Why does one adopt principles? A Republican Party member or ‘MAGA warrior’ generally has a set of ideological foundations (if amorphous and ever-shifting) that he or she abides by. A Black Lives Matter activist, another set. Even though within these two respective movements there are a variety of individual opinions, often diametrically opposed and contradictory, the images of the groups as packaged and sold by mainstream media appear more or less homogeneous. At root, however, most members of these groups want the same thing as anarchists, voluntaryists and agorists, whether they know it or not. At the end of the day it is the individual that matters, and not the easily dismissed label.

Left and Right: Two Sides of the Same COINTEL*

Of course, media-fueled division is intentional and helps to sell the dumbed down divide and conquer narrative to a population of fearful individuals. As such, there is merit to examining some of the actual positions of individual members of these groups, to get a clearer picture. When one does this, a stunning truth emerges: both of the groups wish to leverage state violence to achieve their ends, but even more strikingly, both of the groups are composed of individuals who are largely well-meaning and want justice, but are confused as to how to get there, making a mix of valid and invalid arguments about the state and the respective societies they find themselves embedded in.

In short, many of these individuals share the same core goals as we agorists, but have been so brainwashed as to completely miss the way.

For the time being, a discussion of the validity or lack thereof, of these two respective groups and their principle sets or worldviews is unnecessary. What is necessary is to understand that one’s philosophical foundation itself, whatever it may be, is always and without exception arrived at and adopted for a reason. Namely: the achievement of one’s core values.

Following this lead, it becomes clear a critical reality which might be leveraged in the spread of agorism and anarchy (free markets and lack of violent rulers) is that all humans, with the exception of a tiny percentage of neurologically compromised individuals, have similar root value systems regarding how they choose their worldviews, and this unites us all. While the value systems of BLM and MAGA as collectives may be starkly contradictory in most senses, the motives for choosing these respective value systems are exactly the same. This is a powerful truth, the awareness of which could change the world in a heartbeat if it were to be realized.

To elaborate, all humans use the same basic tools in attempts to arrive at the same general outcomes: peace, prosperity, and happiness.

The means by which these tools (actions, objects, and time) are leveraged has simply become perverted  — the vision of some of the most media-sensationalized ‘fixers’ and influencers associated with various movements has become dim, distorted, fractured, blurred and/or completely blinded by statist and collectivistic propaganda.

Both the so-called ‘conservatives’ and BLM, for example, are trying to attain their peace, prosperity and happiness in their own way. What’s gone wrong is on two levels: first, any collective not based on self-ownership is doomed to violate people and crumble at some point. Second, sociopaths are attracted to positions of power in any such group.

Politics Is One Helluva Drug

The same way a completely intoxicated, bath-salts-snorting, bat-shit-tripping mechanic might try to get his vehicle back in working order by duct taping Grateful Dead CDs to the engine block and then beating his kids with a socket wrench, the MAGA and BLM hive minds are attempting to change society for the better by putting on wild spectacles and advocating violence against their fellow human beings by leveraging the socket wrench of state power.

The two groups are presented as advocating either that all defense and security steps down, normalizing destruction of property and life (BLM), or that defense becomes even more brutal, totalitarian and racist (MAGA). Both sides collectively wish to enact laws that would limit and violate the rights of individuals on the other side. Private skirmishes then also must break out, as people who were once on good terms now battle for control of that great weapon called government.

If you notice, much of this description is the perceptions and images of the movements. Individuals involved in, and the official positions of MAGA and BLM, are often not so cartoonish and sometimes do make sense, at least in theory or by some stretch of understanding and imagination, even if illogical or immoral. But individuals get swept up in the warped perceptions that mass communication sells. That’s the real poison at work. And that’s not to defend either group, either, but we’ll get to that later.

While both collectives miss the mark simply by being collectives which to one degree or another disregard the individual and natural rights attendant thereto, the vast majority of individuals in these groups, I posit, when dealt with and talked to as human individuals away from social pressure — and not under the group label — can be reasonable, caring, and good people at core. Shocking, I know. But they, by virtue of buying into groupthink, help to lend credence to evil anyway. By way of believing lies, they turn themselves into rabid, violent animals indistinguishable from the mob.

Two Opposing Voices Calling for the Same Thing

BLM leaders are making valid points. The anger is justified. Some are making horribly flawed arguments, as well. The same goes for the statist Republicans, MAGA crowd. Here are direct quotes from both Black Lives Matter and a conservative, Republican influencer.

“BLACK LIVES MATTER = DEFUND THE POLICE”

–Black Lives Matter, D.C. Chapter

Defunding this violent socialist ‘protection’ agency that kills, maims, and pillages society is a great idea. 100% on board. Aiyana Jones, Eric Garner, Kelly Thomas and countless others are waiting for justice. Insofar as this simple statement is concerned, I am BLM as well.

“I don’t think it makes sense … to abolish police in general — like just completely get rid of the police — is getting rid of the justice system altogether…”

–Brandon Tatum, former AZ cop and pro-Trump commentator

Here we have a conservative opposed to getting rid of cops because there needs to be a justice system in place. While we as anarchists know he’s deluded about the state, we share the conviction that order and justice are necessary for civil society. Unprincipled, mob rule is chaos. Voluntaryists, agorists, and anarchists thus submit that the market could provide better policing in a stateless society. Indeed, it already does for those lucky enough to afford it.

Chaos and mob rule is literally what the cops provide now, which, ironically, is exactly why the BLM movement the conservative opposes wants to defund them. In case you missed it: both groups are loudly calling for an end to chaos. Exactly what we as voluntaryists and agorists are calling for. The difference is, we are suggesting laying off the bath salts before overhauling the engine, i.e. dropping politics and using reality as our foundation.

Self-Ownership, Not Violent Pipe Dreams

Sobriety in our case is a firm grasp of a reality readily apparent in nature: individual self-ownership. As many libertarian thinkers have pointed out, only by using self-ownership as a foundation for all conceptions of property can a given society approach a situation where rights truly become universal, applying to each individual, with no qualified immunity or ‘extra rights’ for some. In our case, it is not mere opinion or preference, but logically and demonstrably provable. Democracy, on the other hand, will always be an immoral absurdity as it must always support, at the end of the day, rule of the many over the few, or, when perverted (as it always is), the few over the many.

Some examples. The fiercest MAGA warriors want to dictate how every individual member of the Black Lives Matter movement should live and be ruled, via government laws. Many BLM activists wish to privatize police by switching to community-based security initiatives. This should indeed be the prerogative of individual property owners in their communities, but so-called conservatives are weirdly shouting down this very conservative approach by BLM.

Similarly, BLM wishes to politically engage in the interest of agendas which would ‘dismantle cisgender privilege’ and promote ‘commonsense gun laws,’ among other things. For many a Trump supporter, nobody should be able to legislate their personal choices when it comes to guns or lifestyle.

BLM and MAGA could be replaced here with any pair of collectives vying for the reins of violent political power to force their agendas on others. Here’s the slice: if you want peace, you have to have a sound property norm, universal to all. If you want chaos, keep fighting to rule over others via a violent, centralized machine called the state. Most of us want the same things. Peace. Prosperity. Happiness. If this is truly the goal, disagreements must be acknowledged, accepted, and dealt with peacefully.

In the absence of centralized governance, the 0.000001% of literal psychopaths out there will still be a problem, but without a centralized monopoly on violence, their options for taking over vast swathes of the population would be severely mitigated. As the recently released documentary The Monopoly on Violence points out, the state is a rather recent invention in the timeline of humanity, and there are many alternatives to violent central rule which would include and encourage order, justice, and all the wonderful scientific and technological innovation we enjoy today — and likely far beyond what we can imagine — with the cruel and inhumane shackles of the state removed.

In your personal private life, if there is someone that you do not trust or do not like, you simply do not associate with them. You don’t go over to their house and declare yourself king or president, then cage or murder them. Why haven’t we expanded this truth to all of human civilization everywhere?

As the CHAZ autonomous zone in Seattle is now showing, individuals, no matter what banner they gather beneath, or what pretty slogans they shout, will always seek order, and there will always be those who try to violently usurp the self-ownership of others. CHAZ has no property norm based on the concrete reality of individual self-ownership. It will implode and devour itself soon enough. The question is, then, how to achieve this order without systematically violating any individual’s right to their own life, body, or property. Once it’s protested that even one person must be violated for the ‘greater good,’ logic has exited the position and the dissenter is in a performative fallacy, in that he himself would never advocate for the loss of his own individual rights.

Awareness: The Solution to the Hysteria

When talking to a BLM supporter, throw out whatever the news told you to think, good, bad, or in between. Listen to the individual. When talking to a Trump supporter, do the same. This doesn’t mean accepting their cultish, violent views on things where they may have them (we all have traces of them here or there), but it does mean looking more clearly at reality. Nor does it mean accepting their respective movement or agenda is overall good and just. The author is of the personal view that both MSM-fueled movements are ill-intentioned and essentially anti-freedom. But most of the everyday individuals involved are just drunkenly trying to achieve peace in misguided fashion.

And there precisely is our in, as agorists: if an individual, no matter what movement they may be associated with, is truly aiming for peace, prosperity, and happiness, that is where agorism can be sold.

Like your guns, MAGA man? Keep ‘em all and get whatever you want. Want community police instead of abusive, racist pig cops, BLM supporter? Hell yeah. Let’s do that. If the person can understand the biological, concrete, objective and metaphysical reality of self-ownership (hint, we all do already) then that’s the seed crystal from which real principled freedom can take shape.

For the extreme, real racists:

Still hate black people? Don’t live by black people. Still hate white people? Don’t live by white people. The rest of us agorists will be busily engaged in market transactions with whomever we please because free trade doesn’t care. If one wishes to limit their customer base to bigots, more power to them. There will be no state in place to bail you out when the great majority of peaceful, non-bigots stop shopping at your business.

We must be realistic, after all. It is a chlid’s fantasy to think that bigoted hatred and racism will ever be 100% erased from this planet. Or murder, or rape, or theft. The state, however, guarantees these will continue to happen in massive, systemic fashion by affording special seats of power to a few select humans with ‘greater rights’ than the others. Voluntaryism and agorism (anarchy) know no such thing.

Finally, many protest that even within the anarchist idea that a person owns their own body and life, and by extension the property they fairly acquire thereby, there are gray areas. Of course there are. But many, many less than in the chaos-murder-cult global gray area that is the state and its web of endless, bloody wars, legalized murder, rape, theft and brutality, and tangled webs of cruel laws, and special rights for the few, that exists right here, right now.

It’s simply an illogical and stupid premise: people are bad so we need to give some of these same bad people special seats of virtually unlimited power, to control all the others. Get real. Fuck off with that noise.

At the end of the day, reality is the rule. No set of ideas arrived at dogmatically, apart from awareness of reality, will serve to do anything but imprison the holders of those beliefs. The same goes for so-called ‘Libertarians’ who cannot think things out for themselves, apart from a political party’s prescriptions, or an ancap page’s favored opinions. Voluntaryist and agorist principle is arrived at by way of awareness, and not the other way around. Awareness. This is how gray areas and difficult situations are already dealt with in real life, and even the most revered member of the Libertarian Party who cannot see that capitalist corporations such as Amazon still sometimes participate heavily in statist evil, or that someone stumbling onto their property doesn’t necessarily make defensive action moral, is no better off than a red-faced, shouting MAGA zealot or an anti-white BLM bigot.

What finally separates individuals into two groups is ultimately this: are they truly seeking peace, prosperity, and happiness, or are they just seeking to control others? Individuals of the former persuasion, regardless of their group identifications now, can always be brought around to arguments for the peaceful markets and societies of agorism. The latter group is doomed from the start, to seek chaos.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO