Thoughts on Individual Self Determination

Has sociopathy destroyed the natural state of the self determined individual?

Do people really need external structures to provide the framework for their lives? Have we been convinced of this the whole time? Or was the structure necessary at one time to move society forward? And even if it was, does it need to persist? What if the panacea of one moment is the poison of the next?

Is the person that views the state as a pathological overlay constructed to serve criminality themselves pathological? A basic criminal? A free radical causing societal cancer?

The self determined individual is one free of the tyrannies of the mind. They will not except any world view other than their own. They embrace the existential nature of reality and give it meaning as it suits them. A self determined individual doesn’t rely on laws to tell him to do good and act orderly. In fact, he will find himself duty bound to break all such laws that conflict with the goodness of his actions. But can a man be the judge of his own good works? Is he still good if he has the narcissism to believe it to be true?

Why do people want referees that can change the rules mid game? How do you prevent them from being bribed? That is the nature of government- institutionalized bribery. Corruption cannot be avoided with hierarchies of sufficient size, and no organization claiming authority over the behavior of society will offer a true corruption mitigation strategy because it would work against their personal interests.

A perfect society is one where individuals are free from coercion by any other individual. Someone who physically forces someone to do something against their will is the basis for all criminality. To hope to exist in peace, all acts must be voluntary, therefore a culture that hopes to achieve this virtue must engender goodwill and trust among the group of individuals defining that culture. They must be unwilling to hide from the true nature of themselves and others, and the responsibilities they have toward the people they claim to love. Most of all, they must be willing to personally accept the consequences of their own actions, and to hold others to account in the interest of justice and good faith. When these ideas are forgotten and people begin acts of escalating physical coercion, the groups must be willing to break down on those fault lines and create new isolate groups with the aberrant elements outcast, shunned, and blacklisted until that goodwill can somehow be reestablished. This limits the size of such groups. But it doesn’t limit the scope of what a civilization can achieve (as a group of groups) because groups interact as individuals given the context. The natural limit on the size of the group is likely a function of the number of people the average person can possibly claim to know, understand, and trust. That limit is defined by individuals’ physical limits on brain processing power. Whereas, the cap on the size of a civilization composed of a decentralized group of groups is only bounded by the information processing ability of the individual groups and the energy consumed by the overall system.

There is no sovereign other than the self determined individual, there is no state other than that of mind and being. The state is a phantasm. There is no legitimate authority or leadership other than the value we personally place on an individual’s or group’s unique ability to perform a physical task or to organize and dispense information. We form power hierarchies with many levels in a seemingly natural way, but what if that process isn’t natural? What if it is an invention by the pathological element- the sociopaths who are unwilling to act in good faith or incapable of trust and have therefore created a system that convinces us for the need of physical coercion and imposed structure that they themselves are free to exploit? It seems a rule that there is always a sociopathic element given a large enough sample of individuals. Therefore, a prudent society interested in true liberty and individual self determination would seek to organize itself with the trade off of maximizing trust and goodwill and minimizing the ability of sociopaths to implement a system of physical coercion that they can use for exploitation and abuse.

Lastly, it is true that the purveyors of state structure are likely self determined individuals themselves. Government is the creation of opportunists seeking to inflate their power over others. But they will not allow themselves to be chattel and to be subject to the whims of authority and act accordingly. This is the basic sociopathy that strangles society and makes it impossible for most people to believe they can achieve individual self determination and obscures the fact that it is a virtue far greater than the supposed order offered by state structure.