Hello Samuel:
I am curious as to why the insistence on self-victimization? On denying YOUR part on the theft, on the State. Carleas has a point you’re now doing everything to ignore. Let me illustrate with a sample:
Carleas: Sam, isn’t the state composed of everyone?
Your response: No.
Then you go on an elaborate, but albeit pointless argument about “definitions”. The purpose of the OP was to define the State, to find out “what” IS the State. You further request another ambiguous term: Geographical organized theft, or GOT. Let me just say that the term is full of assumptions such as the actual possession of any land, as if borders were drawn by God himself on an international map, therefore making it an actual theft. Moving along you say:
Fine. The State – according to you – is everyone and The Got is something else.
Well, in that case, I insist that The Got comprises everything I listed before:
- the police force
- the military
- the mafia
- the public schools
- the corporations
- the legal system
- the tax-collectors
- the central banks
- some or all of the above
just to name a few.
Remember that the proposed definition is that the State is everyone. The police, the military, banks, judges, so on and so forth are “Us”. This has not always been the case, as some anciet tyrants used to hire mercenaries. But, suppose we condense our discussion to a modern democratic state, then the State is indeed everyone. Now, as States go, they, the State=everyone, does go on to occupied and absorb smaller states, for example. If you feel this is wrong then accept your responsibility for it. When people criticise the War in Iraq for example, from within the border of the United States, to me their objections are hypocritical, because it is the taxes they pay, the economy they support, that powers and backs the machinery of said occupation which they say they are against. For me to take them seriously they would have to first emigrate, otherwise they remain, in my eyes, accomplices and facilitators of every torture, rape or theft done in their Name.
Sometimes the State has laws that limit, obstruct, disempower, a portion of it’s population. Again people complain about the “Man” who is trying to “keep them down”. Some complain that their race makes them targets, and that the State is an imposition upon them from those of another race. As much as the State limits it also empowers. If the State was indeed such a weight on the individual, the State has no ability to hold the individual against his will. He can emigrate. The individual does not have to pay the State for what the State has not facilitated for him or her. A bun does not pay taxes in the US. He lives on the street. Here are the true free anarchist. To rid yourself of the intrusions from the state all you have to do is be a bum.
You would think that the criminal is an anarchist, but in actuality, unlike the bum, the criminal needs the State…he needs clients or victims and both are supplied by the State.
Then Carleas wrote:
Suppose yuo have a military dictatorship. Where do they get their food? Where do they get their raw materials? From where do they replenish their ranks? If a few are oppressing many, what’s stopping the many from refusing to be oppressed? And if they cede, are they really being oppressed? Or are they just making the wrong choice?
You responded: Forgive me but I do not see the relevance to your questions.
I would be happy to answer them but with all due respect, they seem like thread drift to me. None of the answers seem to answer the question “What is The State?” at all.
Yet the answer is plain to see. He already has said that the State is everyone, therefore he supplied a scenario that showed how everyone contributes to the life of the State.
Carleas wrote:
It’s undeniable that a group the cooperates beats a group that doesn’t, i.e. cooperation is powerful. As strong as you are, you will never be stronger than a bear, or a snowstorm, or whatever massive calamity can befall an individual. But a group can, and a group can even better protect the individuals that compose it than those individuals can protect themselves alone.
Your responded: That is not an accurate description of the real world and that is why I insist your definition is useless.***** Most people in the real world are forced into a Got.
Most? So everyone was just happily enjoying a free life and then some blond-beasts came over and imposed on everyone their desires and stuff, right? Most, in fact, are born into a State, a society, people, group, tribe or at the very least a family. There is no violent conquest most of the time because conquest presupposes already the State idea. Individuals, rather than being free and then made into a State are born into families and other social entities with the archetypes of the State. The State is a blown-up version of these more basic groups. The State is an extension of social ties. The State is a projection of these basic social ties upon a larger field of individuals.
When you see civil violence in Tibet, Bosnia, Iraq, etc, it is because the process is not yet complete. Often the frontier is laid over tribal by another and never accepted, so they remain, as politicians call it, a State within a State. The “State”, in this cases, does not exists, because it is not everyone, as Carleas already posited. Sure, there is the name “Iraq”, but the true State of a person is carried with their identifications: “Iraqi Kurd” for example. The US is an experiment on how to integrate States within a State, but this integration, while at times it has been violent, has not always been violent and cannot be, because as Talleyrand said: “The only thing you cannot do with a bayonet is sit on it.” This is the reason why your position is not realistic. Great empires, like Rome have developed not only through the extexion of their bayonets but also by the regularity of life they provide. Note that in the worst years of persecution, Christians still preferred the Empire that persecuted them and considered it a gift from God, because as much injustice the State can at times inflict, it also provides protection, security, “rights” and a rule of Law and rationality to what it considers it’s citizens.
