What's Wrong with Voluntaryism, Part 2

Systemic coercion is as much a fact as gravity, and corporations (not just governments) use it every day!

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Part 1.

Systemic Coercion.

Libertarians and Voluntaryists inveigh against the use of direct coercion as defined above but write and speak as if unaware of systemic coercion. Responsibly Free Jack doesn’t seem to regard the concept as valid … because we all have free will, after all. But do we?

First, what is systemic coercion, why is it used, and what makes it so effective?

Direct coercion, again, is the gun to your head. The irony is that those who want power figured out long ago, after the horrors of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, that direct physical force is messy, can backfire, and leave a lasting negative legacy. No one (one hopes!!!) will ever regard Hitler and Stalin and Mao as anything other than mass murderers.

Systemic coercion, therefore is far more subtle, and the difficulty of pinning it down with precision has proven to be one of its strengths. It operates through structured incentives, because people respond to incentives unless they realize they are being manipulated and do something to evade or thwart the incentive.

Systemic coercion is the “nudge” that promises nonverbally that if you give into it, whatever you’re doing can be done with less inconvenience or annoyance. Consider the commercial interruptions now littering YouTube for those who aren’t paid subscribers. YouTube is one of the most heavily trafficked websites, and therefore a massive moneymaker for its billionaire owners at Google. These “nudges” are everywhere in the present-day “enshittified” online world.

Systemic coercion, in the food arena, is the flavor-enhancer or other additive in a processed food which is mildly addictive and so keeps consumers coming back for more without realizing they are being manipulated.

The use of such devices to sell unhealthy foods are one of the reasons obesity is out of control in America and why chronic health problems have skyrocketed … ensuring greater profits for the healthcare industry.

Systemic coercion is “softer” than the gun to your head, but its purpose is still control. It works through deception. Follow the “nudge,” and your life is a little more convenient. Continue to resist, inconveniences multiply and eventually become barriers to achieving your desired outcomes.

These barriers are easily portrayed as resulting from personal choice. Experiencing inconveniences, consumer? That’s your fault! You chose to resist the “nudge”!

When agents of the state do this, it’s obvious. “You’re not in jail because of me,” says the judge to a defendant he sentenced to a couple days in jail for “contempt of court” because the defendant stood his ground on, e.g., his right to free speech. “You’re in jail because of you.”

All of us could probably enumerate more cases of punishment through resisting incentivization: “Do x and reap the rewards! Refuse to do x, and we’re not penalizing you, you’re penalizing yourself with your decisions!”

This is the rhetoric of systemic coercion.

The inability of Libertarians and Voluntaryists to see this is disturbing. Systemic coercion was the most frequent means of compelling people to go along with covid police policies and then get the mRNA shots. No laws I’m aware of, at least in the U.S., placed guns at people’s heads. But if you didn’t get the shots, your job was in danger. Thousands of people indeed lost their jobs, or gave them up, to not get the shots when they weren’t convinced of their safety and effectiveness. Interestingly, a significant number of refuseniks were healthcare workers. Other strong “nudges” to get the shots included refusal of entry into restaurants or other businesses owned by those who had capitulated. Deplatforming / censorship was a powerful weapon social media corporations used to compel compliance with official narratives as the New Normal set in. Again: “Do x and reap the rewards! Refuse to do x, and we’re not penalizing you, you’re penalizing yourself with your decisions!”

What makes systemic coercion even more dangerous in its not being noticed by defenders of freedom (a lot of conservatives as well as Libertarians / Voluntaryists), is that those working for “economic integration” based on “free trade,” open borders, migration, etc., apply it regularly. The “nudge” is frequently lower prices (Walmart, on cheaply made goods imported from Communist China: “Always low prices. Always.).

A reader emailed me last year arguing compellingly that CBDCs would not be forced on us directly. The term is sufficiently sullied that it probably won’t be called that. It would be marketed in the above sense and sold as the solution to the pain points caused by economic dislocation (which bankster globalists will have caused!) resulting from the greatly devalued dollar. Result: most of the public would embrace it willingly, i.e., Voluntarily. Refuseniks will be shamed with the usual “conspiracy theorist” rhetoric.

I find this entirely credible. “Economic integration” has not been forced on us. Much else that has resulted in economic decline for the majority of the population has not been forced on us. People like low prices! Even if they don’t like low-wage “services sector” labor!

Where Do We Go from Here? I. The System That Worked (However Imperfectly) and Then Went Sideways.

There’s a period in American history we can look at usefully, as a lot went right during those years. I’m referring to the period that began at the end of the 1940s and continued up through the 1970s when we lost our sense of direction.

During this era the U.S. built the strongest economy the world had ever seen. What did we do right? Could we do it again? This depends, because much of went right back then was due to government decisions now rejected by the freedom community, and by Voluntaryists.

First, World War II had left European nations’ infrastructures in ruins. This gave Americans an obvious advantage. Production and consumption in the U.S. thus surged: the post-war economic boom that really was that, and not an artifact of credit expansion as we saw in the 1990s. Jobs were aplenty, and given the times, paid quite well. The rising tide really did lift all boats of its participants. Children could count on living better than their parents and grandparents.

Second — and this is one of those things Libertarians and Voluntaryists won’t like, but I can’t help that — the Rooseveltian New Deal put in safety nets (social security, unemployment insurance, etc.), in addition to large-scale infrastructural projects. The country embraced what some call a mixed economy, with capitalism’s “rough edges” mostly removed. Among the fruits of this system was the Interstate Highway System beginning in the 1950s.

It’s useful to realize: the hostility toward government we see today didn’t much exist back then outside of a very small handful of writers (Ayn Rand, Rose Wilder Lane, one or two others). This hostility entered the mainstream with Milton Friedman’s neoliberalism (although neoliberals had their own uses for government!) and Ronald Reagan’s 1980s economics which liberals of the time derided as “trickle down” (because already, very little was trickling down from the superrich).

The point is, the mixed economy generated genuine prosperity. When neoliberals hijacked government, they turned it into a protection racket for the rich. Within a matter of a couple of decades, no longer could children look forward to being as well off, or better off, than their parents or grandparents.

Third was the introduction of credit cards and credit spending, to ensure that “money” would be available to consumers who could therefore go on spending. This allowed corporations to keep wages down, because people could always be incentivized to borrow against the future.

It did not matter that they began to go into debt, in a system increasingly based on debt. Fueling this culture was rising advertising, blurring needs and wants in the above sense, so that consumers would buy the increasing proliferation of goods. (Again: if consumers don’t buy what capitalists produce, the system goes into a funk.)

Fourth: if World War II accomplished anything it was to advance technology. Peacetime technological advances continued through the 1950s and 1960s, making production more efficient across industry. We had always seen what Schumpeter had called creative destruction.

Fifth: the GI Bill, a government program (my father used it to become the first in his family to earn a university degree), enabled Veterans to go to college. Universities expanded by leaps and bounds. Aspiring faculty had little trouble finding jobs; students benefitted greatly.

Sixth: the top marginal tax rate was high (91 percent!), even if the superrich could use deductions and loopholes even then not available to the peasantry.

Seventh: regulation stabilized the economy, as regulatory capture had not yet set in. Glass-Steagall kept investment banks and commercial banks separate. The Securities and Exchange Commission oversaw financial markets.

Eighth: the Cold War led to increased defense spending, and this, too, stimulated economic growth.

Ninth and far more generally: social trust was strong; men and women trusted each other far more than they do today; families tended to stay together as it was possible for a nuclear family to do very well with just one breadwinner.

Tenth and lastly — possibly still more generally — the overall mood of the country was optimistic. This was because people could see, experience, and benefit directly from progress; it wasn’t an abstraction in some economist’s theory or a mere government number. Inflation was low. Money still had purchasing power.

I believe as well, that independently of economics, the dominant culture in the country was still Christian. The Christian worldview has barely a toehold today, all the fretting by cultural leftists about “Christian nationalism” notwithstanding.

It is true that during the 1950s benefits were not yet equally shared. But minority communities pursued antidiscrimination policies and equality with the same cultural hope and within a larger Christian worldview. Dr. King’s writings are permeated with theological references you wouldn’t find in, say, any screed by a critical race theorist. Women embraced “second wave feminism” (the “first wave” having won them the right to vote and work outside the home), which pursued equal pay for equal work and equal experience.

Then, things went sideways.

We know the basics. Nixon killed the gold standard. This opened the door to inflation and financialization. Oil crises began to drive up energy costs. Advancing technology went international, meaning: corporations could start to offshore work to third world countries and import cheap labor via immigration.

Globalism’s meteoric rise began during the 1970s with the creation of the Trilateral Commission (by David Rockefeller who had helmed the Council on Foreign Relations), on top of other secretive entities like the Bilderberg Group. Soon we would see the rise of the World Economic Forum. All of these, we should note, are private entities, not governments or branches of governments. The Federal Reserve is a private corporation. The Bank for International Settlements (the central bank of central banks) is a private entity.

Corporations were incentivized to embrace globalism.

Recall that they had, all along, a structural incentive to keep wages down; outsourcing labor and hiring immigrants enabled them to do that with far greater efficiency.

Numerous decisions began to break labor, which could then be thrown to the wolves. The most visible of these was Reagan’s breaking the air traffic controllers union at the start of the 1980s.

“Free trade” made capital richer and labor poorer. The middle class began to struggle, in that inflationary environment in which one breadwinner was no longer enough.

Paul Craig Roberts, in an infamous article that got him blacklisted in the controlled mainstream press, criticized “free trade” as having been made obsolete by technology which enabled capital’s global mobility. The comparative advantage about which David Ricardo had written almost a century before assumed that capital was essentially stationary. Since capital could now move operations to where labor was cheapest and environmental regulations were lax, comparative advantage had been replaced by the absolute advantage of corporations operating in cheap labor countries.

This story has been told now many, many times … along with that of rising globalism. Narratives that “globalization” would make us all rich have now collapsed. The throwing of the white working and middle classes to the wolves did much to boost the political rise of a purported outsider, Donald Trump, who promised he would fix this mess by bringing industry home. Whether he has any chance of succeeding during his second term or whether he’s already been thrown off track, remains to be seen.

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Where Do We Go from Here? II. What If Dystopia Continues, or If We Experience “Total Systemic Failure.”

We’re in corporate-state dystopia. There’s no point in denying this.

Reread my list of civilizational needs, and my annotation that none are being addressed. They are discussed — especially after the murder of a healthcare CEO and the widespread support the shooter received on social media — but not by any decision-maker. Trump tried and failed to scrap Obamacare. But what is he going to do to bring down the astronomical cost of healthcare? U.S. healthcare costs are the highest in the world, with no evidence that healthcare in the U.S. is superior in quality to that of other advanced nations which have embraced some kind of national health care.

Parallel things could be said for the skyrocketing costs of keeping a roof over one’s head.

What would fix this?

I keep coming back to the same thing: education. An educational system devoted to truth and not indoctrination, to freedom instead of servitude, and to self-mastery and a will to take action, not learned helplessness.

But would anyone buy such education in the marketplace (no one in his right mind thinks public schools are ever going to teach it)?

Why do people buy anything?

Among the things I’ve learned from studying copywriting and marketing, which presupposes an ecosystem of voluntary exchanges: the buyer’s belief that the exchange will eliminate or at least alleviate an immediate pain point.

That he/she will be better off after trading.

Whether, in fact, he/she really will be, is a logically separate question.

The point is the persuasive force of the sales presentation and its capacity to increase the urgency of the buyer’s decision.

This explains how those wishing to sell in the present marketplace pitch themselves as helpers with solutions to problems, promises of quick pain relief. They appeal to emotions: fear (e.g., of continued suffering, losing out, missing out, or being left out), greed (“immense gains projected for this stock or this cryptocurrency”), or vanity (“You’re special!”)

All of which is short-term if not immediate. The problem is that solving the present problems of civilization, meeting needs such as affordable healthcare and housing, require long-term thinking, not short-term consumption.

Consider education.

We have at hand an explanation of why public education, despite being a complete and total flop, remains the dominant form of education in the country.

From one standpoint, though, public schools aren’t a flop! They’ve done what they were supposed to do, which is produce blind obedience, mass consumption, mindless conformity.

So why can’t we fix education through the various private models that are in circulation.

Libertarians and Voluntaryists say you can! Homeschool your children. It’s not illegal, though it once was! Or send them to private schools.

Or write and sell courses on your own; or even design new educational institutions!

Each of these is fraught with practical problems.

Homeschooling, done properly, is time-consuming. Like all teaching, it calls for periods of preparation in addition to instruction time with children. Parents should be knowledgeable in the subject areas being taught, as well as present with those they are schooling. If they both have to work, this cuts significantly into their time and exhausts their energy.

Homeschooling at its best all but presupposes the kind of economy we had in the 1950s, when both parents didn’t have to work to make ends meet.

Yes, some are finding ways around this kind of barrier and saying, Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

But not the critical mass needed to move the needle.

There are myriad private schools. Some offer quality learning experiences. So why can’t private education catch on with a supportive buying public?

Private schools are usually considerably more expensive than public education (which is free! — a definite incentive for parents to keeping going that route!). Probably again if both parents are working, they’re not likely to be able to afford a good private school.

Contributing from the other end would mean writing courses you believe are needed, but again: can you market and sell them? These are very different skill sets!

Start up a school? It’s possible. The founders of the University of Austin did it, enrolling their first freshman class this past fall — a university devoted to the pursuit of truth rather than wokeness.

Its founders were well-networked and sitting on $150 million, though. Almost none of us peasants, whatever our brilliant ideas, have $150 million lying around unused or any way of raising it!

So how does one “sell” serious education?

For the most part, one doesn’t.

The fact that it doesn’t address an immediate pain point is hurts it in the marketplace. It’s a “niche” enterprise exclusively. “Niche” enterprises again don’t reach the kind of critical mass that is needed.

Can the marketplace save education? I think not. Or we’d be seeing it by now. The Ron Paul Homeschooling Curriculum is excellent! It’s also unknown outside conservative and Libertarian circles.

So who should intervene? Isn’t that the question? The state? Only a state that isn’t bought and paid for by corporations could get this job done.

At present, there is no such state.

Or consider public health. Only an idiot truly believes that either Big Pharma or the broader healthcare industry care about public health, as opposed to profitability. It’s been relatively easy to use the promise of short-term pain relief of one sort or another to sell drugs, or the fear of calamity to sell health insurance. Then, calamity happens anyway when the insurance policy won’t cover something essential.

Will this get more CEOs murdered, sooner or later?

I don’t know, but I think it’s a safe bet.

I’ve advocated primary prevention (read more here), which, in spirit, is the same as homeschooling: taking matters into one’s own hands.

It’s not just imminently individualistic and quite compatible with Voluntaryism, but imminently rational.

It would also, if adopted on a large scale, disempower the powerful — Big Pharma and all its satellite industries and organizations, Big Food, and other repositories of Bigness.

A healthy population simply won’t need pharmaceuticals, won’t consume unhealthy food or diet drinks, and won’t be so lethargic as to be susceptible to misleading advertising.

“But Yates, social media isn’t centralized. No one is preventing you from advocating primary prevention.”

No one is “preventing” parents from homeschooling their children, either. See above.

The article I linked to, on primary prevention, has had 29 views as I write this.

Without appropriate contacts and, on that platform, “boostings” (by its insiders), an individual’s capacity to reach out with an idea amidst the massive overproduction of online content is highly limited. Even with a separate email list, few readers are going to see it.

In addition, even if an audience was reachable, taking the recommended actions requires more proactive thinking than most people will do — again, in most cases there isn’t an immediate pain point — and so (as a Libertarian whose name escapes me now once said) “primary prevention doesn’t sell.”

Only state intervention will lower the costs of healthcare, housing, etc., because state intervention can operate outside profit-drivenness and the need for marketing.

The unfortunate truth is that in both areas, and doubtless in others as well, things are going to have to get worse before they can begin to get better, before alternatives to the existing systems are likely to be able to be heard — because more people, especially if they have children, will be looking for alternatives.

We might have to experience another major economic dislocation, one that would make what happened in 2008 look like child’s play by comparison, what would amount to a total systemic failure. The unfortunate fact about such an event is that it would likely precipitate a mass panic, and out of mass panic usually emerges the first strongman who could promise to restore order. This person would make Trump look like Mary Teresa.

There are no guarantees that we’re going to solve these conundrums. Civilizations rise and prosper for a time; they go sideways; they decline and fall. Is there any reason why the West should be an exception?

Making the changes we need to make before events slap us in the face would be good, but as a cynic would say, their drawback is that they make sense. The normal human state of affairs is to sit on one’s duff until events strike — and the pain points of inaction prompt action. Sadly, by that time it is usually too late.

Conclusion.

This article, at over 7,500 words total, has been longer than most of mine. I had to break it into to two parts because Substack would not email anything this long. Hopefully my splitting it into two parts and continuing with it anyway will prove justified. It has helped clarify my own thoughts, even if it fails to convince anyone not already convinced. Even if it fails to achieve any significant readership at all.

There are significant items I’ve had to leave out (except for brief mentions). I’m firmly convinced (have argued at length elsewhere) that materialism is simply wrongheaded … bad for any civilization, as in the last analysis, it encourages and cannot get beyond nihilism: the world is without meaning; human aspirations are, in the end, futile; and in actual human affairs, power gets the last word however much we seek to deny this to ourselves and each other.

Does saying this prove that a transcendent realm exists? No, of course not, but it should encourage us to keep our minds open and our thinking less rigid.

Also encouraging us as such are the countless phenomena, most having nothing to do with anyone’s religion, that materialism fails to explain. These range from the origin of life itself — which remains a mystery despite over a hundred years of scientific effort — to more arcane phenomena of language use and what it means to understand a language (as opposed to hear physical sounds or see written inscriptions), to the nature of consciousness which continues to have features not reducible to brain biology, chemistry, physics.

Not to mention the many phenomena associated in one way or another with the “paranormal.”

But these are all different articles.

My conclusion, rephrased in light of the above: there seems to me no reason why someone who believes in the NAP shouldn’t practice Voluntaryism. The world would be more peaceful if everyone did. But the bottom line is, not everyone will. So we must retain means of anticipating and responding to those who have no problem using force, direct or indirect. And we must be able to anticipate and respond to the mere stupidity of the person who tries to text while driving on the Interstate, risking killing someone or herself.

The truth about laws against such behavior is that they save lives, and that’s the bottom line. Those who fail all tests of responsibility, place others’ lives at risk, and do not respond to repeated warnings, must be prevented from acting in ways that endanger others. This is very much in accordance with, At first, Do No Harm!

When we really have a population that can rise to responsibility and practice it consistently, embracing Voluntaryism on a large scale might become an option. But we are a long way from being there yet.

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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!

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

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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