@thesotiris 6 September 2025 more from that month

The dumbest objections against statelessness #13 "What would happen if government disappeared right now?"

I love this loaded question, “*What would happen if government disappeared right now?*” It slyly infers that the only thing keeping chaos at bay is the presence of the state. Yet, the only “order” a state brings is the relative and unsustainable hegemonic “stability” of tyranny, servitude, slavery, and oppression. Sure, hell is pretty orderly, too. And still, there is more order, more efficiency, and more security to be found in statelessness, if you truly understand human action — **what** truly drives us, and more importantly, **how** and **why**. https://mises.org/library/book/human-action *So, what would happen if the government disappeared right now?* This loaded question infers that we’d all fall into a Mad Max caricature of a free-for-all, just like the state-funded movie industry loves to instill in us. But if I snapped my fingers and all governments would magically disappear, what do you think would happen? Sure, from the sudden loss of structure and governance that were forcibly monopolised by government, we’d have some momentary confusion, and many would see it as a free-for-all. Yes, there would be some temporary chaos, not chaos is the only alternative to government, but because government has monopolised social structures by force. And in a sudden collapse of government, there is no failsafe, no competitor active to step in and provide that structure. Some chaos, looting, and violent dispute settlement occur sporadically every time a government collapses, when there’s a war, or a natural disaster. See how government does not protect you? But even in those momentary periods of statelessness, the vast majority of people stay home, help each other, and protect each other, even with the few means of protection they were allowed to keep thanks to government prohibitions. Thank goodness, such a snapping-of-the-fingers magical dissolution of government does not happen… Still, governments do collapse when wars break out or natural disasters occur. And war is exclusively an inalienable trait of the centralised monopoly of violence: the state. It is precisely BECAUSE the state exists that government sooner or later collapses in war, leaving everyone exposed to chaos due to their overreliance on it. Again, the question: *What would happen to the current society if government were dissolved?* Easy: What happens every time a government collapses? People quickly find a way to coordinate and massively empower a new flavour of government; this time with different banners and meaningless, minute differences and mini-concessions designed to appease the masses, and mitigate the reasons the previous government collapsed. See? **If people can coordinate under statelessness to form a complicated statist structure, then how much easier it would be for free people to focus instead on the free market**, and receive public services from an efficient, incentive-driven free market, unlike the inefficient, corruptible, violently imposed monopoly of government, unfazed by the regulatory power of competition? And yes, the decentralised free market can and already does provide all public goods that the government presumes to miserably offer: roads, security, policing, justice, property registries, etc. You don’t need government for those. You never did. https://mises.org/library/book/privatization-roads-and-highways https://mises.org/library/book/chaos-theory-two-essays-market-anarchy https://sotiris.substack.com/p/dealing-with-child-abuse-in-the-absence https://sotiris.substack.com/p/punishing-criminals-in-the-absence https://mises.org/library/book/new-liberty-libertarian-manifesto But here’s what we keep missing: if people can come together to coordinate and empower a centralised government, granting it their obedience for “the common good”, then surely, people can come together and form **free, decentralised, voluntary systems of self-governance in the Rothbardian sense of Austro-consentism**. Why people historically keep choosing the knee-jerk reaction path of violent “authority” of the state is because they don’t know any better… yet. Unfortunately, humans are animals of habit and risk aversion. They do what they believe is right. This doesn’t make it right, though. If an Islamic theocracy falls, the most likely scenario is for another Islam-flavoured state to rise in that region. See the recent regime changes in the Middle East. If a monarchy fails, another “sovereign” family takes its place, unless there’s a new fashion amongst the masses to embrace exotic moralistic brands of statism, such as communism or democracy. If a Western-style “democracy” (what a joke) collapses, it is soon replaced with another. If a fascist-style dictatorship collapses, then it is again replaced with another flavour of dictatorship, deceptively called “democracy”: the illusion of freedom. The point is that the system of governance of a given region is determined by the collective culture and understanding of the people who occupy that region. This means that, if they believe in communism, then communism will be the new flavour of government after the collapse of the previous one. If they believe in political Islam, then Islamism will be the new style of government after the collapse of the previous one. People do get what they want, collectively. The only problem is the minorities who have to suffer the statist insanity of the many. To answer the question, “*What would happen if government disappeared right?*” A new government would very soon rise. People would get together, coordinate, and give rise to orators and snake-oil salesmen to institute a new brand of magical “authority”, much like the imagined “royalty” of monarchs. And this getting together of people proves that stateless systems of self-governance can emerge, as long as enough people know they exist (a lot of free-market self-regulation already exists despite brutally suffocating state interventionism). But people keep imagining that only a centralised, violence-based government can bring order. Who can blame them? What do you expect from populations who have been diligently propagandised and conditioned from a young impressionable age to “OBEY AUTHORITY” through forced, abusive schooling, military draft, media brainwashing, religious miseducation, and relentless government interventionism — fiscal, monetary, moral, medical, and intellectual? The fact that most people are deluded enough to believe we somehow need a centralised monopoly of violence for the delusion of social order is not only baffling, but it also supports the fact that we get what people want, whether there is a government or not. And what people want is defined by their mindsets — free or propagandised. So yes, with the current population of Earth, if all governments collapsed, then new governments would soon re-emerge. This is the only thing people know, so this is what they’ll keep getting. Just like back in the day, **overt slavery** was the only thing they knew to “run the economy”, and before that, **child sacrifice** was the only thing they knew how to appease the rain gods. We haven’t progressed much since then. The **appeal to ignorance, tradition, and popularity fallacy** isn’t a logical argument in defence of the existence of the despicable state. If enough people understood human action and how systems of self-governance spontaneously emerge and sustain themselves even today under the suffocating grip of the state, then a collapse of government would bring exactly that: spontaneous, consent-based self-governance driven by incentive, not threat. https://mises.org/library/book/human-action This cannot be overstated: **Consent-based systems of self-governance are driven by incentive, not threat**. They don’t need threats at all. It’s either “*benefit from being civil or FAFO*”. But the state does not grant you this grace. The state says: “*you are spared punishment by obeying to corrupt statists’ whims… this is all*”. So far, humanity’s systems of governance are mostly driven by the centralised threat of violence from the arbitrary, unaccountable, and oppressive state. This is uncivilised and monstrous. What’s even more monstrous is statist apologists projecting their own monstrosity on their image of humanity. When they infer that chaos would erupt without government, they mean that the only thing keeping them from mindlessly killing, raping, and pillaging is the chance they’ll be caught; **they’d gladly kill, rape, and pillage if they knew they could get away with it**. Thankfully, most of humanity isn’t as monstrous as that. **As we see in chaotic situations of natural disasters and even genocide, where the government is essentially collapsed, most people get together to cooperate, to protect the vulnerable, to share, to rescue**. Statists seem to have such a negative view of humanity, judging from their own standards. Constentists, on the other hand, have more faith in humanity, seeing its potential to thrive without the need for a brutaliser to keep it in check. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/stop-using-the-words-anarchy-and And this is how **infuriatingly absurd** the statist argument is: “*We, as a species, are fundamentally evil and corrupt, so we need evil and corrupt people like us, with absolute power, lack of accountability, and police protection, no less, to keep us in check*”. Statism must be the new, improved definition of insanity. The fact that most people can’t even imagine an orderly society without the need for the threat of violence of the state goes to show two things: That most people don’t even understand that most of their daily personal interactions and transactions are already driven and maintained by incentives, not threats. That most people assume they would resort to violence to get what they want if they could get away with it. This is an embarrassing realisation for the human condition. But I don’t attribute it to a default setting of humanity. Humanity’s problem isn’t that it’s fundamentally evil; its problem is that it is **impressionable and easily malleable by psychological trauma, propaganda, and deception**. These constitute the foundation of statism. Statism is also an inefficient way to live, since there are no meaningful or sustainable win-lose scenarios. Win-lose is actually lose-lose. If you want to win in a meaningful and sustainable manner, it must be a win-win where both get to win. This means people need to **consent** to any interaction or transaction they have with you; otherwise, what you get by force won’t last, and it won’t be meaningful. This is why the violently enforced social order we get from the state never lasts: it is always a limited period between wars. Always. And no, the ridiculous circular-reasoning fallacy that “we’d be killing each other in the streets” is not reality at all. Without government protecting criminals by preventing us from protecting ourselves, there would be more FAFO going on, plus private security would be paid by the richest among us, those whose businesses have more to gain from orderly neighbourhoods. Security then becomes fair and efficient; otherwise, the business owners fail. Business owners have every incentive to protect their customers. How does a state monopoly of policing serve the public when the state has no competitor in its regions? https://sotiris.substack.com/p/dealing-with-child-abuse-in-the-absence Why does the government want to protect criminals, you ask? Because, by forbidding us the means to protect ourselves, it makes itself relevant and needed. It’s a racket. Government is a racket, a glorified protection mob. Lastly, I reverse the question: **What will happen if statism is never checked?** What will happen if the centralised violence of the state keeps growing and getting more and more brazen as it applies more and more technology to its arsenal of manipulation, control, and application of force? What will happen if your government takes **yet another leap in power overreach, in more retarded regulations, in more funding of wars, in more pointless taxation, in more scandals, in more corruption**? What will happen then? And since **the state is the alternative hypothesis**, unlike **the default hypothesis of statelessness**, statist apologists have the burden to prove to us how the state is better than statelessness. But just like wife-beaters’ wives hopelessly enthralled by Stockholm syndrome, **statists never bite the hand that slaps them** either. They have internalised the beating, the violation, so much that they began to love their violator. Hopefully, future generations can grow with less generational trauma, less state indoctrination. Hopefully, **with more self-esteem, dignity, and integrity, future generations can reclaim their individual self-ownership** so that they can structure communities with solidarity, consisting of free, dignified individuals.