LarkenRose | Most conflict, violence, and injustice is the result not of individual malice but of people imagining an obligation to obey a perceived authority, usually government. In their daily lives most people accept the non-aggression principle, it’s not OK to rob or attack other people. But they’ve been taught that government has an exception from that rule and that legalized theft and thuggery, taxation, and law enforcement, are moral, legitimate, and necessary for society.
Here are three independent proofs that the concept of government is not just susceptible to corruption and abuse, but is by its very nature self-contradictory and insane.
1) There is not document or procedure where by any person or group of people can delegate to another a right which the first person or group didn’t have to begin with. Ergo, Congress cannot have acquired and does not have the right to do anything that you do not have the right to do yourself.
2) You can’t have a moral obligation to do what you think is wrong. Whenever there is a conflict between what authority commands and your own conscience you have the right to disobey. But if that’s true then the one giving orders isn’t authority, since ‘authority’ means the one with the right to rule you and the one you must obey.
3) No document or ritual can alter morality and make an evil act good. Either man-made law matches objective morality, in which case the law is redundant and irrelevant. Or it conflicts with objective morality in which case it is illegitimate and should be disobeyed. Either way legislation never creates any obligation to obey and therefore has no authority. Once all of this is widely understood, that’s the end of most of the theft, thuggery, oppression, and war in the world. Which happens now as a result of the belief in government, meaning a rightful ruling class. If evil were committed only be genuinely nasty people, instead of being condoned and committed by almost everyone. All those who image that legalizing evil makes it good and imagine that agents of authority have rights the rest of us don’t. The world will be a far more peaceful and just place… Amen.
