Chapter Text
Part I
Axiom 1: There are three Things.
Axiom 2: There are Persons.
A2.1: Person is defined as a creature possessing a unique DNA sequence corresponding to a species known to possess Sapience, defined as the ability to take in information, process it, and produce novel information from it. When a creature demonstrates this quality, they are conferred Personhood.
When a Mommy human loves a Daddy human veeeeery much, they have incredibly kinky sex until Mommy gets pregnant.
If you paid attention in your high school science class, you'll remember that homo sapiens are diploid organisms, meaning that our chromosomes come in sets of two. Meiosis, the process through which gametes are produced in the testes and ovaries, splits and recombinates each parent's DNA, meaning an already unique sequence is given random alterations. What results from the meeting of two matching gametes is the combination of two somewhat scrambled unique sequences, making a new sequence that is neither mother nor father.
This new sequence has never existed before, and can never exist again, by definition.
This is the definition of an “individual.”
Sapience is a product of sufficiently complex cognition. Humans may have been the first species to evolve and demonstrate it on this planet but we will certainly not be the last. The very moment dogs are shown, publicly and beyond the shadow of any doubt, to possess Sapience they are immediately and automatically conferred Personhood without objection.
There is no strict threshold, to the dismay of myself and many others. There seems to be something about language development and theory of mind that gives it away, but I am not educated enough to comment on this.
Whales are close. Elephants are close. Prairie Dogs are close.
A2.2: All organic matter possessing the DNA of an individual Person and all cognitive derivatives produced by that organic matter is Property of that individual Person.
It constantly shocks me that there are people in this modern day that do not believe you own your body and your thoughts. In most cases, the fault is with the church, which peddles the particularly reprehensible doctrine of slavery to extradimensional entities.
That which contains your DNA is your property, regardless of attachment. As the owner of your body, you are ethically empowered to do with it as you please, to include modification, monetization, and termination. This conception of bodily autonomy is the foundation of libertarian ideals, and without it the door to the most heinous kinds of tyrannies is left ajar.
This ownership logically extends to your mind, which is the product of your brain activity, and all the thoughts it generates. They're all yours, pleasant or distressful, and this acknowledgement serves both as defense of copyright and defense against thought-policing.
A2.3: Persons cannot be meaningfully subclassified.
Immutable characteristics, whether externally perceivable or internally sensed, are of little if any consequence in matters of ethics.
The trend of categorizing Persons based on invented social concepts like race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability is the single longest-lived meme of human civilization, proliferated most extensively by the church (ask your pastor why the Israelites were so desperate to pretend they were not ethnically Canaanite).
The death of phrenology in the mid-1800s revealed a basic fact to all people of sound mind: only those who intend to benefit from being classified above advocate for classifying others below. If Europeans had any reason to believe Africans might possess a superiority, they would not have vocalized a desire for racial hierarchy. Thus, all tension regarding immutable characteristics can be safely labeled as mere tribalism, framed through an external locus of control.
The death of bigoted culture begins with the birth of egalitarian culture, conceived by the realization that all labels that modify “Person” are matters of mere vanity, holding no meaningful insight on an individual’s nature.
A2.4: What is conferred to one identifiable Person, is conferred to all identifiable Persons.
For a concept of human rights to have utility, they must have universality.
Rights that are afforded to some but not others are not rights, but simply advantages taken by force. A system made up of advantages, distributed unevenly and unequally, is a tyranny regardless of the specific label you plaster on its face. A tyranny will expand and oppress until there are no scapegoats left to blame, and then it will begin to cannibalize itself.
The truth is, no matter what rung on the ladder you would end up having (looking at you, middle-to-high class white people), give the tyranny you built enough time and it will get hungry enough to consider eating you.
A2.5: Personhood confers the Transmissive Right, defined as the ability to freely broadcast possessed information.
The concept of “free speech” is something we hear about often, especially by those who believe in it the least. Nobody seems to agree on what it means, mostly because the document that coined the term was vague in its execution.
The United States Constitution reads: “Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…”
Good, but not good enough.
Because your thoughts are your property, you have the right to transfer ownership of those thoughts as you see fit, including via open transmission, and those who wish to receive those thoughts have a right to hear you.
Note that this is not a condemnation of protesting distasteful speakers in public spaces, nor of disrupting their transmission through non-destructive transmission of your own. It is a condemnation of state regulation of broadcast media, though.
A2.6: Personhood confers the Associative Right, defined as the ability to voluntarily interact or voluntarily not interact with other Persons. Some interactions between Persons create Disputes, defined as any interactions that are not mutually voluntary.
Anyone seen the meme “The Myth of Consensual Sex”?
“Mutual voluntarism” is a fancy term for consent, which serves as foundational to libertarian ideals. There is no better metric for basally determining whether a Dispute has occurred between Persons than to ask if everyone consented to the interaction in question.
This concept is already well-understood in social groups that care a lot about making sure everyone is enjoying their time, like BDSM and kink communities (shocker, I know). Just as in a kink scene, our societies operate on a kind of contract, where we all make efforts to negotiate our interactions.
The obvious caveat here is this flies in the face of what we call “anti-discrimination laws”, which are designed to prevent selective dissociation based on immutable characteristics. In my mind, bigotry is a bad business strategy that is liable to crash economies of scale, but history disagrees, and so I must concede that ethics are not penal codes. Leave the heavy lifting for the policy wonks, kids.
A2.7: Personhood confers the Defensive Right, defined as the ability to proportionally protect from imminent disputes.
The operative word here is “proportionally,” which means the minimum amount of force needed to terminate a threat, which usually winds up being an equal amount of force.
Threats are measured in levels of the reactor’s (victim’s) vulnerability to the actor (perpetrator). Any number of factors can affect this calculation, but those factors must be articulable and demonstrable.
A2.8: Personhood confers the Contractive Right, defined as the ability to voluntarily enter into binding agreements with other voluntary entities.
This extends from bodily ownership and autonomy, as well as from the Possessive Right. Your word is your bond, which means the bond belongs to you and you are therefore responsible for and to it.
A2.9: Personhood confers the Possessive Right, defined as the ability to claim exclusive control over Property.
Even toddlers, who ostensibly have next to no knowledge of society or social conventions, have an integrated understanding of what is “mine” and what is “theirs”. More importantly than this, our extant primate cousins also seem to have this integrated understanding, suggesting the conceptualization of possession as a discrete status that can be used to associate social actors and external objects is, fundamentally, a matter of biological inheritance.
With apologies to the Primitivists in the back—their heads just explode on occasion, don’t mind them.
A2.10: Sufficiently complex groups of voluntarily associated Persons generate local instantiations of the Monster, and in so doing become Constituencies.
There is only one Monster, but it has many instances running simultaneously. The instance of the Monster currently operating in China is one and the same with the instance of the Monster currently operating in Kiribati, even if it doesn’t recognize itself in each other.
Want to make a Nationalist cry? Show them their altars look the same as their enemy’s.
A2.11: Persons may choose to exchange their Personhood for Power and integrate into the Monster. Doing so is a marker of an anti-social nature.
Your Personhood is… well, *yours*. You can do with it what you wish, though you only have three valid moves to make: retain them, transact them, or surrender them.
Other individual Persons are not able to transact for your Personhood as it has unique value and properties. Constituencies, as a class, *can* properly transact for your Personhood with another object of similarly unique value and properties: Power.
Power—*Institutional* Power—is the force employed by the Monster when it is permitted to eat. It is the violence or threat of violence levied against those that run afoul of the Law, or more realistically, those who run afoul of the Monster’s Agents.
This object, Power, has both great value and great potential for societal impact, and so should not be obtainable for free. Power must have a price, and that price must be something of equal or greater value to those who might seek to obtain it.
And what is more valuable than your Personhood?
It is a universally understood concept that no well-adjusted Person has ever sought Institutional Power over another human being. You think about it every time you watch the news, every time you watch prices go up, every time we start a new war.
They’re all vipers. Every last one of them, no matter the title, no matter the station. They all share the same fundamentally psychopathic urge to control and aggress upon others, and so they are naturally inclined to positions of Power, where their every action is backed by the full force of the Monster’s monopoly on violence. This is how they all see you, how they all treat you, how they all conceptualize their relationship with you: Disobey and be crushed, or comply and be allowed to keep your teeth.
Your local city council member, your Senator, the Sheriff two counties over, none of them became psychopaths because of their jobs. They sought out their jobs because they’re psychopaths.
A2.12: Persons may choose to surrender their Personhood by denying another’s Personhood in whole or in part. Doing so is a marker of an anti-social nature.
Derived from the universality of rights. Those who wish others to not be protected will not be protected.
A2.13: Recognition of surrender or transaction of Personhood is not denial of Personhood.
Observation is not negation.
Imagine you are standing next to me, and we are both observing John Doe, who is holding a kitten in his hand. For you to say that he is not holding a kitten in his hand is to deny a true proposition. This is what the fascist does when he says his favored outgroup has no rights.
Now imagine that we both observe Jane Doe appear around a corner and approach John Doe. She offers to transact with him for the kitten he is holding in his hand. She offers him money, he hands over the kitten. For you to say that John Doe does not have a kitten in his hand is no longer to deny a true proposition, because you observed the transaction occur.
Now imagine that John is your party's candidate for Senator, the kitten is his Personhood, Jane is the Monster, and the money is Institutional Power. In saying that, from the moment John accepted the position until the moment his term expires, he is not a Person is not to dehumanize him, but rather a recognition that he has dehumanized himself knowingly and willingly. One does not lose protection from a universal conception of human rights in merely observing and affirming that others do not wish to have theirs.
Axiom 3: There is Property.
A3.1: Property is all things not possessing Sapience.
I recognize the very human discomfort that comes with drawing a line here, rather than in the place we hoped to draw it. If I’ve learned anything about living in this world, it’s that what we hope for doesn’t always come to pass. Actually, it’s most of the time, for better or for worse. Know that there is sorrow in this choice, but it is the most effective way forward that I can see, and so I make a difficult, but not emotional, choice.
Note that this is not, and should NEVER be taken as, license to wantonly aggress upon the biota that spawned us nor against its other spawn.
There is a base human nobility in living with the land as stewards of it, holding it in trust for those who come after us. There is a base human nobility in taking what the land can give at the least expense. There is a base human nobility in leaving all else to be done in scarcity or off this earth.
We ought to be good stewards of what is, so that later there might be an is for others to have.
A3.2: Persons interact with Property through Ownership, defined as total exclusive control, and Transfer, defined as change of control.
I’m confident this is self-explanatory.
A3.3: Ownership of Property confers the Sovereign Right, defined as the ability to do unto Property as one wills.
I recognize the very human discomfort that comes with drawing a line here. The only soothing I can offer for this discomfort (that you should know I also feel) is the separation of our ethics from our emotions.
There is a very real danger in legitimizing what might be called “Disgust Politics,’ that being the dislocation of ethical systems by cultural and personal whims. I might find it gross and icky for my neighbor to rice out his Civic, but it belongs to him, so I have no place dictating how he can use (and likely abuse) it.
Ownership of a thing has to mean something to us; drawing the line elsewhere has consequences that far outweigh any benefits to the conscience.
A3.4: All Property is unowned until a single, undisputed claim of Ownership is located, identified, and sustained.
“Sustained” here can be thought of in the way a piano key is sustained when continually pressed, even silently. That the sound is no longer being transmitted is not indicative that the key is not being actively played. The note being hit is not what we care about, it's whether or not the instrument is being actively actuated. A Casio DG-20 can certainly be played without being powered on.
Axiom 4: There is the Monster.
A4.1: The Monster has not always existed concurrently to Persons. At some point, Persons created the Monster.
The concept of governance did not spring from the plain grasses nor was it delivered to us from on high; it was designed by humans to serve human interests.
If all humans are equal to one another, who then is able to adjudicate disputes? Traditional lines of thinking would implore that someone among us ought to be elevated, that they ought to be ascended to a place high enough to see and consider all matters justly. The single greatest tragedy of human history is that we ever believed this to be true. This singular decision, the decision to elevate some men over others, is the broodmare that bore the butcherous sons of Corruption and Tyranny.
The Monster is our creation, ergo, it is ours to define as we see fit, and we ought to define it as something that exists below us and not above us. Power is a curse that must be carried, not a blessing to be wielded.
A4.2: The Monster cannot be killed, as it is endemic to Society.
The first civilizations to keep written records wrote about the Monster.
Think about what that means. People much like you, thousands of years ago, before the world resembled anything you would recognize, knew about and understood the very same Monster you now face.
The problem has never been your government or their government, but the concept of governance. There is nothing new under the sun, and when you realize this, you will have seen past the veil of ignorance.
A4.3: The Monster is a piece of Pseudo-Property designed exclusively to eat Persons. It does nothing else, it was designed to do nothing else.
Ronald Reagan, may his grave forever be a gender neutral bathroom, said exactly one correct thing in his entire miserable existence:
The most terrifying words any human being can hear are “I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.”
Government services are not blessings bestowed upon the people nor charities done for their sake, but calculated acts of hateful aggression and extreme harm. Social Security, Firefighting, Wildlife Management, Food Safety Testing, Law Enforcement, and all other government services come at the expense of the taxpayer, who is irreparably harmed by their implementation.
This is not to say that the services are bad in and of themselves, or that they are undesirable to have in a civil society. You may very well want these services, but you must understand that they are not the government doing things for you, but the Monster eating you and your fellow Constituents, even if a little bit at a time.
A4.4: Who, where, when, why, and how the Monster eats is negotiated through Laws written and enforced by the Constituency, with the express intent of resolving Disputes as and when they arise.
Laws are not dictums shouted down at us, they are contracts we force the Government to enter into; they are the collar and leash of the Monster.
As it stands, our governments behave more like overweight pit bulls, yanking us around and attacking other dogs at will. When we attempt to curb their aggression and disobedience, they turn and lash out at us. They do these things because the collars they wear are fitted too loose and their leashes are too long.
What we ought to buy for our pit bull is a prong collar: the sharpest and nastiest one they have in the store.
A4.5: Upon a local instantiation being generated, its existence becomes bound to the Constituency that generated it.
I’m not a fan of borders, to be honest with you. I crossed the US-Mexico borders many times as a kid and it always seemed so… pointless. If the status quo became a North American Schengen, I would be happy with it, and I presume day to day life wouldn’t change that much.
That being said, even in Europe territories are defined and jurisdictions are established.
The American government was generated by a group of people pursuant to a framework, the Constitution, which contained within a definition of its jurisdiction. The American instance of the Monster is therefore bound to those who lie within that definition into perpetuity, which is to include any future revisions, and it cannot absolve itself of this binding by its own power.
This, of course, is not limited to liberal democracies, but to any system generated by groups of mutually consenting Persons. A Constituency can take any form, but can only consist of one thing: those who wish to be there.
A4.6: The Monster is not conferred the Transmissive Right, but the Communicative Obligation, defined as the requirement to relay accurate, complete, and verifiable information to its Constituency without defiance, interference, delay, or additional cost to the Constituency.
Do you find it grating at all that us hiding things from the government is criminal, but the government hiding things from us is procedural? The compartmentalization of information in government is the source of infinite anger and perennial outrage, and yet we never consider the question of why a government should have secrets at all.
Ah, hear the miserable cries of the war hawks now. “National Security!” they snivel, “Our enemies will steal our innovations to kill us with them!”
Consider, my dear friend Bloodfeast, that the biggest threat China and Russia could face is an American body politic that votes with full awareness of the military position it benefits from. An American body politic with full and direct control over the machinery that moves battalions and battleships.
A4.7: The Monster is not conferred the Associative Right, but the Communative Obligation, defined as the requirement to interact with its Constituency without defiance, interference, delay, or additional cost to the Constituency.
The sight of government officials refusing to serve their Constituencies breeds a rage within me that burns like the stellar heat that wrenched every scream of agony in all of Nature's days.
There is nothing more insulting, nothing more immoral, dare I say nothing more demonic.
Your county government employs enough personnel to operate all their offices 24/7/365, guaranteed. There is no excuse, so don't let them give you one.
A4.8: The Monster is not conferred the Defensive Right, but the Immolative Obligation, defined as the requirement to oblate itself in protection of its Constituency without defiance, interference, delay, or additional cost to the Constituency.
If your city councilman wouldn't take a bullet for you, how can you trust him with a gun?
Having Power should mean making a sacrifice. A sacrifice of safety, a sacrifice of comfort, a sacrifice of control. Those who we entrust with Power should be the first to lay down their lives in the name of those they represent, to give everything for the greater good they helped build.
A4.9: The Monster is not conferred the Contractive Right, but the Submissive Obligation, defined as the requirement to carry out all its Constituency demands of it without defiance, interference, delay, or additional cost to the Constituency.
Public Servant. What does that phrase mean to you? What image does it evoke in your mind? What feelings does it inspire within your heart?
To serve is to live for another. To lay down all of one's agency at the foot of another, to willingly hand over control to another, to submit to the will of another. To stand under another, at their beck and call, ready to perform all that is commanded.
When was the last time you felt like any public servant behaved in this way?
A4.10: The Monster is not conferred the Possessive Right, but the Custodive Obligation, defined as the requirement to hold on trust, maintain the condition, and conserve for future use all Property owned publicly by its Constituency without defiance, interference, delay, or additional cost to the Constituency.
With apologies to my fellow Libertarians, but I do not believe taxation is theft; for you to have committed theft, you must be able to own the thing you are stealing, and the government can own nothing.
We constantly complain about politicians and bureaucrats enriching themselves off the backs of their Constituencies, but never do we stop to consider whether they should be permitted to own anything at all. Forget the Corvette in his garage, why should City Councilman John Doe have a house? Wouldn't it be easier to keep all your government officials in a dormitory downtown, where they can always be accounted for publicly?
A4.11: Individuals wishing to exchange their Personhood for Power as part of the Monster inherit the status of and all Obligations held by the Monster, and in doing so become its Agents.
What's the point of becoming a part of the government if the People don't treat you like you're a part of the government?
Too often we fall into the trap of giving these psychopaths the benefit of the doubt and pretending “they're just normal people like us” when we all know they're not. Remember at all times that government officials, by accepting the Power they have been entrusted with, have unforgivably violated the natural order in a way you and I have not.
To pretend like they are not fully immersed in and unicompositional with the government is willful ignorance. Those who occupy the seats of the Monster are the Monster, and they should be treated interchangeably.
Part II
Among the greatest tragedies of American history is the commitment of cultural confidence in the instruments of governance. This unwarranted confidence fermented into a uniquely venomous idea: that officials of the State, elected and appointed, constitute a class of renown deserving of special respect and deference. It is of unparalleled importance that this delusion be expelled from our minds, individually and collectively as Americans. It must be replaced with the absolute knowledge that officials of the State constitute quite the opposite: a laboring underclass, owned by the People as property.
Consider the history of governance. If one were to open any history textbook (preferably not one written in this country), one would find a rather large list of names but not a single angel. This is not surprising, as all of sound mind are aware of the ugly truth of politics. What does frequently astonish is the willingness that many express to ignore this truth and participate in a game rigged against them regardless. Indeed, many a Western democracy has pretended to drown in scandals of corruption and self-dealing, and never has a Western demos sought a remedy. Political participation continues as if nothing has happened, and so the system absorbs any outrage by kicking the can of revolt one election further ad infinitum. It would seem, then, necessary to reformulate the ugly truth into a stickier concept, one that allows no weaseling:
No well-adjusted human being seeks a position of institutional power over other human beings.
Readers may note a rather absolutist mentality pervades this sentiment, and might wonder if they have taken away the correct interpretation. Fortunately for them, there is no other interpretation to be had. No partisan alignment nor individual policy focus can tear any prospective politician from this axiom, nor should it. No speech or public appearance of reasonableness can divorce any civil servant from this axiom, nor should it. Truly, if any body politic is to regain control of the system claiming to represent them, they must internalize the observable fact that a desire for power is indicative of a basal psychopathy no medicine can even begin to treat. To ignore this truth—or worse, to build a state in opposition to this truth—is to abscond oneself of any moral faculty.
All arguments for or against the state should turn on this matter of morality, since politics is, at the end of the day, a moral undertaking, as the state is a functioning embodiment of moral arbitration. That is to say: the state is a machine designed to resolve moral disputes between moral actors. The mistake, then, lies in how this status is framed, and that framing is established not by statement or statute but through culture.
A culture that elevates the state above a constituency, placing it in power over them, is a culture that gives itself over to corruption and fascism from ideological fundament. Once that elevation is ingrained and social constructions are built upon it, mechanisms for oppression are permanently extant and protected from removal. Constituencies, from such a position, are under tyranny by definition, simply because their culture has defined such organization as the default construction. Rejections to any alternative constructions can be delivered on the basis that they deviate from the established norm, or that they stand in opposition to current values, both of which the state now has an interest in preserving at all costs.
The solution, then, is not a reform of current procedure or a mild alteration of the state's temperament, but a wholesale rejection of the fundament on which it sits and the uncompromising insistence on its inversion: the state is in service beneath its constituency. This degradation must be enforced through culture just as the current formulation. When we acknowledged earlier that no well-adjusted human being seeks positions of power, we defined those who do as psychopaths who actively and consistently seek to do harm to others. Once this definition is locked in as ideological fundament, we gain the ability to treat them as such.
Imagine a world where an individual seeking public office is not celebrated or cheered on but insulted and harassed. Political rallies would become humiliation rituals, where the public exercises its moral duty to shame and discourage the candidate from continuing to run. Political parties would be considered organized criminal enterprises, dedicated to the committing of immoral acts with the intent to harm the public peace. Sitting officers would, ideally, be treated as the most heinous of felons, stripped of their rights and forced to work through their terms of service in abusive and squalid conditions. All of this would culminate in the degradation of civil servants to the status of property rather than full personhood, starving them of the benefits they currently enjoy through their double-dipping.
Indeed, a cultural hostility to governance is critical to maintaining supreme political power where any reasonable person would want it to be: in the hands of the governed. If you, as a constituent, have an ownership stake in your government via ownership of your elected representatives, you have direct access to the mechanisms of governance. When elected representatives disobey the instructions or betray the interests of their constituencies, they are not protected by any social conventions surrounding the electoral process but now at the mercy of their constituents directly. The state, under this formulation, becomes akin to a domestic animal. Its owner, the constituency, not only has exclusive and supreme control over this animal, but is insulated from prosecution on the grounds of harm done to the animal.
The question of politics, then, becomes reduced to a conversation about discipline and the method of its delivery upon the state. To continue with the analogy, suppose the animal were to lunge against an animal owned by a different constituency, attacking it without being ordered to. The constituency would have the power and obligation to restrain the animal and apply the necessary disciplinary force to discourage the animal from doing such a thing again. If the necessary force is blunt trauma, so be it: the only priority should be enforcing the discontinuation of the prohibited activity. The constituency, as the lawful owner of the animal, may determine it needs to be beaten, stabbed, shot, or set aflame and none of these methods would be morally dispermitted. To the contrary, such discipline would be, under this ethical construction, morally obligatory in order to secure complete and unwavering obedience of the state to its constituency.
This is, in essence, the acceptance of Franklin's utterance that free governments are ones where the rulers are servants and the ruled are their superiors; the very concept of popular sovereignty taken to its logical conclusion with extreme prejudice. Application of such a concept, then, is neither antithetical to our current structure of law nor impeded by it, as such a measure already exists within the American Constitution in the form of the Thirteenth Amendment. Rather than outlawing the holding of human beings as chattel slaves, the Thirteenth seeks to enshrine the practice by narrowing its codification to a punishment for criminal activity. Movement from current immoral cultural fundaments to the prescription herein is simple and uncontroversial: a constituency need do little more than simply define the holding of public office as a criminal act punishable by slavery for the duration of the office's term of service.
Once such definition is made concrete and immovable within criminal code, downstream policy change becomes simplified and cultural attitudes can properly shift in the direction of liberty. That being said, even if official legislative action is needed for the former, the latter is devoid of such necessity. You can, at the present moment, simply decide to adopt a Subjugationist cultural frame of reference, adapting your ethical constructs to define the abuse of public officers as legitimate civic engagement. Active, open hatred of governance at all levels and the complete dehumanization of those who form part of it are truly the only commitments the Subjugationist alignment requires.
The Subjugationist creed is minimal in that regard: those who make up the State are the State, and the State has no rights. In affirming this creed you become free. In rejecting it you become enslaved.