Proud to Be Robbed
One of the more bizarre results of the belief in “authority” is that it causes the victims of “government” aggression to feel obligated to be victimized, and causes them to feel bad if they avoid being victimized.
A prime example is the citizen who proclaims that he is proud to pay his “taxes.” Even if one believes that some of what he surrenders is used to fund useful things (roads, helping the poor, etc.), to be proud of having been threatened and coerced into funding such things is still strange. Pride in being a “law-abiding taxpayer” is not the result of having helped people, which the person could have done far more effectively on a voluntary basis; the pride comes from having faithfully obeyed the commands of a perceived “authority”.
By analogy, a man may feel good about having freely given to someone in need, but he would not take pride in getting robbed by a poor man. Probably the only situation in which anyone brags about having been forced to do something occurs in the context of one who believes he is obligated to obey a perceived “authority”.
Having been trained to view obedience as a virtue, people want to feel good about surrendering what they earn to “government”. And so, with the help of political propaganda, they hallucinate that their “contributions” are actually helping society as a whole. They speak as if paying “taxes” means “giving back to society” or “investing in the country”.
Such rhetoric, as common as it is, is logically nonsensical, since it implies that every one of the individuals who make up “society” and “the country” somehow each owes a debt to the group as a whole, but is owed nothing. What people are actually doing when they pay “taxes” is giving money not to “society” or “the country” but to the politicians who make up the ruling class, to spend however they please. The implication, as odd as it is, is that “the people” can benefit as a whole, by everyone of “the people” being robbed individually.
The idea that the “common good” is better served by politicians spending everyone’s money than it would be served by each person spending his own money is strange, to say the least. Recently, the lie of “taxes” serving the common good has become more and more transparent as “governments” have spent astronomical amounts of money on things which obviously serve the elite at the expense of society and humanity. This would include perpetual war-mongering, direct multibillion-dollar redistribution schemes benefiting the richest people in the world (”bailouts”), and “government” takeovers of various segments of the economy (e.g. the health-care industry), among other things.
In fact, there is almost nothing average people could financially support that would be less helpful to society and humanity in general than paying “taxes”. Whatever things a person views as worthwhile – schools, roads, defense, helping the poor, etc. – he could just as easily support without going through politicians and “government”.
Yet many people specifically express pride for having surrendered the fruits of their labors to their masters, having “paid their taxes”. Consider how someone would be viewed who proudly proclaimed, “I lied on my tax return, avoided giving $3,000 to the government, and I gave the $3,000 to a really good charity instead”.
Many people would still condemn such a person for his “criminal” disloyalty to the masters, even if the person’s actions better served humanity than “paying his taxes” would have. This is because the pride expressed by many people does not cone from helping humanity, but from obeying “authority”.
There is little or no chance that anyone would voluntarily contribute his own wealth to every one of the programs and schemes now funded via “government”. And if he hands over the money only because some “law” or other “authority” compelled him to, and then expresses pride in having done so, he is in essence boasting about having been forcibly dominated, precisely the way a thoroughly indoctrinated slave might take pride in serving his master well.
There is a big difference between feeling good about having voluntarily supported some worthy cause, and taking pride in being subjugated. Instead of being offended at the insult and injustice of being coercively controlled and exploited – in fact, instead of even recognizing that as injustice many victims of “government” oppression feel profound loyalty to their controllers.
Proud to Be Controlled
If a slave can be convinced that he should be a slave, that his enslavement is both proper and legitimate, that he is the rightful property of his master and that he has an obligation to produce as much as possible for his master, then he does not need to be physically oppressed.
In other words, enslaving the mind makes enslaving the body unnecessary. And that is exactly what the belief in “authority” does: it teaches people that it is morally virtuous that they surrender their time, effort and property, as well as their freedom and control over their own lives, to a ruling class.
Many people express pride at being “law-abiding taxpayers”, which means only that they do what the politicians tell them to do, and give the politicians money. When confronted with the idea that it is wrong for them to be forcibly deprived of the fruits of their labors, even if it is done “legally”, such people often vehemently defend those who continue to rob them, insisting that such robbery is essential to human civilization. (Of course, they do not use the term “robbery” to describe the situation, though they are well aware of what would be done to them if they refused to pay)
Likewise, when one person objects to the level of taxation or other forcible control being inflicted upon him by those in “government”, others who are also being oppressed will often condemn the one who is objecting, telling him that if he does not like how he is being treated, he should leave the country.
Maligning a fellow victim of coercion for complaining about it is a sure sign that a person actually takes pride in his own enslavement.
Frederick Douglass, a former slave, witnessed and described that exact phenomenon among his fellow slaves, many of whom were proud of how hard they worked for their masters and how faithfully they did as they were told. From their perspective, a runaway slave was a shameful thief, having “stolen” himself from the master.
Douglass described how thoroughly indoctrinated many slaves were, to the point where they truly believed that their own enslavement was just and righteous: “I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man”.
Though slavery is no longer practiced openly, the mentality of loyal subservience remains. Most people today detect no inconsistencies in allowing a ruling class to forcibly extort and control everyone else, and in fact feel that such extortion and oppression is right, to the point where many feel actual shame if they are caught keeping what they earn and running their own lives.
It is one thing to feel shame at having been caught stealing, or defrauding, or committing aggression. But it is quite another for someone to feel shame about having done something which, if not for politician decrees (“laws”), he would have seen as perfectly permissible.
Such shame does not come from the immorality of the act itself; it comes only from the imagined immorality of disobeying “authority”, i.e. “breaking the law”.
When, for example, the average citizen is caught “cheating” on his “taxes”, or not having a registration sticker on his car, or smoking marijuana, or doing anyone of a thousand other things which do not constitute aggression against anyone else, but which have nonetheless been declared “illegal” by the ruling class, there is usually some feeling of guilt in the person’s own mind.
Without a feeling of being obligated to obey, being caught and punished by agents of “government” would be regarded in the same way that being bitten by a dog would be regarded: as an unpleasant consequence to be avoided, but having no moral element to it at all.
Instead, most people feel, at least to some extent, that being caught committing a victimless “crime” indicates some sort of moral failing in themselves, because they did not do as they were told. The desire to have the approval of “authority” is extremely powerful in almost everyone, to a degree they themselves do not even realize.
The ubiquitous message of authoritarianism has a psychological impact far deeper than most people imagine, as the Milgram experiments demonstrated. Nearly everyone experiences dramatic emotional stress and discomfort anytime he comes into conflict with “authority”, and will go to great lengths, no matter what acts of evil he must commit, in order to earn the approval of his masters.
Even the terminology people use illustrates how effectively they have been trained to feel morally obligated to obey “authority”. This can be seen in such simple phrases as “You’re not allowed to do that” or even “You can’t do that” when referring to some behavior that has been declared “illegal” by the ruling class.
Such phrases do not simply express a potential adverse consequence but also imply that, because some act has been forbidden by the masters, committing that act is bad, not allowable, or even impossible (”You can’t do that!”).
Looking at the statistical facts demonstrates the power of the belief in “authority”. In the United States, about 100,000 IRS employees extort about 200,000,000 victims. Those being robbed outnumber the robbers by about two thousand to one. This could never be accomplished by brute force alone; it continues only because most of those being robbed feel a duty to be robbed, and imagine such robberies to be legitimate and valid. The same is true of many other “laws”, which are generally obeyed even though the enforcers are always hugely outnumbered by those they seek to control.
The high levels of “compliance” do not come so much from a fear of punishment as from the feeling among those being controlled that they have a moral obligation to cooperate with their own subjugation.
The Good Funding the Evil
Even if an individual is never personally victimized by “law enforcement”, never has a run-in with the police, and sees little if any direct impact by “government” upon his day-to-day life, the myth of “authority” still has a dramatic impact, not only on his own life but also on how his existence affects the world around him.
For example, the millions of compliant subjects who feel an obligation to surrender a portion of what they earn to the state, to pay their “fair share” of “taxes”, continually fund all manner of endeavors and activities which those people would not otherwise fund – which almost no one would otherwise fund, and which therefore would not otherwise exist.
By way of “taxes”, those claiming to be “government” confiscate an almost incomprehensible amount of time and effort from millions of victims and convert it into fuel for the agenda of the ruling class.
To wit, millions of people who oppose war are compelled to fund it via “taxation”. The product of their time and effort is used to make possible something they morally oppose.
The same is true of state-controlled wealth-redistribution programs (e.g. “welfare”), Ponzi schemes (e.g., “Social Security”), the so-called “war on drugs”, and so on. Most of the programs of “government” would not exist if not for the belief among the general population in a moral obligation to pay one’s “taxes”.
Even “government” programs purported to have noble goals – such as protecting the public and helping the poor – become bloated, inefficient and corrupt monstrosities, which almost no one would willingly support if there was no “law” requiring them to do so.
In addition to the waste, corruption, and destructive things which “government” does with the wealth it confiscates, there is also the less obvious issue of what the people would have done with their money otherwise. As “government” takes the wealth of the producers to serve its own purposes, it also deprives the producers of the ability to further their own goals.
Someone who surrenders $1,000 in “taxes” to the ruling class may not only be funding a war he morally opposes, but he is also being deprived of the ability to put $1,000 into savings, or donate $1,000 to some charity he considers worthwhile, or pay someone $1,000 to do some landscaping work.
So the damage done by the myth of “authority” is twofold: it forces people to fund things that they do not believe are good for themselves or society, while simultaneously preventing them from funding things that they do view as worthwhile. In other words, subservience to “authority” causes people to act in a manner which is to one extent or another, directly opposed to their own priorities and values.
Even the people who imagine that their “tax” dollars are doing good by building roads, helping the poor, paying for police, and so on, would almost certainly not fund the “government” version of those services, at least not to the same degree, if they did not feel compelled – by moral obligation and the threat of punishment – to do so.
Any private charity that had the inefficiency, corruption, and record of abuse that AFDC, HUD, Medicare, and other “government” programs have, would quickly lose all of its donors.
Any private company as expensive, corrupt, and inefficient as “government” infrastructure programs, would lose all of its customers. Any private protection service which was so often caught abusing, assaulting, and even killing unarmed, innocent people would have no customers. Any private company that claimed to be providing defense, but told its customers it needed a billion dollars every week to wage a prolonged war on the other side of the world, would have few, if any, contributors, including among those who now verbally support such military operations.
The feeling of obligation to pay “taxes” seems to be little hampered by the fact that “government” is notoriously wasteful and inefficient. While millions of “taxpayers” struggle to make ends meet while paying their “fair share” of “taxes”, politicians waste millions on laughably silly projects – everything from studying cow farts, to building bridges to nowhere, to paying farmers to not grow certain crops, and so on, ad infinitum – and billions more are simply “lost”, with no accounting of where they went.
But much of what people make possible through payment of “taxes” is not just wasted but is quite destructive to society. The “war on drugs” is an obvious example. How many people would voluntarily donate to a private organization which had the stated goal of dragging millions of non-violent individuals away from their friends and families, to be put into cages? Even the many Americans who now recognize the “war on drugs” as a complete failure, continue via “taxes”, to provide the funding which allows it to continue to destroy literally millions of lives.
Even the most vocal critics of the various abuses being perpetrated by the ever-growing police state are often among those making that abuse possible, by providing the funding for it. Whether the issue is blatant oppression, or corruption, or mere bungling bureaucratic inefficiency, everyone can point to at least a few things about “government” that do not meet with his approval.
And yet, having been trained to obey “authority”, he will continue to feel obligated to provide the funding which enables the same bungling, corrupt, oppressive “government” activities that he criticizes and opposes. Rarely does anyone notice the obvious inherent contradiction in feeling obligated to fund things that he thinks are bad.
Of course, people who work for non-authoritarian organizations can also be inefficient or corrupt, but when it comes to light what they are doing, their customers can simply stop funding them. That is the natural correction mechanism in human interaction, but it is completely defeated by the belief in “authority”.
How many people are there who are not currently being forced to fund some “government” program or activity that they morally oppose? Very few, if any. So why do those people keep funding things which they feel are destructive to society? Because “authority” tells them to, and because they believe that it is good to obey “authority”. As a result, they continue to surrender the fruits of their labors to fuel the machine of oppression – a machine which otherwise would not and could not exist.
“Governments” produce no wealth; what they spend they first must take from someone else. Every “government”, including the most oppressive regimes in history, has been funded by the payment of “taxes” by loyal, productive subjects. Thanks to the belief in “authority”, the wealth created by billions of people will continue to be used, not to serve the values and priorities of the people who worked to produce it, but to serve the agendas of those who, above all else, desire dominion over their fellow man.
The Third Reich was made possible by millions of German “taxpayers” who felt an obligation to pay up. The Soviet empire was made possible by millions of people who felt an obligation to give to the state whatever it demanded. Every invading army, every conquering empire, has been constructed out of wealth that was taken from productive people.
The destroyers have always been funded by the creators; the thieves have always been funded by the producers; through the belief in “authority”, the agendas of the evil have always been funded by the efforts of the good. And this will continue, unless and until the most dangerous superstition is dismantled.
When the producers no longer feel a moral obligation to fund the parasites and usurpers, the destroyers and controllers, tyranny will wither away, having been starved out of existence. Until then, good people will keep supplying the resources which the bad people need in order to carry out their destructive schemes.
Digging Their Own Graves
Sadly, the belief in “authority” even makes people feel obligated to assist in their own enslavement, oppression and sometimes death. In fact, only a small percentage of the coercion of “government” is implemented by the enforcers of “authority”; most of it is implemented by its victims. The ruling class merely tells people that they are required to do certain things, and most people comply without any actual enforcement taking place.
As one impressive example, tens of millions of Americans, every year, fill out lengthy, confusing forms known as “tax returns”, essentially extorting themselves. If the victims of the IRS agreed to pay, but only if the “government” figured out their alleged tax liabilities, the system would collapse.
Every tax return is basically a signed confession, with the victim of the extortion racket not only revealing everything about his finances – essentially interrogating himself – but also even figuring out the amount he will be robbed, so the thieves don’t have to.
But all the unproductive and unpleasant inconveniences and bureaucratic hassles that people subject themselves to, simply because they were told that “the law” requires it, are nothing compared to the more serious symptoms of the belief in “authority”.
Based upon the mythology about “duty to country” and the “laws” imposing military conscription (”the draft”), millions of people throughout history lave become murderers for the state.
Only a small fraction (so-called “draft-dodgers”) ever resisted, and they have usually been despised by their fellow countrymen, for being cowards or for lacking “patriotism”.
In the case of many “laws”, it can be difficult to distinguish between people who obey because of a simple fear of punishment, and those who obey out of a feeling of moral obligation to bow to the commands of politicians (”the law”).
With military conscription, however, it is easy to tell the difference, because “compliance” is usually far more dangerous than any punishment “government” threatens against those who refuse to comply. If the choices are to “comply” and possibly die a gruesome death on some battlefield on the other side of the world, or to disobey and possibly go to prison, it is unlikely that the threat alone is why so many people “register” and show up for” duty” when called.
In short, the level of compliance with “the draft”, at least in the past, shows quite clearly that most people would rather commit murder or die than disobey “authority”. There could hardly be a better indication of just how powerful the superstition of “authority” is: that thousands upon thousands of otherwise civilized, peaceful human beings will leave home, sometimes traveling halfway around the world, to kill or die simply because their respective ruling classes told them to.
Every soldier is both an enforcer and a victim of the superstition of “authority”, whether he volunteered or was drafted. Fighting to defend innocents against aggressors is a noble cause, and is often the intention of those who join the military. But in a hierarchical military regime, the soldier becomes a tool of the machine rather than a responsible individual.
Rather than being guided by his own conscience, he is controlled entirely by the orders he receives through the chain of command. And every time his obedience leads him to do something immoral (which is quite often), he not only harms his victims, he also harms himself.
After the Vietnam war, as one example, many American soldiers came home with their bodies intact but with deep psychological problems. How much of the mental damage was a result of witnessing carnage and how much was the result of personally creating carnage is difficult to say. A prolonged fear of imminent death can, of course, cause serious psychological problems, as can inflicting death upon others.
Violent confrontations can be quite stressful, even when the individual feels entirely justified, such as when defending his family from an attacker. But to engage in mortal combat where no one, including the combatants, seems to have any clear idea what the purpose or justification for the conflict is, as occurred in Vietnam, seems to add an additional degree of psychological trauma.
As many combat soldiers have attested to, once in the hell of war, any vague but noble cause or justification for the fight is usually forgotten, and all that is left is the desire to stay alive and to help one’s friends stay alive – both of which are served much better by going home, or by not joining the military in the first place.
And yet the number of people who simply walk away is quite small, for one simple reason: because it would constitute an act of disobedience to a perceived “authority”. And the average soldier, though he may have the courage and strength to throw himself into mortal combat, does not have the courage and strength to disobey a perceived “authority”.
As in many cases of authoritarian coercion, the victims of military conscription almost always far outnumber those trying to implement it. Even when people are “legally” commanded to sacrifice their minds and bodies for the sake of turf wars between tyrants, simple passive disobedience by any significant portion of “draftees” would make the war machine grind to a halt.
What punishment is there to fear that is worse than the result of compliance? The usual results of fighting in war are prolonged terror, physical and mental pain and suffering, dismemberment or death.
Nonetheless, even after witnessing the horrors of war first hand, very few people can bring themselves to disobey “authority”, take off the uniform and walk away.
A testament to the power of the belief in “authority” is the well-documented (if seldom discussed) fact that the atrocities committed against the German Jews by the Nazis were often carried out with the cooperation and assistance of Jewish police, such as occurred in the Warsaw Ghetto.
In their culture, just as in almost every other culture, the people had been so thoroughly convinced that obedience is a virtue that, even though someone new was “in charge”, they still felt obligated to do as they were told, even if it meant violently oppressing their own kinsmen. But what may be even more disturbing (but indisputable) is the fact that many millions of people in history have assisted in their own extermination, because “authority” told them to.
For example, during the Holocaust, many hundreds of thousands of Jews, on their own power, boarded the cattle cars of the very trains that would take them away to their deaths, without trying to hide, run away, or resist. Why? Because those pretending to be “authority” told them to.
While it was no doubt true that they were not all aware of exactly what lay in store for them at the other end, they still handed themselves into the custody of a machine that obviously meant them harm.
There is a certain feeling of comfort and safety that one gets by conforming and obeying. Believing that things are in someone else’s hands, and having trust that someone else will make things right, is a way to avoid responsibility.
Authoritarian indoctrination stresses the idea that, no matter what happens, if you simply do as you are told, and do what everyone else does, everything will be okay, and those in charge will reward and protect you. The body counts from one “government” atrocity after another show how misguided such a belief truly is.
Had the victims of “legal” oppression and murder simply withheld their assistance, even if they did not lift a finger to forcibly resist, the world would be a very different place today. If the Nazis had had to physically carry each Jew, dead or alive, to the gas chambers or crematoriums, the level of murder would have been dramatically lower.
If every slave sold into bondage had refused to work, there would soon have been no slave trade. If the IRS had to calculate the tax due and then directly take it from each “taxpayer”, there would be no more federal “taxation”.
In short, if the victims of authoritarian extortion, harassment, surveillance, assault, kidnapping, and murder simply stopped assisting in their own oppression, tyranny would crumble. And if the people went a step further and forcibly resisted, tyranny would collapse even more quickly.
But resistance, whether passive or violent, requires the people to disobey a perceived “authority”, and that is something that most people are psychologically incapable of doing.
Ultimately, it is the belief in “authority” among the victims of oppression, even more than the beliefs of the ruling class and their enforcers, which allows tyranny, and man’s inhumanity to man, to continue on such a large scale.
The Effects on Actual Criminals
Ironically, in situations where obedience would actually improve human behavior, “authority” has no effect. Those individuals, for example, whose own consciences do not stop them from robbing or assaulting their neighbors, because they do not care about the usual standards of right and wrong, also do not care what “authority” tells them to do.
It is only those who are trying to be good who ever feel compelled to obey “authority”. The belief in “authority” is a belief about morality – it is the idea that obedience is morally good. To those who do not care about what is deemed “good” – the very people whose consciences are not enough to make them behave in a civilized manner – the myth of “authority” has no effect.
To put it another way, only those who do not need to be controlled – i.e. those already trying to live moral lives – feel any obligation to obey the controllers. Meanwhile, those who pose a real threat to peaceful society feel no moral obligation to obey any “authority” anyway.
Generally speaking, all commands from “authority”, including inherently justifiable commands such as “do not steal” and “do not murder,” are always either unnecessary (when directed at good people) or ineffectual (when directed at bad people).
It is difficult to imagine any situation in which an individual would otherwise have no qualms about committing theft, assault, or murder, but would feel guilty about violating “laws” which prohibit such actions.
A distinction should be made here between moral obligation and fear of retaliation. A thief who feels no moral obligation to refrain from stealing will also feel no moral obligation to obey “laws” against stealing. However, if he perceives a threat to his own safety, whether from the “police” or anyone else, he might be deterred from robbing someone.
But that deterrent effect comes entirely from the threat of violence, not from the claimed “authority” underlying the threat. This means that supposed “authority” is never what stops actual crimes from happening, and that an effective deterrent system does not require “authority” at all. This is discussed in further detail below.
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