What's Wrong with Voluntaryism? Part 1.
What is Voluntaryism? Can it solve the problems of civilization?
Voluntaryism: What It Is.
What is Voluntaryism? You can find out a certain amount here. Responsibly Free Jack (as he calls himself), author of that Substack, and I have communicated regularly for around eight years, which has meant sharing a lot of ideas, information, areas of agreement, areas of disagreement. Some of the last have to do with voluntaryism itself; others, with more foundational questions such as which worldview has the best pedigree: Christendom or materialism. I’m a Christian. He’s a materialist.
Voluntaryism itself is like Libertarianism in holding as a moral principle that no human being should ever initiate force against another human being, or advocate or delegate the use of force. Libertarians call this the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP). Jack, author of the Responsibly Free Substack (link above), understands force as physical force, or direct coercion: the gun-to-your-head variety at which violent criminals and agents of the state excel.
How do the two ideas differ?
Most Libertarians participate in the political process. They support what the late Libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick called the night-watchman state: minarchism. In this view, the state as an institution can be justified if it confines itself to encoding individuals’ rights to life, liberty, and property, and serving as an agent punishing those who violate such rights (using physical force) according to the rule of law: an objective code of laws, that is.
Voluntaryism rejects this. The state, all Libertarians agree, has a legal monopoly on the use of force. With this legal monopoly and also the capacity to define its own limits, it will invariably expand and rationalize its expansions until we’re back where we started.
The trajectory of attempts to contain the American state based in the Asylum on the Potomac within Constitutionally-prescribed limits surely shows that this is not a crazy point of view. But what is the alternative?
Theoretical anarchism, says the Voluntaryist: a stateless, self-ordering society of individual persons who have agreed to respect the NAP and so interact voluntarily, without force or violence, and where those who break the rules suffer social sanction and, if necessary, expulsion from the community. How to we get to such a stateless order? Voluntaryists propose redirecting education to delegitimize the state, encouraging withdrawal of support from its institutions and practices such as voting for its carefully vetted candidates, while promoting a completely free marketplace of goods, services, and ideas: Responsible Freedom. From The Voluntaryist:
Voluntaryists are advocates of non-political, non-violent strategies to achieve a free society. We reject electoral politics, in theory and in practice, as incompatible with libertarian principles. Governments must cloak their actions in an aura of moral legitimacy in order to sustain their power, and political methods invariably strengthen that legitimacy. Voluntaryists seek instead to delegitimize the State through education, and we advocate the withdrawal of the cooperation and tacit consent on which State power ultimately depends.
In other words, it strives for a fully consistent application of the NAP, something minarchism compromises.
Here is how Responsibly Free Jack conveys the essential message (note the not-so-subtle dig at classical Marxism, for obvious reasons a central target of all individualist thought, since Marx saw “collectivity,” not “individuality,” as our human essence). There are a few other ideas evident in Jack’s version of voluntaryism, rooted more in evolutionary psychology than Libertarian philosophy, such as the idea that parenting as it has understood itself from time immemorable is the enemy, creating in children a psychological acceptance of authorities outside themselves: be they gods or government.
Prelude to Evaluation: The Current Problems of Civilization.
I wish here is to evaluate this. I’ll conclude that as a personal philosophy it is coherent, useful, and if practiced on a large scale, would probably bring about a more peaceful world (Jack’s hope). How does the Voluntaryist achieve practice on a large scale, though. Here we quickly run into difficulties.
I’ve just implied that there are two ways of approaching this. One is personal: the small scale approach, in which one decides to honor the NAP as the foundation of all one’s dealings with others: family, friends, neighbors, employers, employees, etc., while encouraging others both through teaching and by setting an example.
I see nothing wrong with this, although its application may be limited to those who share the Voluntaryist philosophy.
Then there’s the Big Picture, what I will call the contemporary problems of civilization. What are these?
They are rooted in the realization that civilizations have needs, conditions for their stability and for their thriving or at least the surviving of their citizenry. The long-term sustainability of the advanced West requires that these needs be met, in aggregate:
(1) Affordable energy.
(2) Affordable housing (shelter).
(3) Family stability (nuclear family at least; extended families might have advantages not available to nuclear families).
(4) Affordable healthcare — especially for the elderly and others unable to contribute to the economy.
(5) Education, understood as transmission of the civilization’s accumulated knowledge, know-how, and wisdom, to ensuing generations.
(6) A stable, reliable currency that really is just a trustworthy medium of exchange and not a surrogate for God.
(7) A worldview adequate to its people’s experience of reality, consistent with their logical acumen, and existentially satisfying in that it exhibits their place or significance in the larger universe. This typically involves access to, or interaction with, a Transcendent Reality, Agency, and Moral Order.
(8) Social trust, based on people knowing most of what to expect from one another because most of their behaviors and actions are predictable.
What ought to be worrisome — very much so! — is that none of these exist in any great measure in the U.S. right now.
Just as worrisome is that few people are discussing the matter systemically and constructively. Those that are, are assuming they have (or in the near future will have) technical solutions, i.e., technocracy. Expanding a little on each:
(1) The cost of energy has risen steadily over the past half-century. When I was a child, gas was around $0.25/gallon. Today, in most places, it hovers between $2 and $4/gallon: higher in some locations. This is just one example.
(2) Housing costs have gone through the roof, to the point where homelessness hit a record high last year (noted here).
(3) Families are shattered, leaving millions in relative isolation; no-fault divorce and feminism have been contributing factors, but due to the rising cost of living, with which wages have not kept up, against the declining purchasing power of the dollar, typically today both parents need incomes. A lot of women won’t like it, but this is not a recipe for effectively nurturing children which is women’s superpower.
(4) Healthcare costs are the leading cause of personal bankruptcy; it is clear (and I’ve written about it) that healthcare corporations place profits above lives, and this has already gotten one CEO killed. There is clearly a great deal of public resentment against these corporations. Absent policies either able to bring down costs or introduce viable alternatives to the pharmaceuticals-industrial complex, I expect this situation to worsen.
(5) Public education is a disaster at all levels. Employers trying to fill positions complain regularly that newly minted graduates with university degrees are functionally illiterate. Reading has fallen precipitously in favor of videos on Instagram and TikTok. Those of us who write are counseled to write at an eighth-grade level, or less.
(6) Relentless (and systemically necessary) money printing has undercut the value of currency everywhere. More currency chasing the same amount of goods means inflation; what is being inflated is the money supply. Increasing the quantity of anything lowers the capacity of individual units to command the same economic value: Econ 101. This is not sustainable. The present system often compels people to go into debt to survive. It depends on debt. If people save, moreover, the system is harmed. If they refuse to spend, it falls into recession. The irony here is that money is worshipped as a surrogate for God by the haves, but operates like a demonic force for the have-nots, totally encircling and circumscribing their lives.
(7) Materialism, which denies the Transcendent, I would argue (and this is a point where Jack and I are 180 degrees apart) is not an adequate worldview for civilization, because for most people it is not sufficient for a moral view of the world and human life. It is true that historically-important philosophers such as Kant have worked out intricate secular theories of morality, but most people are not philosophers, do not read philosophers, and never will. What they do not absorb, morally speaking, from their parents, peers, and education, they will obtain from the culture surrounding them. If the culture is communicating implicit nihilism, they will become implicit nihilists.
(8) Once the U.S. was a relatively high trust society, but social trust has been dropping. The Internet, which has increased the frequency of anonymous interactions and their possibilities, is loaded with gimmicks, shiny objects, and scams of all kinds. I receive hundreds of emails per week the only purpose of which is to try to separate me from my money. Almost once a week I encounter an account of someone, frequently an elderly, non-tech-savvy person, who was just scammed out of his/her life savings. The operating principle seems to be, caveat emptor (buyer beware!). The research is clear, moreover: social media siloes its users into online echo chambers while creating pseudo-communities, diminishes individuals’ privacy, and subjects people to all manner of abuse at the hands of anonymous strangers (cyber-bullying). The long and the short of it: once, long ago, the Internet was a breath of fresh air. Today it is filled with predators of various sorts, and I can fully understand the desires of some to simply ban certain social media platforms like TikTok. Many of the “hoops” one must jump through to undertake certain activities (online banking comes to mind) now involve double authentication, to prove “you’re you.” This indicates how little corporations trust their clients, and it’s conceivable that they have their reasons. Is any of this a recipe for social trust? I think not.
The Marketplace: Myths and Realities.
Voluntaryists, like Libertarians broadly, propose a totally free marketplace. They assume the marketplace to be self-regulating, and so not needing any interference in its workings from outside, i.e., from meddlesome regulators or bureaucrats.
Even Adam Smith, however, who authored the first treatise on capitalism before it was called that, recognized that business needed to be circumscribed. Why? Because businesspeople couldn’t be fully trusted. Even if most were honest, some would collude to fix prices, organize cartels, or establish monopolies if they could do it. They would thwart the “self-regulating” tendencies of the marketplace.
This is because people will take short cuts if they find them, or if short cuts are made available to them. Frederick Bastiat, mid-19th century Christian classical liberal, wrote of a “fatal tendency of mankind”:
When [people] can, they wish to live and prosper at the expense of others…. The annals of history bear witness to the truth of it: the incessant wars, mass migrations, religious persecutions, universal slavery, dishonesty in commerce, and monopolies. This fatal desire has its origin in the very nature of man — in that primitive, universal, and insuppressible instinct that impels him to satisfy his desires with the least possible pain….
…[S]ince man is naturally inclined to avoid pain — and since labor is pain in itself — it follows that man will resort to plunder whenever plunder is easier than work. History shows this quite clearly. And under these conditions, neither religion nor morality can stop it. When, then, does plunder stop? It stops when it becomes more painful and more dangerous than labor.
With 175 years of 20/20 hindsight, we can say: Good luck with that!
This phenomenon manifests itself as the powerful and moneyed, usually within corporations, hijacking markets. As I’ve emphasized for years, some among us are fascinated with power. Their entire value system revolves around power as an end in itself. They may be drawn to politics, but politics is hardly the only arena where they can thrive. In a market-oriented society — or a society which sees itself as a single large marketplace, so that all values are ultimately economic values — money is the primary instrument for wielding power. It becomes power. Those who want power have figured out that, as David Rogers Webb put it in The Great Taking (2023):
Money is an extremely efficient control system. People order themselves upon money incentives, and thus difficult, dangerous and energy intensive overt physical control need not be employed broadly.
This is a point we’ll be stressing. Money’s wielders may have begun with an honest product or service that satisfies a genuine need (e.g., Rockefeller and oil, or Vanderbilt with steel), but fascination with wealth soon overtakes this (witness subsequent Rockefeller generations moving first into education and then into banking and finally politics).
The superrich purchase favors from the political class. If possible, they buy the political class outright. They create institutions that give them de facto control over the economy. Their creation of the Federal Reserve System is an example. Most politicians and bureaucrats have even less of a moral compass, need money for reelection campaigns or for other agendas, and so are easily manipulated with offers they can’t refuse. Arguably today entire state agencies are owned, lock, stock, and barrel, by the corporations they were established to regulate. There’s even a term for this: regulatory capture. The multibillion dollar pharmaceuticals industry — Big Pharma — is an obvious example. There are others.
The upshot is that there is no “free” marketplace outside of theory. There are, of course, myriad physical marketplaces everywhere where people buy and sell freely. But for those who find the dynamics of the larger system significant, these are not where the action is.
Most Libertarian and, by extension, Voluntaryist thought ignores not just the above features of human nature but structural features of the system itself, emergent properties that come about when human beings interact in large and mostly anonymous aggregates. Among these is the tension between capital and labor which Marx thought would grow until it precipitated a revolutionary situation that would destroy capitalism.
Is this tension real? Behind both capital and labor, after all, are human beings, and all human beings have fundamentally the same basic needs: water, food, shelter, clothing, the company of others, sleep.
Then I realized that capital needs profit to survive, and the more profit, the better. Labor needs wages to survive, and so naturally petitions for the highest wages it can obtain. Wages are a problem for capital. Labor is its biggest expense. So there is a structural incentive for capital to keep wages as low as possible, while another incentive for labor urges them upward. So, yes, the tension between capital and labor is real. Libertarianism and Voluntaryism proceed as if discussion of structure was a mere product of Marxian ideology and not a description of what happens when human beings interact this way. The anonymity element enables capital, moreover, to see individual laborers receiving paychecks as ciphers: names and social security numbers on file folders or, these days, on computer files.
There’s a further structural tension: labor, in aggregate, must have money to spend, or laborers cannot buy what capitalists produce. The system falls into recession, meaning that capital falters as well.
Henry Ford solved this problem by paying his laborers generous wages. They thrived! He discovered that when his laborers could afford to buy the cars his factories turned out, his corporation thrived!
But the idea never took hold, especially when advancing technology made “globalization” an option.
And whether anyone likes it or not, advancing technology has been a mixed blessing at best. On the one hand, it now enables Responsibly Free Jack and me to communicate in real time even though we live on different continents: something that would have been unimaginable in Henry Ford’s time.
On the other, accompanied with an appropriate ideology (neoliberalism), it has enabled wealth and hence power to concentrate in the hands of the infamous “one percent,” which is actually the point-zero-one percent. Neoliberals used the language of free markets but developed what became a welfare state in reverse: a protection racket that redistributed wealth upwards into the hands of the rich, creating the billionaire class of the present as well as many other lesser players who live by extracting wealth from others instead of actually producing anything (landlords being an example — see Jared Brock’s extensive archive covering the subject of landlording thoroughly; consider another topic Brock has covered in depth: how Airbnb, easily one of the most predatory corporations in the world, has taken millions of houses out of the market, which has part of what has driven up housing costs for everyone else).
The result is a system controlled by the superrich and their corporations — a plutocratic oligarchy (the dystopia we are in already and not merely “in the making,” as Caitlin Johnstone recently argued in a disturbing piece). The language of this system is the language of markets, of course. Don’t like monopolies or oligarchies. You can always enter markets and compete by offering a better product or service, says the ideology.
Yes, <sarcasm on>, we’re able to create tech companies able to compete with Google and Facebook, or create an online store able to compete with Amazon, just by supplying a better service or product and working our butts off to sell it <sarcasm off>.
Corporate cartelization (Big Pharma) or monopoly (Amazon) ensure that meeting actual human needs is an option, not a necessity. People buy from these entities, of course. But are real needs being satisfied?
This brings us to yet another tension in the system, one that deserves its own section.
Needs, Wants, and Marketing.
Our physical needs are relatively few. I listed them above. A system optimized to satisfy genuine human needs would supply clean water, grow and distribute nutritious food, build sufficient affordable housing, deliver affordable healthcare, and so on.
Those are our needs. There are a few more civilization-created needs, of course: for indoor plumbing, electricity; and these days, Internet access and email. Without these, one cannot live a normal twenty-first century life.
Everything else is a want.
The latest Stephen King bestseller is a want. Vacations are wants. A second vehicle is a want. “McMansions” are wants. Collectables (anything) are wants.
Needs, of course, demand to be satisfied; the unsatisfied need provokes pain, which increases until the need is satisfied. Many unsatisfied needs, if they continue long enough, cause death. Without water or food, you die. Lack of shelter won’t kill you, but your life is ever at risk from other factors. Lack of nutritious food also won’t kill you, but smoking, or living on processed foods, will eventually damage your health. Without healthcare to deal with an acute condition, again you’re dead.
Defenders of a completely free marketplace argue that it uniquely satisfies human needs.
Truthfully, in the final analysis I have no idea because I’ve never seen a completely free marketplace outside of economic theory, and outside Libertarian and Voluntarist lectures. I never met anyone who did.
What should become clear upon some reflection is that marketplace choices are not made in a vacuum, as if isolated from a variety of influences, personal and otherwise. Homo economicus, who makes decisions rationally based exclusively on cost-benefit calculations, is a myth.
What we’ve said about about human nature and the capacity of some to hijack an ostensibly free system — trying to benefit at the expense of others — makes the prospect dubious that there could even be such. Libertarians and Voluntaryists inveigh against the state, but don’t say much to address the human nature issue beyond pointing out that the state, too, is comprised of human beings who would have the same sins and faults as us ordinary mortals — in addition to their legal monopoly on the use of force.
So whether a completely free marketplace would uniquely satisfy the above needs seems an unanswerable theoretical question … on the order of, “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”
But suppose, for the sake of argument, that it could. Then what?
A capitalistic economic system requires money to change hands. It can’t stand still. Again, if people (labor or capital) do not spend, the system falls into recession. So what happens when basic needs are satisfied?
Enter marketing and advertising, and detailed (and well-funded) studies on the psychology of buying / consuming. Using language and other psychological devices to transform mere wants (if they are even that) into pressing needs has been studied intently for over a hundred years now. The classic works include Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins (1923) or the better known Propaganda by Edward Louis Bernays (1928). Other figures came later: David Ogilvie, Gary Halbert, Jay Abraham, Mark Ford. Notice the dates on the first two. The problem of what to do when most people’s basic needs are satisfied didn’t start with neoliberalism. It has been part and parcel of a market-centered economic system from the start.
The results are why email has been transformed from a means by which people who know each other communicate into a cluttered morass of sales pitches from anonymous strangers. The strangers, or their corporations, obtained your email address because email addresses are bought and sold just like everything else. Phone numbers being readily available, you’re telemarketed daily. Everyone must sell, because money must change hands or the system crashes!
The best marketers will convince you that they and they alone have the solution to some actual pain point. Or that you “need” something you didn’t know you “needed” until they came along and enlightened you. Buy now, moreover; don’t wait! Because the discount is only for 24 hours! (In other words, buy on impulse, not following the thoughtful reflection that should accompany any major, potentially life-altering purchase.)
Part 2.
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Steven Yates is a (recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored three books, more than 20 articles, numerous book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself.
In 2012 he moved to Chile. He married a Chilean national in 2014. Among his discoveries in South America: the problems of the U.S. are problems everywhere, because human nature is the same everywhere. The problems are problems of Western civilization as a whole.
As to whether he’ll stay in Chile … stay tuned!
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Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.
His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.
His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.
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