Voluntaryism versus Power – Part II: Leaving the Left, Rebranding Anarchism & Hobbesian Propaganda

Originally published on A Plague on Both Houses

Bob Moran

My journey from leftism to voluntaryism

Pre-covid, I wore a “Far Left” identity badge. In the interests of full disclosure, this did not stop me from drinking champagne. So, let me explain what my conception of “Far Left” was.

Having arrived in the UK in 2005 with a poor understanding of the left-right paradigm – in Africa you are either rich, poor, or somewhere in between – I was not indoctrinated into any of the articles of faith in British politics. One such article was that the Labour Party was a vehicle for defending the working class. Upon arrival, however, it took me roughly a week to realise that Blair’s New Labour was doing a better job of defending the interests of Capital than Thatcher ever got credit for. It was not difficult to verify this as an uncontroversial fact since Thatcher herself proudly held up New Labour as one of her greatest achievements.

Two things struck me about Labour and the Conservatives working for the same vested interests. Firstly, it was obviously nonsensical for someone who believes in rooting for the underdog to vote for either of these vampires. Secondly, the system had to be thoroughly nobbled for this to have happened. These two observations led me to conclude that any political position worth taking had to rest on a trashing and burning of this broken system. For me, ‘Far Left’ was a reasonable banner to rally under for the purpose of signifying meaningful change to the system, and distancing from the wolf in sheep’s clothing – the Labour ‘left’.

That’s why I had never voted for Labour until November 2019, when Corbyn emerged as the only decent, albeit feckless, human to have risen to power in politics in several decades. Crucially, I thought he was interested, albeit vaguely, in changing The System. Which brings us back to the discussion of political power, begun in Part I.

Paradoxically and accidentally, The System had thrust someone who didn’t want power into a position of power. Seemingly clueless about how to operate in a system in which power is the currency of exchange, Corbyn immediately set out to demonstrate how decency can make you rudderless in the stream of power. Like a rabbit in the headlights, he naively embraced his enemies and threw his friends under the bus. A man who had no appetite for power proceeded to disappoint people who desperately wanted him to grip the sword and smite their enemies with it. In the end, debate ensued as to whether Corbyn was capable of gripping his own toothbrush, as he drowned in the anti-antisemitism tsunami, and then fell into the Brexit trap set for him by the right-wing of the Labour Party by adopting an ambiguous stance.

Lord Voldemort, aka Keir Starmer, never had an easier job of dashing his enemies’ brains against the rocks of power as he did with Corbyn from 2015 to 2019. A crushed Corbyn degenerated into a dithering fool as he stood in front of a Premier League football stadium and used its brand to promote ‘vaccines’. In a tragic twist of fate for someone who wanted to fight power but did not truly understand it, and perhaps even as two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose, he had prostrated himself at the alter of Big Pharma and the WEF.

The woeful tale of Oh Jeremy Corbyn is in fact an instructional tale about power. Decent people who eschew power cannot do battle with it on its own terms and expect to win. Labour, Conservatives and the entire establishment are one and the same vampire doing exactly what you’d expect – drinking the blood of Ukrainians and Palestinians and, equally apposite for vampires, blocking the sun with stratospheric aerosol injection, to name but two of its evil deeds. We, and not Jeremy Corbyn or anyone else, hold the key to turning this vampire to dust – the crucifix of Voluntaryism.

Many subscribers to this blog know that much of my output also gets published on Real Left. So am I Real Left? I don’t think labels are important anymore. I haven’t disagreed with Real Left on anything, and I know that, given all the tests that have been thrown at us these past 4.5 years, we will remain friends regardless of what political differences may eventually surface. Real Left are a remnant of the old Left that understands that nothing, absolutely nothing, that The System conjures for us is good. They understand that the object of power is power. Covid taught us to despise power and to love voluntaryism.

In conversations I’ve had with friends who gravitated to Real Left, and who spit at the mention of the totalitarian, power-crazed Pfizer Left, we ask ourselves the what-are-we question. And with increasing frequency, I started to answer tentatively: “I think we might be anarchists.”

I am grateful to the Covidian Cult for sparking my interest in this hitherto mysterious fringe political sect. I can say with a high degree of certainty that the anarchist commentators and writers I have encountered since 2020 are the ones with whom I tend to agree most violently. James Corbett, Nevermore Media, Paul Cudenec, Winter Oak. It was James Corbett, referring to his anarchist principles, who planted the word “voluntaryist” in my lexicon. If James Corbett is a self-declared anarchist, you could say that my journey to voluntaryism passed, at high speed, through anarchism. At any rate, to the extent that I feel like an anarchist, it’s because the anarchist literature I’ve seen thus far embraces voluntaryism. It is not based on a deep exploration of anarchist thought, though I will continue to explore it.

If discovering that you’re in the wrong place and then getting the hell out of Dodge can be described as a journey, then yes, I’ve journeyed. The one thing I should be clear on about this journey is that I haven’t changed my values. If I am a new person, it comes from greater clarity about what my values are, and I know that the tribe I thought I belonged to does not share them. I try to forget the injury of deceit, which is a peculiar affront that makes it possible to harbour greater resentment towards a former friend who deceives you than a perennial enemy who doesn’t. But it’s very hard not to loathe a lobotomised zombie death cult as it lumbers confidently into the climate alarmist and ‘pandemic’ traps set for it by the Owners and Controllers of Global Financial Capital.

That said, I’m not in search of a new -ism or membership in a new club. I don’t need a membership card to remind me of who I am. I know what my values are, and -ism badges, for reasons explained in Part I, are not reliable indicators of values. That’s because isms are not values; they are tribal affiliations. However, my intuition thus far tells me that anarchism has the potential to be the least tribal and most values-driven of all the political tribal affiliations. That may be because it’s more of a spiritual movement than a political one, which is a compliment, not a criticism.

What’s in a name? From anarchism to voluntaryism?

When Nevermore Media published a piece titled “Should Anarchists rebrand as Voluntaryists?”, I responded in the comments section:

“The biggest problem anarchism has is branding. This solves it. I must also add that I'm actually a bit pissed off about this excellent article for the simple reason that I've had this in my head as an article idea for some time now and...I sat on it for too long.”

As far as the history behind the branding problem goes, Etienne de la Boetie explained that Bastards Inc. succeeded at some point in changing the definition of Anarchy from "No Rulers" to chaos and dystopia by corrupting the dictionary aficionados. Disappointing but unsurprising – if you’re in the business of government, people trying to abolish it are clearly a threat. Ironically, it’s the definition of government that is in desperate need of an overhaul. “Government” is derived from the root Latin words ‘gubernare’ (to rule), and mens (mind). Just think of the word government as the Latin derivation of Psyop. 

Putting aside this nefarious distortion of the meaning of anarchism, chaos is in fact the natural order of things. The natural world, including humans, is designed to move in and out of equilibrium, like wave motion or breathing. "Going with the flow” is the embodiment of the embrace of natural chaos. The disease that is begging for a cure is the desire to impose order when taken to the sick levels implicit in technocracy – a manifestation of the will to power. I’m fine with natural chaos. Going with the flow is possibly the one thing that voluntaryists should seek to make mandatory!

Someone else commented on the Nevermore Media piece that “branding isn’t that important”. If that comment represents the views of anarchists more broadly, then I can confidently say that anarchism is destined to languish on the outermost fringes of Nowhere Land until the year 7893. Need I remind people that Brexit was won on the strength of three words: Take Back Control. If anarchists don’t understand communication in politics, that may be why I’d never really heard of them until the Covidian Cult sprang their version of Springtime for Hitler on the world.

Another interesting comment that confirmed my circumspection about latching onto an -ism was:

“I think anarchists can validly rebrand as voluntaryists if they believe that human interactions should be voluntary. This is not a universal opinion among anarchists, sadly.” [emphasis added]

Indeed. The self-declared anarchist, intellectual and human rights defender Noam Chomsky advocated for the removal of the unvaccinated from society and, if they starved to death…well, “that’s actually their problem”, he said. He describes himself as an anarcho-syndicalist, which actually has a distinctly criminal air to it and might explain his barbaric stance on starving people for refusing the medical establishment’s snake oil. At any rate, if anarchism is predicated on the abolition of hierarchical government and the organisation of society on a voluntary, cooperative basis, then a form of anarchism that doesn’t wholly embrace voluntaryism is as unfathomable to me as a Christian rejecting the New Testament.

It would be surprising if all anarchists spoke with one voice. But you’d expect anarchists of the purist school to want to wake up from the nightmare of government. And perhaps never before in the history of government have anarchists been presented with such a golden opportunity. More and more of us are bridling at having to supinely accept government ‘authority’ to make us pay for an S&M service we never asked for, whether it’s spending our money on killing sprees in Ukraine and Gaza, laundering it in Rwanda, enriching Big Pharma executives for ‘vaccines’ that do a far better job of maiming than immunising, or generally subsidising the filthy rich with an endless slew of wealth transfer scams.

Even the sacred NHS is doing its best to attract a greater share of public ire. And it definitely earned it – we were all abused by the NHS for at least a year from 2020-21 in the simple act of its refusal to treat people while its staff performed choreographed dance routines in empty wards.

Voluntaryist societies will evolve as people come to see the present system for what it is – rule by corrupt, inept, coercive, and concentrated power. People with the requisite talent to build new systems will do so when they have rejected power and embraced voluntaryist cooperation. For the old systems to die, new institutions must grow and present themselves as attractive alternatives.

Government institutions cannot be abolished overnight. To the extent that non-coercive government institutions are necessary to the functioning of our complex societies, their remit has to be limited to the restraint of evil. Natural Law morality must be injected into them, notwithstanding the inherent oxymoron that exists for anarchists in contemplating moral government.

Citizens who wish to ‘do good’ can form private cooperatives and limit their do-gooding to its voluntary members. That is obviously not an attack on being caring and compassionate. It is a recognition that government cannot mandate caring on our behalf. If you are forced to care, all accountability for the effects of your caring is removed, which is how caring can turn into its opposite – abuse. And, as we well know, being ‘good’ has been very effectively weaponised to deliver all manner of control and subjugation.

Voluntaryism does not mean signing up to the Wild West, but it does mean accepting and underwriting a lot more of our own risks. The alternative is what we have now – the government dictating and creating risks for you, and then getting you to pay for ‘solutions’ which not only entail more suffering, but increase its power over you. The challenge is to transmute voluntaryism as a spiritual movement into a practical principle for restructuring corrupt institutions. But people must first embrace it as an all-pervasive societal value. Covid tyranny has definitely moved the dial in the right direction. The Machiavelli in me is wondering how we could weaponise wokeness to deliver on a voluntaryist programme.

Whether or not anarchists are open to rebranding to voluntaryism depends on what anarchists want and how they want to get it. I don’t know the answer to that because I’m not an anarchist. The renaming problem is more than just ‘rebranding’. It’s actually a rethink about what and who you are – your purpose and meaning. From where I’m standing, voluntaryism is more meaningful and purposeful than anarchism. Anarchism is esoteric, but voluntaryism hits you where it matters – in the gut.

In opening up the rebranding discussion, anarchists may have unwittingly kickstarted a process to expose fake anarchists. If voluntaryism is not seen as the core component of anarchism – the thing that makes anarchists anarchists – then there will be no rebranding to voluntaryism. In my view, that ought to lead to an Anarchist / Voluntaryist schism that leaves the Chomskys behind in a fetid authoritarian swamp of decomposing anarcho-syndicalists!

Regardless of whether anarchists rebrand or not, I will continue to hope against hope for a day when a critical mass agrees on the aspiration to move from involuntary, imposed government to cooperative ‘government’ or voluntaryism.

Contrary to Hollywood propaganda, it doesn’t have to be this way

A societal (r)evolution to voluntaryism can’t happen until humans understand how we got here as societies; how and why did humans go from being free to collectively opting for mass suicide by government?

In a dinner-table sermon delivered by Harrison Ford’s character, Jacob Dutton, in the TV drama 1923, Dutton explains to a rapt dinner-table audience that pre-modern groups of people numbering under 500 did not need systems of government. When the numbers within a group rose to above 500, “the strongest people would take advantage of the weakest. Every time, without fail. They would enslave, rape, steal. Enrich their lives at the expense of other people’s lives.” The moral of the story:

“Government is man’s way of trying to control our behaviour but it can’t be controlled. That’s what we are. Sooner or later the kind of people that would enrich themselves at your expense will use the government to do it. And mark my words, one day they’ll create laws to control what we say and how we think. They’ll outlaw our right to disagree, if we let them.”  

Hollywood propaganda wouldn’t work unless there was a dash of truth in it. You would expect smaller groups of people to be preoccupied with survival, and not war or exploitation. Cooperation is the default position in small numbers perhaps because the smaller the group, the greater the existential threat posed by conflict. Specialism and hierarchy is introduced in larger groups, allowing resources to be diverted from the main group and exploited. But Dutton’s Hobbesian conclusion to the dilemma of government is self-contradictory. It recognises our inherent capacity for cooperation and then posits that it vanishes on the basis of a simple yet mysterious mathematical hypothesis – a Hobbesian rule of 500.

The temptation to accept this rule as immutable is powerful because governments are indisputably creating laws to control what we say and how we think. They are outlawing our right to disagree. It is happening. But the lie is in the Hobbesian portrayal of humanity. Government is not “man’s way of trying to control our behaviour”. It is a psychopathic ruling clique’s way of controlling our behaviour. Dutton says we can’t be controlled – “that’s what we are”. But it’s not who we are. It’s not who I am, and it’s not who you are.

To the extent that the world we currently live in is becoming increasingly Hobbesian, it is because we have granted governing power to psychopaths who animate their vision of society. They have spent centuries making a world in their image – a world in which voluntaryism is strangled by their power. This  world becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy only if you believe “that’s what we are”. It’s then an easy job for Hobbesian propagandists, like Hobbes (!), to come along and delight in confirming the outcome that the psychopaths have engineered, with your permission. Voluntaryism is a basic design law for the 99% of humanity – the healthy humans – and the opposing worldview collapses under its weight. Our job is to reboot the voluntaryist spiritual revolution that began roughly 2000 years ago, and to get it right this time.