@thesotiris 29 November 2025 more from that month

The Devout Religiosity of Statism: Cult-like fanaticism & misplaced faith in government

If you *believe* *in* government, that all its inherent evils and the atrocious sacrifices it requires are somehow worth it, then you are undoubtedly, devoutly religious, and I will abundantly and exhaustively prove it to you here. **The statist faith** People who ‘*believe*’ in the so-called “necessity” of a centralised government can attribute their faith — because it’s nothing more than just blind belief — to their tendency towards fervent religiosity. Creationists assert that reality cannot exist without a divine, intelligent, and eternal designer. Similarly, **statists of all denominations (socialism, fascism, monarchy, democracy, etc.)** claim that social order, and the human species for that matter, cannot exist without a “divine”, “intelligent”, and “elite” ruling class. It is not within the scope of this article to crayon-draw yet again how social order is achieved more effectively, efficiently, and morally without a centralised, threat-based, and totally arbitrary and delusionally perceived “authority” — without a government. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-dumbest-objections-against-statelessness-series https://sotiris.substack.com/p/how-i-know-statelessness-works-part-78c Here, I will simply point out that **statism is nothing more than a religious cult**, and by far the largest and the most fanatical at that. Actually, statism is the dumbest cult of all because, unlike other unprovable religious claims that cannot be disproven, statism is, in fact, easily debunkable. Humans, for all their borrowed, unreliable intelligence, seem to fail to use it when faced with their emotional instability and dire need to believe in comforting fairytales, most of all being the insane assumption that the state someone looks after them, like a caring sky-daddy. **The pathology of statism** Faith in government is emotionally driven, irrational religiosity; nothing more. There are no logical arguments for government, other than the one logical (but totally evil and utilitarian) argument of **hegemonic stability**, plus childish emotional rationalisation by people with unresolved issues from unmet parental needs, which, unfortunately, are the majority of the human species. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/how-to-build-your-childrens-self And this is what the state represents to most of us: the idealised version of a parent they never had… this god-like entity from an imaginative child’s starry-eyed perspective… and they dream they might have this parent if they are “good kids” enough to get a pat on the head. Only a traumatised individual would carry such childish and distorted parental needs into adulthood, which is why statism is interlinked with childhood abuse, especially psychological abuse (intimidation, shame, guilt, enmeshment). https://sotiris.substack.com/p/what-you-owe-your-children https://sotiris.substack.com/p/narcissistic-parenting https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-cycle-of-abuse https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-evil-of-abraham https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-shaming-fallacy-part-2 https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-loudest-moralists-tend-to-be https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-devouring-mother **Parallels with other religions** Where honestly open religions have a God, statism has “The State”, a benevolent, all-knowing, all-powerful, and non-existent divine entity that gets to do what it wants, when it wants, because it gets to define right and wrong; even if it’s child sacrifice on a Middle-Eastern goat-fucker’s altar or in carpet-bombing cities. Anything goes for “God” and “The State” alike, even if it’s genocidal floods and nuclear bombings, we keep making excuses for it, because “god” or “the state” always “knows better”. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/alternatives-to-the-story-of-abraham https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-emptiness-of-abrahamic-religions Instead of a church consisting of the exclusive arbiters and interpreters of the “Word of God”, statism has politicians and government officials. For Holy Texts and dogmatic “morality”, government has its sacred constitution and legislature. For temples, the state has government buildings built with the same bombastic architecture for that awe-inspiring effect. For priesthood: legislators and academics, those with an arbitrarily imposed monopoly of accreditation and “authority”, who presume to have all the answers, dogmatically, unquestionably, solely on the merit of their arbitrarily evaluated “qualifications”; those so convinced in their self-righteousness that they mentally imprison themselves in a limiting dogma of their own making. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/what-was-covid For holy symbols, the state has flags, insignia, crests, and seals. For prayer and mantra-style meditation: national anthems. For saints and prophets: “heroes” and “fathers” of the state. For a Satanic antagonist scapegoat: rival states with a slightly different brand of governance. For mass or liturgy: political speeches and military parades. For sacrament: ceremonial voting, the delusion of “commuting” with the god-state. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/socialism-fascism https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-case-against-voting **The god of statists** Statists believe in “the government” or “the state” as an entity entirely independent from the people and premises of which it is comprised. They believe that “the state” is beyond human greed, selfishness, evil, and a tendency to exploit circumstantial advantage at the expense of others. Even though politicians, lobbyists, bureaucrats, and government brutalists clearly abuse their unaccountable positions of “power”, the statist will still believe that the arbitrary concept of “the state” is still somehow looking out for the “best interests” of the people under its dominion. This proves that the statist brain imagines entities here in the room with us that aren’t really here: governments that somehow think for themselves, and are motivated — for whatever reason — to look out for us despite the demonstrably evil intent of all the people who make up government. Statists believe in the existence of a conceptual entity — the state — that is separate from the people of whom the state is comprised. How otherwise would they be able to reconcile the laughable non-sequitur fallacy of “All humans are bad, therefore, we need government to prevent them from doing bad”. Think this over. Take all the time you need. All say it again for clarity. Statists believe “we need government” because “all humans are inherently evil”, and would therefore do evil if “left to their own devices”. Yet, the government is made up completely from the same evil people, and not only that, they are granted absolute, unaccountable power over the others, no less. This is completely illogical, unless statists imagine that “the government” is a completely different entity above and beyond the people within government. So statism is either illogical or schizophrenic, or both. Government is formed by people, those bad, selfish people who supposedly necessity government. Government is made of the worst of them, no less, the ones who pursue positions of power. And then we hand them our submission, deluding ourselves that they are the good guys, even though they have an unincentivised monopoly of governance, and they are totally unaccountable with their clever schemes of overlapping authorities and branches of government, blaming one another to protect each other from the wrath of the confused masses. So, again, if statists believe that all humans are evil (admitting their own projected self-image), then their belief in the state must be a religious one: faith in a god-like entity — the state — that is more than and above all the people in government: a spirit of sorts, which is by default benevolent and knows what’s best for us, more than we do. This is their belief. Every statist believes this. This is why a self-announced “atheist” who also places religious faith in government is perhaps the epitome of hypocrisy. Statism is a cope: we make up religious fairytales to comfort us when faced with the fear and uncertainty of reality. But mostly, we create the fake god of the state and tell ourselves that “the state somehow knows and wants what’s best for us” because deep down we regret relinquishing our self-sovereignty, dignity, and integrity to it. This, I believe, is the true cause of statism. It’s Stockholm syndrome: “***If I can’t beat my abuser, or if I pathetically submitted to him, I might as well love him and pretend that I chose this, to deflect by self-loathing***”. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/stockholm-syndrome-explained **Objections** No? You don’t believe in the god-like entity of the state? You believe that you control the people who make up the state? “*But we control the people in government through voting*,” says the naive statist. How do you imagine you control the state? The same way a religionist has the **hubristic illusion that he controls God through prayer**, but in your case, it’s calling your corrupt congressman and voting for a limited hangout and the illusion that “the government is somehow doing its job”? How many times will you be fooled and still make excuses for the state due to your hopeless false hope? How many times will the government tell you it’s closing Guantanamo Bay or withdrawing from the Middle East or arresting elite pedophiles before you realise that words don’t mean action? https://sotiris.substack.com/p/losing-hope-part-2 If you think you control government through voting, then you believe you control God through prayer. You don’t. Both assumptions are as deluded as they are hubristic. There is no incentive for the state to satisfy your wants because you have **no leverage** — **an anonymous piece of paper grants absolutely no negotiating advantage to anyone**. **Statist cognitive dissonance** Here is another statist hypocrisy or cognitive dissonance: Statists believe that the government diligently obeys public opinion, yet they fail to comprehend that, similarly, a society can function without centralised governance where public opinion is even more powerful. Decentralised self-governance grants more power to public sentiment because independent providers of public goods are more subject to free-market competition, and thus more incentivised to obey their customers’ demands, unlike the artificial, violently imposed monopoly of government. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-dumbest-objections-against-statelessness-series https://sotiris.substack.com/p/a-threat-based-civilisation-is-not If you think that public opinion can affect a monopoly of public services, such as the state, then how on earth can you fail to grasp the notion that public opinion can have a much stronger effect on smaller, competing providers of public services, each subject to the unforgiving pressures of free-market competition, each trying to outcompete each other by providing better value than the other? Oh? You’re afraid that “big corporations will rise to the top and monopolise”? You mean like the state? You mean like the huge oligopolies we have today, despite government, and actually, *because* of government; since the government apparatus is there to be used by the highest bidding lobbyist to draft favourable regulations that crush competition and create barriers to entry. If you wonder why it’s so hard to open a company in certain “developed” countries, this is why: **the biggest corporations have recruited the government’s monopoly of violence to impose their own brand of legislature**. This is the only reason monopolies can emerge. In a free market without government intervention, there can be no sustainable monopolies; Economics 101. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-dumbest-objections-against-statelessness-4 The fact that you admit that the government is made up of evil people, yet you still believe that somehow a government is better than people, leads to the inevitable deduction that you see the face of god in the state; that the concept of government is a separate entity from the people it’s made of, above and beyond them, and somehow “benevolent” and “knowing better” for some reason. The ONLY thing sustaining the arbitrary power structures of the state is the misplaced belief of the populace in the state. Statism is nothing but faith. I recently wrote an article on how **collective faith is the only thing required for any state to emerge and be sustainable**: **The dumbest objections against statelessness #15** https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-dumbest-objections-against-statelessness-ef5 The ‘argument from incredulity’ fallacy presumes that someone’s stubbornly persistent disbelief in a particular subject, or their admission of lack of comprehension of it, is somehow a valid argument. No, your incredulity, or your lack of comprehension and imagination — especially as a consequence of your refusal to learn — is not a valid argument. Your… **Read full story** https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-dumbest-objections-against-statelessness-ef5 **Deferring self-accountability** The imaginary entity of “the state” is also a good way for us to avoid placing conviction in our decisions and opinions — this is how low our self-esteem is. What better way to avoid the burden of standing by our convictions than to have “the state” arbitrarily tell us what’s “right and wrong” instead? Even when the government does something that goes against the vast majority of people, admittedly so (such as war), we still rationalise it and tell ourselves that “it would have somehow been worse without a state”. We believe that obeying an audaciously tyrannical state, despite our vehement disapproval of its obvious abuses, is better than disobeying it, because then we “risk not having it”, as if that’s a bad thing. If you believe in “the state”, then you do believe in a separate godlike entity, because when the people who make up the state enforce what the vast majority of people oppose and would oppose in a referendum, the same people who oppose it accept it as “OK”. We tell ourselves that we need to obey “the state”, even though its people are monsters, because “we need to respect the law”, as if “the law” is the word of god, just like the voices that Abraham heard in his head. Even though most of us disagree with most of the state’s laws and policies, we still obey it like we would a god, not only out of fear but also out of perceived obligation to something higher. This higher being is the god of statism, which doesn’t even exist. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/abrahamism-must-end **Closing remarks** Yes, statism implies a belief in a different entity separate from the politicians, bureaucrats, and employees that make up government; **government is just made up**. I can’t disprove God. But I *can* disprove the state. A socialist atheist is less intellectually congruent than a religious voluntaryist. **Belief in the state is Satan-worship**: we sell our souls, our principles, to the apparatus of government — the devil himself — in exchange for what the devil promises: special privileges at the expense of others. The irony of government is https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-state-is-the-devil https://sotiris.substack.com/p/why-you-want-government ***Statism is satanism.*** How can we not have statism if most of us are brought up with religious stories like the ghastly, vomit-inducing story of Abraham, which teaches blind obedience to all who internalise it from a young, impressionable age? The psychological conditioning from such stories passes from generation after generation in a cycle of abuse, even though one might consider themselves “atheist”. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-evil-of-abraham https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-cycle-of-abuse It doesn’t matter if you’re an atheist or not. Your messed-up “morality” was heavily influenced by religion, especially religious stories about fearing a piece-of-shit “god” who demands praise and obedience like an insecure spastic child… or else! https://sotiris.substack.com/p/on-morality-part-1 https://sotiris.substack.com/p/who-are-you-to-judge-my-god And **we project this god-tyrant onto government**, the systems we create to enslave ourselves with the chains of our psychological trauma.