Debating About Democracy

The following debate originally took place upon my Facebook wall, after I posted artwork being shared by the page, “People for Anarchy, Voluntaryism, Non-Aggression, and Liberty“…

Rayn:

"Democracy is the means by which those who adore authority and crave security of servitude can use their superior numbers to enslave those who wish to be free"

“Democracy is the means by which those who adore authority and crave security of servitude can use their superior numbers to enslave those who wish to be free”

Daniel Sv.: Democracy is stable until a politician discovers they can stay in office by promising free goodies from the treasury.

Daniel F.: There is a reason why we have a Constitution and a judicial branch. On more than a few occasions a law that was passed by a majority-elected legislative body (federal or state) that reflected the desires of a majority of that body’s constituency was nonetheless struck down as unconstitutional, often for infringing upon the rights of a minority.

And it is for this reason that federal judges (including Supreme Court justices) are appointed and not elected, so as to not be subject to the whims of an often prejudiced electorate. Cases like Brown v. Board of Ed. could have gone down very differently if the justices rendering the decision had to worry about being reelected and how their decision would affect their reelection chances.

Rayn: Daniel Sv., democracy is merely mob rule, as a political system. It is inherently flawed because it does not adequately acknowledge and protect all of the rights of the Individual. Mises said it best: “All rational action is in the first place individual action. Only the individual thinks. Only the individual reasons. Only the individual acts.”

The “common good” that Democracy claims to protect is just an ever-elusive, ever-evolving myth that inevitably signifies the slow-march towards pathocracy, and eventually, full democide.

Rayn: Not at all impressed by the US government, I agree with Lysander Spooner, Daniel F. “But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain – that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist.”

The US government certainly was designed with a Constitution and three branches of “checks and balances” for VERY GOOD, HISTORICALLY-ESTABLISHED reason: GOVERNMENT CANNOT BE TRUSTED WITH AUTHORITY, NOR POWER, NOR HUMAN LIVES!!!

While real human beings demanded the acknowledgement and respect of their rights, the US government was busy institutionalized slavery, committing genocide, and denying their MAJORITY (women) the right to even directly participate in said system. The Truth isn’t nearly so romantic….

Daniel F.: Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. There will always be someone in power, someone who will be able to wield enough force in order to coerce the masses to obey. When there is more than one faction competing for power within a given area, you end up with civil war as each faction attempts to exert its rule.

Voluntaryism doesn’t work because if behaving in a civilized manner is “voluntary,” then there are those people out there who will refuse to do so, and that only the threat of force will keep them in line.

Our government was supposed to have a control on it – We the People. It obviously was never perfect but it was an improvement on what the usual arrangement for much of human history – rule by autocrats with ordinary people having no say in how they were governed. Of course even with the drafting and implementation of the Constitution there were a lot of people who were denied any say in how they were governed, to say the least, and it took several amendments to that Constitution in order to fix that, and I would argue that it still hasn’t been completely fixed.

Genaire: Daniel, you stated that electorate is often prejudice which I would have to agree. I would however have to disagree about the judges. It has been my experience which is backed up by statistics that black people are given longer sentences on average than white people for the same crime, pass over more frequently for land in which they are more than qualified to receive….

Laws have been passed by this same government that is now heralded that made it legal to enslave and kill both my ethnicities (native and African American).

So with that being said I think I would rather take my chances dealing with the individual over a government that made it (and continually makes it) legal for me to be deemed a second class citizen.

Rayn: Where there are no masters, you will find no slaves! And, alternatively, where there are no slaves, you will find no masters! Accepting such political fetishism perverts the soul, my friend!

“Voluntaryism doesn’t work because if behaving in a civilized manner is ‘voluntary,’ then there are those people out there who will refuse to do so, and that only the threat of force will keep them in line,” you say, Daniel F.? Hmmm… I’m sorry, but Voluntaryism is not simply “behaving in a ‘civilized manner'”… especially when “civilized” is a VERY relative term, which has been as a blunt-force tool of control for everything from institutionalized slavery of the past to war crimes of today… In reality, Voluntaryism is actually a PHILOSOPHY according to which all forms of human association should be voluntary as far as possible. It is the doctrine that all relations among people should be by mutual consent, or not at all. Feel free to research the term in order to fully understand what it means.

In essence, the only “people out there who will refuse” Voluntaryism are those who SEEK TO COERCE OTHERS. And, historically, it is these Individuals who use the “threat of force” to keep their victims “in line.” Meanwhile, in a fully Voluntaryist society, where the Individual is Sovereign, those who choose to initiate aggression against the innocent and the peaceful are duly viewed as criminals, and are subject to summary justice of their former peers. There are no hats, no costumes, no weapons, no wealth, nor titles big enough to protect the guilty from the cause and effect of using coercion in a system of peace!

We the Individuals trump this “We the People” tripe! You can bow before a gaggle of rich, all-male, land-thieving, slave-owning, genocidal white supremacist criminal “founding fathers” if you want, but they never have, and never will “represent” me!

“[US government] obviously was never perfect but it was an improvement on what the usual arrangement for much of human history – rule by autocrats with ordinary people having no say in how they were governed,” you say? Human history? Which books have you been reading? This worldview you describe seems very Eurocentric, so I’ll just provide an alternative perspective, here:

America’s TRUE “Founding Fathers”:
http://acidrayn.com/2011/02/16/americas-true-founding-fathers/

From the article, “the ‘Constitution’ was directly inspired by the Iroquois Constitution, a system of government shared with European settlers by the Iroquois League of North America! Of course, unlike America’s INFERIOR DERIVATIVE, the Iroquois Constitution guaranteed equal rights to both sexes, and freedom from slavery for ALL!

Iroquois Constitution Influenced That of U.S., Historians Say:
http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/article/2004/09/20040924120101akllennoccm9.930056e-02.html

Iroquois Influenced the United States Constitution:
http://gettingtruth.blogspot.com/2007/07/iroquois-influenced-united-states.html

Yet, sickeningly enough, America repaid the kindness of the Iroquois League with a propaganda campaign, labeling the indigenous individuals of the North as “savages” to demonically justify a barbaric GENOCIDE! This is REVISIONISM, FOLKS! Can you see it? The snake eats its own tail in order to remove the evidence of its past, and feign present perfection! It is the “circle of evil,” and the TRUE WISDOM BEHIND THE OUROBOROS! If only we would WAKE UP to the CLEVERNESS of our ENEMY, TRUTH and JUSTICE would FREE US from “THE BODY OF THIS DEATH!” We must ALL increase our CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS and our SYMBOL-LITERACY – as well as EACH OTHER’S! This is the only REAL KEY to UNLOCKING the SHACKLES OF IGNORANCE!)

Check your history! Just like most revolutions of the past and present, the American Revolution was CO-OPTED by a bunch of ultra-rich, ultra-greedy PIRATES in sheep’s clothing, looking to rule over an unrepresented majority using their age-old, long-worshiped BABYLONIAN, INSECTOID HIERARCHY- the HOUSE OF BONDAGE!”

The Iroquois League, made up of five different peaceful Northern Tribes of Indigenous, ran a successful, Stateless Voluntaryist system of peace, with no prisons, no poverty, no masters, and no slaves! It was such a marvel that Europeans negotiated for the “knowledge” required to duplicate their results!

Meanwhile, the peaceful Arawak Tribe of the Caribbean also enjoyed a Stateless, Voluntaryist system of PEACE, as well. Sadly, European devils like Christopher Columbus were too busy robbing, raping and murdering to spend more than a fleeting moment marveling at the MAJOR accomplishment of these Indigenous:

https://www.facebook.com/LiberateRva/photos/a.349613965115451.79113.311568842253297/901232696620239/?type=3

"The Indians are so naive an so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, then never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone." "They would make fine servants... With fifty men, we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want." - Christopher Columbus / Cristóbal Colón (artwork originally located here, where it was posted by the Facebook page, "Liberate RVA")

“The Indians are so naive an so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, then never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone.” “They would make fine servants… With fifty men, we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.” – Christopher Columbus / Cristóbal Colón
(Artwork originally located here, upon the Facebook page, “Liberate RVA“)

Even old-world EUROPEANS enjoyed the peace of Stateless Voluntaryism, right here on American soil! In “The Rights of Man,” Thomas Paine wrote the following:

“For upwards of two years from the commencement of the American War, and to a longer period in several of the American States, there were no established forms of government. The old governments had been abolished, and the country was too much occupied in defence to employ its attention in establishing new governments; yet during this interval order and harmony were preserved as inviolate as in any country in Europe. There is a natural aptness in man, and more so in society, because it embraces a greater variety of abilities and resource, to accommodate itself to whatever situation it is in. The instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act: a general association takes place, and common interest produces common security.”

Daniel F.: I’m sure that even the Iroquois League had to deal with the occasional psychopath. That said, aside from those few individuals who are just “born bad”, the root of much crime and civil unrest is social and economic inequality, and the greater the degree of inequality the more force it takes to maintain the status quo. In general, without some outside force to level the playing field, people with wealth and power tend to use that wealth and power to obtain even more of it, often at the expense of those around them. Some countries – the Scandinavian countries come to mind – do things quite well. This country does it horribly.

The Iroquois League also didn’t have to deal with a lot of the problems that plague modern society – particularly in regards to the environment. Just look at the large corporations (ultimately controlled by rich and powerful people) pillaging our natural resources and destroying the environment – how does one put a stop to that, when force is often the only thing that these “people” will respond to? And when their response is to hire muscle of their own in order to protect their perverted interests. Such a thing may very well have been completely unthinkable to that society, and social pressure alone may very well have been enough to prevent people from accumulating too much personal wealth for themselves without sharing a fair amount of it without any need for physical force, social values can cut both ways, as our own country’s history shows us all too well.

For example, if a vast majority of a population strongly believe that a certain minority constitutes an “inferior bloodline” and deserve to be treated like slaves, you are going to have a very difficult time in trying to counter that; especially when such systems often reserve their most brutal oppression toward those nominally of the privileged group who dare to speak out against such injustice, which serves to perpetuate that system. In the case of both slavery and segregation it took intervention from the federal government, backed by force, in order to even nominally abolish those systems, which even then to a large extent has merely amounted to little more than putting lipstick on a pig. (There is one notable difference: unlike, say, a white person living in Alabama or Mississippi back in the 1950’s or before, I can speak out and denounce institutional racism without putting my livelihood or even my life on the line. Which IS significant, as positive change only ever occurs when people speak out, and when people who disagree with an unjust system are intimidated into silence it makes said system far more resistant to any sort of change. It literally took people risking their lives and even dying just to get to the point where we can even have a real discussion about race relations in America.)

Rayn: “I’m sure that even the Iroquois League had to deal with the occasional psychopath,” you say? Indeed, they did! They just so happen to have been wise enough not to clamor for a small minority of them to be in charge of everyone else, is all! 😉

I’d take my point a step further by saying that they weren’t foolish enough to consolidate all of the psychopaths living within in a larger geographic location into a small cage to live together, while forcing their peers, at gunpoint, to pay for the arrangement, whether said “peers” consented to it, or not.

Must be nice to read about the real origins of the Constitution, and then, without even pretending to adjust your viewpoint, accordingly, instead, boldly claim that the authors “didn’t have to deal with a lot of the problems that plague modern society,” as if that doesn’t PRECISELY make MY points, EXACTLY, rather than yours! You’re DAMN RIGHT, they didn’t! They avoided ALL of the threats you mentioned PRECISELY because they were WISE ENOUGH NOT to name a small gaggle of criminals as their “rulers” and give them the “legal right” to harm others and steal from everyone else, without escape – AKA STATISM!!!! You see… they were a group of Tribes, NOT A STATIST CULT. And, they VOLUNTARILY contracted themselves to each other through their INDIVIDUAL CONSENT to a UNANIMOUSLY-AGREED-UPON CONSTITUTION. They were a Stateless and borderless society, and could come and go amongst each other as they pleased, even leaving the Tribe, completely, if desired – and, with ZERO CONSEQUENCE! That’s right! All members enjoyed full and free passage – and amazingly, this was even accomplished without the need for licenses, permits, nor the apparently-super-high technology of government-tax-theft-based “road” to extort or yoke!

The Iroquois League also understood the absolute necessity of Individual Sovereignty in the equation of liberty, and the illegitimacy of psychopathic constructs like “national borders,” “implied-social-contract-based-citizenship-slavery,” and “taxation,” along with the subsequent immorality of lethally-enFORCING such insanity on the peaceful and free individuals around them, just like they understood that living in a natural state of peace for one’s self can only come from leaving others in their own natural state of peace, without molestation!

“Aside from those few individuals who are just ‘born bad’, the root of much crime and civil unrest is social and economic inequality, and the greater the degree of inequality the more force it takes to maintain the status quo,” you say?

Seems like you’re overlooking the fact that there is no greater cause of “social and economic inequality” than Statism, itself! Meanwhile, there was no poverty among the Iroquois League, because they were wise enough to VOLUNTARILY work daily towards keeping a healthy living standard for all those around them, Indigenous, or otherwise – almost exclusively in the name of keeping purity, and preventing disease! Check your history, and you will see that these same Tribes are the ones that actually HELPED the original European pilgrims settle the “New World” by giving them mass quantities of food, helping them to plant crops, and gifting them with the knowledge of ash fertilizer, which was NECESSARY to grow native MAIZE! Meanwhile, the MAIN REASONS the Indigenous did these things were because they were FED UP with starving pilgrims in places like Jamestown STEALING their crops! And, rather than continuously punish such violations, these Tribes offered up a peaceful solution to the problem that would easily distinguish the desperate pilgrims from the outright criminal pilgrims, so that the latter could still be dealt with accordingly. They found the appropriate means to uncloud the moral issues, and did so ONLY with the desire for peace, and with the FAITH that MOST of the pilgrims wanted the same! RESPECT the TRUTH: without the love and nurturing hand of this Stateless society, there would be no “AMERICA” or current genocidal Statist empire to speak – just a few hundred thousand European bodies, starved dead, baking in the sun, and being eaten by vermin and worms (probably creating a horrible plague for the whole continent, in the process, if any tribes passed through the area, unaware)! The American holiday called “THANKSGIVING” commemorates all of these things I mention, and every effort to conceal or downplay these facts, as well as the true origins of the Constitution have FAILED miserably! For those of us who are WILLING to learn the Truth, rather than accept the lies of murderers and thieves that have subsisted on a steady diet of death for all of history, the information I mention is readily available!

What Really Happened at the First Thanksgiving? The Wampanoag Side of the Tale:
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/11/23/what-really-happened-first-thanksgiving-wampanoag-side-tale-and-whats-done-today-145807

Rayn: Being very knowledgeable, the Iroquois League understood the interconnectivity of all life on Earth, and took on the long-term goal of preserving the planet for all future generations. With these ideals in mind, they decidedly kept their pollution levels close to zero, while wasting not, and also wanting not! Besides this, as I illustrated above, they wisely recognized the BIOLOGICAL FACT that human conditions like starvation were as much a threat to the sufferer as to those healthy beings around him! No years of scientific debate among “experts” needed, nor the invention of the microscope were required for them to reach their conclusion, much unlike the formula behind today’s failing, so-called “progressive” modern societies (AKA willfully ignorant masses who bow to the “authority” of a tiny minority of other men). Nope! These “primitive” (as their oppressors continue to call them, to this day) people were guided ONLY by their HUMBLE, OPEN-TO-TRUTH OBSERVATIONS OF NATURE, and they drank in her wisdom like it was mother’s milk! After centuries of them keeping up this “good work,” and eradicating all major disease in the process, the immune systems of these Indigenous tribes became very relaxed, leaving them ABSOLUTELY unprepared for exposure to the DEADLY DISEASES that had been ravaging sickly European societies for ages! These great and noble people had eliminated such issues from their societies, long ago, and hence, had NO NATURAL DEFENSES against the onslaught of long-cultivated European pathogens!

The Iroquois League also amazingly understood property rights correctly: human beings own THEMSELVES, the fruits of their OWN labor, and the living spaces THEY PERSONALLY occupy. Unlike the arrogant delusions that certain cultures throughout history have continued to peddle as Truth, these Tribes DID NOT erroneously attempt to “own land” as if they were LORDS/MASTERS, and hence, made no attempts to claim the labor of those who are ACTUALLY working upon it as their own, as though such Individuals were their SERVANTS/SLAVES!

HUMAN SACRIFICE always has been, and always will be, the root of DEVIL WORSHIP, and the Iroquois League completely rejected such evil! These Tribes inherently understood that one can only OWN HIMSELF, and those things he has PERSONALLY manufactured through HIS OWN labor, plain and simple! In seeing this self-evident truth as the natural order of life, and acknowledging it as thoroughly as possible, through both oral contract, through Constitution, and through the symbology of the Wigwam Belt, Nature rewarded their understanding by continuously providing them with enough space, wild-growing food, and clean water for all, plus the equal opportunity for shelter-construction, water irrigation and agriculture, among the able-bodied, as well!

The Iroquois League also didn’t adhere to the just-as-diseased, equally-arrogant concept of “intellectual property,” as they were well-aware that open-sourced information and crowd-sourced information are VASTLY SUPERIOR to such TYRANNICAL, CONTROL-EFFORTS, understanding well that the concept of “sharing” was much, much more beneficial and sustainable to both the Individual, AND the societies that Individuals form (as I illustrated above, with their teaching of agricultural technology to the European pilgrims)!

As for your COMPLETELY ILL-FOUNDED claim that “in the case of both slavery and segregation it took intervention from the federal government, backed by force, in order to even nominally abolish those system,” your viewpoint SHOCKINGLY DEVOID OF TRUTH! Oh, no, no, no, my friend! Slavery was, in fact, INSTITUTED by the State, then BACKED by the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT through many means, most especially through the FEDERAL FUGITIVE SLAVE ACT!

According to your logic, if my bloodline were to enslave your entire bloodline for a few centuries as “inferior,” establish it as “legal” through an elite-interest-serving “government,” force breed you all until I had an entire tribe of your family working “my” family’s fields, and even raping some of your women, so that your bloodline started looking more and more like MY bloodline, with each passing century, all while collaborating with a tiny minority of my equally-sociopathic slave-holding neighbors, who’s bloodlines are much more like mine family’s than yours, all to keep “your kind” from escaping our legally-protected, lethally-enforced system of bondage – then, FINALLY, FINALLY, FINALLY – when even my non-slaving “superior”-bloodline’d peers begin to daily demand complete abolition of the “peculiar” system of human “ownership” that my neighbors and I have been operating over your family’s “inferior” bloodline for ages, with said peers feeling especially threatened by the fact your bloodline has slowly begun to become indistinguishable from that of the “superior” stock, and many threatening to take ALL OF “MY” exploited wealth away through legal means – when we all finally “let you all go free,” while not only making sure to keep ALL of the fruits of your bloodline’s labor, but also quickly enacting a host of new exploitative laws which ensure myself to be the “rightful” owner of said wealth, and ensuring that my bloodline remain legally “superior” to your bloodline, and still able to exploit you all, just in less harsh ways – you’d have the GALL to refer to me as some sort of “EMANCIPATOR” in your history books!?!?!?!?

Two years ago, I posted the following comment about Thomas Paine (February 9, 1737 – June 8, 1809), and I believe it applies to this discussion: “This TRUE ‘Founder’ wrote ‘Common Sense’ (the inspiration for the ‘Declaration of Independence’), is considered the “Father of the American Revolution,’ argued for the EQUAL rights of WOMEN, and was a SLAVERY ABOLITIONIST! Check into Paine, and, like me, you will NEVER AGAIN allow a single immoral individual to tell you that you can’t SH!T ALL OVER the memory and reputation of the other so-called ‘Founding Fathers’ for their disgusting white supremacism, male chauvinism, and slave ownership! NEVER ACCEPT the cowardly, illogical, disingenuous and collectivist argument that you are looking at the despicable deeds of these revolution-hijackers through a ‘lofty,’ ‘modern day understanding’ of what actually ALWAYS HAS BEEN, and ALWAYS WILL BE RIGHT! Any sheep that would say such a thing only seeks to reduce their own cognitive dissonance at the expense of YOUR SOUL – bidding for your silence, just as those of their ilk ALSO did BACK in the days of Paine, TOO!

“Positive change only ever occurs when people speak out, and when people who disagree with an unjust system are intimidated into silence it makes said system far more resistant to any sort of change,” you say? This is ABSOLUTELY TRUE, so long as you’re referring to Statism!

Daniel F.: The Federal Government did back the institution of slavery from the beginning until Lincoln was elected president. There were dissenters, but they didn’t have the political might necessary to really challenge the institution until the rise of the Republican party and Lincoln’s election. And then it took a long bloody war. The three-fifths “compromise” should give an indication as to just how powerful the pro-slavery faction was. Not only did those at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 who were opposed to slavery have absolutely no chance of having it be outlawed in the new Constitution, they weren’t even able to get half way in not having those people with no political rights whatsoever (i.e., slaves) not counting towards a state’s population for the purposes of determining said state’s representation in Congress. The southern states didn’t need the federal government to preserve the institution of slavery (or Jim Crow afterward) – the white majority in those states enthusiastically supported and enforced both. And the only way that they were EVER going to give those things up was if someone FORCED them to – someone with enough power to make it stick.

The problem isn’t governments, it’s people. Governments merely reflect the values of the people (to some extent), and ultimately do require the support or at least acceptance of the people being governed. Even an absolute dictator’s rule is not 100% absolute, as they still have people who they depend on in order to enforce their rule. Even an absolute dictator would not have been able to end slavery in a single southern state back in the antebellum south without having some serious firepower at his disposal (which, in the end, it took the entire Union Army to put an end to it. And then when all the federal troops pulled out after the Reconstruction blacks lost what societal gains they had won after the Civil War as there was no one left able and willing to enforce their rights against the racist white majority that refused to recognize or respect them.)

Of course, propaganda also has a lot to do with it, and if there’s one thing that governments seem to do very well, it’s in spreading propaganda; though you don’t need a government for that. Consider that the whole system in place during the antebellum south didn’t actually benefit even the majority of whites, mainly just the rich plantation owners. But by convincing even the lowest white man that is still better than any black man or woman, and they convinced the white majority to go along with it even though they would have been far better off under a system where everyone was more or less equal. (The power elite has long managed to con the ordinary people into being complicit in their own oppression; unfortunately too many people seem to be little more than sheep).

Genaire: These atrocities only become legal when given credence by the state. I challenge any one person to try to enslave me.

"Dont forget: slavery was legal, the Holocaust was legal, segregation was legal. Never use the State as a metric for ethics."

“Dont forget: slavery was legal, the Holocaust was legal, segregation was legal. Never use the State as a metric for ethics.”

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