How to End the State

The state is a complex of coercive mentalities that seeks to control your life through fear, brainwashing and ultimately violence. But what can individuals do to free themselves? If you push against the state it will flatten you like an ant. Choose your battles vary carefully.

The author of "How to End the State", Alex Ryan, seems to think that humans are evolving into more insightful and hence more benign beings. This in itself should hasten the end of terrorist states. I see little evidence for this as states employ the full arsenal of technology to control every aspect of life. Knowledge and protection are key to survival but if dropping out is tantamount to falling out then fear and despair may swamp the once pure desire for freedom.

The first enemy is the fear inside and so the first task is to purify oneself, becoming the ideal rather than just thinking it. Then one will have both the inner strength and wisdom to pick one's fights. Only then can one claim to know how to set others free.

Animals that have been kept in captivity, such as in a zoo, cannot be just liberated into the wild and expected to survive. They have learnt to live in a prison and have few resources to live in the wild. Similarly, if the state was to collapse tomorrow people would still have the same fears and desires. States that have recently collapsed descended into lawless gangsterism, not peace-loving utopias. A large gangster-state just turned into smaller gangster-states.

The various refinements of anarchism, such as agorism and voluntaryism, which the FR33 AGENTS blog discusses, all seem to suffer from age-old dilemmas. You cannot force others to be free. You cannot hate those who do not show compassion. To do so is to fall back into the same mindset as the coercive state that one is trying to destroy. If the simplest moral law is to do unto others as you would wish them to do to you, then perhaps the zeroth law is to first become what you would wish others to be. Then the path to revolution will be illuminated by wisdom.