A Note to Principled Anarchists

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Robert Higgs makes no bones about it: "The state is the most destructive institution human beings have ever devised – a fire that, at best, can be controlled for only a short time before it o'erleaps its improvised confinements and spreads its flames far and wide."

As an anthropologist about to celebrate my 76th birthday, my great interest has been social evolution. It is clear to me that the state is a social pathology. It has infected the world, due not to some innate nature of society, but to the insufficient development of the institution of private property as we make the transition from self-sufficient bands dependent on kinship recognition to a world society integrated by contract. We suffer a deficiency disease – a deficiency of authentic social organization – which is something time will take care of. There is light at the end of the tunnel, and the tunnel is not that long, provided we survive the dangerous near term. Meanwhile, we endure our growing pains.

Voting is but one of the means by which the state maintains a fiction of legitimacy by co-opting its citizens into the political organization, thinking thereby they are self-governing. I have no illusion that voting or any other political mechanism or "reform" will change the trend of the state toward self-aggrandizement that Higgs describes. Voting is normally counterproductive.

Then why this letter? Obviously I have decided to vote in the coming election, or I would not be writing this. There is one and only one reason: Ron Paul promises to withdraw all troops and stop the physical and spiritual carnage on all sides in Iraq. People are dying in this moment. An enormous percentage of the homeless in this country are war veterans whose ability to live productive lives was shattered by their battlefield experience. More Vietnam veterans have died by suicide, it is said, than were killed in action in that war. Human life is too precious to waste this way.

True, the United States government under Ron Paul will continue all of the things governments do. That is its nature. I see no chance of "returning to the Constitution" under Ron Paul or anyone else; for that is not government's nature. But Ron Paul promises to stop the altogether unnecessary deaths in Iraq, and based on his demonstrated character, I believe he can and will.

December 20, 2007