How I Became a Libertarian

I remember driving with my family to our Lake Simcoe cottage in the early- to mid-1970s and seeing the protest signs of Pickering residents whose homes and property had been expropriated by Canada's federal government in order to build an airport. Something is wrong when a mere child can discern the injustice of theft to which adults are blind.

Even as an unlearned youngster, I recognized that people have a right to be left alone. The idea was inchoate at the time, but I can expand on it now. Every person's fundamental status as a human being precludes political arrangements. It is axiomatic and therefore undeniably true that we pursue goals, and hence that free agency inheres in the very structure of human reality. Rousseau was right: We are free by default. Politics, by contrast, which is the initiation of physical force or intimidation, is an artificial imposition that necessarily disrupts natural human enterprise. It impedes free will by forcing us to act contrary to our desires—in effect reducing our status from that of human personalities to mere physical objects, from ends to means. Any act of violence rejects its target's volition and thereby his personhood, treating him instead as a lump of matter. (Note that defensive violence simply respects the aggressor's demonstrated decision to treat persons as lumps of matter.) Even a threat of violence eliminates choices that would otherwise have been available to the person threatened; think of an armed mugger who demands your wallet or a policeman who orders you to stop your car. Politics, then, in suppressing what is human in us, is intrinsically anti-human. It always and everywhere interferes with our lives, infringes on our activities, and is therefore destructive of civil society. In my youth, these thoughts were intuitive and imprecise, and I was unable to articulate them. Because they also seemed irrelevant and naïve, and alien in a social milieu that did not seem to value liberty beyond shallow rhetoric, I did not pursue or develop them.

The Cold War

A few years before the fall of the Iron Curtain, I found a book in my high school library about the Cold War. Though I must have known it was pro-Western propaganda, its portrayal of Soviet misdeeds convinced me the struggle was against black hats, and consequently I presumed that "our" hats were white—just as my lifelong fascination with World War II and Nazi oppression blinded me to the culpability of Allied atrocities in that war, such as the terror bombings of Axis cities, the internment of racial Japanese in North America, and the atomic mass murder of innocents at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After all, I did not see oppression around me, and life was good. From that day I became a pro-American Reaganite/Thatcherite who feared Communist domination brought about by peaceniks who would convince effete Western governments to unilaterally disarm. I read Toronto Sun columnists like George Jonas, Barbara Amiel, Lubor Zink, Peter Worthington, and David Frum. I read most of Jonas' books, agreed with everything he wrote, and came to identify myself as a fellow classical liberal. Copies of his columns were handed out to friends in the hope that rational, well-articulated arguments would banish erroneous ideologies. (I still believe that history is captive to ideas, but know better than to badger friends about it—which partly explains why I have decided to air my thoughts in a format which is by nature passive and thus less likely to generate self-defeating resistance, and which invites the reader to consider ideas at his leisure, when he is most receptive. This is important because a thinker who cannot refute an argument is logically compelled to adopt it.) In addition, Jonas made me aware of Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek, the distinguished free-market economist—though I was unable to find any of Hayek's books at that time (this was before the Internet). I would later encounter Hayek's ideas in connection with the Austrian school of economics. The writings of Barbara Amiel, Jonas' former wife and the present Mrs. Conrad Black, introduced me to the term statism, though I dismissed it because it seemed unduly provocative and did not fit with my advocacy of muscular democracy. Lubor Zink was a vociferous and implacable critic of the Soviet Union whose maverick cynicism about glasnost and perestroika heightened the perceived threat posed by the "evil empire." I thought David Frum was a conservative and a proponent of freedom. I believed Israel was a perpetual victim on the verge of destruction—despite her victor status. My views, in retrospect, lacked nuance, and their weaknesses went unexamined. The U.S.S.R. was always the aggressor, always the sole villain. It was proper for the anti-communist regime in South Vietnam to have invited U.S. military forces into the country, but wrong for the Soviets to send its army into Afghanistan years later at the behest of communist Kabul. The anti-Sandinista Contras were noble freedom fighters deserving of U.S. taxpayer funding even if laws had to be broken. Democracy was the apotheosis of political organization, as expressed by Francis Fukayama, and force was sometimes necessary to extend it. Charles Krauthammer, polemicist for Time magazine, masterfully articulated this view and also influenced my thinking on foreign policy, which was dangerously close to the Trotskyite notion of perpetual global violence—but in the service of democracy.

And yet, even when they promoted destruction and suffering, my early opinions were at least grounded on the conviction that freedom was important. My belief that life was worthless without freedom dovetailed with the Cold War slogan, "better dead than Red," so I saw no contradiction in championing American militarism abroad. Opposing communism seemed to be both necessary and sufficient, despite the moral error of advocating evil against a greater evil.

In 1984 or 1985—late in my high school career—I recall being derided by my history class for describing the KGB (the Soviet equivalent of the Nazi SS) as an instrument of repression. The teacher, a Mr. Christidis, was a Castro apologist and explained that the Berlin Wall was erected to keep West Germans out of the GDR. To my disgust, the students seemed to believe him.

Anti-nuclear activism was perhaps reaching its zenith at the same time. Toronto's municipal government declared the city a nuclear-free zone. On a particularly fine summer day I observed a large disarmament rally at Nathan Phillips Square, which adjoins City Hall. It was my lunch hour, and I was wearing a suit due to the requirements of my summer job. After the crowd had mostly dispersed, I approached one of the speakers, an American who served as a medic in Vietnam. The conversation grew heated when he asked me if I would be prepared to drop a nuclear bomb on a communist city, knowing that children would die. I said I would do it, and in his understandable outrage he punched my shoulder. I was a gloating punk who had misdirected his thoughts into avenues of evil. This was perhaps the nadir of my intellectual development.

Political Correctness

In domestic affairs, I opposed that virulent and anti-rational aggregation of postmodern ideologies, popularly known by the Marxist term political correctness, which sought the segregation of Western society into ethnic, racial, and sexual collectives, and which gained influence and momentum in the 1980s. As I saw it, political correctness implicitly rejected the very concept of humanity insofar as its proponents proclaimed that identity-based groups are defined and separated by insurmountable epistemological barriers, preventing us from understanding other times and cultures. Truth and morality were held to be culture-bound, and even mathematics and the natural sciences were declared to be Western artifacts with no necessary correspondence to reality—never mind that the academic underpinnings of political correctness are themselves a subspecies of Western thought and that its claims to truth are logically self-contradictory under its own terms. And despite what its defenders maintain, P.C. is not inconsistent with racism, since both imply the alienation and dehumanization of "the other." These trends drove me to read books like Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education (1991).

The mass media often latched on to what I now regard as frivolous, tangential cultural issues, such as whether Canadian Sikhs and officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police should be permitted to carry kirpans (daggers) or wear turbans, respectively, or whether government schools ought to exclude recitations of the Lord's Prayer. My opposition to what I saw as pandering to ethnic interests was largely motivated by the apparent danger posed by multiculturalism to Western values, because although political correctness was and is a Western phenomenon, I feared that massive and sustained immigration from the Third World was undermining the intellectual and cultural foundations of our society, and that newcomers would vote for the ruling political party that had devised official multiculturalism and opened the borders. I dismissed as economic opportunists those who were drawn to Canada by our superior standard of living. In retrospect, my anxiety about immigrants was largely misdirected, since it is the bureaucracy—not immigrants—that propagates conflict among and between Canadians as they struggle to control or deflect official multicultural policy. Rights-respecting ethnic minorities offend only bigots, for race, language, culture, and religion are at worst annoyances to the majority. Thus, it should scarcely matter to the public if an RCMP officer wants to incorporate a turban into his official costume. Nevertheless, government intervention strips away the wealth and decision-making power of ordinary people without substantial recompense—except for a lingering perception that we have a proprietary stake in the public sector. Yet the monolithic and centralized nature of political bureaucracy not only excludes the wishes of large segments of the population but forces them to abide by its directives, which may be driven by special interest groups and lobbyists. Since government policy cannot please every taxpayer, its very existence fosters discontent among the subject population. It is no coincidence, then, that all culture-based controversies are centred on government institutions. In a truly free society, parents would simply send their children to the private schools of which they approved, taking account of whether the morning announcements include the recitation of the Lord's Prayer—or not, as they might choose. Similarly, consumers who disapprove of turbans could choose a private security firm that did not allow its employees to wear them; the lack of such firms would indicate either an untapped market demand—and a business opportunity—or the lack of a demand. Everybody would be satisfied.

As a post-secondary student I witnessed the now-forgotten Darryl McDowell affair at the University of Toronto's Scarborough College. McDowell, a member of the student government, provoked outrage for an article in a student newspaper in which he opined that a student-funded feminist group, which disallowed male executive members, ought to fund themselves rather than obtain financial support from the larger student population—which included men, of course—without their express consent. He also scandalized the university by telling fat jokes on the air at CSCR, a campus radio station at which I spun blues records (McDowell and I never met). He was hauled before a student hearing and a petition was circulated to dismiss him from his elected position. As far as I know, I was the only one who refused to sign it. It was a disappointment to learn that so many students and faculty were seemingly unable to discern or appreciate that only unpopular speech and ideas need protection from would-be censors and speech code advocates. Free speech, and therefore, free thought itself, is obviously meaningless in such a hostile climate. It was sobering to witness such ire directed towards something as trifling as a tasteless joke. At around the same time, the university meekly stood by when one of its professors, Jean Cannizzo, was hounded during her lectures by belligerent "anti-" racism activists, some of whom were not students at the university, for her work as the curator of an African exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum. Perhaps more than anything else, my university education taught me about the frightening influence of establishment orthodoxy, and the inability of most people to resist—let alone recognize—it.

Decentralization and Freedom

The amalgamation of Metro Toronto into a "mega city" by the nominally conservative provincial government of Premier Mike Harris in early 1998 seemed like a good idea, and I was persuaded by the self-styled conservative Toronto Sun's editorial position that consolidation of local municipalities would eliminate waste and reduce costs. I was wrong about that, too. Centralized bureaucracies are more remote from the people they rule, are less receptive to the wishes of taxpayers, attract the more ambitious careerists, and therefore tend to be unaccountable, unresponsive, tyrannical, and stupid. Political decentralization, on the other hand, confines mismanagement and corruption to smaller political units, which reduces their harm. Also, the degree of liberty enjoyed by citizens tends to be proportional to the number of political jurisdictions available. When people have more migration options, governments competing for productive subjects have an incentive to minimize their own interventions.

On the Québec issue, I was a Canadian nationalist—though I opposed the Meech Lake Accord (1987) and voted no on the Charlottetown Accord in 1992. As I saw it, the people of Québec had no right to secede—but I didn't think they deserved special privileges, either. My view was bolstered by legal treaties that granted Québec much of its territory as a condition of its membership in the Dominion.

Another argument against Québec secession was that even if separatists carried a referendum by 50 percent of the votes "plus 1," the minority had a right to retain its Canadian citizenship—but since this was unworkable in a winner-take-all contest, separation had to be rejected. I did not see at the time that this minority problem exposes two decisive weaknesses in democratic theory. First, since a right is an absolute entitlement possessed by every person, no majority can justifiably violate the rights of even the smallest minority. Thus, the prevention of a minority's extrication from a given political arrangement amounts to involuntary inclusion, enforced by police power, which is a violation of the minority's right to opt out and be left alone. The democratic state is supposed to be our servant, but if the social contract on which our polity is said to be based is not mutually consensual, honesty demands that we stop pretending that the contract metaphor is accurate. Second, the domain of a popular election not only influences its outcome, but also is a measure of its justice. Had all Canadians been able to vote on the future of Québec, for instance, the majority would surely have chosen to keep the province within Ottawa's grip. Yet this would have thwarted every separation-minded Québecer, guaranteeing the continuation of the minority problem. On the other hand, had each of Québec's administrative regions held its own referendum instead, it is highly likely that some regions would have elected to secede—thus mitigating, but not eliminating, the minority problem. But if smaller domains yield more equitable results, why not ask individual neighbourhoods—or, better yet, individual Québecers themselves—if they wish to remain subjects of the crown? Clearly, the minority problem in Québec is caused not by the desire for secession but by the political establishment's insistence on collective solutions that, in the event of a separatist victory, would consign all Québecers, including those wishing to retain the privilege of paying taxes to Ottawa, to a new nation-state. By contrast, referenda held at the level of the citizen—allowing, in effect, people to opt out of federal government control altogether—permit everyone to get his way and solve the minority problem. Canadian nationalists would continue filing federal tax returns and secessionists would make their own arrangements—which might include disengagement from the provincial government as well. The implication here is that every adult has a right to secede from all political authority.

I endorsed the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement of 1988 and its 1992 expansion, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Later I would learn that genuine free trade—as opposed to the state-managed trade of NAFTA—does not require legislation. A moment's reflection reveals that free trade, the unhampered exchange of goods and services between two or more contracting parties, is a universal human right. Free trade is simply laissez-faire or economic liberty, the direct economic expression of our wills. My money, labor, and goods are mine by definition, and therefore I am morally entitled to retain, sell, or bestow them according to terms of my choosing, subject to the voluntary acquiescence of those with whom I wish to conduct a transaction. Regulations imposed by a third party which limit or add costs to trade constitute an unjust interference in my affairs. The solution, then, is the removal of all imposed economic barriers—whether between individuals or nation-states.

The Emperor's New Clothing

Although initially skeptical of the Internet and the World Wide Web, I came to embrace it as a resource that rivals any other human accomplishment. One day, probably in 2000, I discovered LewRockwell.com. At first I was attracted to its deliciously contrarian articles, for arguments that challenge my assumptions are always a pleasure to read. Indeed, I have come to suspect that most commonly-held beliefs—including, frequently, my own—are mistaken, and sites like LRC show us where we stand in Plato's cave and provide a map to the exit.

Winston Churchill, resolute defender of English-speaking civilization against the encroaching abyss of a new Dark Age, had been a hero of mine since I was a teenager. After having reached the third volume of his Second World War, I encountered historian Ralph Raico's revisionist article, "Rethinking Churchill." My exasperation at Raico's unflattering assessment of the great man prompted me to furiously make notes for a rebuttal that I planned to send to the author. Eventually, the truth of Raico's thesis—that Churchill was a warmongering socialist—sank in, and I abandoned my efforts at refutation. Further critical re-examination of the widely-accepted facts of the conflict led me to a disturbing but, I think, more honest assessment of Allied involvement in the war. Who can deny the hypocrisy of France and Britain declaring war on only one of the two invaders of Poland, a futile gesture which not only failed to help the Polish people but also resulted in the conquest of France and the exposure of Britons to aerial bombing, starvation, and the threat of invasion themselves? Appallingly, the Western Allies consigned Poland and much of eastern and central Europe to the Soviet slave system at the war's conclusion. My ideas were shifting in accordance with a view of history stripped of jingoistic chauvinism and cultural conceit. The light of truth destroyed history's cartoonish simplicity and revealed the hand of the propagandist.

My immediate response to the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States was a rather immature and indignant suggestion for a policy of extreme religious isolationism. In a post to an automotive-themed electronic mailing list on 20 September 2001, I wrote:

My idea would be for North America to refuse entry to any person who is of the Islamic faith, and to expel Muslims who are not citizens. To test claimants who may be lying, they would be placed in a holding room for a 24 hour period to see whether they pray to the east five times.

Admittedly, it was an asinine proposal—but I had much to learn, and the blatant prevarications of the Bush administration would eventually goad me into reviewing my long-established stance on U.S. policy.

I was shocked to hear, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, talk of the FBI using torture against suspected terrorists. My dismay stemmed from my longstanding interest in the dark side of history. I became a horror buff as a youngster, building Aurora model kits, poring over books about horror films, reading Poe and Dracula before the age of 10, and amassing horror comic books and issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland. Later, I studied the European witch-hunts and totalitarianism. Of all the outrages visited on human beings by their rulers, torture fascinated me most because its utter horror always surpassed my understanding. I could not fathom the depravity necessary to deliberately inflict agony on fellow human beings. For while murder is the deliberate and permanent termination of human experience, torture is the total subjection of human experience to suffering and thus is the supreme assault on human dignity. Like murder, torture removes its victims from the world. These early interests probably stimulated my aversion to bullying and, later, to its institutionalized form, the state. Ostensibly, the Enlightenment in Europe spelled the end of torture in the West until its recrudescence under authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century. But those states had passed from the scene, and torture was dead—or so I thought. My alarm at news stories that the United States government, post-9/11, was prepared to make men scream in the name of security and, ironically, freedom was amplified by the shattering of my naïve belief that all civilized people categorically rejected the practice, as evidenced by the very existence of a debate on the subject rather than outright and unanimous condemnation.

The stupendous transparency of the lies and equivocation employed by the administration of George W. "I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building" Bush in its attempts to justify plans for the final destruction of Iraqi society—after a previous war and a decade-long policy of murderous sanctions and air strikes—forced me to question my previous and uncritical support of U.S. and British foreign policy. I do not know if the Toronto Sun (helmed at the time by Lorrie Goldstein, for whom I have much respect) or other local dailies, which I no longer regularly read by that time, provided a critical or factual counterpoint to the dishonest propaganda used to mobilize public support for the forthcoming invasion, but the Internet did provide access to a wealth of material, from mainstream press stories to independent analyses and reports from a wide variety of sources across the partisan spectrum. Not only could I not support the war, but my newfound skepticism revealed a pattern of deception used by past American presidents to galvanize their nation into the wars the political rulership wished to have its subjects fight: Wilson's promise to keep America out of World War I and his reversal after Germany's resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, and the linking of America's entry into the war with the purported need to combat the alleged threat to international order posed by the Central Powers; the U.S. government's manipulation of events leading to the Japanese government's attack on Pearl Harbor; the nixed scheme, code-named "Operation Northwoods," to stage fake or real "false flag" terrorist incidents against American targets that could be blamed on the Castro government in order to shape American public opinion into supporting a military response; and the phony Gulf of Tonkin Incident that led to the escalation of U.S. military intervention in Vietnam. Thus, the naked evil of the Bush-Cheney administration opened my eyes to greater truths and enlarged the scope of my political skepticism. I may not have become a true libertarian otherwise—so at least something good has come of evil.

An Uncomfortable Truth

When I first read, in March 2002, Murray Rothbard's "The Anatomy of the State" (Chapter 3 of his Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays), which characterized the state as a parasitical, criminal organization based on violent aggression, I was unconvinced. Although I did not find fault with the facts, I resisted their interpretation—possibly because the conscious recognition of the state's true nature necessitates a paradigm shift for which I was emotionally unprepared. After all, I viewed Western governments as mostly benevolent, despite the cracks I was starting to see in the edifice of Anglo-American state militarism. The implications of Rothbard's thesis are troubling, and it is understandable, from a psychological point of view, why most refuse to acknowledge that the democratic state, seemingly omnipresent in their lives, is neither more nor less than institutionalized physical brutality and extortion—with a near-perfect record of failure tethered to a ballooning price tag that we are forced to pay. The concerns of governments are typically alien and irrelevant to most people—who only wish to raise families and improve the conditions of their lives through work, leisure, love, and friendship, and for whom scrutiny of the unending stream of legislation emanating from the halls of power is an unnatural distraction. Man is naturally apolitical. If it were not for the continuous danger of creeping statism, ordinary people would be able to turn their full attentions to their private goals and become politically apathetic. Political apathy, against which the establishment and high-school activists rail lest meagre voter participation threaten the legitimacy of the political power structure by revealing its irrelevance, is a bad thing only because it compromises vigilance against the state.

The force of Rothbard's argument against the state proved irresistable once I was able to confront it objectively. The state’s malignance is obvious once recognized. There are simply no serious arguments on its behalf. Furthermore, to know the truth is to be burdened by it. Ignoring the truth once known is immoral, just as it would be immoral to turn away from a child in distress.

We have deluded ourselves in order to evade the ugly truth and because we do not wish to acknowledge our diminishing capacity to act as free human beings—a trend for which we bear some culpability, for no state can prevail without at least the tacit compliance of its subjects. By going along with the status quo, we submerge our doubts and tend to identify ourselves with the state. After all, we are told that in a democracy we are the government. Thus, the child who points out that the emperor is naked is frequently disregarded or rebuked. It is easier to ignore the unpleasant facts of our increasing servility and declining standard of living: The continuous benefits imparted by capitalism are reduced by government depredations such as generally rising taxes and fees; shoddy, monopolistic services that are being scaled back; an endless succession of bureaucratic regulations and legal statutes that micromanage our lives at finer and finer levels and which infantilize society by revoking normal adult responsibilities; rising prices caused by inflation of the money supply by government-controlled central banks; the business cycle of boom and bust resulting from government intervention into the economy; the unprecedented growth of global security states in the aftermath of America's foreign policy "blowback;" and ongoing consolidation of trans-national political power into fewer and fewer centralized quasi-state blocs such as the European Union, a possible North American Union, and the United Nations and related international agencies—perhaps culminating in a single world government. We pretend that the electoral ballot makes us masters of the Leviathan state, and that we are in charge of our lives. The truth is that we need official permission for almost everything we do.

The worst acts of violence have always been carried out by governments, and in the West, organized mass brutality did not really begin until the modern state appeared during the early modern period. State atrocities include warfare, torture, democide and other forms of genocide, involuntary medical/radiological experiments on human beings, and slavery. The state also excels at terrorism: The incendiary bombing of Tokyo on 10 March 1945 by American B-29s killed some 80,000 to 100,000 civilians. Altogether between 330,000 and 500,000 Japanese civilians were murdered from the air by the U.S. government during World War II.

Lesser government outrages include capital punishment (abolished in Canada), coercive social control, the indoctrination of children in government schools, continuous and escalating extortion (e.g., taxes, fees, inflation), the gradual neutralization of social units (e.g., the family) that shield the individual from atomization by the state, and the creation of a politicized democratic culture that, in seeking to outlaw everything that is merely undesirable and in empowering government to solve every problem, is increasingly grounded in violence (i.e., because every positive act of the state is backed by aggressive force or intimidation, society becomes more violent as the state's role expands).

What does it say about us that we allow this obvious evil and nonsense to persist? We claim to abhor monopolies because of their high prices and poor-quality products, yet we angrily and often mindlessly defend the only true monopoly—the state—against libertarians who alert us to the emperor’s nakedness, even as our high standard of living—which we owe to liberty—is threatened by the growing tumor of Leviathan. Strangely, it is more comforting to believe that, absent the state, our neighbors would be at our throats—but a moment's thought will reveal this to be a superstition.

Do we really think the state will roll back its own power, wealth, and privileges and restore freedom to us? Is it rational to deny that future crises, real or exaggerated, will not form pretexts for further tyranny, waste, incompetence, and restrictions on our ability to live the lives we wish to live? Do we truly believe that encroaching government authority and its endemic rapacity will cease before our civilization is choked into extinction? Are we too blind to see that the most prosperous societies are also the freest, and that the unconstrained state will destroy society because it is by definition inimical to human freedom and therefore to humanity itself? Is it not apparent by now that the great American experiment in constitutional republicanism, perhaps the most effective constraint on the expansion of executive government power yet devised, is nearing its failure point—after which we may face either: (1) the emergence of an American dictatorship armed with nuclear weapons, furnished with a demonstrated policy of military aggression, and possessed of a dangerously egotistical sense of historical exceptionalism that already fuels its twisted moralistic claim to "benevolent global hegemony"; or (2) a global financial crisis that could break modern civilization and lead to new political orders that in all likelihood will be authoritarian, if we can judge by the accelerating trend of meeting every sort of emergency—as defined by the state—with overwhelming centralized and militarized government force that is akin to martial law?

Nonetheless, there is a chance that libertarian ideas, already spreading thanks to Ron Paul's presidential campaign in the United States, his new book, and the free-spiritedness of the Internet generally, will gain credibility among natural elites who will then be able to reverse the authoritarian trend and lead us away from the state as an organizational principle of human societies—just as slavery, judicial ordeals, and the Inquisition are now unthinkable and absurd (although military conscription is not widely recognized as slavery). It is possible that future generations will be amazed that we could be so stupid as to think the state could be anything other than an enemy of mankind.

The Child is Father to the Man

Cold War propaganda convinced me that if communism were a cruel and destructive ideology, those who opposed it must be the bearers of freedom and virtue—and consequently, virtually any means were justified in combating it. This explains, for instance, the late William F. Buckley, Jr.'s 1952 call for "Big Government" and a "totalitarian bureaucracy" in America—though I never went that far. Analysis proved this to be a false dichotomy. The genuine enemy of humanity is not a particular political doctrine such as communism, National Socialism, or fascism, but the state itself—an institution that has legalized the violation of human rights, and which constitutes an apparatus of coercion that is highly vulnerable to usurpation by psychopathic personalities.

This truth—that the state is the superlative expression of human evil—can also be applied to an analysis of the historical inhumanities perpetrated by religious zealotry. Ecclesiastical rule in the West, which was often characterized by religious persecution, was replaced by secular authority. Yet one must be skeptical of the notion that people today applaud this development because they have a problem with oppression and injustice—given the relative tolerance for state brutality carried out on our alleged behalf. Secular propaganda efforts have successfully transferred our moral distaste for genuine religio-political oppression into an abstract aversion towards religion in general and Christianity in particular. Nonetheless, ecclesiastical horrors such as the Crusades, the Inquisitions, the witch persecutions, the Counter-Reformation, the Wars of Religion, and the Thirty Years' War were predicated on political power. Religious intolerance has little power to physically harm anyone except through organized aggression, just as fascism, for example, is harmless in the absence of government sponsorship. Moreover, while popular sentiment has demonized the cruel historical excesses of the Roman and Protestant churches, we should be aware that the magnitude of religious killings was generally small by modern standards, that religious authorities typically handed over condemned prisoners to secular officials for execution, and that much of this repression had secular elements (e.g., the Spanish Inquisition was instituted by the crowns of Castile and Aragon). Astoundingly, the modern secular state has not been generally recognized as malevolent, though it has extorted, killed, exterminated, tortured, and enslaved in far greater numbers in 150 years—much of it within living memory, no less—than in the 1,500 years of Christian religio-political domination. The chief ideological difference between religious and secular injustice is the avowed rationale. Rights have been violated for any number of reasons, such as religious heresy (as by the medieval Inquisition), alleged racial inferiority (as in Nazi Germany), unorthodox speech (such as questioning official pronouncements on Nazi mass murder in present-day Germany), improper social class membership (under communism), and victimless "crimes" (such as illicit drug use). The rationales differ, of course, because of historical circumstance, but the injustice underlying them all is the the same: the violation of the rights of innocent (i.e., rights-respecting) persons. Yet our ambivalence towards injustice is demonstrated by our moralizing about the rationales for injustice—as though we believe that the means are justified by the ends.

The true political dichotomy, as I eventually learned, is neither communism versus freedom, nor theocracy versus freedom. Because freedom is the absence of violent aggression, the central struggle is therefore between violent aggression and freedom. The modern state happens to be the most advanced form of violent aggression—and its self-aggrandizement continues.

The progression of my thought, then, has led me back to my nascent observation that mankind is free by nature. Its logical corollary is that the state always imposes itself on society by force. This proves that those upon whom the state inflicts itself are unwilling subjects whose basic human rights are thereby violated. This is obviously true.