On the Assumed Necessity of the State

I find it interesting how most people, when discussing politics, begin with the assumption that a state is necessary or preeminent without consciously checking such a premise first — and then seek to defend it rather than question it. The natural although erroneous response is always to ask “how do we get the right people in power?” The question of what limitations should be placed on a state, or whether a state is moral or necessary, never enters the conversation at all.

This is the trap of Hegelian dialectic in practice: thesis and antithesis, left versus right, one party against another — yet all sides remain bound by the same unexamined premise. The players may change, but the rules stay the same. It is like passionately supporting one team in a football match while never questioning the rules of the game, or whether you need to be playing at all. This false opposition keeps people engaged in the game itself, and the resulting frustration is inevitable — because genuine change cannot come from within a framework that is never challenged.

The deeper issue is that most people have never been exposed to even the possibility that a state is a human construct, not something natural or inevitable. This assumption acts as a kind of status quo which inherently disempowers anyone who senses something is wrong but lacks the framework to articulate an alternative.

The State as God

The modern state functions as a secular religion. Its authority derives not from rational examination or explicit consent, but from belief — cultivated from birth, reinforced through education, maintained through ritual participation in elections and civic ceremonies. Flags become holy symbols, constitutions become scripture, and those who question the state’s legitimacy are treated as heretics.

This is not mere metaphor. The state claims powers once reserved for the divine: over life and death, to command obedience, to take a portion of every person’s labour, to define what is just and unjust. When the state kills, it is execution or war; when an individual does the same, it is murder. The distinction lies not in the nature of the act, but in who performs it — and that distinction rests entirely on belief.

Albert Jay Nock captured this in Our Enemy, the State (1935): “The state has spread out its powers until they penetrate to every act of the citizen, throwing around its operations the high dignity of a State religion. Its agents become a separate and superior caste. Yet it remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men.”

The crucial point is that this authority is not legitimate in any objective sense — it is created and reaffirmed unconsciously by the very people over whom it claims dominion. This is the essence of statecraft: the deliberate practice of forming and maintaining a state through mechanisms designed to perpetually reaffirm its own legitimacy. Education, media, political ritual, the careful management of national mythology — these are not incidental to governance, they are its foundation. Remove the belief, and the state is revealed as nothing more than a collection of individuals claiming the right to rule others.

The Question Nobody Asks

The great mystery of politics, as Murray Rothbard observed, is obedience to rulers. Why do people obey? In Anatomy of the State (1965), Rothbard argued that the State is almost universally considered an institution of social service — and this acceptance is precisely what prevents people from questioning its legitimacy. States must unceasingly impress upon the public their legitimacy, distinguishing their activities from those of mere brigands. (As an aside, I have issued an open challenge to anyone who can provide a meaningful difference between a state and a mafia. So far, no takers.)

Four centuries earlier, Étienne de La Boétie posed the same question in his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (c. 1553). If a tyrant is one man and his subjects are many, why do they consent to their own enslavement? His answer: tyranny is maintained not primarily through force, but through voluntary submission. People have, through custom and habit, forgotten their natural liberty.

La Boétie proposed that people in their natural state would follow their own reason and would not subordinate themselves to anybody beyond their own parents. His solution was simple: withdraw your consent. The tyrant falls of his own weight, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away.

The State as Human Construct

One of the most neglected facts about the state is its historicity. The state has not always existed. The modern state is a European invention, emerging between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is not the inevitable product of universal reason, but the result of specific historical circumstances.

Franz Oppenheimer demonstrated that the state invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. Nock built on this, distinguishing between two ways people can obtain wealth: the “economic means” (peaceful production and exchange) and the “political means” (taking what others have produced). The state, by definition, operates through the political means. It does not produce; it redistributes — through force.

Instead of recognising the State as the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men, the run of mankind regards it as a final and indispensable entity. This acceptance is not the product of rational examination but of relentless conditioning — so thorough that the very idea of questioning it feels strange, even threatening.

This threatening feeling is worth examining. When a deeply held belief is challenged, the mind does not respond with neutral curiosity. It responds with resistance — sometimes visceral, sometimes violent. This is cognitive dissonance: the discomfort that arises when new information conflicts with existing belief. The brain, protecting its model of reality, releases stress hormones that trigger defensive reactions. The threat is not physical, but the body responds as if it were. This is why political and religious discussions so often generate heat rather than light — the challenge to belief is experienced as an attack on the self.

In practice, this operates as a kind of mental firewall. Information that would destabilise the existing worldview is rejected before it can be rationally evaluated. The more foundational the belief, the stronger the defence. And what belief is more foundational than the legitimacy of the system under which one has lived their entire life? A person already operating under indoctrination does not experience it as indoctrination — they experience it as reality. The firewall does not announce itself. It simply blocks, and the individual feels only that the challenging idea is obviously wrong, dangerous, or not worth considering.

This is why truth alone is often insufficient. The mind must first be willing to lower its defences — and that willingness cannot be forced. It can only be invited. Perhaps this is what Christ meant when he warned: “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.” (Matthew 7:6, KJV)

The Illusion of Consent

Lysander Spooner challenged the foundation of democratic legitimacy in No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority (1867). His argument was simple: governments claim legitimacy from the consent of the governed, but no one alive ever signed the Constitution (America). Consent has always been assumed — which fails the most basic requirements for a valid contract.

The notion of a “social contract” is often invoked to justify this assumed consent — the idea that by merely existing within a territory, one has implicitly agreed to the terms of its government. But this is no contract at all. A contract requires voluntary agreement between parties, with clearly defined terms that can be accepted or rejected. No one was presented with the terms of the social contract. No one signed it. No one can opt out without abandoning their home, their livelihood, their family — and even then, they are merely delivered into the jurisdiction of another state making identical claims. A contract that cannot be refused, whose terms are dictated unilaterally and enforced at gunpoint, is not a contract. It is an imposition. To call it otherwise is to strip the word of all meaning.

If a man has never consented to support a government, he breaks no faith in refusing to support it. A constitution not only binds nobody now, but never did bind anybody, because it was never agreed to by anybody in such a manner as to make it binding upon him.

Rothbard echoed this: the phrase “we are the government” enables an ideological camouflage over political reality. If we truly are the government, then anything the government does to us is somehow voluntary. Taken seriously, this would mean any persecution by a democratically elected government was self-inflicted.

The Role of Intellectuals

How does the state maintain this illusion? Rothbard identified a crucial alliance between the state and intellectuals. The masses do not create their own ideas; they follow ideas disseminated by intellectuals. These opinion-moulders (I prefer the term social engineers) persuade the majority that their government is good, wise, and at least inevitable.

Friedrich Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom (1944) that central planning and the expansion of state power inevitably lead toward authoritarianism. Coordination through central direction and through voluntary cooperation are roads going in very different directions: the first to serfdom, the second to freedom.

Ayn Rand, though she believed a minimal state was necessary, offered a devastating critique of state overreach: instead of being a protector of man’s rights, the government is becoming their most dangerous violator. We are fast approaching the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission.

Breaking the Spell

The first step is to recognise that the state is not a natural phenomenon but a human institution — one that can be questioned, limited, or rejected. This does not require violence. As La Boétie understood, tyranny collapses when enough people simply withdraw their consent.

David Hume, Ludwig von Mises, and Murray Rothbard all made the same point: all governments ultimately rest on public opinion. The state has no power except what society gives it. Ideology — the framework through which people interpret political reality — is the true battleground.

The frustration so many feel with politics stems from playing a game whose rules they never chose and whose premises they have never examined. Left versus right, progressive versus conservative — these are merely different teams on the same pitch. The players may change, but the rules stay the same.

The Solution: What Those Who Believe May Not Accept

For those still invested in the belief that the state is necessary, what follows may be difficult to accept. The mind protects its deepest assumptions. But consider: the discomfort you may feel reading this is itself evidence of how thoroughly this belief has been instilled.

The solution is not to elect better rulers, nor to reform the system from within, nor to pass better laws. The solution is to withdraw consent. This begins in the mind — with the recognition that the state’s authority is not divine, not natural, not inevitable, but merely asserted. Asserted authority requires your acceptance to function.

Samuel Edward Konkin III developed this into a practical strategy called agorism — from the Greek agora, meaning marketplace. Agorism advocates creating a society where all relations between people are voluntary exchanges through counter-economics: peaceful action outside state control. Rather than reforming the state through political participation — which only reinforces its legitimacy — agorism proposes to make the state irrelevant by building alternatives based on voluntary cooperation.

Every time you engage in voluntary exchange without state intermediation — every act of mutual aid, every informal agreement — you are practising counter-economics. You are demonstrating that human beings do not require coercion to cooperate. Such activity results in what Konkin called infrastructural substitution: replacing state-dependent systems with networks of voluntarily cooperating individuals.

When Henry David Thoreau refused to pay taxes supporting slavery and war, he demonstrated that government depends upon the cooperation of its citizens. One principled individual who withdraws acquiescence does more to challenge illegitimate authority than a thousand voters casting ballots within the system.

Voluntaryism: The Natural State of Human Beings

The ultimate solution is not a new political system but the recognition that human beings already possess everything they need to organise themselves peacefully. This philosophy is called voluntaryism — the principle that all human interaction should be voluntary, free from coercion, force, or fraud.

Voluntaryism is not utopian idealism. It is simply the codification of how human beings naturally interact when not subject to coercion. The charge of utopianism is better directed at those who assume men are inherently evil or corruptible, yet simultaneously advocate for an organised state that grants some men tremendous power over others — and then expect this arrangement to remain benevolent. That is the utopian fantasy. Voluntaryism merely observes what already exists.

Consider your daily life: the overwhelming majority of your interactions are already voluntary. You trade labour for wages by mutual agreement. You purchase goods from those willing to sell. You form associations based on mutual benefit. You resolve most disputes through negotiation, not violence. This is the natural state of human cooperation.

The principle of reciprocity — treating others as you would wish to be treated — emerges spontaneously in every human society because it works. It requires no state to enforce it. The state’s intervention more often disrupts natural cooperation than facilitates it, creating perverse incentives and conflicts that would not otherwise exist.

As Auberon Herbert wrote: each man asks no more for himself than to go his own way, while he in turn concedes the same perfect liberty to his neighbour. This is not a radical programme but the restoration of something fundamental — the recognition that human beings are capable of governing themselves without masters.

The Choice Before Us

Real change begins not with choosing a better team, but with questioning whether the game itself is legitimate — or whether we need to be playing at all. The state is not God. Its authority is not natural. Its legitimacy is not inherent. It exists because people believe in it, and it will cease to dominate when enough people withdraw that belief.

This is not a call to violence or destruction. It is a call to construction — to build voluntary society within the shell of the old coercive one. You already live much of your life according to voluntaryist principles. Extending them is both natural and achievable.

La Boétie’s words from nearly five centuries ago remain the clearest expression of this truth: “Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.”

The choice is between coercion and cooperation, between imposed authority and voluntary association, between the state and freedom. The players may change, but the rules stay the same — unless we choose to stop playing altogether.

Further Reading

De La Boétie, Étienne. Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (c. 1553)
Hayek, Friedrich A. The Road to Serfdom (1944)
Herbert, Auberon. The Principles of Voluntaryism and Free Life (1897)
Konkin III, Samuel Edward. New Libertarian Manifesto (1980)
Nock, Albert Jay. Our Enemy, the State (1935)
Rand, Ayn. “The Nature of Government” in The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)
Rothbard, Murray N. Anatomy of the State (1965)
Spooner, Lysander. No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority (1867)
Thoreau, Henry David. Resistance to Civil Government (1849)