop believing slavery is a legitimate institution, and eventually it dies out.

Stop believing the State is legitimate, and eventually it dies out.

In each case, nothing has to replace the bad idea. It only needs to be abandoned.

Another White Pill

This brings us to another reason to be White Pilled…

Our position is realistic; the statist’s is not.

It’s not utopian to advocate for sand-free engines. But it is quite utopian to believe sand will improve them.

It’s not utopian to advocate for a free society. But it is quite utopian to believe a coercive State will better mankind.

Exactly who needs to be discouraged here?

If the advocates of freedom are discouraged because the world, in essence, keeps believing we need sand in the engines, consider that the wrong people may be feeling discouraged.

Let the statist be Black Pilled

Let the statist spend eternity in frustration, struggling uphill trying to make government into what it can never be: just.

Let the statist watch his expectations about the State roll downhill again and again, with every single try.

Let the statist live with a well-deserved sense of hopelessness, for wanting to free people by means of chains.

Let the statist reap what he sows: failure…from trying to implement a contradiction.

And let the anarchists be White Pilled

Let the advocates of freedom be proud in our consistency of principles.

Let the advocates of freedom be confident, as our principles are rooted in truth.

Let the advocates of freedom recognize that anarchy is actually the natural, default behavior of virtually everyone.

And if we feel impatience, remember the importance of low time preference, i.e., a long-term perspective. And if that is not enough, there is still hope for rapid social change. Recall that slavery ended quickly; and the Soviet Union fell in almost the blink of an eye.

Conclusion

History looks back to the worst ideas of humanity, such as slavery, and judges them harshly. Deservedly so.

But imagine having believed such atrocities were part of the fabric of reality. Inevitable. Unstoppable.

Then imagine them vanishing, and quickly, once the bad idea was understood as bad. Anyone who had believed they were permanent, could rightly feel embarrassed. Because in hindsight, it is patently obvious the bad idea was really really bad.

Anarchists have every reason to avoid that embarrassment. Our view of the State need not be one of an unconquerable enemy. It should be as a pitifully weak adversary. And once it has withered away, we will say that it could not have been otherwise.

As Ace’s well written piece makes clear, how we deal with the public’s mass indoctrination of statism is up to us. Being Black Pilled or White Pilled is a choice.