Sunday, March 30, 2014

"Well, what do you expect?"

A while back I read Albert J. Nock's "Our Enemy, The State" and thought it was excellent. Well, I found something else he wrote that is more concise and possibly even better. It is "The Criminality of the State", and here's an excerpt:

"The State's criminality is nothing new and nothing to be wondered at. It began when the first predatory group of men clustered together and formed the State, and it will continue as long as the State exists in the world, because the State is fundamentally an anti-social institution, fundamentally criminal. The idea that the State originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscation—that is to say, in crime. It originated for the purpose of maintaining the division of society into an owning-and-exploiting class and a propertyless dependent class — that is, for a criminal purpose. No State known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose. Like all predatory or parasitic institutions, its first instinct is that of self-preservation. All its enterprises are directed first towards preserving its own life, and, second, towards increasing its own power and enlarging the scope of its own activity. For the sake of this it will, and regularly does, commit any crime which circumstances make expedient." Albert Jay Nock - The Criminality of the State (1939)
I love his suggested reaction to every expression of outrage at something "the State" has done- "Well, what do you expect?"

I highly recommend reading the whole thing, while keeping in mind that "the State" isn't real- it is a belief, and every single thing "it" does is in actuality done by flawed, and vulnerable humans who can be beaten.

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4 comments:

  1. I always laugh when people complain about "political corruption." I have to explain to them that what they see as "corruption" is how government was DESIGNED to function. It's just that occasionally their masquerade is exposed.
    In order for an institution to be "corrupt" it first has to originate as honest and legitimate.

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  2. Google "Stockholm Syndrome". It took sociopathic and socialistic sociologists (try to say that quickly 3 times) many centuries to deduce what the Attila the Huns and Genghis Khans appeared to know intuitively about a conquered people. They ardently fall in love with their captors.

    And that, my dear friend, is what we face when we try to preach the philosophy of liberty and freedom.

    Sam

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  3. Nock told it like it is.

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  4. "Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency." -- H.L. Mencken

    "People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing, and if need be, murdering those who resist?" -- H.L. Mencken

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