Larken Rose on the Belief in Authority mp4

Larken Rose demolishes the Myth of Authority in four short minutes. Transcript below. Excerpted from “Larken Rose vs. Tom Willcutts (Anarchy vs. Authority)“ “The problem does not exist in Washington DC, and the solution is not doing something to that thing over there. And a lot of people assume that anarchists want to go take the government and make it not be there. And that’s not what I want. I want people to stop hallucinating that the gang of crooks in DC has any right to do anything. Because if you look at the Mafia, nobody imagines that they have the right to rule. And that usually restricts the amount of violence they can do. Now mostly the Mafia makes its money off of government created black markets -- prostitution, gambling, drugs, alcohol when that was illegal. Because you can’t run a gigantic extortion racket if your victims don’t believe you have the right to do it, and they have guns. Now in the case of government, the problem is not that there’s this big nasty gang. It’s that the vast majority of the victims of this big nasty gang imagine an obligation to obey it because they imagine it to be authority. Nobody imagines the Mafia to be authority. They’re big, they’re scary, they have the ability to hurt people, the ability to scare people and take your stuff. But nobody thinks it’s righteous and legitimate. Nobody calls them government. The problem with government is that it’s not an organizational tool. It is by definition an entity that is imagined to have the right to do things that mortals don’t have the right to do. Such as steal, and they call it taxation. Such as initiating violence, and they call it law enforcement. Such as committing murder, and they call it national defense. The problem is not that there’s this gang over there, and we need to fix that. The problem is that people are imagining the gang to have the right to do things that human beings don’t have the right to do, such as initiate violence. And I would use the example when people say: if there wasn’t a government some other big gang would just spring up and beat us up. Imagine, put yourself in a position where okay, you’re the bad guy, and I’m going to give you about 100,000 people, only 2,000 of them are armed. It’s your job to rob a hundred million people of a huge chunk of what they earned every year. You only have 2,000 armed agents and then a bunch of paper pushers. How would you rob a hundred million people? There is only one way you can do it. Call yourself government and dupe your victims into imagining that them handing over their money is “paying their fair share for the good of society“ and calling your gang the IRS. But if the victims of the IRS stopped imagining law and authority and government to be real, and just recognized them as a gang of thugs, they could ignore the IRS out of business overnight. Because the victims outnumber the perpetrators a gazillion to one. It is only the belief in the legitimacy of the ruling class, the belief that we are obligated to obey it because it’s authority -- “It has the right to rule, we have the obligation to obey.“ That belief is a lie. And that belief is the entire problem. And when that belief is gone, and sooner or later it will be, when that belief is gone, you don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to abolish it. You don’t have to vote it out. You don’t have to have a revolution. The people simply ignore it. And we could because we outnumber it and we outgun it by a huge margin. But most of the victims imagine an obligation to obey the gang of crooks in DC. When that changes, the world changes. Until then revolutions don’t do any good. You knock it over, we’ll put up another one. Just as long as people still believe that government can be legitimate, they’ll bicker over who should sit on the throne and what kind of throne it should be. You know, a parliament, or a congress, or a king, or whatever. But as long as they believe in authority, they will set up a new God and it will stomp on them and oppress them to varying degrees, and it will happen over and over again. When people give up the belief that one man can ever have the right to rule another, it ends, and it ends forever.“