Secession is the go-to faith of many, if not most, so-called right/conservative/alt-right/libertarians and even many left-libertarians, along with a good portion of anarchists.
As the belief is usually stated, large governments and empires become economically and/or culturally unstable and break apart through secession into smaller governments. Smaller governments, it is believed by the faithful, are easier for individuals to deal with and eventually these smaller governments become local governments, and then individuals use secession to break free of all governments.
In a world so described, Mary Poppins can fly, the Lost Boys never grow old, and the Seven Dwarves own a diamond mine. Honestly, any of these fairy tales is just as plausible as the myth that secession will set you free.
But none of them are products of actual history nor of the real world in which we live. It is true that empires crumble, but never through secessionist movements that result in individual freedom. Often empires are a false/forced association of separate cultures held in political union by a strong-fisted central government.
Typically, they are formed by conquest, and when that empire eventually crumbles the separate groups return to roughly their old local governments, many of which incorporate some of the worst aspects of their previous empire. Additionally small governments invented oppression, tyranny, and even empires. So to believe a small government is the path to freedom is to ignore what small government has consistently produced over and over throughout the history of governments. Id est; bigger government!
But just because secession to the individual level has never worked once in history, and just because secession has never produced one single free person, that doesn’t disprove it as a theory. It should, however, cause the thinking person to have at least some skepticism of its claims and maybe ask specifically how secession could suddenly start working when it never has before.
The proponents of secession often resort to slogans and mantras about anarchy being the ultimate secession of the individual, and that secession is the right of every individual, but their ranting lacks a mechanism to explain why and how a government of any size would ever allow secession down to the individual level.
After all, for secession to ever take place on the individual level an existing government would have to relinquish power (not likely) or it would have to cease to exist while being replaced by no new government.
In that way secession is much like alchemy. It seems to make sense, but requires lots of faith and an element of magic provided by a Philosopher’s Stone that no one has ever seen. Therefore, no matter how much faith, effort, money, and blood is invested it will never produce what it advertises. Yet its believers fanatically cling to their faith in it despite all evidence and logic.
One of the smartest men of the twentieth century was Ludwig von Mises. Mises wrote eloquently about secession and clearly stated the case that secession on the individual level is a right. One should appreciate his argument and consider it and then remember that if the gang lords of government say you are not seceding, then you are not seceding, and Mises words become nothing more than whispers in the wind.
Likewise, some 350 years earlier, Isaac Newton spent countless hours and an incredible amount of wealth and mental energy attempting to prove alchemy, all to no avail. Again, the fantastical ideas of brilliant men are not always restricted to the realm of reality.
There is no Philosopher’s Stone to justify Newton’s efforts and there is no mechanism of secession to provide individual anarchy.
Believing in such myths causes otherwise smart people to waste time, effort, money, and yes sometimes blood, pursuing that which cannot be obtained with the process they have chosen. Worse yet, believing in such fantasies prevents people from perusing paths that could produce their freedom. Rather than embracing actual tools of liberation, they invest their hope into that one election that will finally set them free.
Setting aside the fantasy world, real secession has happened over and over throughout history, it just never produces freedom. As it has been traditionally accomplished, secession takes place under one of two, or a combination of two sets of circumstances.
The first being the peaceful type where a subset of a government petitions the existing government for separate but equal legal status. If successful, the two government bodies negotiate and agree upon a fixed border, and the old government grants the new government recognition. In order for this to take place the old government has to have some reason, a mechanism, to allow the secession, and usually a petition alone is not enough. Usually the old government lacks the military means to maintain the old border, so to prevent a war the old government capitulates.
In this example, the desire to prevent war is part of the mechanism of secession that motivates the old government to permit peaceful secession. Also in this scenario, another aspect of the mechanism of secession may be an alliance between those attempting to secede with some other third government that promises to recognize it or perhaps align with it if the measure comes down to war. But in almost all cases, the threat of an unwinnable war is the main mechanism of secession that motivates the old government to grant separate but equal legal status to the new nation state. And in every single case of successful secession, those seceding simply exchange one tyrant for another.
The second type of secession may start like the first, but the old government refuses to grant secession and war becomes the only mechanism the old government recognizes. The war will proceed until one side weighs the cost of war to exceed the desire to win. In either case, secession is typically initiated by a subset of a government and granted by the old government. So there are separate actions by two separate government bodies, those asking and those granting.
To logically believe secession can take place, you must determine why and how one body would seek secession, and why and how (the mechanism) that the other body would be motivated to grant it. Simply asserting the argument that secession is a right provides no evidence of a mechanism to make that right possible. And again, this process in no way provides an explanation of how and why a government would ever grant an individual the same separate but equal legal status as a nation state.
It doesn’t matter that you believe it to be your right!
The crime gangs known as governments will never willfully allow individual secession because they know it would dissolve their ability to maintain their crime rackets. They will simply kill you first, as they have proven over and over for thousands of years.
While reading the above paragraphs, the faithful secession believer may experience the feelings often associated with cognitive dissonance. Part of the reason for this discomfort is the simple fact that he wants freedom so bad that he finds himself panicked at the thought that secession to the individual level, as it is generally taught, is a myth at best, a silly religious belief to many, and a money-make scam for some.
However, possessing no process to replace secession with, he must continue to believe in secession otherwise he has no hope at all for freedom, or for humanity itself. In addition to that, the believer has often embraced secession as part of his personal identity. He has written about secession, talked about it, taught it, stood upon it, demanded it, and people know him as a secession guy. If his hope for secession vanishes he feels a part of him will die with it.
For this reason, he simply cannot abandon his faith, no matter how silly his religion has been revealed to be. He has nothing to fill the space it occupied so he clings to it for dear life.
I have no intention of taking away the secessionist’s metaphorical ladder to freedom while leaving him on a crag of the Cliffs of Despair with destruction awaiting on the rocks below. There is a clear flaw in the doctrine of secession. There is also a simple way to understand that flaw and a realistic solution to provide a better ladder to freedom.
The fact that there is no mechanism of secession to the individual level provided in the orthodox doctrine of secession doesn’t mean that we have no hope of freedom from government enslavement. It simply means that a different process must be discovered and embraced and the old doctrine must be vigorously abandoned. So then, let us examine the flaw, and see if it reveals the proper ladder to freedom that we should embrace.
As explained by Franz Oppenheimer in The State, and later by Albert J. Nock in Our Enemy, the State, there are two fundamentally opposed methods of accomplishing one’s wants and needs.
The first; work, in conjunction with voluntary interactions such as exchange and charity. Oppenheimer called this “the economic means.” The other method he described is robbery in conjunction with fraud, extortion, graft, nepotism, and murder. Oppenheimer called this second method “the political means.”
All government actions are preceded by theft and then paid for and enforced with the product of that theft. Everything you ask government to give you must first be stolen from someone. Every dollar, every voting ballot, every lighted bulb in every government building, every law, and every act of government, is preceded by theft and enforced by murder or threats thereof.
Once a person of morals fully understands this simple concept, they can no longer rightfully and with a clear conscience ask government to do anything on their behalf because they then know that by asking government to act, they assume the guilt of that government’s actions.
So if the moral person may not rightfully petition, nay I say beg government for the “right,” nay I say permission to secede, then how can we have hope of freedom from the chains of the State?
The four conventional strategies for resisting the State are commonly believed to be; the political means, civil disobedience, speaking truth to power, and agorism.
There is a fifth strategy that will be mentioned at the end of this article. However, secession falls clearly under the heading of the political means. To succeed, the secessionist must ask for and obtain the permission to secede from the previous government, either through some political pressures or war. Then once attained, the secessionist government is just that, a government.
The individual has achieved no freedom. The individual has used the political means in an attempt to achieve his desires, just as every state actor has always done, and in the end, he has only enslaved himself to a new master. This process has been repeated over and over throughout history, always producing the same result.
That fact, however, doesn’t seem to affect the deep seated religious faith of the secessionist. He is bound by his blind faith to preach the gospel of secession in spite of every example of its failure. Thus we see that the religion of secession is a subheading of the religion of statism. It is an expression of faith in the political process, and absolutely nothing more. This explains why the vast majority of secessionists are also faithful voters. No matter the words they speak, in their heart they are statists living in expectation of a State solution to the problem of the State.
What then can be done to obtain freedom?
Of the many paths available that may move people toward freedom, pursuing a path that has failed over and over for thousands of years is not wise, and that is exactly what the political means has done. Leaders who still insist that this time it will be different, should be recognized as either fools or out-right con men. The half-asleep who blindly follow such leaders should be considered in the same category as all other faithful followers of the State.
The “libertarian” or “anarchist” who is dedicated to using the political means to achieve their desires is morally the same as the “conservative, “liberal,” “fascist,” “communist,” or any other label you wish to use as you describe the thief who is using government to continue robbing you. But by no means will these criminals ever achieve freedom from the aggression of the State by using the aggression of the State. They ARE the State!
I promised to mention the fifth strategy of resisting the State, however it can’t help but come off as a sales pitch. [OK with us – Management]
SEDITION SUBVERSION AND SABOTAGE FIELD MANUAL No. 1, A Three-Part Solution to The State is a 165 page book available in paperback or e-versions. It is a collaborative effort by The Office of Sedition Subversion and Sabotage and the Lego Distribution Network, which explains in detail how a fifth strategy can work to once and forever kill the State.
If you are serious about freedom, and you understand that doing the same thing over and over will never produce a new result, then find and read this book. Or if you prefer to play liberty games on the internet, then keep believing in secession and keep supporting those liberty leaders who preach their statist creeds, and keep voting for secession.
Because remember, using the State to fix the State has worked so well so far. All you need is that Philosopher’s Stone and BINGO! the magic will happen.
