Correct, it can't and won't be overnight. In order to make statism a thing of the past, the culture must reject it. Rejection of statism will thus, IMO, be a generational endeavor. Not by way of collapse, not by way of shrinking, but by way of rejection.
Rejection doesn't happen in a vacuum though: Why do you think libertarians are more prevalent in the US than other countries? It's because our system of government, and more importantly its founding documents, provide a better backdrop for cultural reinforcement. On a mental level, baby steps are important, and you were already "primed." You were also easy to convert, because you're actually intelligent enough to think critically...but thanks to the Dunning-Kruger effect, intelligent people often overestimate the average person's ability, and it's important to remember that a critical mass of people will never arrive at libertarianism in the contemplative manner you did.
Changing existing practice in order to influence culture is especially important when it comes to Boobus, who cannot reason about abstract concepts, only what he concretely experiences and maybe slightly beyond it. Don't make the mistake the Communists did by thinking we can change the underlying nature of humanity or distribution of intelligence or curiosity. The bell curve is not going away anytime soon, and barring technologically or biologically engineered improvements, most people will always be incredibly shallow thinkers...forever.
Morever, the number of people with the personality to ever give a rat's ass about moral absolutes of any kind for their own sake will always be even smaller than the number of people who can think critically. Most people have flexible utilitarian morals that are easily overridden or distorted by emotion and opportunism, and it's been this way since the "dawn of man." You can get people to think more deontologically, and you can expand the horizons of morally-inclined people who just weren't ready before, but you will never transform the average person into someone who cares more about an abstract moral principle than "what works." To be totally frank, being "principled" in even the slightest degree is a personality trait that will always be rare; at best we'll only be able to get Boobus to superficially mimic it. Arguing on absolute moral grounds only gets you so far before you get to the point of diminishing returns.
We have three options: Live in denial of the human condition, live in despair of it, or work around it. The vast majority of people will always form their views based on social cues and memorize rationalizations later, and existing practice and feeling "strong" by personally identifying with a "winning team" is a huge social cue. It's how the neocons got their chest-thumping followers. We can either take steps to use that in our favor, or we can keep allowing it to be used against us.
In other words: If we want to move enough people toward total rejection, we have to restrain the government in practice first.
States do not shrink in any substantial, sustained, or meaningful way. This is in part due to how smaller government is the perfect habitat for the growth of the State; and in part because war is the health of the State, and war leads to the ratchet effect. Moreover, minarchy doesn't strike the root, it reinforces faith in statism and inconsistent logic. If your goal is the rejection of statism (and for many minarchists, this is not their goal, I might add), how is participating in and legitimizing statism not a contradiction of this goal?
It is often claimed that statelessness is a utopian pipedream. I submit that it is arbitrarily defined ideas of minarchy that are the utopian pipedream. These are just the more concise, finer points, but I've discussed this topic at greater length in previous threads--one of my blogs also concerns this topic.
I don't think
either are utopian pipe dreams. It's a false dichotomy. I think that most anarchists are just too morally prejudiced against the state (for very good reason) and its inherently voracious nature to objectively separate morality from practicality and objectively consider what potential checks and balances could actually work. (When you reject any possibility of minarchism for moral reasons, a natural consequence is you don't end up spending much time thinking about checks and balances.
) Surely the checks and balances I listed in my earlier post are less nebulous than the more abstract and distant competitive checks and balances of an an-cap system. If you can readily accept the practical viability of the latter and imagine resilient reasons why competition and cultural enforcement would be strong enough to prevent feudalism and a new state, only bias would cause you to reject the former (or a revised version thereof), because they're more grounded in what we know and leave less room for "unknown unknowns" (as Rumsfeld would call them
).
Anyway, hardcore voluntaryists view the NAP as an absolute that must never ever under any circumstances be violated. Minarchists view it as a value and an asymptotic moral goal to strive toward in the process of maximizing individual liberty in practice, and they're willing to condone coercion only in the name of
otherwise enforcing it. It doesn't sound logically consistent from a deontological moral perspective, but it's perfectly logically consistent for someone who wants to maximize individual liberty in practice and fears that taking the NAP the whole way will lead to it becoming impossible to enforce and utterly irrelevant. It's not insane and unworkable, like arbitrary utilitarian statism or half-assed Swiss cheese limited government (the Constitution), and I maintain it's possible to craft working checks and balances.
Minarchists
currently stop at minarchy, because it's the furthest horizon their imaginations can see with any clarity, but understand that they do
value the NAP, and the closer we get, the more will decide the NAP can be taken the whole way without everything reverting to feudalism and a leviathan state. Minarchist views do marginally reinforce the supposed legitimacy of the state, but only in a limited context. Anarchists as a whole grossly overestimate the danger of this, because it matters only to people already close enough to consider the merits of voluntaryism vs. minarchism...i.e. it only matters in our own little echo chamber. Meanwhile, Boobus is twenty thousand leagues under the sea, and he will never even consider entirely rejecting the state on principle until it's right in front of his face. That will only happen if he's already accidentally made it most of the way by being raised in a culture that values individual liberty as a rule.
Look at it this way: By your own arguments, you
implicitly understand yourself that once you make it to minarchist viewpoints and thinking about the NAP, it's not too long before you start to wonder, "Wait, is it logically consistent to value the NAP without rejecting the state entirely?" EVERY minarchist of our generation asks themselves that question. Most just reject it, because we're too far away for them to understand the practicality in a deep way, let alone defend it. Once we're closer, that will change.
