This week the Peaceful Treason and Friends Against Government podcasts did a crossover episode (Peaceful Treason episode link) to talk about issues on which they disagreed with a lot of the libertarian community. One of the topics was the idea of “Collapsitarianism,” which is promoting the immediate collapse of the state with the intention that a stateless libertarian society would emerge in its place.
I’m writing this not to rebut anything that was said—I agreed with everything they said on it. I would, however, like to add a few thoughts to support their arguments.
If the state were to collapse tonight, what would happen tomorrow morning? We’d probably end up with something that is pretty close to what we had just before. Of course, it wouldn’t happen that quickly, but the point is that in order for the structure of society to have a major shift towards liberty, a huge paradigm shift would need to occur in the minds of the people in that society. If a stateless society were to come out of the collapse of the current state, the collapse would need to affect the mindset of a significant portion of the people in a way that they would come to reject the state.
Maybe that would happen for some people. But based on history, the result of collapses and revolutions has been to try the state again but in a bit different way. People just try it with different rulers.
This means the root cause of the problem is not solved. Rinse and repeat.
This is why the incremental replacement of state institutions by private markets is superior in an effort to have the market make the state obsolete. This slow approach makes people change without them even realizing it. Look at Uber: how many people want to go back to riding in taxis?
Imagine being tasked with losing 5 pounds in a month. You can wait until the last day or two and not eat anything and sweat out whatever water is in you and accomplish your goal of losing the weight. But what happens the next day? You gain it all right back. If you focus on making small changes, like eating better (or less) and exercising more, you can gradually lose the weight and then keep it off.
And that’s really the goal, isn’t it? What good is throwing off the weight of the state if it hops back on a short time later?
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