LEGITIMACY AND DISOBEDIENCE

These are times that try men’s souls, wrote Thomas Paine in 1776, and so is the time that’s upon us now. So, it is time to examine our core beliefs, very clearly and plainly. More than anything else, difficult times demand that we know what we believe – not with shallow slogans, but down to our depths.

"Conservative values" are not a core belief – they are derivative, not primary. The term is, at best, a short-hand reference to a set of ideas. But unless you have a very clear grasp of what those values are, the slogan becomes a cheap imitation. We must know the real thing, not merely a group of words that stand in its place.

THE TWO LEGITIMACIES

Have you ever asked yourself what makes a government legitimate?

Legitimacy in human government is far more important than force. Ruling humans by force alone is a losing proposition: The ruled will adapt; they’ll hide their grain before it can be taken, or they’ll just leave. In order to rule humans successfully, they have to be willing. This willingness can be attained either by manipulation or by convincing people that joining together provides better results.

A government that convinces people to support it has a valid claim to legitimacy.

A government that manipulates people into supporting it does not.

Manipulation does work, of course; every government on the planet majors in it. But the fruit of manipulation is not legitimacy, it is merely acquiescence. It is the work of free men to examine the legitimacy of their place and time, and to reject manipulation and false legitimacy.

PRIMARIES AND DERIVATIVES

We run into a crucial issue when talking about the Constitution: Is the Constitution liberty itself, or merely a tool for securing liberty?

The US Constitution was written as a compact between the men who endorsed it, and its purpose was to secure their Creator-given liberties. In other words, the Constitution was subsidiary to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Let’s be clear on what that means:

• Rights, coming from God, are primary, and the Constitution is valuable if (and only if) it protects life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That was very clearly its purpose.
• The only legitimacy possible to the US government is if it:

  a) follows – without deviation – the Constitution that spawned it, and
  b) protects – without deviation –  life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The purpose of the US Constitution is not to enlighten us; it is not to guide us; it is not to unify us; and it is certainly not to protect us from ourselves. The only purpose of the Constitution is to protect our liberties from outside threats.

We may regard the Constitution as an excellent tool or a brilliant statement, but we may not turn it into a primary: only God giving us rights can be primary.

THE LOCKEAN FORMULATION

Liberty in America was clearly based on the writings of John Locke. More or less all of the founders revered him and quoted him. For example, Samuel Adams wrote this, dated December 23, 1771:

Mr. Locke has often been quoted in the present dispute between Britain and her colonies, and very much to our purpose. His reasoning is so forceful that no one has even attempted to disprove it. He holds that:

"The preservation of property is the end of government, and that for which men enter into society… men in society having property have a right to the goods, which by the law of the community are theirs, that no person has the right to take any part of their property without their consent… For I truly can have no property in that which another rightfully takes from me when he pleases, against my consent.

"Therefore, it is a mistake to think that the supreme power of any commonwealth can dispose of the estates of the subjects arbitrarily, or take any part of them at its pleasure… for this would be in effect to have no property at all."

Adams concludes by saying:

The government of the United States was always intended to be a Lockean compact: A set of rules agreed to by free men, the purpose of which was to secure their Creator-given rights against aggression. And that is all that it was intended to be.

UNCONDITIONAL LEGITIMACY BREEDS TYRANNY

Legitimacy must be earned, and it must forever prove itself anew. If it does not, and if free men fail to challenge it, they descend into tyranny.

If we cannot question the legitimacy of a government, how will we ever restrain it? If it is permanently legitimate, no challenge can be made – the people must obey, no matter what. In the end, we end up like the Germans of 1940: obeying because everyone obeys, and knowing that only crazy, dangerous people would ever say anything else.

Let’s be honest and admit that people world-over confess the legitimacy of their governments out of a mixture of fear, training and inertia: they’ve always done it so they continue to do it, or they were taught to do so every day of their state schooling, or they fear to step out of line.

Men and women who claim to be free, however, cannot allow themselves such luxuries: fear, training and inertia are the hallmarks of serfs.

No legitimacy is unquestionable by free men: no constitution, and certainly no government. Legitimate things stand up to examination. If we cannot heartily challenge anything pertaining to governance – including governance itself – we join the serfs, no matter how many brave slogans we utter.

AND WHO IS MY BROTHER?

Locke, rather than forming his principles around current controversies, looked back to man’s essential nature and his condition in his primal estate – before rulers, philosophies and crimes drove him to unnatural reactions. Locke wanted to discover the natural laws that affected man before human laws were imposed. In his Second Treatise of Government, published in 1690, Locke did precisely this, and started a new stream of liberty-consciousness on Earth, of which we are heirs. This was the root of Locke’s formulations:

All men are naturally in a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of Nature, without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other man.

Thomas Jefferson held John Locke as one of the three greatest men who had ever lived (the other two: Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton), and his formulation of liberty was very similar to Locke’s:

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add "within the limits of the law" because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.

It is crucial to understand that none of us have a monopoly on Locke. Here’s what that means:

Anyone who holds to Locke’s formulation is your brother and sister, and you must accept them as such. You must treat them with respect.

We are past the time when we can be insular (if there ever really was such a time). You don’t have to agree with the Ron Paul people or the free-market anarchists, but you must accept them as joint heirs of the Lockean liberties.

If you think the Paulistas are wrong, you can ignore the difference of opinion, or you can, respectfully, correct them. Better still, you could laugh at your joint human frailties and move forward together. What you may not do, is to cast them off as idiots; you may not resent them for honestly disagreeing. They believe in John Locke. They are your allies, not your enemies. They don’t have to believe identically with us to be "okay."

If we cannot to do this, we don’t deserve to succeed.

YOUR DUTY

When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

How are these words less true today than when Thomas Jefferson wrote them 236 years ago in the Declaration of Independence?

The despotism now upon us is no less than tyranny over the minds of men – a far worse thing than tyranny against the bodies of men. If you believe this, and if you claim devotion to the Declaration of Independence, it is your chosen duty to "throw off" such a government. It is your duty to disobey.

Is disobedience scary? Yes it is. (And what should we learn from this, when doing the right thing might bring a terrible retribution?) The really important things in life are seldom easy. They stand as challenges before us, prodding us to define ourselves – not in words, which are cheap, but in deeds, which are dear.

What is most important to understand is that peaceful civil disobedience is a far better choice than any other, such as violence. States are designed to survive physical attacks, but none of them can survive a lack of support. If a people ceases to consider a state legitimate and withdraws their obedience, that state will fail.

TTPer Paul Rosenberg – "prosberg" on the Forum – is the developer of the Cryptohippie.com virtual private network.