Developmental Delay and the State

In this article, I examine the concept of the “statist.” Broadly speaking, the statist asserts the legitimacy of the state in some sphere of activity. The state in this sense is a corporation, or body politic. Here is how Chandran Kukathas frames the state’s being:

“The question now is: what does it mean to say that a state is a corporate entity? The state is a corporation in the way that a people or a public cannot be…The question in political theory has always been not whether such an entity can come into existence (since it plainly has) but how it does so. This is, in a part, a question of whether its existence is legitimate.” (2014 University of Queensland Law Journal 360, http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/UQLawJl/2014/21.pdf)

He does, however, over-state the case. In On Corporate Government, we see Edward Coke’s definition of persons natural vs. “persons incorporate or politique created by the policy of man.” Kukathas’s assertion that “it has come into existence” is sort of akin to concluding God has come into existence because there are priests, churches and an administrative apparatus that purports to “serve God.” This is identical to the way in which Government employees infer that the state exists because they “serve the state” or are employed by it. It is a banality: “my paycheque comes from STATE OF X, and I can cash it against STATE OF X’s bank account, therefore STATE OF X exists.”

There are certain strains of academic epistemology that have a very low bar for existential quantification, which is a fancy way of talking about assertions about what exists. So, for example, in academic epistemology, one might assert that Hamlet exists, or that Unicorns exist; if they do not, how can we talk about them? I will not deal with this argument here, but I dont think it credible.

But even if we accept a low bar for existence, we can still distinguish between things that exist naturally, and things that exist by the “policy of man.” A state is clearly not a natural creation; it is an artifice, like a sculpture or a church building. An awful lot of people assert that it exists, and believe it to be natural: to deny the state’s existence draws from them claims about mental health, and so on and so forth. I think there are two possibilities at play here, at least:

(1) Developmental Delay

Aristotle covers this in Physics:

“What nature is, then, and the meaning of the terms 'by nature' and 'according to nature', has been stated. That nature exists, it would be absurd to try to prove; for it is obvious that there are many things of this kind, and to prove what is obvious by what is not is the mark of a man who is unable to distinguish what is self-evident from what is not. (This state of mind is clearly possible. A man blind from birth might reason about colours. Presumably therefore such persons must be talking about words without any thought to correspond.)” (Aristotle, Physics, II.ii, http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/physics.2.ii.html)

Thus, we might say that individuals incapable of distinguishing “natural” bodies from “political” bodies are, in a sense, “blind.” So, for example, you show them a dog, and you show them a statue of a dog, and they cannot distinguish that one is a natural dog, and one is an artificial dog. This developmental delay, therefore, leads them to either conclude that nothing is natural; we see this in the contemporary transgender phrase “assigned at birth,” with reference to sex, as though sex were some sort of assignment, and not an observed, natural property of human bodies.

The other end of the spectrum is that everything is natural, even artificial things; for example, they will naturalize the state, and buildings, and art, and say it is all “natural” because it is “part of nature” or something like this. In both cases, they are “talking about words without any thought to correspond,” or, if there is a thought, it is a defective thought, because it does not acknowledge the difference between natural bodies and artificial bodies, which Aristotle details more fully in the above work.

Thus, we may be dealing with a population of humans who are, largely, mentally disabled. It’s not that they can even understand what it means to say ‘the state is artificial’ or ‘man is natural.’ These words don’t map to any organized system of concepts. These people are certainly to be pitied, and it is, of course, not their fault, but should our accommodation of them go so far as to allow them to deny our freedom and sovereignty, as individual sovereign men and women, on the basis that they don’t understand phrases like “the natural sovereignty of man” as contrasted with “the artificial sovereignty of the state”?

(2) Mendacity

The other possibility is that these people do understand the difference between nature and artifice, and they are bright people who understand that there may not be a natural law against telling pork pies, or lying. So, for example, to lie to someone about the existence of the state, in order to trick him into accepting medical treatment, or paying taxes, or any of a thousand things, is not wrong, because there is no wrong in nature; in this sense, they think that right and wrong are not natural but artificial that is, they are, like corporations, “framed by the policy of man,” and not God or nature.

Therefore, they don’t think there is anything wrong with lying about the existence of the state, or framing its existence, and brainwashing children and others into believing that it exists, as, for example, via compulsory education, or via coercive treatment. This also provides them with a sort of denyability: they are never doing their own will, which is to steal, to cheat, to rob; they are simply doing the will of the state.

And, in all truth, it is likely that the statist population is a mix of developmentally disabled people, who are farmed by the mendacious people, for their own profit and advantage. Whatever the mix, it is clear that both populations are a danger to the minority of sovereign individuals who simply want to be left alone to enjoy life, liberty and property. Whether that danger exists due to overt intent, or simply due to developmental incapacity to understand words like “nature” should be, in my humble submission, irrelevant to the sovereign: they are dangerous animals who will attack you for not obeying them, and they are not even honest about this, again, either due to delay or mendacity: instead, they claim that they are simply “following orders” from their fictitious employer, the state, a corporation.

And in the end, a corporation has no mind, no arms, no legs, so it is merely an as it were to say that “the state commands you.” In reality, whatever the state commands, is commanded by the one-in-five individuals who work for the state, and who benefit from its continued existence, at the expense of ever-larger numbers of sovereign individuals who are abused from cradle to grave by the state and its adherents. So, one thing to remember is to never let them say they work for the state. Challenge them. When they say “I’m here on behalf of the state,” demand proof that the state exists and it is not just a figment of their imagination.