Voluntaryism versus Power – Part I: The Object of Power

Originally published on A Plague on Both Houses Substack

Jones Plantation: Not just another slave movie. It’s a movie about our ‘democracy’

“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.” – George Orwell – 1984 [emphasis added]

By the end of this piece, I hope to have conveyed what I think Orwell was trying to say about power – both the will to power in every human psyche, and political power, which is the individual will to power made manifest in the social and political world. The battle being waged in all of us, and therefore in the world at large, is that between power and its counterbalance, voluntaryism. It is therefore both an inner spiritual and outer communal or political battle. The battle must start on the inside and work its way outwards.

Government is not working. What is voluntaryism?

Government is not working. I’m not talking about this particular government. I’m talking about the whole concept of government. Government is the idea that we place a cross against the name of a political party representing the, or a, ruling class, and then allow that party to do whatever it pleases for five years with the money it extracts from us. This idea is collective madness. I do not need to bore readers of this blog with examples of policies that our government has and is enacting, that we do not consent to. You know exactly what I mean. If a thief breaks into your home, steals all the cash under your bed and buys cocaine with it, we call that theft. But when a group of 650 MPs elected to manage the vested interests of a ruling class does more outrageous things with the taxes it extracts from us – things that we would never sanction – we call this ‘government’.

But here’s the thing – even if the government accidentally does something you do not violently object to, you cannot say that you approve of it any more than a slave can say he approves of his master giving him the day off on Christmas. Sometimes the slave master will beat you and sometimes he won’t, but you don’t congratulate the slave master for not wielding the stick on a particular day. You’re just relieved. People engage in the mass ritual of voting and then complain about all the arbitrary acts of terror inflicted on them in the following five years. “We did not sign up for this”, they say. And they’re right. We didn’t sign up for it; not by voting and not by any other act of consent. Voting is simply the religious ritual in which the members of the cult called ‘Democracy’ signify to their high priests that they will stoically endure the abuse that follows after the election.

The most cursory examination of modern history will tell you that it is government terror in one form or another that has consistently delivered the bulk of pain and suffering that humanity has endured. Not floods, not fires, not plagues, not earthquakes, but governments. So the ineluctable conclusion is that we have passively acquiesced to a condition of slavery. And a slave, even if content on some days, is not in a position to approve of the condition. He or she can only come to an understanding that they aren’t free, and then decide that it isn’t acceptable. At that point, the slave has a chance of abandoning the whole arrangement. Insofar as our slave ‘democracy’ is concerned, this is where the concept and value of voluntaryism comes in.

The vast majority of what the government does is by coercion, and it has a system called ‘the law’, and mercenaries called ‘the police’, to impose its rule over us. I am not advocating abolishing all law, and I’m not advocating sacking all police officers. But given the sheer levels of coercion we are experiencing, it would not be difficult to start rooting out agencies, policies, and actions that are totally coercive. The primary guiding principle would be one of assessing whether there is a restraint of evil taking place or whether there is an attempt to do ‘good’. The former is welcome, and the latter is paradoxically almost always coercive. Underpinning this guiding principle is Natural Law, which at its core dictates that we have the right not to be assaulted, and we have the right not to suffer theft. Any government policy that is not directed at protecting people, with their agreement, from assault and theft is probably not voluntary since it does not address a Natural Law transgression. There will be exceptions, which is why I say “probably”.

Thus, enacting a law dictating that I must have a smart meter in my home and enabling state organised violence to enforce this policy is not voluntary and violates Natural Law; taking our money and using it to fund a genocide is not voluntary and clearly violates Natural Law; using police resources to arrest people for speaking their minds is a violation of voluntaryism and of Natural Law. It is highly likely that most government policies and actions that aren’t mutually voluntary tend to also violate Natural Law! They’re not neutral.

Voluntaryism is not complicated; we all know exactly what it means. The problem is that, as feudalism evolved into ‘democracy’, the ruling class played a blinder on us. Many of us haven’t yet realised that the biggest institution in our lives that manages the interests of the ruling class – the government – is not a voluntary association. It is simply a more sophisticated form of feudalism – people at the top of a pyramid taking from and dictating to people at the bottom. We need to make all arrangements and institutions in our life voluntary, and it would be absurd to exclude government from this, since government is by far the biggest encroachment on our lives. At which point, government won’t be government anymore. It will operate in the same way as all the other myriad institutions in our communities – voluntarily.

In a spirit of humility, it's important for me to add that I did not come out of my mother’s womb knowing what I have expressed above. Despite knowing the value of voluntaryism, I too was once under the spell of government, although probably not as deeply as many are. The ideas I’ve expressed above are much better expressed in Larkin Rose’s book: The Most Dangerous Superstition, recently publicised by James Corbett. More of us need to wake up from the nightmare of government, and if you’re interested in rational arguments against the superstition of government, I highly recommend starting with Rose’s book.

To win a political battle, the cause must be successfully couched in spiritual terms – terms that define values. Not all values are worth fighting for, which is precisely why political parties are in a constant battle to convince you to the contrary, as far as the policies to protect the vested interests they serve go. It’s also why no political party has ever promoted voluntaryism as a value. It is a threat to political power because it is the opposite of power. Voluntaryism is a self-evident good, like free speech, privacy, and freedom itself. In fact, you cannot acquire those values listed in the last sentence without voluntaryism.

If you find yourself having to explain the value of freedom or voluntaryism to someone, you know you’re not dealing with a sentient human being. Just back away very slowly, keeping one eye on the door and the other eye on this humanoid to make sure they don’t  stab you in the skull with a small but serviceable pickaxe.

What is dark power?

The opposite of voluntaryism is coercion, and coercion is the exercise of dark power. To be clear, I’m referring to political power and its correlate in the individual psyche – the will to dominate. I’m talking about the dark side of human nature that seeks to control others. While it should be obvious that I am referring to dark power when discussing political power, I will contrast it with light power to emphasise that the latter is nourished by voluntaryism. Light power is the power of love, the power of compassion, the power of forgiveness. We all know there is a power that flows from the human ability to perform life affirming acts of joy, personal achievement, love, compassion, cooperation, and compromise. There is a power inherent in the exercise of talent, imagination and skill that can be directed towards the fulfilment of meaning, purpose and life itself. That is a life affirming power. All of that power flourishes in the power of voluntaryism.

On the other hand, the coercion inherent in dark power engenders resentment, which cannot, in any way, lead to the fulfilment of light power. That dark power corrupts is a truism because it is antagonistic to life-affirming power. The will to power does not foster love, compassion, cooperation, compromise. Dark power censors you when it disagrees with you, mandates behaviour when you don’t do as it instructs, sanctions you when you try to go your own way, and kills you if all else fails.

The will to power, to dominate, is elemental. By that I mean, we have many psychological theories for its existence, but no amount of understanding or explaining can eliminate it. This is the power Orwell spoke of. It is not a tool or a means to anything other than the expression of itself. Power controls because it can. The thrill of control is the same as the thrill of a destructive addiction. Those who perceive themselves as weak want it, and those who have it are consumed by it. The powerful are able to consume power because it is given to them by the weak. When we surrender the power of voluntaryism, it is alchemised by the controllers into the power of domination.

Power has reached its zenith in the forces we are fighting, but you don’t have to look too far to find it in the ‘freedom’ movement too. If you’ve ever found yourself wishing you had the same power as Bill Gates to do to him what he is doing to us, then that’s the will to power whispering in your ear. When you fight power with power, power wins. The only true way to win both the political and spiritual battle is to ensure Bill Gates’ will to power drowns in a tsunami of mass voluntaryism. That, to Bill Gates and his ilk, would be a living death, because they live for the power we give them when we surrender the power of voluntaryism.

The story of Peter Thiel is the story of the will to power at the psychotic end of the spectrum, and it is also the story of the power we are up against. The entire swarm of plutocratic oligarchs pissing on humanity today is just a gaggle of Peter Thiels and their minions – entitled nerds with a grossly inflated sense of self-worth, bullied at school, and primed to weaponise the lethal combination of a Machiavellian mindset and the will to power. If there are any psychologists out there ready to explore the revenge of the bullied nerd as an  explanation of the looming end of civilisation, I’m all ears.

Power wins when those who have it exercise it, as they inevitably will, and crucially, when those who would like to have it but don’t, end up siding with power to experience the vicarious thrill of having it. That was the covid psyop in a nutshell. Once power had dictated lockdowns, masks and following arrows in a supermarket, power’s skivvies in the professional managerial class gleefully went to work to enforce the ridiculous. Order-following, especially when it entails oppressing someone else, is a thrill because it is the vicarious enjoyment of dark power through the surrender of one’s own power. A non-voluntaryist order-follower finds it easy to obey because they would do exactly what the order-giver is doing if they possessed the same resources and power. This is why the order-follower is really on the same side as the order-giver. Following orders is a soothing drug for the non-voluntaryist because they vibrate to the dictates of power.

It should be clear by now that the discussion of power and voluntaryism is an apophatic thought experiment. By apophatic, I mean gaining an understanding of something by understanding its opposite. One cannot truly understand voluntaryism unless one understands dark power and vice versa. Voluntaryism is the negation of the will to power; the will to power is the negation of voluntaryism. For one to flourish, the other must die. To argue against voluntaryism is to advocate for coercion. To advocate for coercion is to advocate for tyranny and oppression in myriad forms. On the other hand, if you despise power, you must love voluntaryism.

If the will to power is the political and spiritual problem, voluntaryism is the solution on both fronts. Rights like bodily autonomy, free speech, and privacy are nearly always a test of the principle of voluntaryism because the exercise of these rights is a negation of coercion by those with power. Which is why power seeks to deploy sophistry to discredit voluntaryism. One of power’s most pernicious sophist arguments is: “with rights come responsibilities”. This is immediately followed by a spurious ‘responsibility’ to give up your rights! A prime example: being forced to sacrifice the right to bodily autonomy to meet your ‘responsibility’ to ‘protect others’. While these arguments always have logical flaws embedded in them – a right is not a right if it can be cancelled out by a so-called responsibility – they also invariably fail on the logical terms of the issue itself. If inserting a substance into your body is designed to protect your body, then having it inserted into someone else’s body to protect your own body is clearly a manifestation of a psychic meltdown between one’s own bodily boundary and everyone else’s.

“With rights come responsibilities” is bullshit. The rights stand on their own; they are not diluted or cancelled by anything, including ‘responsibilities’. A right is an absolute non-negotiable moral good. With rights come rights. A right is inalienable or else it is not a right. The true test of your commitment to a right is your willingness to grant it to those with whom you may have the strongest disagreements. The only duty you have is to respect the rights of others as you would your own. The only responsibility you have is to fight to ensure everyone else has the same rights as you. That’s the most effective way of safeguarding your rights.

You can’t argue with voluntaryism. To argue with or deny voluntaryism is to invert the teachings of Christ Himself. The intention here is obviously not to alienate other spiritual belief systems since all the greatest spiritual teachers say the same thing. It is not even necessarily an advertisement of my own spiritual beliefs since I am reluctant to wear my spirituality on my sleeve for numerous reasons. It’s simply a reference to what is most familiar to me. Those from other spiritual backgrounds will be able to transfer the point I’m trying to make to their own teachings. Christ was the archetypal voluntaryist and, as I say, being a Christian is not a prerequisite for acknowledging that. Whether they know it or not, atheists and humanists with sound moral principles are simply practicing voluntaryism as Christ intended. It’s loving your neighbour as yourself, and doing unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Many have described the struggle we are engaged in as a battle between good and evil. This characterisation is prone to denigration by humanist atheists as a gross simplification of the crises we face. But I’m afraid that at a fundamental level, this really is a battle between good and evil. The battle for free speech, the cry to halt genocide, the fight for individual sovereignty – these are all battles over right versus wrong, moral versus immoral, Natural Law versus the law of the jungle. In short, good versus evil. Everything that has ever been worth fighting for has always been a battle between good and evil. Getting you to think about big issues in less than moral terms is a psyop because it disconnects your judgement from Natural Law and from your conscience. That is evil.

Another reason humanists balk at the good-vs-evil characterisation is that it smacks of overbearing piety. And that is definitely unattractive. But it isn’t pious, because denigrating power as an evil isn’t about self-righteous finger-pointing. It’s about recognising that we need to be more voluntaryist. In reality, the battle starts with ourselves and ends with ourselves. Thus, we must point the finger at ourselves. The battle can only be won when we collectively conduct an internal power purge and collectively start practicing voluntaryism. It cannot be won by throwing stones. Once we understand the power of voluntaryism, walking away from power is all that’s required.

Nor does characterising the battle as good versus evil detract from the complexity of the battle and the battlefield. The war is so all-encompassing that people cannot discern its contours and therefore cannot see it precisely because it is everywhere, and our mental focus and vision are limited. In order to see more than what is put immediately in front of us, we need to exercise our peripheral vision by constantly feeding our minds with information outside the controllers’ propaganda. We need to look behind the curtain to truly understand what is unfolding on the stage. Too much is simply not understood because only a fraction of the story is presented. That is complicated. That is part of fifth generation warfare. But the war itself is not complicated. They are fighting to conquer our minds, our bodies, our wealth, our speech, our privacy, our natural environment. And the array of weapons deployed is vast – pharmaceutical, financial, media, digital, weather, military, food.

Those  with power seeking to subjugate us can muddy the waters with appeals to ‘science’, convenience, comfort, wealth and other paradigms divorced from right and wrong. But if something is wrong, if something is evil, no amount of science or convenience can get you to acquiesce to it. Those with power know that, and they fear it. That is why science has been hijacked, repackaged as a religion, and presented as the final arbiter of right and wrong. It is not. Voluntaryism is right, and dark power, however it is disguised, is wrong.

Capitalism, communism and isms in general. Why voluntaryism isn’t an ism!

With the exception of voluntaryism, isms tend to denote ideologies of which I am now generally scornful. So it’s probably worth discussing some other isms if only to prove that, by contrast, voluntaryism is not an ideology – it’s a value in opposition to power; a fundamental moral good. It is a moral compass.

What’s wrong with ideologies? Morris Berman’s aphorism is a good starting point: “an idea is something you have; an ideology is something that has you”. They are systems of thought, heavy on belief and light on facts and truth, designed by small groups of power seekers as vehicles to move large groups of people in the direction the power seekers want them to go – a mental control pen. Dressed in false morality, ideologies are almost always vehicles for subjugation and power concentration.

Conservative Americans are apt to think of China as communist. It’s understandable given the Communist revolution that took place in the first half of the 20^th century, led by the Chinese Communist Party, which is still the only player  in Chinese politics. But in reality, China is now a state-controlled authoritarian capitalist oligarchy. Quite a mouthful, but it really is all those things. When China embarked on its economic reforms as part of its agreement with the West to become the world’s provider of cheap consumer goods, it went from being an economy of State-Owned Enterprises to a hybrid that included privatised entities. Corruption and cronyism permeated this process, with the result that these private entities are largely extensions of economic power projected by the Chinese political elite. It has become abundantly clear over the last five years that the Big Pharma, Big Tech and Big Finance monopolies in the West are also extensions of economic power projected by the West’s political elite who are incestuously linked to these businesses. So, the Chinese and Western polities today are far more similar than the average American conservative might care to admit.

The Chinese political economy  appears more efficient than the US plutocracy, which is equally corrupt but more messy owing to the perceived need to disguise plutocracy as ‘democracy’. That of course is undergoing a revolution towards something more closely approximating the Chinese model, of which the West’s parasitic class is extremely envious. If they get their way, it will be technocracy with a faded ‘democracy’ stamp left on it so the vax-stupefied citizenry have something warm and familiar with which to console themselves as they use their meagre allowance of carbon credits to shop for the next meal of bugs. The main point being that China is not communist. It is a more efficient version of the US’s current ‘capitalist’ farce. 

So what’s the state of capitalism  in the West? Well, I’ve more than hinted at that already. We’re hurtling towards a sinister One World Government under the UN’s Pact for the Future; a WHO governed biomedical global fascist dictatorship, and; a global digital gulag that posits the strangulation of free speech as the only way to achieve ‘online safety’ and defend our ‘democracy’ from ‘far-right’ mal-, dis-, and mis-information. Because, as we all know, every historical civilisational collapse can be unequivocally traced back to the foolish citizenry reading printed matter that hadn’t been ‘fact-checked’ by the ruling parasitic class.

As for capitalism’s much vaunted claims to free enterprise, that would be a fine thing indeed, except it was always destined for destruction under the piratical capitalism that has existed from day one. The clue to what capitalism is lies in the name. Capital is the cash or other assets required to start a business that requires an initial investment to get it off the ground. It can come from savings, but more often than not it comes from debt issued by the banking industry, aka the banksters. The more capital you have, the more business opportunities you can exploit to employ a workforce and buy the equipment necessary to make the venture work. Capital is therefore a lever, and the aim of that lever is to get back the initial capital invested and then some. The “then some” is called profit, the word every entrepreneur dreams of.

The chief problem is that the more capital you own and control, the more power and wealth you accumulate. It will not be news to readers of this blog that the world has never seen a greater concentration of wealth and power – capital – in the hands of so few. And the best term I have seen to describe that little clique, a term I have gleefully appropriated because of its power to accurately describe this little clique, is the Owners and Controllers of Global Financial Capital (OCGFC). They have the power, and in case you’ve forgotten the significance of power, glance again at the title of, and introduction to, this article.

Capitalism has power concentration, and therefore authoritarianism, baked into it, because the key to economic power is access to capital, and access to capital is not democratic, and never has been. Capitalism is the evolution of feudalism. The thugs who were in the front of the queue in that system were also in pole position when Adam Smith started waxing lyrical about capitalism. The goal of enterprise under capitalism is and always has been to firstly hog the capital, get bigger, and then eliminate the competition. It’s designed to strangle free enterprise. The capitalist romantics delude themselves by insisting that competition is fundamental to capitalism. What we have been witnessing over the last 100-200 years is the inevitable power concentration that is a design feature of capitalism.

As for the sacred right to private ownership, there is a clear stated intent on the part of the oligarchic parasites to relieve us of that burden. I’m all for private ownership, not for ideological reasons, but because I happen to think humans have a natural urge to call certain important material goods their own – like a roof over your head. Your roof, not some fat landlord’s roof that you rent and might be kicked out of in three months. But it’s capitalist ‘elites’ who are now telling us that owning nothing is the ticket to happiness.

The power of global capital has reached its zenith, and it no longer needs to pretend that it was a free enterprise system bringing burgers, movies, handbags, and general consumerist nirvana to the planet. In fact, having reached its logical end point – total power – it is unable to pretend. There was never any way that the capitalist plutocracy was going to spare its own citizens from the horrors it had wrought on everyone else around the globe in the centuries prior to this one. How or why could it? In the same way that colonial subjects were instructed to obey or die, Western subjects are now being fast-tracked into an obey-or-die dystopia. Of course, there is always a ‘reason’ to obey that disguises the raw will to power and to subjugate. In colonial times, it was a ‘civilising’ mission. For Western subjects today, it’s ‘saving the planet’, saving our ‘democracies’ from ‘misinformation’, saving us from the existential threat of ‘pandemics’, saving us from Russia. Funny how being saved from something is a prerequisite for enslavement!

The two mythical C-isms are two sides of the same coin – the power coin. They are simply manifestations of power, and the only way to confront the power devouring the soul of humanity is with something approximating its exact opposite – a Voluntaryist social, economic and spiritual revolution.

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In Part II, I’ll discuss my journey from ‘leftism’ to voluntaryism and the potential rebranding of anarchism to voluntaryism