"Modern states are fictions of the mind brought to life. They are false gods. False gods are worshipped. They are represented in clay, wood, and stone. We make them seem authentic to us. It will seem insane to deny their credentials, when we have their shapes and images in front of us. When we use them to send us to the deaths that we crave. When we give them credit where none is due. When we fear them and obey their imagined instructions. Yet these false gods are nothing more than projections of our own minds. They are ultimately made up and counterfeit. They are vain imaginings of the mind used to nullify our being. They are used to reduce us from human beings to ciphers. The false priests of the state preach the false god of the state in the temples of Washington, London, Beijing, Moscow, Tokyo, and Caracas.
Smash these idols. Utterly destroy them. Let no remnant of them remain. States as we know them are a prime evil. They are ridiculous and absurd institutions in which a few men and women, operating with subnormal ethical and supernormal violent capacities, control the lives of millions upon millions of other normal people while demanding submission, obedience, and loyalty to the ultimate authority they proclaim for themselves. They are the sinful and false extensions of our imaginations into bonds of violence that chain us. The state's absurd wars serve at least one useful purpose. They make highly visible the complete and total absurdity of governments, states, and empires as we know and experience them. How many such lessons do we need before we understand that the state with its territorial imperatives is a design for human conflict and nullification? Larger and larger unions and alliances of states such as NATO, the European Union, and the United Nations merely multiply the absurdity. They are only seeking to replace local deities with more universal deities. NATO's bombs are the bombs of its member states. In an overall social sense, modern states are the furthest thing from being rational. Their actions always appear absurd. They cannot be rationalized by any theory of social welfare because they always aggrandize some at the expense of others. They can't be rationalized because their object is always power, and power has no rational reason behind it or rational manifestation of it. Besides being used for its own sake, power gratifies the preferences of its users; and we can find no rational basis for most exercises of preferences. The modern state always suppresses and oppresses. All the claims that states exist to further the public welfare are false. All the claims that states exist to overcome public goods problems are false. States are born in power and maintained by power. Often they have been painstakingly constructed over long periods of time by a complex mixture of conquests, bribes, payoffs, ruses, threats, propaganda, deceptions, and all manner of wily techniques. The furthest things from the minds of state-builders have been public welfare and public goods. These are the rationales concocted and maintained by power-seekers and intellectuals. And there are many more, such as prosperity, equality, freedom, and security. Speaking personally, the state has no claim whatsoever on me in the sense that really matters. The material claims it makes on me are ultimately irrelevant. When I die, those material things will make no difference. The God of my fathers has my ultimate loyalty. No man commands that loyalty. Not one. I completely reject the state as we know it. That is all that it takes for me to dissolve the state's psychological hold over me." http://www.lewrockwell.com/rozeff/rozeff176.html [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
