# Partyarchy

published: 2020-01-07

2020 is an election year in the United States of America, in case you've been living under a rock or have somehow dodged the incessant political talk since the previous election. But who will we hand the crown over to for the next four years? Orange Man of Unbridled Debauchery? Ineffectual Bernie "I Wrote The Damn Bill" Sanders? Mr. Free Money For NEETs? Professional Figurehead Who Happens To Also Be Gay?

Why am I even sullying my blog with the name of statists who will never have my true interests at heart, who, when all is said and done, are only concerned with increasing and keeping their power over the American people? They're all the same at the end of day: promise one thing during campaign season, and then just uphold the status quo once they get their coveted seat in the Oval Office. Even oh-so-precious Jacob Hornberger, who every libertarian podcaster shouts at me to believe is the second coming of the Messiah and will lead us with a golden lamp to liberty, is a statist at end of day, for a requirement of being president is having a state to preside over.

Such is the fate of minarchy, of libertarian gradualism that holds that, to decrease the government's hold on the people, one must first gain control of the government. One goes in, puts themselves on the public stage, maybe even goes so far as to see themselves as a spy sneaking into a high-security facility or as a David going against Goliath's Leviathan. You take the shape of that which you hate the most so that you survive the slaughter- but eventually you forget that there was a time that you weren't a monster. The monster becomes you. The "libertarian" seeking to change the system with the system becomes the police trying to change the police system from the inside, the judge trying to change the judicial system from the inside, the executioner trying to change the execution system from the inside.

And then they all unwittingly work together to indict and execute their cousin agorist, their dear family member who cannot live with the cognitive dissonance of helping the state to hurt the state and decides to do away with the government in their lives altogether here and now.

"It's not yet time to reach for freedom," they assure themselves. "Not yet time for revolution."

Not yet time? You idiots! If not now, then when? How much worse does it have to get? You insist "give me liberty or give me death", but given a way to finally effectively snatch the golden tincture of liberty in your fingers, you instead reach for the state's bottle of sedation right next to it on the shelf.

But what does it mean to reach for freedom, anyway? If the partyarchists (god, what a monstrous word) would be believed, then I could drown all my sorrows in saving enough money for a train ride to escape to the better parts of New Hampshire. I could stash the cash somewhere where my parents would forget about it and then flee in the middle of the night with nothing more than I could carry on my back. But what of the college debt that I'm just barely chipping away at, now that I'm finally employed? What of the rectangular tracking device in my pocket I've been conditioned to live my life through? What of the craft supplies I've hoarded, all the paper books I've so lovingly arranged on my bookshelf? Sure, I could abdicate myself of most of my possessions if I absolutely had to in order to survive... but it's my property. It's mine. It's one of the few things I can properly call mine.

The NEETs who I've just left would admonish me and proclaim that I am, in my shitty job, annihilating myself to conform to someone else's dream. But a driver's license is, thanks to shaky hands and skittish judgement behind the wheel, out of reach, and so my ability to flee is limited. My ability to accrue the things I need to survive, even more so. In a prepper's terms, "bugging out" is off the table. Anywhere I can go must be reasonably reachable on my own two feet.

And, truth be told, I am not one for political action. I am not one to sing and dance on the stage of public life. That's (part of) why you're reading this on a backwater website instead of, say, Facebook. I prefer backstage, subsisting where most cannot see me. Tomatoes get thrown at actors, but rarely (if ever) at the people working the curtains or the lights. The effects are still visible, but the people responsible are safely out of the way.

If we citizens are the theater crew and the police are the audience, then to make a bold move towards New Hampshire for me would be like dropping down onto stage and making a series of profane gestures that would immediately get me dragged off stage by an irate audience and beaten to a pulp in a dark alley somewhere. It would attract too much state attention towards me when all I want to do is disappear to them. To make enough that I can get by, but not enough that they can start stealing it through income taxes. To sleep in a place that I own, and to do what I please with my body and the property I own. Who cares about the laws when the police don't know that the laws are being broken?

What is an agorist like me supposed to do with partyarchy? Working with the state is the exact opposite of counter-economics. I can't use the same system that enslaves me every day to free me. Here, in Bumfuck, Minnesota, so long as the police don't look my way, I live in Ancapistan every day.

Cancer grows and kills a person by uncontrollably growing cencerous cells and spreading them all over, not by making normal cells and lying in wait. The anatomy of the state has tolerance for cells like its own, cells that serve its purposes in the end. Only when a cell becomes cancerous- seditious- does it become a genuine threat. But if the body does not know that there is cancer lurking around, then it cannot act until it is too late.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 © Vane Vander