S4: E30 – Malice, or the Establishment? | Michael Malice

Please let me suggest that the resolution to the apparent conflict between the anarchic viewpoint and, generally, a positive view of ‘structure,’ is given by the classical liberal perspective of Frederick Bastiat. This French economist and philosopher writes most clearly about this crucial issue, in his “The Law,” which can be found here: http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html. The crucial question that is relevant as soon as more than one individual interacts is, ‘for what classes of activity or behavior or structure can force on humans be rightly used?’ Bastiat’s answer is that right force or righteous force is just Law (big L) which is really good for every human individual, and is defined by being defensive only. This means that right force is and can only be right and, really, full context, good for every human if it always remains an interference with initiated force — with violence, trickery, fraud, deception, threat, etc. that violates literal human life or violates the individual thought/reason that necessarily supports it. As soon as it is proposed that force be initiated to accomplish some end that is not of the type of action that is defensive, ie. of the sort of action that interferes with some human(s) violating other humans, then that initiation of force is itself injustice, the violation of one human by another, and is bad, rather than the defender and protector of justice and human good. This is because positive human values are always derivatives of the expenditure of portions of human life time (one or many in cooperation.) And human life is literally time for a living human. All human values are produced, secured, transported, stored, or enjoyed by expenditure of particular human life time engaged in thought and/or effort. This means that all initiation for force for some material or social or personal end, other than an agreed upon organization of self defense or individual self defense, is a violation of human life as the inviolable property of a human. If this violation of the necessities for human life (qua human) is sanctioned in any way, there is no logical border for when/where more such force initiation should end in the name of some conceived ‘good.’ Only justice conceived as an extrapolation of self defense has clear objective limits. And self defense means defense from attack on or violation of one’s actual physical life or the liberty necessary to act on reason to the purpose of securing unavoidably necessary consumables, or on the private property secured by reasoned action done without making anyone else a victim. (The ‘rules’ are reciprocal because each human being is of the same class of being, and because each member of the class relies on the same tool of survival by necessity (reason), and force is the negation of reason in action; so, the sanction of initiated force destroys one’s own reason based defense of one’s own conditions necessary for living human existence.)
All this means that organized ‘structure’ that proposes to direct, by force (vice persuasion or cooperation), the ‘doing of good,’ with other people’s lives destroys the logic of justice, the respect for Law, and, in the end, the basis for human good at all as defined by the natural boundaries and necessities of human life. And, anarchy proponents fail to understand that reality is the basis on which to derive prescriptive truth – that volition or liberty is *not* a floating axiom. This matters because human liberty must be defended from attack, and this is not accomplished by yelling every louder that it is self evident. It is not self evident. Volition or choice is a human good, not because liberty is an axiom, but because reason is found to be the human tool of survival qua human. (This *is* self evident, and can be incontestably demonstrated by even a short three day trip into the wilderness alone.) For reason – non-contradictory identification and integration – to enter the world in reality, it must be spoken as the ‘true word’ either literally or in action. This is the ‘is so’ for humans on which to place the ‘ought do,’ through the prescriptive axiom that each human ought desire and do that which is*really* good for them in full context and nothing else (see Mortimer Adler.) The means of human life by the human means (reasoned action to purpose) is the ‘is so’ that dictates that human liberty is essential to human survival by the human means, because the absence of liberty in action prevents the expression of reason into the world. Initiated force/threat/fraud is the violation of this — the attack on the ‘true word’ — the attempt to divorce man’s tool of survival from expression or use in the world. Initiated force attempts to silence the speaking of reason into reality. It is anti – human – life. It short circuits the interplay of the vast system of billions of actors speaking into reality and combining these and comparing results — the radically democratic means of human progress in all ways. The anarchist failure to understand the objective, nature-of-human-life based derivation of liberty as a fundamental human necessity leads to their position that an organized defense is either unnecessary or can be competitive in principled application – meaning – it can be distributed among voluntarily chosen force agencies with differing standards within the same geographical area — meaning it can remain either non-objective or non-codified. Only two results can follow – either continual war among various competing defense organizations, or, the competitive emergence of a single defensive organization with objective codified rules (which would be a just government — one that is the agent of organized right force, meaning force limited to only interference with interpersonal violations of natural rights — which is the proposal of a classical liberal to begin with.)

Ultimately, though, the answer to why we ‘need’ a government, or political force, or an enforcement agency for Law, is a historical one —one that is not, necessarily unavoidable in theory, but found to be so, time and time and time again throughout all human history: Humans will choose to violate one another whenever it is less dangerous and less pain than using their own lives to produce or secure necessary or desired values. It is irrational because doing so sanctions the life of the brute — destroys their own reasoned defense of their own property, liberty, and life — but is done time and again when a human supposes he or she can ‘get away with it.’ There is never ever any full context ‘getting away’ with it for a human who rejects the nature of his own humanity – rejects the life via reason, in truth, which, in society, means the life in good faith with others.
Best, dr y