You look into a world of many problems, many counter-intuitive solutions, many ideologies and points of view, people divided over what they believe, and you ought to wonder, How we can put an end to war and truly have peace? We know that people will always do wrong, but could we know how to prevent such wrong from manifesting, such as to the point we have observed in World War 2? Inquiring upon the nature of conflict, people often believe that they are right in their world-view, but do they need to impose that on others using violence? We know our disagreements arise due to a variety of factors, without which, we could not have discernment or innovation. Perhaps our disagreements are not the problem, but rather how we carry them out. How is this the philosophy of the future? It is because violence is never a good philosophy, ever, as we will come to see again and again.
In the 19th century, there was a man named Auberon Herbert who postulated that our world could be based on consent, rather than violence. He called it “voluntaryism.” Many American Abolitionists such as Charles Lane would take on similar positions, but especially philosophers heading into the 20th century such as Benjamin Tucker and Leo Tolstoy. Now, in the 21st century, we have seen a resurgence of this term, this idea, as simple as it is. Why is it gaining relevance? Perhaps you can observe Auberon’s words for yourself, however we may deem it is because people act voluntarily on a daily basis, with the only exception being with politics and man-made law. All it takes is a look at humanity’s long bloody history fighting over ideology, to realize that perhaps we can respect each other’s views and allow people to live the life they voluntarily want to live, without creating “authority” (the right to rule) in man and forcibly compelling our fellow man to comply. This simple worldview, if understand and embraced in the aggregate, could turn the political world on it’s head.
Auberon explains through poetry how without voluntaryism, we become heartless slaves: “Chorus — Each man shall be free, whoever he be, And none shall say to him nay! There is only one rule for the wise and the fool — To follow his own heart’s way. For the heart of the free, whoever he be, May be stirred to a better thing; But the heart of the slave lies chill in its grave, And knows not the coming of spring.” Did the soldiers in World War 2 use their own conscience or did they follow the commands of their political authority as though they are compelled to also compel others?
He goes on to detail the nature of power: “From the moment you possess power, you are but its slave, fast bound by its many tyrant necessities. The slaveowner has no freedom; he can never be anything but a slave himself, and share in the slavery that he makes for others. It is, I think, plain it must be so. Power once gained, you must anxiously day by day watch over its security, whatever its security costs, to prevent the slippery thing escaping from your hands.”
What then do we use force or violence for? Though nonresistance or pacifist individuals may disagree only in this regard, Auberon explains: “The only true use of force is for the destruction, the annihilation of itself, to rid the world of its own mischiefmaking existence. Even when used defensively, it still remains an evil, only to be tolerated in order to get rid of the greater evil. It is the one thing in the world to be bound down with chains, to be treated as a slave, and only as a slave, that must always act under command of something better and higher than itself.”
What if somebody wants to be a slave (mental slavery), voluntarily giving themselves up? Are they much a slave at all? Auberon tells us: “It must be borne in mind that the unfailing distinction between direct and indirect compulsion, as I have employed the words, is that in one case (indirect compulsion) the person in question gives his consent, in the other case (direct compulsion) his consent is not required from him. It is no answer to say that the weakness of men is such that their own consent is a mere form. Our effort in all cases must be to build up sufficient strength in the man so as to make his consent a real thing.” We may see here, the importance in education and knowledge, so that consent is not abused, even if the person giving consent is not coercing others. The systems of government we have had are all based on some who do consent, coercing others who do not consent. Auberon goes on: “Those who bid you use force are merely using language of the same kind as every blood-stained ruler has used in the past, the language of those who paid their troops by pillage, the language of the war-loving German general, who in old days looked down from the heights surrounding Paris, and whispered with a gentle sigh 'What a city to sack!' It is the language of those who through all the past history of the world have believed in the right of conquering, in the right of making slaves, who have set up force as their god, who have tried to do by the violent hand whatever smiled to their own desires, and who only brought curses upon themselves, and a deluge of blood and tears upon the world. Force--whatever forms it takes --can do nothing for you. It can redeem nothing; it can give you nothing that is worth the having, nothing that will endure; it cannot even give you material prosperity. There is no salvation for you or for any living man to be won by the force that narrows rights, and always leaves men lower and more brutal in character than it found them. It is, and ever has been the evil genius of our race. It calls out the reckless, violent, cruel part of our nature, it wastes precious human effort in setting men to strive one against the other; it turns us into mere fighting animals; and ends, when men at last become sick of the useless strife and universal confusion.”
Dispelling common myths and concerns, he explains: “If being a slave and owning a slave are both wrong relations, what difference does it make whether there are a million slave-owners and one slave, or one slave-owner and a million slaves? Do robbery and murder cease to be what they are if done by ninety-nine per cent of the population?” “You may say, as a friend of mine says -- 'I feel neither like a slave-owner, nor like a slave' -- but his feelings, however admirable in themselves, do not alter the system, in which he consents to take part, of trying to obtain control over his fellow men; and, if he fails, in acquiescing in their control over himself.” “You can collect three men on one side, and only two on the other side, that can offer no reason--no shadow of a reason--why the three men should dispose of the lives and property of the two men, should settle for them what they are to do, and what they are to be: that mere rule of numbers can never justify the turning of the two men into slaves, and the three men into slave-owners. There is one and only one principle, on which you can build a true, rightful, enduring and progressive civilization, which can give peace and friendliness and contentment to all differing groups and sects into which we are divided and that principle is that every man and woman should be held by us all sacredly and religiously to be the one true owner of his or her faculties, of his or her body and mind, and of all property, inherited or--honestly acquired.”
Voluntaryism is merely modern Abolitionism, Auberon details: “Life divided between rulers and ruled, between slaveowners and slaves; or on the side of Liberty, that is, of self-dependence and self-responsibility, of free thought, free religion, free enterprise, free trade, of every free moral influence that grows where force is not, of all those countless individual energies and countless individual differences that arise where men are not constrained to live in imitation of each other, and of that natural selection that eventually preserves every improved form in either mental or material things, where these individual energies and individual differences are allowed to clash freely together. In other words every man has to decide for himself, as his creed in life, whether men are to be made happier by a system that rests on and believes in coercion, or a system of self-directed agencies and moral influences; whether their continual co-operation throughout life is to be voluntary or to be imposed.” “For a nation whose units are willing to place their bodies and their minds in the keeping of others, there are no hopes of growth and movement. It is only reserved to them to fall from one depth to another depth of State slavery, whilst they live in the mocking dream that they are moving onwards and upwards.” “We, who call ourselves Voluntaryists, appeal to you to free yourselves from these many systems of State force, which are rendering impossible the true and the happy life of the nations of to-day. This ceaseless effort to compel each other, in turn for each new object that is clamored for by this or that set of politicians, this ceaseless effort to bind chains round the hands of each other, is preventing progress of the real kind, is preventing peace and friendship and brotherhood, and is turning the men of the same nation, who ought to labour happily together for common ends, in their own groups, in their own free unfettered fashion, into enemies, who live conspiring against and dreading, often hating each other.”
Auberon explains true education: “To have our wants supplied from without by a huge State machinery, to be regulated and inspected by great armies of officials, who are themselves slaves of the system which they administer, will in the long run teach us nothing, will profit us nothing. The true education of children, the true provision for old age, the true conquering of our vices, the true satisfying of our wants, can only be won as we learn to form a society of free men, in which individually and in our own self-chosen groups we seek the truest way of solving these great problems. Before any real progress can be made, the great truth must sink deep into our hearts, that we cannot in any of these matters be saved by machinery, we can only be saved by moral energy in ourselves and in those around us.”
To conclude, he shares with us the one choice we actually need to take: “The great choice lies before you. No nation stands still. It must move in one direction or the other. Either the State must grow in power, imposing new burdens and compulsions, and the nation sink lower and lower into a helpless quarreling crowd, or the individual must gain his own rightful freedom, become master of himself, creature of none, confident in himself and in his own qualities, confident in his power to plan and to do, and determined to end this old-world, profitless and worn-out system of restrictions and compulsions, which is not good or healthy even for the children. Once we realize the waste and the folly of striving against each other, once we feel in our hearts that the worst use to which we can turn human energies is gaining victories over each other, then we shall at last begin in true earnest to turn the wilderness into a garden, and to plant all the best and fairest of the flowers where now only the nettles and the briars grow.” “May the day come, for us and for every other nation, when the politician, as we know him at present, shall be numbered amongst the fossils of the past, when we shall cease to desire to rule each other either by force or by trick, when we shall dread for the sake of our own selves the possession of power, when we shall recognize that there are such things as universal rights.”
Learn more from the book: theliberator.us/book
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