Authority is a bluff

Authority is a bluff. It exists only if you fall for it. You fall for it if you stand for nothing, if you don’t stand up for yourself or your family.

Authority is a bluff. It takes only a critical mass of the population to fall for it to make it real. When they fall for it, they become it, and authority grows like a zombie army. Those it devours become its instruments, so that even those who deny it must reluctantly comply to superior force.

Authority is a bluff. If not enough people fall for the bluff of authority, authority cannot exist.

Authority is a bluff. It is arbitrary and based on violence. It relies on deception, fear, dimwittedness and a fetish for subservience.

Authority is a bluff. No one is endowed with moral or divine right to authority over anyone. Contrived systems of arbitrary authority are morally reprehensible. The emperor has no clothes.

“But how can social order exist without authority?”

A naive straw-man question by those who presume that only “might is right,” and that only threat can motivate people; a confession that their comprehension skills are weaker than a toddler’s who just begins to understand human behavioural dynamics. Or perhaps an admission that they prefer social structures based on the threat of violence because they are the beneficiaries of said structures.

Incentives are better predictors of human behavior than threats.

You threaten someone and he may willingly comply, or he might fight you out of spite, when otherwise he could have complied voluntarily. He might even comply reluctantly, and wait for an opportune moment to knife you in the back when your guard is down. Or he might pretend to comply and defy you when you’re not looking. This is how authority’s order “works.”

Whatever “order” you imagine that systems of centralised authority bring to society, it cannot be compared to what decentralised competing free systems of self-government can bring.

See laws without government and punishing criminals in the absence of a state. Read Murray Rothbard, Lysander Spooner, Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Robert P. Murphy (to name a few) before you came at me with straw-man appeals to ignorance.

Thank you for reading.

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