Here’s a simple reality we don’t talk about enough: For over 99% of human history, survival didn’t depend on governments, currency, or institutional systems. People lived off the land, moved freely, and accessed what nature provided — water, food, shelter — without paying for the privilege. Formal governments, centralized control, and resource regulation are relatively recent inventions — just a few thousand years old, mostly tied to agriculture and urbanization.
Today, the situation is reversed. Virtually every resource required to survive is regulated, taxed, or owned. There's no longer any practical way to opt out. You can’t live off-grid without facing fines, property restrictions, or lack of access to land and water. Even collecting rainwater is illegal in some places. That’s not a conspiracy theory — it’s a matter of legal record.
The problem is not just control, but vulnerability. If systems go down — water grids, food supply chains, electricity, fuel — billions are immediately at risk. Urban populations especially have no buffer. Modern life has removed every layer of self-sufficiency that once allowed people to endure natural or social disruptions.
This isn't just about political ideology — it's infrastructure math.
Consider this analogy: Imagine survivors of a cruise ship disaster wash ashore on an uninhabited island. One person declares ownership of the entire island — the fruit trees, the streams, the shelter. Now everyone else must negotiate, work, or pay to access what the Earth provides freely. It would be seen as absurd — even tyrannical — in that context. But that’s the exact system humanity operates under now, only on a global scale.
Ownership, in the modern legal sense, is a conditional grant. Governments can seize land (eminent domain), freeze assets, revoke licenses, change laws — all by decree. This is not theory. It happens.
Supporters of centralized systems argue that such control brings order, stability, and protection. But in reality, these systems have also removed any means of independent survival. If people can no longer access food, water, or shelter without institutional permission, that’s not civilization — it’s dependency.
And dependency on a system that can fail — or be intentionally shut off — is a risk multiplier, not a safeguard.
Human beings aren’t inherently helpless. The belief that we’d all collapse into chaos without government ignores hundreds of thousands of years of cooperative living, bartering, self-governance, and local conflict resolution. Modern systems didn’t create cooperation — they replaced it with bureaucracy, and criminalized alternatives.
The real question isn't whether systems provide benefits. They clearly do. The question is what happens when those systems no longer need the people they were designed to serve — when automation replaces labor, and governments or corporations hold all means of production, with no incentive to sustain a surplus population.
In that scenario, the problem isn’t a lack of government — it’s too much of it, with no way out.
