The state has always been the pinacle of all evil throughout history. The center insists it is the only legitimate source of law, taxation, courts, and armed force. From Vercingetorix to Makhno, the state apparatus murdered and executed all true leaders while using heresy/rebellion/banditry/extremism to convert political centralization into moral necessity.
Remedies:
1. Exit over voice
From nomads to frontier settlers to digital communities, liberty survives longest where people can leave. This is already articulated by Étienne de La Boétie:
Tyranny persists because people continue to participate.
2. Polycentric power (no single vertical)
Liberty persists where power is fragmented, redundant and non-hierarchical.
Examples (temporary but real):
Medieval free cities
Stateless borderlands (Scott’s “Zomia”)
Early Swiss cantons
Pre-tsarist Caucasia
Certain pirate enclaves
Short-lived federated revolutions (Ukraine 1918–21, Spain 1936)
3. Material independence precedes political independence
Historically, people are free only when they are hard to tax, track, and conscript.
That means:
Control of food/energy
Peer-to-peer exchange
Low fixed capital exposure
Self-defense capacity
Political rights follow after, not before.
4. Technological asymmetry (new, crucial factor)
This is new relative to most of history:
Cryptography
P2P networks
Stateless money
Censorship-resistant communication
These restore exit at scale, temporarily reversing the state’s legibility advantage.
They do not abolish the state — but they raise the cost of domination.
