Why it is your duty to stop supporting the government → ethics → values are things you live, not things you profess

Some feedback:

The biggest decision I think you have ahead of you at this point is whether you want to not support the government, or actually resist it in some fashion. Not supporting the government is, of course, much easier than resisting it. On the other hand, resisting the government may have much better results.

I thought it was important that before I begin considering whether to or how to resist the government that I start by withdrawing my support for it. I think many of the people who are out on the streets with their signs and chants are fooling themselves if they think they oppose the war — their chants don’t take a nickel from the bottom line of their actual support.

How to or whether to resist the government is another matter. I think that a compelling case for the need to resist the government can be made. Now, finally, I have the luxury of being able to weigh that case. Once I stop supporting the government, I can make the decision of whether to wash my hands of it or whether to actively oppose it.

Until I stopped supporting the government, my “opposition” to it was a matter of opinion and had pretty much as much weight as any other opinion does — less than nothing unless the weather is hot enough so that air exits my mouth at less than the ambient temperature.

So, what’s your goal? 20 years from now what would the “perfect” government look like? Given your knowledge of human nature, is such a government possible? Is it worth your individual effort for an extended period of time?

I don’t spend much time anymore thinking about what a good government would look like. I’ve come to disbelieve in government — not in the sense of disillusionment, but actual non-belief. I think that what we call government is really just people and places and buildings. The actions of “government” are really just the actions of people following certain rules and roles and norms.

Which isn’t to say that “government” isn’t a useful shorthand for referring to a set of institutions, employees, legal algorithms, etc. But this shortcut doesn’t in itself have an existence. The mistake is like saying that you want to refer to the creative, life-giving entropic momentum in the universe by the name “god” — (“okay,” says the skeptic) — then you start to personify “God” and give Him opinions and motives and eyes and a crown and such. Pretty soon, you’re not naming an abstraction so much as creating literature and living in a fantasy world.

So the question isn’t “what kind of government is good,” “what can a just government demand of its citizens,” etc. but “how should people behave towards each other, since the idea of an external government to which we must relinquish our consciences is a myth?”

It’s like asking an atheist to tell you what kind of god he thinks made the world, or what kind of responsibilities God has toward his creation, or what kind of responsibilities we should have towards God, or how God would have us live. The atheist would say none of those are meaningful questions, since there is no god.

The questions the atheist would ask are: “how should we live, given that we can’t rely on a god to tell us how to live?” “how was the universe created, if it wasn’t God who did it?” and so forth.

I think it’s important to awaken in people their own consciences and their sense of responsibility for their own choices. I think that’s more important than dreaming up some institutional or algorithmic structure designed to take these burdens off of our shoulders.

When a government agent steals from me, it is just a person stealing from me. When a police officer threatens to make me a hostage, it is just a person threatening me with kidnapping. That they use the excuse of having a job description or “government” that authorizes such behavior is their hallucination and their problem (though I certainly will take into account the threatening delusions of my well-armed fellow citizens), and I feel as helpless trying to reason with them as Elizabeth Smart must have felt in the clutches of her God-authorized child-snatcher. My feelings towards reform of government are much as my feelings towards any large criminal syndicate that threatens me: reduce the threat as much as possible, and keep my head down meanwhile.

Agreed. However, there is a reason we have abstractions, so we can work with more complex thought objects than the base atomic components (if there are such things) that exist at “lower” levels. By your standard, almost everything (if not everything) we talk about is a myth.

My problem isn’t with the use of abstractions or shorthand symbols but with the confusion this causes when people forget or deny that they’re using abstractions.

When people say that the reason they’re performing an action is because the government requires it, they’re using “government” as an excuse for their behavior in a way that is often dishonest. The problem with the shorthand version is that it covers too much ground — it’s ambiguous. It pretends to explain something, but actually leaves it unexplained.

The shorthand of “government” or “law” as an excuse for behavior hides behind it a jungle gym’s worth of evasions of personal responsibility.

It is, indeed, important to awaken in people their own conscience and sense of responsibility for their actions and decisions. But if you do it without other tools or some other structure in place, that re-awakened conscience will quickly fall victim to the same factors that caused the person to abdicate it in the first place, and you’ll be right back where you started.

My feeling is that people do not have the capability to abdicate their consciences. They can make trade-offs, they can decide to defer to the judgments of people they consider better-informed, or whatever — but in doing so they are exercising their consciences. If you make the wrong decision by following someone else’s judgment — you have made the wrong decision, not the someone else (who may also have made the wrong decision, but you know what I mean.)

And this is the problem that “government” (among other things) pretends to cure. “Government” says “I will make some of your decisions for you, and I will take all the blame if things go bad.” That’s snake oil. Can’t be done. It’s like a perpetual motion machine.

And, crucially, it killed almost two hundred million people in the last century. Which is to say, people killed almost two hundred million other people in the last century, shooting them in the back of the head, starving them to death, stuffing them into gas chambers, etc. thinking all the while that it wasn’t them who was doing these things but the “government.” (And that isn’t even counting the deaths when armies met on the battlefield).

If you decide to go along with the law or the majority or what have you because you’re not confident that your own judgment is any better — that’s a plausibly sensible heuristic and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But your decision and your action is ultimately yours, and you are responsible for the consequences. If it turns out to be a screw-up, the right thing to do is to consider alternative courses of action that won’t be so screwed up — the wrong thing to do is to passively hope that the law / majority / whatever will improve so that your moral laziness won’t have those consequences anymore.

It’s tempting to object to this by saying that the law is different, because it really is an implicit gun-to-your-head that eliminates your freedom of choice.

But even a gun to your head doesn’t eliminate your freedom of choice — it just adds to the set of consequences your choices may produce. It becomes a factor that you add up along with all of the other factors before making your decision. In the case of a gun to the head, it’s a pretty big consequence and a pretty overwhelming factor, but it doesn’t change the basic rules of the game.

It sounds so reasonable at first: why won’t the government just change? Would it be that hard for it to stop stealing from people to support its expensive habits and for-the-cameras philanthropy, to stop giving aid and comfort to the world’s torturers, butchering and crippling innocent people, dressing up repulsive lies in pretty clothes, and giving the word “liberty” a bad name from abuse?

But the answer is that yes it would be that hard. It takes a lot to change a government. Don’t be fooled by the democratic trappings of the U.S. government — it’s actually easier to change a dictatorship: it only takes one bullet. To change the course of a government like the U.S. government — well, just think of all of the people you’ve got to talk to, the lobbyists you’ve got to hire, the bribes you’ve got to hand out, the door-to-door work you’ve got to do, the media events you’ve got to stage, the bills you have to watch closely as they get amended away, the lawyers you’ve got to hire to prod the bureaucrats even if you finally get the law on your side.

There’s a lot to it; and the government may not want to change — it probably likes it right where it is. It doesn’t get into the stealing and torturing and butchering business just because it lost its way somehow — there’s something in it, some advantage gained or payoff made. You’ve got to counter the devil’s offer with a better one of your own, or counter the devil’s threat with a bigger threat.

Or you could try appealing to conscience, I suppose. I know there’s not much success to be found there, but it does sometimes work — and it sure makes it easier to get out of bed in the morning if you think moral persuasion still makes a difference.

But what are you going to say? “Hello, I’m here to persuade you that the government should go through what amounts to a grand moral rebirth and make whatever grand sacrifices and vast changes are needed to insure that it no longer violates our liberties, murders the innocent, and tarnishes the name of freedom, et cetera, et cetera, amen. It’s gonna require fortitude on the government’s part, and a willingness to change, and certainly it’ll have to swallow hard and forgo some of the privileges associated with might-makes-right, but that’s what it’s got to do in order to be legitimate and worthy of our respect.”

Well if you’re still paying taxes, you’re vulnerable, you know, to an answer like this: “Look, Charlie, why don’t you swallow hard and forgo some of the privileges associated with being a well-off, taxpaying citizen, and stop funding all of that nonsense yourself? It’d be easier for you to change than for the government to change, so if you’re not willing to do it, what’s all your moral clarity really worth anyway? Why, if the government paved a new road to town out of live kittens, I’d be the first to complain — but even before that, I’d choose to take a different road to get to town, even if it took me there by a longer and harder route. Step off of the kittens or shut up about their yowling!”

A friend writes:

Though the news of a bad nature is frequent, this one torques me more than usual. Shall I go to Ruckus training camp? Shall I go into Bush country and educate the right?

I don’t want to sound like a scold, but if you didn’t see this coming, you weren’t paying attention. The worst abuses of the Patriot Act probably won’t come to light until we have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission or something… in any case: many, many years down the road. There’s so much secrecy in the Act that there may not be anybody who really has large-scale knowledge of just how bad it is out there — certainly nobody who cares.

There’s a brief window between when it becomes completely obvious to anyone who isn’t trying to hide from the truth that things have crossed the line and when it’s crossed the line so far that it’s too dangerous or too late to stop the speeding train. I think we’re in the window. I think if we pass the window, lots of people will look back and say “if I knew then what I know now, I woulda done something… I’m sure of it.”

The key is to be one of those people who actually did do something so you don’t have to live with the stomach-churning or life-denying neurosis involved in having to repeat that phrase to yourself over and over again in order to get to sleep at night or look at yourself in the mirror the next morning.

So far as I can see, there are folks on the right who are educating themselves and each other pretty well… we who speak lefty as a first language ought to concentrate on educating the left — the left is acting at least as idiotic, slavish, and obedient these days as the right is.

Yeah, what you said. But how do I get people to look out the window instead of getting hung up on their reflection? Let alone to open the door and go out and kick Ashcroft & Sons & Assholes in the dick?

I’m working on the assumption that what’s needed isn’t for more people to see the problem — it’s for the people who do see the problem to act like they mean it. Until that happens, people who don’t see the problem don’t have any reason to believe those who do. “It can’t be that much of a problem, or you hippies and malcontents would be doing something different than just complaining and waving signs like you always do.”

Millions of Americans and others demonstrated against the invasion of Iraq in the last months before it occurred, 10 million around the world on one particular day, in what dissident intellectual Noam Chomsky described as the most significant showing of opposition to war at such an early stage in living memory. Yet all that failed to stop the war or even produce a bona fide antiwar candidate for president, at least not a major party nominee. This has discouraged many protestors, particularly among the impressive proportions of first-timers. When, they ask, will we ever have a better chance to win? If we couldn’t stop this one, what’s the use of even trying?

But award-winning sociologist and activist Francis Fox Piven says the antiwar movement may have expected too much for too little. “War-making is never determined by anything like a democratic process,” she says. “War is something that governing elites undertake, and they don’t undertake it in response to popular opinion. If that were the case, we would probably never go to war, because ordinary people pay for war with blood and with their wealth.”

“One kind of evidence for that is that candidates never campaign as war candidates. Lyndon Baynes Johnson, who kept us in Vietnam, promised not to go to war in Vietnam. You can see that again and again. Candidates always campaign as peace candidates.

“Another kind of evidence is that antiwar movements — popular opinion against wars expressed in marches and demonstrations — has rarely succeeded at the outset. It’s as the war grinds on and people become more and more angry and disillusioned with the war that popular opinion, popular resistance to the war begins to take its toll on the capacity of government to make war. So in a way the antiwar movement is being too impatient. They expect to win too easily.”

So do we just keep doing what we are doing and look forward with bated breath for that fateful day? Hardly. What the current antiwar movement has done so far, she says, is express opinion. “They marched in large numbers, they rallied, and it was a kind of voting, voting in the streets. I think a successful antiwar movement has to act in ways that throw sand in the gears of the war machine. Resistance has to be more serious.”

What does the way forward look like? I’m watching the Kerry voters digest their loss — and what belches their sour stomachs produce! There’s a lot of talk of “values,” such as that from George Lakoff which preceded the campaign, or the more panicky talk since, which seems to boil down to something like this: “The swing voters swung Republican because of something called ‘values’ — is there any way we can fake some of those convincingly ourselves?”

Kerry’s slogan might as well have been “abandon your values and support the Kerry campaign — I did!”

To recap: Kerry voted to authorize the war in Iraq, and used his apologia to broadcast the familiar lies about weapons of mass destruction and the like. He voted shamelessly for the Patriot Act, knowing all the while who was going to be holding the reins of that horse. He spent his campaign bragging about the weapons systems he’d voted to fund, and most grotesquely of all: he bragged about how proudly he’d defended the United States by killing people in Vietnam. He vowed to fight the war in Iraq more tenaciously and viciously, with more troops and (with any luck) more allies.

Now perhaps those repulsive stands did represent his values, but what of the rest of us? Those Democrats who opposed the war were counselled not to vote for their values in the primary but to vote for the “electable” candidate, and that’s what they did. And then after the primaries, there were the daily pleadings to Nader leaners or disgusted non-voters not to waste their votes on their values but to vote for Anybody But Bush instead.

And now the discovery that people who value “values” abandoned Kerry at the polls. Listen to the wailing and gnashing of teeth. They cry: How can opposing gay marriage be considered a value and opposing the ongoing bombardment of Iraq not be? It’s a bit late for that.

In the values war, the Democrats unilaterally disarmed — worse, they turned traitor. Gay marriage? Oh, we hate it too. The war in Iraq? We’re no wimps.

It’s as though they forgot that people who find such positions valuable already had a candidate to vote for and didn’t need a new one.

Those of us who are against the war are doubly-humbled. Not only did we not come close to bringing the country around to our point of view, but we couldn’t even convince the opposition party, which not only might have been able to make hay from a stand against an increasingly unpopular war, but which could have become a useful bullhorn for promoting anti-war views.

Part of our problem is that we too often express our “values” not in our actions but in our petulant demands, petitions, and opinions. The United for Peace & Justice Position on Ending the Occupation of Iraq, for instance, is all about what “The Iraqi people” and “The United States” and “The United Nations” “should” do. None of those bodies of people, alas, give a flying fuck what United for Peace & Justice thinks they should do. Pardon my French.

What distinguishes a value from an opinion is that for something you value you’re going to put your money where your mouth is. An opinion as to which mouth somebody else “should” put their money at is an opinion cheaply had, and worth about that much.

When people who are anti-war move from having opinions that are fit for bumper-stickers to having values that motivate their actions, this in and of itself will be more persuasive than any number of opinions, whether expressed as ad campaigns, petitions, letters-to-the-editor, or protest marches. And beyond persuasiveness, it will be the first step toward change. People will work for what they find valuable; opinions just make for more blogs.

More from the pen of Leo Tolstoy:

Tolstoy’s writings on tax refusal can be found in the book We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader.

In order that people who do not want war should not fight, it is not necessary to have either international law, arbitration, international tribunals, or solutions of problems; but it is merely necessary that those who are subjected to the deceit should awake and free themselves from the spell or enchantment under which they find themselves. The way to do away with war is for those who do not want war, who regard participation in it as a sin, to refrain from fighting.…

But the enlightened friends of peace not only refrain from recommending this method, but cannot bear the mention of it; when it is brought before them they pretend not to have noticed it, or, if they cannot help noticing it, they gravely shrug their shoulders and express their pity for those uneducated and unreasonable men who adopt such an ineffectual, silly method, when such a good one exists — namely, to sprinkle salt on the bird one wishes to catch, i.e. to persuade the governments, who only exist by violence and deceit, to forsake both the one and the other.…

No one can help desiring that his life should not be an aimless and useless existence, but that it should be of service to God and man; yet frequently a man spends his life without finding an opportunity for such service. The summons to accept the military service presents precisely such an opportunity to every man of our time.

Every man, in refusing to take part in military service or to pay taxes to a government which uses them for military purposes, is, by this refusal, rendering a great service to God and man, for he is thereby making use of the most efficacious means of furthering the progressive movement of mankind toward that better social order which it is striving after and must eventually attain.…

Awake, brethren! Listen neither to those villains who, from your childhood, infect you with the diabolic spirit of patriotism, opposed to righteousness and truth, and only necessary in order to deprive you of your property, your freedom, and your human dignity; nor to those ancient impostors who preach war in the name of a cruel and vindictive God invented by them, and in the name of a perverted and false Christianity; nor, even less, to those modern Sadducees who, in the name of science and civilization, aiming only at the continuation of the present state of things, assemble at meetings, write books, and make speeches, promising to organize a good and peaceful life for people without their making any effort! Do not believe them. Believe only the consciousness which tells you that you are neither beasts nor slaves, but free men, responsible for your actions, and therefore unable to be murderers either of your own accord or at the will of those who live by these murders.

From Carthago Delenda Est.

“Americus” puts forth a mighty rant over at The Claire Files:

So World War Ⅲ has begun, and I’m in the bad country. Our President is totally F’ing mad, he and his millennial dispensationalist raptureists backers are trying to fulfill an ancient religious prophecy about an all-destroying battle between good and evil, and the most powerful propaganda industry in history is strangely backing him up, pretending he’s sane and reasonable, leading Americans on a cult of global-scale murder-suicide that may very well leave our country in ruins. How did we come to this?

Bush is already being set up as the scapegoat, like Hitler before him, so Americans can pretend we’re all good people who just got a bad ruler by some fluke and we were “only doing our jobs” or “we didn’t know.” But nobody is born with an urge to conquer and exterminate, with an active resistance to empathy, with an inability to psychologically adapt. People like this are made, and in a healthy society they’re seldom made and never given influence. In America we crank them out by the millions and tend to make them our leaders and congress critters. Wishful-thinking lefties say the American people are against this war, but I don’t see it. I see every part of the government and every large business going along with the war, and I see a majority of people who either actively support it, or refuse to give any attention to politics, or secretly feel good about “their” side ruling the world and are happy that they don’t have to admit it, happy the system is set up so they can benefit from brutality just by continuing to behave normally, whatever that term may mean.…

And it doesn’t stop there… The trick is to bottom-out in this sort of rhetorically nifty anger and frustration and then somehow pull out of the dive into some hopeful and believable imagining. “Americus” gives it a pretty good shot.

Some words of wisdom from Claire Wolfe:

[T]he thing we have the greatest power to change — our own lives — is the thing we’re often most resistant to change. This is a good-old/bad-old human trait in general; we don’t want to give up our grudges or our self-destructive habits (because after all, they’re ours). But especially we don’t want to practice our “political” ideals in our own lives because it’s risky and uncomfortable to personally resist the evils we claim to oppose.

We want to stop the war but we won’t do it by refusing to finance the war. We want to stop the invasion of our privacy, but we won’t do it through non-cooperation with the database makers or through smashing the surveillance systems. We don’t wish to reduce our dependence on heavily regulated and taxed products. We cooperate, we collaborate, then we complain.

It’s so comfortable to complain. So familiar. So us. And it is so easy just to blame the entire loss of freedom on them — whoever they may be today.

So the one part of the world that we’re best positioned to “do something” about is the one thing we often do the very least to change. The one place we really, truly can oppose evil — right at our own doorsteps, right in our own hearts — is the one place where we perpetually surround ourselves with excuses for inaction.

This morning I wake up to the news that the voters of San Francisco have boldly passed a non-binding resolution declaring that the people of San Francisco disapprove of military recruiters in the public schools. This pairs up nicely with last year’s Proposition N, in which San Franciscans boldly voted to declare their absolutely powerless opinion that U.S. troops should be withdrawn from Iraq.

When it comes time for empty gestures, San Franciscans can be counted on to disapprove of the war. When it comes time to send representatives or money to Congress, however, these scolding peaceniks seem to have other priorities.

The people, united, will pass a non-binding resolution disapproving of their defeat!

Sunni Maravillosa is engaged in an interesting debate on walking the walk when you’re talking the talk regarding liberty.

The personal is political, as the old slogan goes. Or, as Sunni puts it, “the idea that a pro-freedom revolution will be some discrete, distinct event sometime in the future is a narrow and shortsighted perspective. Each and every act against the state, from small, mostly symbolic rebellions to large-scale, principled acts of civil disobedience, dropping out, and/or education comprise the revolution that has been and is swirling around us every day.”

Joey at The Freedom Symposium isn’t so sure, he’s got his own ideas of how to translate your ideals into your day-to-day life.

In the opening paragraph of Andrew Oldenquist’s introduction to Readings in Moral Philosophy he tries to explain the book’s focus. Describing moral philosophy, Oldenquist says:

It is distinct from moralizing, for moralizing is neither philosophical, nor is it a study of morality, but rather one way of participating in morality. Anthropologists and sociologists sometimes study morality. The former try to discover what other societies think about moral matters, and the latter investigate the moral beliefs of various groups within our society and perhaps try to discover what makes groups of people believe what they do. The philosophical study of morality is both more general and more critical than this… a great many of the problems that interest the moral philosopher are logical problems… the consistency or inconsistency of various moral opinions and principles; in the ways in which good and bad reasoning enter into moral deliberation… in the meaning of moral statements; and in the extent to which some moral opinions depend on more basic ones… [which] has led moral philosophers to look for ultimate moral principles…. [And] the attempt to justify, or in some way to make reasonable, ultimate moral principles…

All of this is reasonable, but when I read this it seemed to me that there was something missing both in what Oldenquist includes and in what he excludes from his focus. There’s an important bridge between moral theory and moral practice. I’m not sure what you would call it, but I’m sure it merits study.

I think philosophers shy away from thinking about this because they think of it as secondary to ethical theory. Once you’ve figured out the Ultimate Moral Principles and have used these to deduce the proper moral behavior, everything then will fall into place on its own. The difficult part is to do this figuring out and deducing.

I’m not so sure. It seems to me that the problem most people have is not that they’ve gotten lost on the way to determining Ultimate Moral Principles and have chosen the wrong ones (or have been unable to choose), but that in applying whatever makeshift moral principles they’ve adopted, they’re being flummoxed by mental biases, various forms of deliberate deception, and such — all of which they’re helpless against because they have not learned to identify and defend against them.

The philosophy (art? technology?) of ethical development would consist of studying the obstacles to living ethically — independently of the details of the Ultimate Moral Principles the moral philosophers discover. Assuming you have some moral principles (though perhaps rudimentary, naïve, and in need of refinement), how do you avoid the many tricks and traps that lead you to make unethical decisions in spite of these principles?

In the Christian world, there’s no shortage of literature on this theme, though instead of “obstacles to living ethically” it’s “temptations to sin.” Is there a secular equivalent? If so, what’s it called? If not, why not?

It seems like the kind of thing that could (and ought to) be taught in the schools. Most of the controversy that has led to the removal of any useful moral instruction from public schools (that is, instruction that rises above “don’t have sex and don’t do drugs”) comes from worries that the schools will start favoring some varieties of Ultimate Moral Principles over others. But a class that teaches the skill of not being a hypocrite seems like it could safely be compatible with just about any set of these Principles.

The debate about the place of agorism in the life of a freedom-loving person continues over at The Freedom Symposium and I was invited to chime in, which I did in a comment that I’ll also include here.

There’s a subplot to the debate that has to do with whether paying taxes is “voluntary” (and if so, in what sense), and whether it’s ethical, and whether tax resistance is appropriate or a waste of time.

Here’s what I had to say:

I’ve been following this debate, or bits and pieces of it anyway, but haven’t put my two cents in yet. This is partially because I’m not sure I understand what the core point of disagreement is.

It seems to be something like this: do we need to be vigorously attempting to build protocols and structures in which people can engage in transactions free from state interference in order to begin to build a free world inside the shell of the decaying state, or, are we better off submitting to the fact that the state will remain a dominant force in our lives for the foreseeable future and concentrate on building satisfying lives within that limitation while trying to spread the good word of liberty and seeking out the company of like-minded people?

It seems to me there’s plenty good to be drawn from both positions.

I agree that if the state were, through our efforts or through its own bumbling, to collapse today, the fact that the statist mindset is so ubiquitous would mean that people would assemble something just as bad in no time at all just out of habit. So education is essential.

On the other hand, agorist transactions and structures can be a vivid part of this education. Seeing an utterly anarchist festival thrive in the midst of state hostility — the Rainbow Gathering — was a real eye-opener to me about the possibilities of organization without coercion. A bunch of hippies in the woods creating something strikingly well-organized without any leadership hierarchy to speak of, without any coercion, and in direct defiance to a hostile state, did more to make the possibilities of anarchism come alive to me than any theoretical texts.

As tax resistance is my Big Deal, I’ll say a few things about it specifically.

Tax resistance today is no threat to the government. One way I know this is that I can refuse to pay my taxes, blog about this day after day, publicly encourage other people to do the same, attend conferences of other resisters, publish books and other writings on the subject, and so forth, and at no time do I feel like I have jack-booted thugs breathing down my neck. They don’t give a damn. We are barely an annoyance, much less a threat.

Tax resistance can be a powerful method of resistance, but it requires a much larger and well-disciplined set of resisters than we have at present. Such resistance would have to come at some point after a majority or at least a very significant minority of people had given up their allegiance to the state and were sufficiently frustrated to be wiling to go into risky confrontation with it.

This leaves tax resistance today as some other sort of tactic. In some people, it’s just self-interest — more frequently called tax evasion and just designed to hold on to more money. In some people, it’s a variety of protest that takes the form of civil disobedience as a way of emphasizing the strength of the protester’s convictions. A third form is tax resistance as conscientious objection — not paying taxes because you find contributing to the government to be something that offends your sense of ethics. That’s more what I have in mind when I resist. I don’t want to voluntarily contribute to the state.

This brings up the whole “what’s voluntary about it?” question.

The government says that if you earn income you must pay FICA (for instance). This is a demand, not a request, and they have an enforcement apparatus that includes violent coercion to back that up.

But I don’t mean voluntary as opposed to coerced, but as opposed to involuntary.

If the government knocks down my door and makes off with something valuable they find in my house, they have taken this thing from me, and to the extent that I’ve given it to them, I’ve done so wholly involuntarily. But if they come to me and say “give me your stuff or else…” then it is my voluntary decision whether to choose what’s behind door #1 or door #2.

Now certainly there are some circumstances where you look at the alternatives and choose to fork over the loot rather than choose a very unpleasant alternative.

But for me, tax resistance means asking “or else what?” each time the demand is made, and then deciding whether the alternative is really any worse than putting my time and energy (fossilized into money) into supporting the state.

About 40% of Americans live under the federal income tax line, which is to say that they pay no federal income tax at all because after credits and deductions and such their income isn’t high enough. I decided I’d rather become one of them than earn more income and therefore pay income tax.

There are consequences to earning more and paying income tax, and there are consequences to earning less and not paying them. I picked the ones I preferred. In doing this, I put less value on money than a lot of people do, and more value on not supporting the state than just about anybody does, which is why I came up with a decision that’s rare enough to be remarkable. I think the world would be a better place if more people had values a bit more like mine, but I guess I’m not alone in having such feelings.

(I also evade other taxes in other ways, some legal and some illegal. And the process of trying to work out a good balance of living well and minimizing my support for the state is an ongoing one for me.)

In the fourth section of the second book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes acting virtuously from merely doing virtuous acts.

He says that it’s not enough to just behave virtuously by imitation or by following a rulebook, you also have to incubate a particular mental state:

1. You must know what you’re doing.
2. You must choose your acts deliberately.
3. You must be acting based on “a firm and unchangeable character” (other translations include: “fixedness and stability”, “a fixed and unchangeable principle”, “the expression of a formed and stable character”, “a fixed and unalterable habit of mind”, and “a settled and immutable moral state”)

Isn’t Aristotle undermining himself here? He’s trying to come up with a way of molding people into virtuous people, and to do this by training them by practice in virtuous action, but at the same time he says that in order to practice virtue you have to base your actions on a “firm and unchangeable character.” Sounds like a hard process to bootstrap.

Maybe what he’s saying is that there is an art of virtuous action, which you can practice on your way to becoming a virtuous person, and that eventually by so doing you will develop the ability to choose virtuous acts deliberately based on your newly-molded fixed and stable character.

Aristotle ends this section with a good jab at theoretical ethicists who are more concerned with elucidating a philosophy of right and wrong than in becoming virtuous through practice.

In the opening section of the fifth book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle begins his examination of the virtue of Justice. Much of the time these days when we talk about “ethics” we’re really talking about what Aristotle would consider this particular part of ethics. It’s certainly the part of ethics that attracts the most interest these days (see, for instance, Harvard University’s Justice with Michael Sandel, or Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice, each of which hit my RSS feed reader with a splash just last month).

The Nicomachean Ethics translation I’ve been using as my base camp (Ross) is very difficult going here, so I’m going to consult some others (particularly Stock, whose paraphrases are less-shackled by devotion to Aristotle’s Greek) and see if I can make things a little more clear. (Complicating matters, in this chapter in particular different translators divide it up into sections very differently.)

First off, Aristotle says that he’s going to treat Justice as a virtue, which is to say that he’s going to try to fit it into the same framework that he’s used to evaluate the various other virtues he’s dealt with so far:

1. Determine the subject matter of the virtue and its associated vices.
2. Show how the virtue demonstrates the mean between the extreme vices.
3. Look also at the nature of these extremes.

Paragraph two defines justice and injustice with what at first glance looks to be a puerile and wordy pair of tautologies: Justice is that state of character that makes people act justly and desire what is just; injustice is that state of character that makes people act unjustly and desire what is unjust. (And you’re thinking: it’s stuff like this that got Aristotle in the philosophy hall of fame?)

But the important thing to notice here is not the superficial tautological foolishness of the definition, but that Aristotle is planning to define justice as a state of character (that is, a virtue) that is possessed by people who engage in just acts from just desires. These aren’t the same things, and so the definition isn’t as tautological as it first seems. Ignore the adjectives and pay attention to the nouns: justice is a character-state demonstrated by acts and the desires that prompt them.

From here, Aristotle goes into a set of arguments that I found it very difficult to get my head around. Now that I’ve had a chance to look at them from the perspective of a number of translators and commentators, I’ll try to summarize them here in a less-confusing way.

First off he distinguishes states-of-character from “faculties” or “sciences.” A faculty or science concerns a subject matter in which your knowledge and skill can help you aim for opposite extremes: for instance, a doctor knows the science of health, and this knowledge would be equally useful to her in healing someone and in harming them. A state-of-character, on the other hand, goes in only one direction — having a courageous state-of-character doesn’t make it easier for you to be cowardly, nor vice versa. Get it?

Aristotle asserts that Justice is a state-of-character rather than a faculty or science. So Justice isn’t about learning the rules of what makes one thing just and another thing unjust (which, presumably, could help you do either one were you so inclined, and which, incidentally, is most of what ethical philosophy concerns itself with these days), but is about having the right desires and doing the right acts because you have the right state-of-character (Justice) that impels them.

Next, Aristotle notes that the words “justice” and “injustice” each have fuzzy and ambiguous meanings in common usage, and that these ambiguities and fuzzinesses are complimentary so we can’t expect help from using the more precise of the two terms to sharpen the meaning of the other one.

For instance, lawbreakers are sometimes called “unjust” because they break the rules of justice. But shifty operators are also called “unjust” for gaining unfair advantage through craft and wile and unfairness, whether or not what they do is illegal. So justice, in one case, is following the rules, and in the other case it’s playing fair.

Aristotle isn’t troubled by this ambiguity, but just wants to warn us that Justice is a complex virtue that seems to have at least these two different dimensions at play: A grasping person who tries to get more goods (or avoid more evils) than he or she deserves is unjust, whether or not it is illegal; and someone who violates the just laws of the state may also be unjust, whether or not the motive is to get away with unfairly coming out ahead.

As a note expanding the first prong of Justice (that of being happy with getting what one deserves, no more, no less), Aristotle says that people who try for more than their fair share are acting under the misapprehension that it is the goods themselves that are important, rather than the whole package of being a virtuous person who has come by goods virtuously. This, I guess, would be like someone stealing a trophy rather than winning it, and expecting it to give as much satisfaction as if it had been won.

In support of the second prong of Justice — that being just means being law-abiding — here is the curious idea of the law that Aristotle has in mind:

Since the lawless man was seen to be unjust and the law-abiding man just, evidently all lawful acts are in a sense just acts; for the acts laid down by the legislative art are lawful, and each of these, we say, is just. Now the laws in their enactments on all subjects aim at the common advantage either of all or of the best or of those who hold power, or something of the sort; so that in one sense we call those acts just that tend to produce and preserve happiness and its components for the political society.

So Justice, as Aristotle is using the term, is radically relative to the particular legal system in effect — from particulars like individual laws to the core issue of who in general the laws were designed to benefit. It would be a mistake to think that Aristotle is saying that all legislators have wisely made their laws coincide with a preexisting model of justice; I think he is just saying that to the extent that justice is defined as law-abiding, lawful acts can be considered just acts.

Aristotle was a serious student of political science — he collected constitutions, and managed to study more than a hundred — so any time he says something about political arrangements, it’s worth paying attention.

He does not address, yet anyway, what happens when the two parallel definitions of justice go perpendicular — when being law-abiding means being unfairly grasping, or when being just in the sense of fairness means breaking the law. (I’m a little worried he’s going to put this off until another of his works, the Politics.)

Aristotle notes that there seem to be some parallels between what legal systems encourage and prohibit and what his system of virtues and vices encourages and condemns: there are laws against cowardly actions by soldiers, laws encouraging temperance (e.g. by prohibiting adultery), and good-temper (e.g. laws against assault and defamation), and so forth. “[T]he rightly-framed law does this rightly, and the hastily conceived one less well.”

Most of these laws concern those aspects of virtue that show themselves in public acts. And, to the extent that the law really does properly prohibit or punish the vices and reward the virtues, justice (in the form of law-abiding) “is complete virtue, but not absolutely, but in relation to our neighbor.” If you internalize the law, and practice its dictates as a virtue — that is as a character-state or habit — then you will behave virtuously towards your neighbors, which is sometimes more difficult for people to do than to behave virtuously in their own private affairs.

Furthermore, Aristotle asserts that this sort of virtue (practiced towards other people) is a better variety. He doesn’t develop this much, not here anyway, so I don’t know what line of thinking gets him from here to there. But he concludes from this that justice “in this sense, then, is not a part of virtue but virtue entire, nor is the contrary injustice a part of vice but vice entire.” Virtue is a superset that includes all of justice and some additional private virtues.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Marlene at Pick My Brain reviews “Death & Taxes,” the new war tax resistance video from NWTRCC: “I listened intently to the 28 voices who spoke with clarity and passion about their call to action and I was definitely inspired to do something, even a token action to resist using my taxes to fund war and militaristic action. … I heartily recommend using this 30 minute DVD in small groups, Sunday School classes, peace and justice retreats, etc. It is fast paced, very positive and upbeat with lively music.”
• RantWoman, at RantWoman and the Religious Society of Friends, reflects on the neglected tradition of Quaker war tax resistance and what it might take to revitalize it in modern Meetings.
• South Carolina is requiring all organizations that “directly or indirectly advocate, advise, teach or practice the duty or necessity of controlling, seizing, or overthrowing the government of the United States, the state of South Carolina, or any political division thereof,” to register their activities with the South Carolina Secretary of State and pay a five-dollar filing fee. A member of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left decided to register: “When belligerence and inhumanity prevail, the peaceful and the humane must find honor in being categorized as the enemies of the prevailing order. Please keep me updated as to the status of our registration. I look forward to hearing back from you as to our official recognition as enemies of your state and its government. … PS. I am told that there is a processing fee in the amount of $5.00 for the registration of a subversive organization. Our organization is in fact so dastardly that we have refused to remit the fee.”
• Paying taxes is not a civic virtue, according to a Google Translation of an op-ed by Thomas Schmid in a recent issue of Welt Online, which namechecks Thoreau on the way to criticizing governments who rely on data stolen from banks in tax havens to crack down on tax evaders.
• Wendy McElroy has an interesting note about the philosopher William Wollaston who investigated the sensible idea that our actions are a more reliable indicator of our beliefs than are our utterances.
• “Where are 1% of American adults?” asks Shakesville. In prison, is the answer. Along with some other revolting statistics about America’s lockdown culture that you’ve probably heard before was this interesting claim: “It is illegal to bring into the United States any goods produced by forced labor or by prisoners, yet American prisoners make 100% of the military helmets, ammunition belts, bulletproof vests, ID tags as well some other items used by the US military. Although a prisoner is not technically forced to work, solitary confinement is the punishment for refusal. They also make 93% of domestically produced paints, 36% of home appliances and 21% of office furniture.”

At Wendy McElroy’s suggestion I read William Wollaston’s The Religion of Nature Delineated. It is at times brilliant and ahead of its time, at times utterly daft and pedestrian. As a writer, Wollaston is much more straightforward and easy-to-read than many of his 18^th century contemporaries, and even when he goes astray he often does so in interesting ways.

His goal in the book is to try to discern ethical truths solely by combining observations about the natural world with rational deductions from these observations — to see if he can derive a sort of universal, baseline religion without the aid of divine revelation but merely by drawing logical conclusions from the available facts. What sort of religion might you come up with if you had no assistance from God or his prophets other than the light of reason, the evidence of the senses, and a steadfast regard for truth?

Religion, to Wollaston, is synonymous with ethics. The science of categorizing human acts into the categories of good, evil, or indifferent is the basis of religion. He acknowledges the many attempts to formulate a rational rule to govern this categorization, and that these attempts have failed, but he asserts that such a rule must exist, and, furthermore, that he has discovered it. The opening chapter of his book, probably the most interesting one, gives his rule and the reasoning behind it. It goes a little something like this:

1. All acts that can be categorized as good or evil must be acts of an intelligent and free agent, capable of choosing or not choosing the act.
2. Propositions are true if what they express conforms to how things actually are.
3. A true proposition may be denied either by words or by deeds. By deeds, I don’t just mean language-like gestures: sign language, pantomime, body language, and the like. “There are many acts of other kinds, such as constitute the character of a man’s conduct in life, which have in nature, and to imply some proposition, as plainly to be understood as if it was declared in words.” For example, if a company of soldiers attacks another company, they are by virtue of their attack stating the proposition that the other company is their enemies, which may be a true or false proposition. Or, if you promise to do A but instead do B, you are by the very act of doing B instead of A denying the truth of your earlier promise.
   
   This does not mean that only those actions that actually communicate something to someone else, or that are theoretically intelligible by someone else, are those that deny propositions. In the privacy of your home, when you reach for the salt-shaker, you are asserting the proposition: this food isn’t salty enough yet.
   
   Some act-statements, like speech-statements, may be conventional (for example, in some religions, putting on head covering is a sign of reverence; in others, taking off your hat means much the same thing). Other act-statements are more universal and can said to be natural in a way that words never can be because words are always particular to some language.
   
   “Whoever acts as if things were so, or not so, doth by his acts declare that they are so, or not so, as plainly as he could by words, and with more reality. And if things are otherwise, his acts contradict those propositions which assert them to be as they are.”
4. No act that contradicts a true proposition can be right.
   1. False propositions are wrong, so acts that assert them cannot be right.
   2. True propositions express the actual relationship between a subject and an attribute of that subject. An act that denies this relationship denies reality and is therefore wrong, against nature/reality.
   3. If there is an omnipotent Creator-God, then to deny what is actually true is to deny what God has deliberately called into being. This is not to say that we should be fatalistically blasé in the face of an evil act, for instance, but that in such a case we should acknowledge as being a true proposition that an evil act occurred.
   4. There are eternal truths that seem to be part of the Divine intention, like “every thing is what it is; that which is done cannot be undone,” and to deny any particular truth that fits this pattern is also to deny the eternal truth itself, which is in effect to deny God. To deny anything to be true that is in fact true, and that an omniscient God therefore knows to be true, is also to put yourself in opposition to God.
   5. To deny what is true in any instance is to embrace absurdity and to put truth and falsity, good and bad, and knowledge of any sort out of reach.
   6. To deny what is true is to transgress against reason, “the great law of our nature.”
5. Acts of omission as well as those of commission can be assertions or denials of propositions. This requires a bit more subtlety to deal with, but, for example, you do not necessarily deny that The Religion of Nature Delineated is an interesting book by not personally being interested enough to read it, but you do deny that everyone ought to read some Shakespeare if you don’t bother to read any yourself. If you don’t read anything at all, you deny that reading is valuable, or that the value it gives is important, or some proposition of the sort. Certain truths seem to imply certain actions: if I am rich, and there are poor, were I never to be charitable I would be in a way denying the truth of wealth and poverty by not taking the obvious step such things imply. If I neglect to help someone in dire need when I am the best or only person able to help, I am making an assertion about myself, that person, the straits that person is in, human nature, and so forth.
6. To judge rightly what a thing is, all of those attributes of the thing that are capable of being denied must be taken into account. For example, if a thief rides off on another man’s horse, the thief isn’t denying that it’s a horse by doing this, but that the horse was another man’s property. The thief’s actions imply certain assertions about the horse (I can do with it what I please, it’s a horse, it’s safe to ride) but don’t imply anything about others (it’s a filly, it’s mottled brown, it was born in Kentucky).
   
   Truths are always consistent with one another, so you won’t ever find yourself in a situation in which you must deny one truth in order to affirm another. What if you make a promise that you are later unable to keep because of some other obligation? “It is not in man’s power to promise absolutely. He can only promise as one who may be disabled by the weight and incombency of truths not then existing.”
7. When an act would be wrong, forbearing that act is right; when the omission of an act would be wrong, doing that act must be right.
8. Moral good and evil are coincident with right and wrong.
9. Acts of omission and of commission that have the effect of denying what is true are morally evil. Their opposites are good. Acts that have no propositional content are indifferent.
   
   Denying any truth is evil, but some such denials are worse than others. All sins are not equal. For instance, it is worse to deprive someone of an estate than of a book, even though in both cases you are denying the truth of ownership: the estate might be worth 10,000× the book, in which case the evil is also 10,000× greater. (He tries to justify this by saying that the owner’s valuation of the property is somehow part of the truth statement that the thief is denying, which I think is probably incorrect. The thief isn’t saying anything about the value of the property to the owner by stealing it, necessarily.) The quantity of evil/guilt involves “the importance and number of truth violated.” Good actions, that is, acts that serve as true propositions, are also good in degrees, by inverting the evil that would be the result of their omission (or, I suppose, their commission in the case of good deeds of omission, but that seems to lead into a thicket: aren’t I just about always failing to commit a near infinite number of possible sins?)
   
   Though some deny that there is any such thing as good and evil, indeed there is just as there is a difference between true and false. Indeed: they resolve to the same thing. There have been many attempts to find a criterion or rule for distinguishing good things from evil ones, or some ultimate end that serves as the criteria by which good and evil acts can be distinguished, but these have all either failed, or are incomplete, or are circular tautologies, or eventually just reduce in practice to this rule I have proposed. (Here he reviews several such attempts.)
10. The natural existence of good and evil implies natural religion. Religion is “nothing else but an obligation to do… what ought not to be omitted, and to forbear what ought not to be done.”
11. “[E]very intelligent, active, and free being should so behave himself, as by no act to contradict truth; or, that he should treat every thing as being what it is.”

From here, Wollaston answers some possible objections to his scheme, most of which are the result of misunderstandings of what he’s getting at. He slips up, I think, when he discusses the case of whether or not it would be a wrong denial-of-truth to refuse to tell an enraged murderer where his prospective victim is hiding. Among his answers here is that “no one can tell, in strict speaking, where another is, if he is not within his view. Therefore you may truly deny that you know where the man is.” This seems to subvert his scheme by hinting that you can behave deceptively while holding on to the truth verbally and legalistically and thereby stay on the straight and narrow. In general, his answer to this objection seems to rely less on the scheme he’s introduced and more on ordinary folk ethics, which seems odd to me, since I don’t think this objection is particularly threatening to his scheme.

Wollaston also says that some truth-denying sins are worse than others. Some are so minor as to be “evanescent or almost nothing.” Furthermore, it is only those truths that have some reference to other living things that we really must respect. If we don’t treat a television as a television but instead treat it as a target at a shooting range, we don’t commit a sin against the truth (as we would if we treat it as our television when it actually belongs to someone else). To me, this seems an important qualification tacked carelessly onto Wollaston’s scheme, and weakens the original justification for it, which was that a denial of truth as such was a denial of truth as an aspect of God and therefore a denial of God, without any regard for whether that truth had some relation to other living things.

That concludes the first chapter.

Chapter two concerns happiness. Wollaston agrees with Aristotle that happiness is best measured over the sum of a person’s life rather than in any particular time-slice. He also asserts that to make oneself happy is the duty of every intelligent being, and that we must take this truth about intelligent beings into account in our dealings with others.

Furthermore, nothing that denies truth can be productive of the true and ultimate happiness of any being; neither can the practice of truth make any being unhappy (in this life-wide sense of happiness). This bold assertion he bases on his understanding of the nature of God (which he’ll expand on later): nobody has the power to increase his happiness by setting his will above the evident will of God, and, also, it would be absurd to think that God would be so sadistic or defective as to punish people for conforming to His will. Because of this, our duty to make ourselves happy and our duty to conform in word and deed to the truth amount to the same thing, and this is our true religion.

Chapter three concerns reason and epistemology. If we cannot actually know the difference between true and false, or at least have some good heuristics, then all of Wollaston’s project is for naught. He starts by giving an interesting and sophisticated description of how sense qualia and certain ideas and relationships are both examples of immediate mental data. These ideas/qualia as such are irrefutable data that we can use as axioms. Wollaston also asserts, less rigorously, that reason can in fact obtain new truths for us (if not, what else is it for?).

The practice of reason is another term for what is also called conformity to truth or the pursuit of true happiness, that is, the true natural religion. Each person must be his own judge of truth: “to demand another man’s assent to any thing without conveying into his mind such reasons as may produce a sense of the truth of it, is to erect a tyranny over his understanding and to demand a tribute which it is not possible for him to pay.”

There are also things we can’t determine the truth of, but there may be various ways in which we can get a probable truth, and he discusses several such heuristics, for instance, which sorts of authorities to trust. In such cases, you’re as obligated to conform to the probability as in certain cases you are obligated to conform to the truth: you put your money down on the best odds, even though you can’t know how the dice will roll ahead of time.

Chapter four concerns the free will problem. Is it even possible for people to conform to the truth? Wollaston acknowledges that people are not completely in control of their actions, and that you can only be morally obligated to do what you are in fact capable of doing. You are obligated to conform with truth only so far as your faculties, powers, and opportunities allow, and to the extent that the truth is discernible by you. That said, don’t act like this is an available cop-out. You must endeavor “in earnest… heartily; not stifling [your] own conscience, not dissembling, suppressing, or neglecting [your] own powers.”

Wollaston thinks that the free will problem comes up in ethical philosophy as a sort of dodge by people who are hoping for some sort of excuse for not taking ethical problems seriously. If you were told that a great reward was waiting for you in the next room if you were just to go and retrieve it, you wouldn’t waste time discoursing about whether or not you had the free will necessary to undertake such a task — you’d just get up and go. But in the realm of ethics, people for some reason feel obligated to dive into the free-will labyrinth rather than just staying on the straight and narrow path to what they know is best.

In chapter five, Wollaston decides to prove the existence of God and describe His nature. It’s your standard first cause argument (every effect has a cause stretching back through time, but there must have been some original uncaused cause to set this all in motion) combined with the argument from design (isn’t the universe amazing and don’t we see evidence of God’s order and benevolence everywhere?).

Wollaston also shares some thoughts on the compatibility of the divine regulation of the universe and of divine omniscience with free will; whether petitioning an omniscient God with prayer makes any sense; what God might have had in mind by introducing free will into His creation; whether God might from time to time rescind our free will to set us on a particular course; why it is that God seems sometimes to reward the wicked and punish the good; and how it is that we have immaterial souls planted in us by God.

To the certain relief of his publisher, Wollaston discovers that the truths about God that any heathen could discover by diligently applying reason to those facts and relations immediately available to our minds conform remarkably well to contemporary Christian worship: we should feel gratitude to our creator, and express this in prayer; we should eschew idolatry; we should form into congregations and worship together; and so forth.

In chapter six things get interesting again, as Wollaston derives and maps out what in modern anarcho-libertarian popular writing is called the “non-aggression principle.”

1. People are distinct individuals, each with certain unique properties.
2. Each person has by nature the possession of certain things, such as his own life, limbs, labor, and the products thereof. That is to say that basic property rights are inherent in the state of nature and don’t require government or custom to come into being.
3. Whatever is inconsistent with the general peace & welfare of mankind is inconsistent with the laws of human nature and therefore wrong. The right laws for a society are those that produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
4. Reason respects cases, not persons, so something that would be true for person A with respect to person B would also be true for B with respect to A if the case were inverted.
5. In a state of nature, people are equal in terms of dominion (with the exception of the natural dominion parents have over their children). Power does not confer right — if it did, it could confer the right to anything, including denial of the truth, which we’ve already proven to be wrong.
6. “No man can have a right to begin to interrupt the happiness of another.”
7. However, you do have the right to defend yourself, to recover what is stolen from you, or to make reprisals against those who have aggressed against you (to recover the equivalent of whatever you have lost by the injustice). To have a right to anything means also that you have the right to defend your possession of that thing.
   
   Alas, his first justification for this is that each of us has a natural capability and instinct for self-preservation, and that it would be absurd for us to have such a thing and not be allowed to use it. It seems to me like this same logic could be used to justify aggression.
8. Initial property rights are established by first possession or by something being the product of one’s own labor, and last until they are voluntarily relinquished by the possessor. Stolen property, if it is never reclaimed, may eventually lose its taint as it is passed from hand to hand or generation to generation, so it is not necessary to be able to trace every possession back to a first legitimate owner.
9. A property right may be transferred by compact or donation. Among the rights a person has by virtue of ownership is the right to dispose of property in this way, and both the giver and the receiver are acting within their rights. Trade is mutually beneficial and commerce is a social good.
10. Therefore: property is founded in nature and truth.
11. If you don’t dispose of your property by compact or donation, it is yours until you die. If someone else uses your property without your consent, they are in effect denying the truth of your ownership, in violation of the principles of chapter 1.
12. If something is your property this means exactly that you have the sole right of using it and disposing of it.
13. If you use something or dispose of it, you are simultaneously declaring the proposition that it belongs to you. (Borrowing or renting something is a special case, in which you declare that the thing is yours for the time allowed without doing violence to the truth.)
14. Injustice means usurping or invading the property of another; justice means quietly permitting to everyone what is theirs.
15. To not do violence to the truth you must avoid injustice. Injustice is wrong and evil.
16. To carelessly cause suffering in others, or to delight in the suffering of others, is cruel. To be insensitive to the suffering of others is unmerciful. Mercy and humanity are the opposites of these.
17. Those who religiously regard truth and nature will, in addition to being just, also be merciful and humane, these things being right.
18. Let me reiterate that.
19. Therefore: murder or injury (not in self-defense), robbery, stealing, cheating, betraying, defamation, detraction, defiling the bed of another man, and so forth, as well as tendencies to these things, are heinous crimes (tendencies include things like envy, malice, and the like).
    
    The value of something (for instance, when calculating compensation for injury) is determined by how the rightful owner values it, not by some objective standard and certainly not by the standard of the person who behaves unjustly with respect to it. A crime done in secret (for instance, to sleep with a man’s wife behind his back) is still an injury and a violation of the truth.

Another interesting thing in this section is that Wollaston seems to anticipate Kant’s categorical imperative, for instance when he says that a person who breaks a promise “denies and sins against truth; does what it can never be for the good of the world should become an universal practice…” (Wollaston died the same year Kant was born.)

Most of what Wollaston concluded in this chapter would be simpatico with modern anarcho-capitalists and libertarians, though many would cringe at his attempts to find a utilitarian grounding for his scheme, and the objectivists would quibble at the altruism involved in Wollaston’s mandate of mercy.

But in the following chapter, Wollaston reintroduces and justifies government, though he does this along classical liberal lines that probably wouldn’t leave all of the modern fans of the previous chapter behind:

1. Man is a social animal. Even if there were not many advantages to living socially, as individuals we would inevitably come up against other people. Disputes are inevitable. There will be vicious and ambitious people who will strive to become more powerful and thereby more troublesome to the rest of us. It is natural, therefore, that good people will form local alliances of mutual support and defense.
2. The purpose of society is the common welfare of those in it.
3. People enter into society for that purpose, which implies certain rules or laws according to which they agree to be governed. This means that they must settle on certain areas of unanimous consent, certain methods for resolving disputes, a system of punishments and deterrents to discourage offenses, and on a method of protecting the alliance from outside attack.
4. Such laws must be consistent with natural justice in order to be in harmony with truth and thereby not evil. (Like Robert Nozick, Wollaston believes that a state can naturally emerge from anarchy without violating natural rights along the way.)
5. A society with laws implies a hierarchy, with governors and governed, judges, magistrates, and the like. This seems to rule out anarchy, though Wollaston says that “if the society has none [no executors of the law, or no laws, it’s not exactly clear what he means], it is indeed no society, or not such a one as is the subject of this proposition” so maybe he’s leaving open the possibility.
6. A person may relinquish some of his natural rights and put himself under the control of laws and governors in order to gain the protection of being in a law-governed society. This is a form of contractual exchange, in which a person gives up something and gets something the person feels is more valuable in exchange, and so this is no violation of the truth as laid out in the previous chapter. (Indeed it would be a violation of the truth not to make such an advantageous exchange.)
7. This exchange, says Wollaston, may either be explicit or implicit. If you take advantage of those privileges that are not your natural rights but are only available to you as a citizen of a commonwealth, you implicitly own allegiance to the laws that go along with it, even if you have not explicitly taken an oath or what have you. Merely accepting the protection of a state, or choosing to live within its borders, is an implicit acceptance of its laws.
   
   This does real damage to the scheme Wollaston set up in the previous chapter, in which he said that the value of something is set by the rightful possessor of it, and that only the rightful possessor has the right to use or dispose of it. This modification reminds me of the people who set up shop at road medians, who, when you’re stopped at a red light, wash your windshield without asking you if you want their service, and then act as though you owe them payment for a service you never requested.
8. Once you become a member of a society, you need to respect not only the natural rights of the people in it (as described in the previous chapter), but any conventional or legal rights that the society establishes: for instance, their titles to property, or the privilege of the state to resolve disputes (rather than individual initiative to seek redress), or subordination to legal authority.
9. When the law is silent, or impotent, people retain their natural rights, and should behave as described in the previous chapter. If the law is contrary to natural justice, “one of them must give way; and it is easy to discern, which ought to do it.”
10. Societies established like the ones described in this chapter have a right to defend themselves against other societies. “War may lawfully be waged in defense and for the security of a society, its members and territories, or for reparation of injuries.” This is deliberately parallel to his formulation of an individual right in the state of nature. Nations with respect to other nations are situated like individuals with respect to other individuals in the absence of a state (at least “so far as they have not limited themselves by leagues and alliances.”) Another way of looking at this is that a nation may defend collectively the agglomerated individual rights of its citizens against the unjust aggression of an outside individual or group of individuals under the very same principles that individuals in the state of nature can defend their rights against one another.

Chapter eight concerns families and kinship: the nature of marriage, the responsibility of parents for children, the authority of parents over children — “I have designedly forborn to mention that authority of a husband over his wife, which is usually given to him, not only by private writers, but even by laws; because I think it has been carried much too high. I would have them live so far upon the level, as (according to my constant lesson) to be governed both by reason” — the debt of gratitude and other duties children owe parents, and the justification for us not treating all men as brothers but actually treating our kin better than everyone else.

Absolute maxims about individual liberty favored by some libertarian and anarchist thinkers often seem to run aground on the parent/child relationship. By what right do I as a parent interfere with my child’s liberty to run out into traffic? Well, it’s not hard to come up with some good reasons, but it can be hard to shoehorn them in alongside certain confidently-asserted principles about liberty. So it’s a sign that Wollaston takes the subject seriously that he includes this chapter.

He also tries to guard against the monarchist gambit of sneaking tyranny in through this gap by analogizing the relationship of a king to subjects to that of a parent to children. Wollaston says this won’t fly for a number of reasons.

The final chapter concerns human nature. It reiterates our duty to devote ourselves to truth, reason, and virtue (three names for the same thing). Some of the self-facing virtues are prudence, temperance, chastity, and frugality, but Wollaston is quick to stress that these are not virtues of self-denial so much as of rational self-interest. Chastity, for instance, is not the avoidance of sex, or of the pleasure from sex, but it’s knowing how best to fit sexual pleasure into our lives in a way that is compatible with our long-term goals and with other virtues.

Virtue, says Wollaston, tends to lead to happiness; vice to unhappiness. It’s not as though “virtue can make a man happy upon a rack” or dissolve all the misfortunes we may encounter, but in any situation, the most advantageous act and the virtuous act coincide (vice can’t make you happy on a rack either).

Wollaston goes on at great length to speculate on the nature of the soul (which he describes at first in a way that we might use the term “mind” for). He rejects three monist hypotheses to resolve the mind-body problem: 1) that all matter thinks, 2) that certain configurations or motions of matter generate thought, 3) that thinking is an epiphenomenon of some sort that accompanies certain configurations of matter. Instead, he asserts that thinking is a property of some special, non-material substance that God attaches to some sort of diaphanous interface in our brains that allows it to receive impressions from the physical world and to direct our bodies.

This substance is the soul, and, it being non-material, we have no reason to expect that it expires when the body it is attached to dies. From here, Wollaston makes a number of ill-supported speculations about the nature of the soul. Worst, he reasons that there must be an afterlife because he has proven that there is a just and reasonable God, and yet on earth there is so much cruelty and injustice and disorder, that only a just and harmonious afterlife could possibly balance the scales and be compatible with God’s nature. Alas, the proof of God he relies on as one of the axioms of this argument itself proceeded from the observation that the universe was so orderly and benevolent that it must be the creation of a just and wise God. So Wollaston has to utterly contradict himself to try and prove his point.

In all, once he gets past some interesting and well-considered thoughts on the mind/body problem, the rest of this chapter in which he gives his speculations about the nature of God, the destiny of the soul, and so forth are pretty worthless: just his own opinion of how he would organize the universe were he a just, omniscient, and omnipotent creator. He even uses that most desperate gambit of saying that even if the immortality of the soul cannot be demonstrated, “yet it is certain the contrary cannot”! From which he slides into Pascal’s Wager. (His version is slightly improved by his assertion that a virtuous life that is to our advantage from the standpoint of eternity also happens to be to our advantage from the standpoint of our mortal lives.)

His concluding advice: “let our conversation in this world, so far as we are concerned, and able, be such as acknowledges every thing to be what it is (what it is in itself, and what with regard to us, to other beings, to causes, circumstances, consequences): that is, let us by no act deny any thing to be true, which is true: that is, let us act according to reason: and that is, let us act according to the law of our nature.”

In late 2016, The Religion of Nature Delineated was released as a free (as in speech, and as in beer) ebook, with a number of readability improvements for the benefit of today’s reader. You can download it from this link.

Some tidbits that have caught my eye lately:

• The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research has done us a service by gathering together decades of American opinion surveys about taxes conducted by multiple polling organizations and putting all the numbers in a single, hundred-page PDF.
• Darian Worden has a sensible piece at the Center for a Stateless Society on how to Build Liberty From the Ground Up. “If you want to be effective at increasing freedom,” says Worden, “your daily activity should be consistent with the principles of individual liberty.”
• “Rad Geek” has some thought-provoking things to say about “thick” versus “thin” libertarianism, as does John Holbo at Crooked Timber.
• And here’s a heartwarming cartoon.

I wrote an article for the latest issue of New Escapologist. I haven’t seen the magazine yet (sending out contributor copies seems often to be far down on the publishing to-do list, alas), but I think my article made the cut. Here it is, anyway:

Escape from Collaboration

The ethical escapologist wants to escape not just from the stultification of mainstream life, but from the moral burden of collaboration.

The tactics of the escapologist and of the conscientious objector dovetail — the same techniques that make us more self-reliant, independent, frugal, and skeptically ornery are ones that make us less likely to be bullied or bribed into being useful cogs in a brutal machine.

To other people, ethical escapologists sometimes seem deprived and reckless — renunciates, vagabonds, roustabouts — but the reason we’ve not sold out is because of the high price we put on our values: assets more valuable than whatever it is other folks are willing to trade their values for. Escapologists want not only to escape but to smuggle their values out with them — intact.

Christian anarchist Ammon Hennacy took up itinerant farm work as a mode of escape. One day someone asked him, “Why does a fellow like you, with an education, and who has been all over the country, end up in this out-of-the-way place working for very little on a farm?”

I explained that all people who had good jobs in factories, etc. had a withholding tax for war taken from their pay, and that people who worked on farms had no tax taken from their pay. I told him that I refused to pay taxes. He was a returned soldier and said that he did not like war either, but what could a fellow do about it? I replied that we each did what we really wanted to.

That’s what it amounts to: not sacrificing for our principles, but just looking at the big picture and making sure that we’re doing “what we really wanted to.”

As Swiss conscientious objector Pierre Ceresole put it: “You have no right to be moral if it is not your joy, your highest form of artistic expression. Wrestle for the good life exactly as the poet wrestles to create a beautiful verse, in the same spirit, for the love of the thing itself.”

Not everybody writes verse, but everybody lives a life. Ethical escapologists really want to live good ones.

Maybe what you really want is to be the hero, not the villain, of the story your life tells; the one who hid Anne Frank, not the one who dropped a dime on her. Or maybe you don’t have any interest in being a hero — maybe you’ve got something else you really want to do with your life — even so, as Thoreau put it when he explained his escape route:

If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too.

The ethical escapologist recognizes that many of the established ways of doing things involve the privileged sitting on the shoulders of the dispossessed — that first world citizenship and the opportunities it permits (including, in some cases, the opportunities to escape) are part of a package deal and that you can’t just absorb the personal benefits and pretend you aren’t responsible for the rest.

Escapology is not evasion — not a denial of responsibility, but acceptance of it: both gratitude for the wider horizons of life it gives to us and acceptance of the project of living our values in the bounds of these new horizons.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• “LittleSis is a free database of who-knows-who at the heights of business and government.” It seems to be a cleverly-engineered, crowdsourced, ever-evolving database of the connections between politicians, lobbyists, business executives, organizations, bureaucrats, and the like.
• “The Neglected Costs of the Warfare State: An Austrian Tribute to Seymour Melman” — Melman was the Winslow Wheeler of his time, keeping a watchful and critical eye on the military budget and both its inherent and extravagant waste. This article looks in particular at the opportunity costs of military spending, and at the common fallacy that such spending stimulates the economy and enriches society.
• A little while back I read Visions of Poesy: Anthology of 20^th Century Anarchist Poetry and didn’t find anything in it inspiring or interesting, sad to say. Read IOZ’s A Coherent Philosophy instead.
• At Strike the Root, Glen Allport describes How the 1% took America’s Wealth (and How to Get It Back).
• Claire Wolfe has an interesting column on developing derring-do.
• Greek tax protesters in Athens hung their unpaid utility bills on a Christmas tree.
• Argentine congresswoman Griselda Baldata couldn’t help but notice that nobody was maintaining the road on Route 36, but the company in charge of maintenance was still collecting a toll. So she stopped paying and urged her constituents to do likewise.
• Martin Newell, from the London Catholic Worker community, broke into Northwood Headquarters with the hopes of disrupting the disreputable. He was instead hauled into court and fined. He refused to pay and was sentenced to 24 days in prison for his refusal.
• Carl Watner has put his introduction to Render Not: The Case Against Taxation on-line.

You see the beauty of my proposal is
it needn’t wait on general revolution.
I bid you to the one-man revolution —
The only revolution that is coming.

—Robert Frost
from Build Soil

Today, instead of dredging up something from the archives about historical tax resistance campaigns and movements, I want to spend some time looking at individual tax resistance in service of what Ammon Hennacy called the “one-man^* revolution.”

Whether Hennacy got the name from Frost’s poem, or Frost from him, or whether each came up with it independently, I don’t know. The idea goes back much further than either, and in particular is especially pronounced in Thoreau’s thinking.

This idea is that, contrary to what the organizers of the world are always telling us, the key to curing society’s ills is not necessarily to organize at all. You don’t need a majority, or a critical mass, or a disciplined revolutionary vanguard. Just get your own house in order and commit yourself to your own personal revolution — that’s the most crucial and practical thing you can do.

“One-man revolution” is the answer to the question posed by radicals and reformers who feel overwhelmed by the task ahead. “What can one person do?” they ask (half-hoping, I suspect, that the answer will be “nothing, so don’t sweat it”). They think the revolution that will finally put things right is scheduled for later — when the masses see the light… when a crisis comes… when we find a charismatic leader… when we unite the factions under one banner… when… when… when…

The one-man revolutionary says: no, the revolution starts here and now. Your first task as a revolutionary is to overturn the corrupt, confused, puppet governor of your own life and to put a more responsible sovereign in its place.

As to what the policies of this new sovereign ought to be, well, that’s up to you. I’m not going to cover the details of how Hennacy’s and Thoreau’s one-man revolutions played out and what specific decisions they made along the way. Today instead I’m going to look at the reasons they gave for why the one-man revolution is practical and effective, in answer to the “What can just one person do?” skeptics.

These reasons can be roughly divided into five categories:

1. With the one-man revolution, success is in reach. It may not be easy, but you can win this revolution with your own effort. Furthermore, whether or not you succeed, the struggle itself is the right thing to do.
2. You don’t need to wait for a majority. You don’t need to water down your message to try to win mass appeal or group consensus. You can start immediately from a firm platform of integrity and honesty. This also makes you more self-reliant so that you can endure challenges better, which makes you more effective and far-reaching than those revolutionaries who always have to check to see if the rest of the pack is still with them.
3. Political revolutions that are not also accompanied by individual revolutions don’t make enduring radical change — they just change the faces of the clowns running the circus while leaving the corrupt structure intact.
4. The world sometimes is changed radically and for the better by the efforts and example of a single, one-in-a-million character. But the first step is not to set out to change the world, but to develop that character.
5. By fighting the one-man revolution, you are not as alone as you may think you are: you “leaven the loaf” and cause all society to rise, you attract other one-man revolutionaries to your side, and you sow the seeds that inspire others.

You can win the one-man revolution

Ammon Hennacy’s theory of the one-man revolution crystallized, appropriately enough, while he was being held in solitary confinement. He’d been sentenced for promoting draft evasion during World War Ⅰ and then thrown in “the hole” for leading a hunger strike of prisoners to protest awful food. Because he refused to name names, he was kept there for several months.

Locked up alone in a cell 24/7, unable to communicate with his comrades in the prison or outside, given the silent treatment by the guard, and overhearing the day-in day-out torture of the inmate in the adjoining cell — this was not the most promising situation for a revolutionary.

The only book they allowed him was the Bible (and they even took this away and replaced it with a smaller-print version for no other reason but to inflict another petty torment in the dim light of his cell). In the course of reading and reflecting on what he read — particularly the Sermon on the Mount — he decided that the revolution could be fought and won even where he stood.

To change the world by bullets or ballots was a useless procedure. …the only revolution worthwhile was the one-man revolution within the heart. Each one could make this by himself and not need to wait on a majority.

(A few days back I saw a bumper sticker that read “Jesus was a community organizer.” But if you read the Sermon on the Mount, you won’t see any organizing going on there at all — Jesus is urging people individually to get their lives in order so that their deeds will be like a light shining before others to inspire them. Do you see any “we must,” “we ought to,” “we should work together to,” or “once there are enough of us” in that sermon? Jesus isn’t addressing an organization but an assembly.)

You can start now, with full integrity

Lloyd Danzeisen expressed one of the advantages of the one-man revolution in a letter to Hennacy: “You are lucky and of course very wise to be a ‘one man revolution,’ for you do not have to discuss your action over and over again (with committees) but can swing into action.”

The advantage of organizing and working together is superior numbers, and, in theory anyway, greater force. But there are many disadvantages. It takes a lot of time and negotiation to get a bunch of people to take action together, and usually this also involves finding some lowest common denominator of principle or risk that they can all agree on — which can mean watering down the core of what you’re fighting for until it seems less like a principle than a petty grievance.

What such a movement gains in quantity it may lose in quality, and the force it gains from numbers it may lose from the diffuse, blunted, half-hearted effort of the individuals that make it up, or from the fact that much of their energy is expended in the organizing itself rather than the ostensible goals of the organization.

The advantage of drawing a large crowd of half-hearted followers is rarely worth the effort. It is not too hard to sway a crowd of wishy-washy people by appealing to the half-truths they already believe and being careful not to attack any of the nonsense they adhere to. But what does this get you? A crowd of wishy-washy people who are just as vulnerable to falling for the next demagogue who comes along with patronizing speeches. Instead, Hennacy recommends, we should “appeal to those about ready to make the next step and… know that these are very few indeed.… We can live and die and never change political trends but if we take a notion, we can change our own lives in many basic respects and thus do that much to change society.”

Thoreau wrote of how when he was invited to speak he refused to water down his message to make it most palatable to his listeners. He wasn’t aiming for the sympathy of the crowd, but hoped to reach that one or two who were ready to be challenged: “I see the craven priest looking for a hole to escape at — alarmed because it was he that invited me thither — & an awful silence pervades the audience. They think they will never get me there again. But the seed has not all fallen in stony & shallow ground.”

Thoreau noted with approval that the abolitionist revolutionary John Brown had not gathered around him a large party of well-wishers and collaborators, but instead had been very selective about whom he let in on his plans:

I hear many condemn these men because they were so few. When were the good and the brave ever in a majority? Would you have had him wait till that time came? — till you and I came over to him?

The very fact that [Brown] had no rabble or troop of hirelings about him would alone distinguish him from ordinary heroes. His company was small indeed, because few could be found worthy to pass muster. He would have no rowdy or swaggerer, no profane swearer, for, as he said, he always found these men to fail at last. He would have only men of principle, & they are few.

He quotes Brown as saying:

I would rather have the small-pox, yellow-fever, and cholera, all together in my camp, than a man without principle.… Give me men of good principles, — God-fearing men, — men who respect themselves, and with a dozen of them I will oppose any hundred such men as these Buford ruffians.

A one-man revolutionary is more effective and harder to defeat

A one-man revolutionary — a “man of good principles” — is individually more effective and harder to defeat than that same person would be as part of a movement. This may seem paradoxical to people who are used to thinking in terms of “strength in numbers” or “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

This is for two related reasons:

First, because as a one-man revolutionary you are self-motivated, you do not get thrown into confusion if the lines of communication down the chain of command are disrupted, and you don’t lose momentum by looking about to check if your comrades are still with you or if they have retreated or surrendered.

And second, because this makes it difficult for your opponents to get a foothold in trying to persuade you with threats or with bribes to give up the fight.

For example, Hennacy tells of one of his captors trying to trick him:

Detective Wilson said that the young Socialists arrested with me for refusing to register had all given in and registered. (Later I found out that he had also told them that I had registered.) [But] I felt that if they gave in, someone had to stick, and I was that one.

The detective assumed that Hennacy valued his belonging more than his integrity, and so made a completely ineffective attack. Thoreau similarly noted that his captors had failed to understand his motives, assuming he valued his freedom from confinement more than his freedom of action:

It costs me less in ev­ery sense to in­cur the pen­alty of dis­o­be­di­ence to the State, than it would to obey. I should feel as if I were worth less in that case.

I saw that, if there was a wall of stone be­tween me and my towns­men, there was a still more dif­fi­cult one to climb or break through, be­fore they could get to be as free as I was.… In ev­ery threat and in ev­ery com­pli­ment there was a blun­der; for they thought that my chief de­sire was to stand the other side of that stone wall.

People often draw the wrong conclusion from the success of the “divide and conquer” tactic when used by governments against opposition movements. The lesson proved by this is not that unless we stay united we are weak, but that to the extent that our strength depends mainly on our unity we are vulnerable.

Without the one-man revolution, no other revolution is worth the trouble

The problem with the mass, popular, peasants-with-pitchforks sort of revolution is that it’s so unreliable. You put everything on the line, shed buckets of blood, endure betrayals and unfriendly alliances and hard compromises, and finally (if you’re lucky) cut off the king’s head and take charge… and then what? As often as not, you end up with something as bad as before.

Political revolutions, says Hennacy, “only changed masters.” — “We made a revolution against England and are not free yet. The Russians made a revolution against the Czar and now have an even stronger dictatorship. It is not too late to make a revolution that will mean something — one that will stick: your own one-man revolution.”

Tyranny is not something that only infests the top of the org chart. The tyrant doesn’t cause tyranny, but is its most obvious symptom. Tyranny lives as tenaciously in the tyrannized as in the tyrant. This is why Thoreau was careful to say (emphasis mine):

“That government is best which governs not at all;” and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

Not, “when the workers seize power” or “when we get money out of politics” or anything of that sort, but “when men are prepared for it.” We must prepare ourselves, one one-man revolution at a time, and when we have, we will get the government we deserve (self-government, if Thoreau is right and if we ever do deserve such a thing).

The revolution is not accomplished when the last faction still standing wipes the blood from its hands and sits down behind the presidential desk to issue its first decree, but “when the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office” — that is, when tyranny is purged from the bottom of the org chart.

Define success and failure carefully

Be careful how you define “success.” You can do everything you set out to do, but if you haven’t set out to do anything worth doing, you still fail. Even in mundane things, you’d be wise to keep your eye on a bigger picture. Thoreau mused in his journal:

If a man has spent all his days about some business by which he has merely got rich, as it is called, i.e., has got much money, many houses & barns & woodlots, then his life has been a failure, I think. But if he has been trying to better his condition in a higher sense than this — has been trying to be somebody, to invent something — i.e., to invent and get a patent for himself — so that all may see his originality, though he should never get above board — & all great inventors, you know, commonly die poor — I shall think him comparatively successful.

Success and failure have superficial and deep components that may contradict each other. John Brown set out to launch a rebellion that would end American slavery; the government stood its ground and defended slavery against the rebellion and had Brown hanged. Who was successful? Who won? A victory for evil is just a triumphant form of failure.

And a year and a half after Brown’s execution when Union troops set off to crush the confederacy of slavers, they were singing “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave — his soul is marching on!”

At the time of the Harpers Ferry raid, Brown was called insane by the pulpit, popular opinion, and the press (even — especially — the liberal, abolitionist press). Some gave as evidence for his insanity the most extraordinarily sane thing about him:

It is mentioned against him & as an evidence of his insanity, that he was “a conscientious man, very modest in his demeanor, apparently inoffensive until the subject of slavery was introduced, when he would exhibit a feeling of indignation unparalleled.”

You’d think with the example of Jesus hovering over Western Civilization, people would be skeptical of traditional notions of success: being captured and tortured to death by your enemies and having your followers scorned and scattered throughout a hostile empire doesn’t seem much like a victory. But Thoreau thought the response to John Brown proved that even after centuries of Christianity, “[i]f Christ should appear on earth he would on all hands be denounced as a mistaken, misguided man, insane & crazed.”

You don’t have to believe that history will eventually smile on you and turn your seeming defeats and setbacks into obvious victories. You don’t have to believe the nice-sounding but unlikely sentiment that Hennacy attributed to Tolstoy: “no sincere effort made in the behalf of Truth is ever lost.” You just need to remember that the seemingly small victories in an uncompromising one-man revolution can be more worthwhile (when seen from the perspective of what is worthwhile, not just what is expedient) than huge triumphs rotting within from compromise and half-truths.

Slavery in particular was such an unambiguous evil that it was one of “those cases to which the rule of expediency does not apply,” Thoreau said. He made this comparison: if the only way you can save yourself from drowning is to unjustly wrest a plank away from another drowning man, you must instead do what is just even if it kills you. If you are “victorious” in wresting away the plank, and thereby save your own life at the cost of another, you lose.^✴

But even in cases not as extreme as slavery, he says, compromise and expediency are overrated: “there is no such thing as ac­com­plish­ing a right­eous re­form by the use of ‘ex­pe­di­ency.’ There is no such thing as slid­ing up hill. In morals the only sliders are back­sliders.”

The one-man revolution is more about doing the right thing daily than achieving the right result eventually, so even if it seems that everything is going against you, you can be confident you’re on the right track. “[B]e as unconcerned for victory as careless of defeat,” Thoreau advises, “not seeking to lengthen our term of service, nor to cut it short by a reprieve, but earnestly applying ourselves to the campaign before us.”

“Hennacy, do you think you can change the world?” said Bert Fireman, a columnist on the Phoenix Gazette.

“No, but I am damn sure it can’t change me” was my reply.

If you want to change things you have to get 51% of the ballots or the bullets. If I want to change things I just have to keep on doing what I am doing — that is: every day the government says “pay taxes for war”; every day I do not pay taxes for war. So I win and they lose. The One Man Revolution — you can’t beat it.

Do not let your opponent set the norm. Generally a minority is jeered at because they are so small. It is quality and not quantity that is the measure. “One on the side of God is a majority” is the perfect answer which I have given dozens of times with success.

(In this last quote, Hennacy is paraphrasing Thoreau, who wrote that “those who call them­selves ab­o­li­tion­ists should at once ef­fec­tu­ally with­draw their sup­port, both in per­son and prop­erty, from the gov­ern­ment of Mas­sa­chu­setts, and not wait till they con­sti­tute a ma­jor­ity of one, be­fore they suf­fer the right to pre­vail through them. I think that it is enough if they have God on their side, with­out wait­ing for that other one. More­over, any man more right than his neigh­bors con­sti­tutes a ma­jor­ity of one al­ready.”)

One-in-a-million can move the world

Sometimes, a single one-man revolutionary really does change the world. Maybe the world was already ripe for changing, but it still needed a one-man revolutionary to break from the pack and make the change happen.

Hennacy says the self-transforming doers like Christ, the Buddha, Gandhi, or Joan of Arc, were far more radical than theorizers like Marx or Bakunin. Thoreau would agree (though his list — “Minerva — Ceres — Neptune — Prometheus — Socrates — Christ — Luther — Columbus — Arkwright” — was a little more ethereal):

I know of few radicals as yet who are radical enough, and have not got this name rather by meddling with the exposed roots of innocent institutions than with their own.

We don’t progress by passively absorbing the inevitable bounty of history grinding away unconsciously on the masses, as the Hegelians might put it. Rather, says Thoreau, “The great benefactors of their race have been single and singular and not masses of men. Whether in poetry or history it is the same.” We should not be content to admire these heroes, or to await their arrival, but should be inspired by their examples to be heroic ourselves.

The gods have given man no constant gift, but the power and liberty to act greatly. How many wait for health and warm weather to be heroic and noble! We are apt to think there is a kind of virtue which need not be heroic and brave — but in fact virtue is the deed of the bravest; and only the hardy souls venture upon it, for it deals in what we have no experience, and alone does the rude pioneer work of the world.

Ac­tion from prin­ci­ple, — the per­cep­tion and the per­for­mance of right, — changes things and re­la­tions; it is es­sen­tially rev­o­lu­tion­ary, and does not con­sist wholly with any thing which was. It not only di­vides states and churches, it di­vides fam­i­lies; aye, it di­vides the in­di­vid­ual, sep­a­rat­ing the di­a­bol­i­cal in him from the di­vine.

There is something proudly thrilling in the thought that this obedience to conscience and trust in God, which is so solemnly preached in extremities and arduous circumstances, is only to retreat to one’s self, and rely on our own strength. In trivial circumstances I find myself sufficient to myself, and in the most momentous I have no ally but myself, and must silently put by their harm by my own strength, as I did the former. As my own hand bent aside the willow in my path, so must my single arm put to flight the devil and his angels. God is not our ally when we shrink, and neuter when we are bold. If by trusting in God you lose any particle of your vigor, trust in Him no longer. … I cannot afford to relax discipline because God is on my side, for He is on the side of discipline.

We can’t all be Christ, Buddha, Gandhi, or Joan of Arc. (Steve Allen said that Ammon Hennacy fulfilled more of the role of a Lenny Bruce; Hennacy’s wife suggested Don Quixote.) It is only one-in-a-million who moves the world. But despite the odds we all should aspire to be this one in a million.

Love without courage and wisdom is sentimentality, as with the ordinary church member. Courage without love and wisdom is foolhardiness, as with the ordinary soldier. Wisdom without love and courage is cowardice, as with the ordinary intellectual. Therefore one who has love, courage, and wisdom is one in a million who moves the world, as with Jesus, Buddha, and Gandhi.

Even if we fall short of this goal ourselves, by choosing this goal we not only choose the only goal worth choosing, but we adjust our standards so that if we are ever lucky enough to meet this one in a million, we will be more likely to recognize her or him. Most people are incapable of recognizing or comprehending the hero in real life — they lionize the dead martyred heroes of past generations, while joining the lynch mobs to martyr the heroes of their own.

It only takes a little leavening to leaven the loaf

By aiming at this standard, you also raise the standards of those around you, and so even if you cannot detect a direct influence, you improve society. The way Thoreau put it — “It is not so im­por­tant that many should be as good as you, as that there be some ab­so­lute good­ness some­where; for that will leaven the whole lump.”^†

By being virtuous in an out-of-the-ordinary way you encourage people to call ordinary vices into question and you force the devil’s advocates to show themselves by coming to the devil’s defense. Thoreau was convinced that one person was enough to leaven the loaf:

[I]f one thou­sand, if one hun­dred, if ten men whom I could name, — if ten hon­est men only, — aye, if one hon­est man, in this State of Mas­sa­chu­setts, ceas­ing to hold slaves, were ac­tu­ally to with­draw from this co­part­ner­ship, and be locked up in the county jail there­for, it would be the ab­o­li­tion of slav­ery in Amer­ica.

Hennacy said that his “work was not that of an organizer but of a Sower to sow the seeds.”

We really can’t change the world. We really can’t change other people! The best we can do is to start a few thinking here and there. The way to do this, if we are sincere, is to change ourselves!

When they are ready for it [my emphasis again — ♇], the rich, the bourgeois intellectual, the bum, and even the politician and the clergy may have an awakening of conscience because of the uncompromising seeds of Christian Anarchism which we are sowing.

You have a plan to reform the world? As the saying goes: “show me, don’t tell me.” Thoreau:

The Reformer who comes recommending any institution or system to the adoption of men, must not rely solely on logic and argument, or on eloquence and oratory for his success, but see that he represents one pretty perfect institution in himself…

I ask of all Reformers, of all who are recommending Temperance, Justice, Charity, Peace, the Family, Community or Associative life, not to give us their theory and wisdom only, for these are no proof, but to carry around with them each a small specimen of his own manufactures, and to despair of ever recommending anything of which a small sample at least cannot be exhibited: — that the Temperance man let me know the savor of Temperance, if it be good, the Just man permit to enjoy the blessings of liberty while with him, the Community man allow me to taste the sweets of the Community life in his society.

Too many reformers think they can reform the rottenness of the system the people are sustaining without changing the rottenness of the people who sustain the system. “The disease and disorder in society are wont to be referred to the false relations in which men live one to another, but strictly speaking there can be no such thing as a false relation if the condition of the things related is true. False relations grow out of false conditions. … It is not the worst reason why the reform should be a private and individual enterprise, that perchance the evil may be private also.”

So often we hear of a Big Plan that, were it enacted as designed, would solve the Big Problems. But the problem with the big plans is that they never seem to get enacted, or if they do, they never seem to work as designed, as the same problems show up in new guises. Meanwhile the planners waste their time and energy and don’t change what is changeable. Tolstoy put it this way:

If a man drinks, and I tell him that he can himself stop drinking and must do so, there is some hope that he will pay attention to me; but if I tell him that his drunkenness forms a complex and difficult problem, which we, the learned, will try to solve in our meetings, all the probabilities are that he, waiting for the solution of the problem, will continue to drink. The same is true of the false and intricate scientific, external means for the cessation of war, like the international tribunals, the court of arbitration, and other similar foolish things, when we with them keep in abeyance the simplest and most essential means for the cessation of war, which is only too obvious to anybody. For people who do not need war not to fight we need no international tribunals, no solution of questions, but only that the people who are subject to deception should awaken and free themselves from that spell under which they are. This means for the abolition of war consists in this, that the men who do not need war, who consider a participation in war to be a sin, should stop fighting.

An alcoholic who spoke with Hennacy had much the same sentiment: “the AA fixed me up. You are right in not wanting to change the world by violence; the change has to come with each person first.”

The present American peace movement, stubbornly paying for the imperial armies it says it opposes, reminds me of drunks meeting in a tavern at happy hour to organize a prohibition movement that will solve their alcohol problem.

Your one-man revolution isn’t as lonely as it may seem

Hennacy and Thoreau also had faith that if you begin the one-man revolution, this will attract like-minded souls to you and you to them, and that you will find yourself working in concert with comrades you never knew you had:

Thoreau: “Men talk much of cooperation nowadays, of working together to some worthy end; but what little cooperation there is, is as if it were not, being a simple result of which the means are hidden, a harmony inaudible to men. If a man has faith, he will cooperate with equal faith everywhere. If he has not faith he will continue to live like the rest of the world, whatever company he is joined to.”

Hennacy: “In reading Tolstoy I had gained the idea that if a person had the One Man Revolution in his heart and lived it, he would be led by God toward those others who felt likewise.… This was to be proven in a most dramatic way, and was to usher me into the second great influence of my life: that of the Catholic Worker movement.”

The One-Man Revolution

So what do you have to do to be the exemplar and sow the seeds?

1. Accept responsibility, and act responsibly.
2. Build yourself a glass house and start throwing stones.

Accept responsibility, and act responsibly

Most political action amounts to “who can we find to take responsibility for this problem” — the One Man Revolutionary asks “what can I do to take responsibility for this problem?”

Not that everything is your responsibility, or that the world is looking to you personally to solve all of its problems. But you should at the very least examine your life to see what problems or solutions you are contributing to with it. Can one person make a difference? You are already making a difference — what kind of difference are you making?

It is not a man’s duty, as a mat­ter of course, to de­vote him­self to the erad­i­cat­ion of any, even the most enor­mous wrong; he may still prop­erly have other con­cerns to en­gage him, but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it prac­ti­cally his sup­port. If I de­vote my­self to other pur­suits and con­tem­plat­ions, I must first see, at least, that I do not pur­sue them sit­ting upon an­other man’s shoul­ders. I must get off him first, that he may pur­sue his con­tem­plat­ions too.

A man has not ev­ery thing to do, but some­thing; and be­cause he can­not do ev­ery thing, it is not nec­es­sary that he should do some­thing wrong.

In Thoreau’s time, the evils of slavery and of wars of conquest were sustained by the active allegiance and support of the ordinary people around him, many of whom nonetheless congratulated themselves for their anti-war, anti-slavery opinions.

I quar­rel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, co-op­er­ate with, and do the bid­ding of those far away, and with­out whom the lat­ter would be harm­less.

I have heard some of my towns­men say, “I should like to have them or­der me out to help put down an in­sur­rec­tion of the slaves, or to march to Mex­ico, — see if I would go;” and yet these very men have each, di­rectly by their al­le­giance, and so in­di­rectly, at least, by their money, fur­nished a sub­sti­tute. The sol­dier is ap­plauded who re­fuses to serve in an un­just war by those who do not re­fuse to sus­tain the un­just gov­ern­ment which makes the war…

Those who, while they dis­ap­prove of the char­ac­ter and meas­ures of a gov­ern­ment, yield to it their al­le­giance and sup­port, are un­doubt­edly its most con­sci­en­tious sup­port­ers, and so fre­quently the most se­ri­ous ob­sta­cles to re­form. Some are pe­ti­tion­ing the State to dis­solve the Union, to dis­re­gard the req­ui­si­tions of the Pres­i­dent. Why do they not dis­solve it them­selves, — the union be­tween them­selves and the State, — and re­fuse to pay their quota into its trea­sury?

If a thou­sand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a vi­o­lent and bloody meas­ure, as it would be to pay them, and en­able the State to com­mit vi­o­lence and shed in­no­cent blood. This is, in fact, the def­i­ni­tion of a peace­able rev­o­lu­tion, if any such is pos­si­ble.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that because the one-man revolution is in your heart that it can just stay there, locked up inside, without leaking out into the world around you.

As to conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I have not a very high opinion of that course. Do not let your right hand know what your left hand does in that line of business. I have no doubt it will prove a failure.

The one-man revolution doesn’t necessarily require living in opposition to society and the status quo, but it does require holding fast to justice and virtue. When society and the status quo are opposed to justice and virtue, as they so often are, this puts them in opposition to you as well.

Build yourself a glass house and start throwing stones

Your friends and even your enemies will come to your aid when you try to hold yourself to a high standard. All you have to do is to make yourself vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy. People love to point out hypocritical moralists, in part because some hypocritical moralists are hilarious, but also in part because it helps people excuse their own failures to hold themselves to high standards. If you build yourself a glass house and throw stones from it, everyone will volunteer to keep you on the straight-and-narrow.

Hennacy:

I have… put myself in a glass house. If so I must needs take whatever stones come my way. I have the right by my life of integrity to criticize, but I must also take whatever criticism comes my way in all good humor.

[A] spoiled and arrogant priest wanted to know if I was “holier than thou.” I told him I hoped by Christ I was, for if I wasn’t I would be in a hell of a fix. I used this blunt method to deflate his spurious piety.

At times those who do not want to have their inconsistencies pointed out say in a super-sweet voice to me “judge not, lest ye be judged.” I reply, “O.K., judge me, then.”

When your standards for yourself rise, so do your standards for other people (otherwise you really are being arrogant). Thoreau, criticized for demanding too much from people, said he could not “con­vince my­self that I have any right to be sat­is­fied with men as they are, and to treat them ac­cord­ingly, and not ac­cord­ing, in some re­spects, to my req­ui­si­tions and ex­pec­ta­tions of what they and I ought to be.”

While both Thoreau and Hennacy strike me as stern with others, and maybe not always fun to be around (as Hennacy would say: “I love my enemies but am hell on my friends”), they were anything but joyless. Thoreau’s vigorous, enthusiastic love of life and the world are legendary, and Hennacy’s character too was eager, life-affirming, and generous (even in its criticisms).

Utah Phillips came home from the Korean war a drunken brawler, checked in to Hennacy’s Catholic Worker hospitality house in Salt Lake City, and eight years later checked out again, sober, a pacifist, and an anarchist. He remembered Hennacy this way:

He was tough without being hard — tough without that brittle hardness that some tough men have that would shatter if you struck it too hard. “Love in Action,” Dorothy Day called him — Dostoyevsky’s words: “Love in action is harsh and dreadful compared to love in dreams.”^‡

Neither Thoreau nor Hennacy had any tolerance for bliss-bunnyishness, but both were cheerful; both knew how to be dutiful without being dour. Thoreau:

To march sturdily through life, patiently and resolutely looking grim defiance at one’s foes, that is one way; but we cannot help being more attracted by that kind of heroism which relaxes its brows in the presence of danger, and does not need to maintain itself strictly, but, by a kind of sympathy with the universe, generously adorns the scene and the occasion, and loves valor so well that itself would be the defeated party only to behold it; which is as serene and as well pleased with the issue as the heavens which look down upon the field of battle. It is but a lower height of heroism when the hero wears a sour face.

A great cheerfulness indeed have all great wits and heroes possessed, almost a profane levity to such as understood them not, but their religion had the broader basis of health and permanence. For the hero, too, has his religion, though it is the very opposite to that of the ascetic. It demands not a narrower cell but a wider world.

In conclusion

I’ve tried here to put forward the strongest affirmative case for the practical effectiveness of the one-man revolution, at least as it can be found in Hennacy’s and Thoreau’s writings.

They make a strong and persuasive argument, I think, but not an airtight one. I wish more evidence was preserved of them in dialog with incisive critics of the one-man revolution, to hear how they would respond to the best arguments against it.

But what keeps the argument for a one-man revolution from persuading people is not, I think, the strength of the counter-arguments, but just the fact that to accept the argument is not enough — it demands much more than a “Like,” and much more than most people think they have to give. To be persuaded is to be overwhelmed, to take the first step off the path and into uncharted territory, and only a few of us have the courage to take that step.