The origins of Statism in child abuse

If you punish children, most will grow up believing that they were punished because they were bad. They grow up believing that others are bad, too. That human beings must be beaten to stop them from hitting each other. That without this coercive parent, social relations would, almost overnight, descend into chaos.

Thus, you have the basic concept behind Leviathan and the Hobbesian social contract: that human beings are basically evil and that without the State as substitute-parent and ruler to stop them from devouring each other you would in short order have The Lord of The Flies, but with adults and on a grander scale. The Christ myth, together with his sacrifice for your original sin (not sin from choices and actions in life, but a sin apparently encoded in your genetics) is part of the same archetype.

The problem statists think requires a government to solve is not one of human nature, but one of child abuse. It is not innate, but created. And the inherent contradiction in the State using its own initiatory violence to suppress the private initiatory violence of others is the same one that a parent engages in when hitting a child to punish them for hitting.

The ridiculousness with which an anarchist approaches these statist claims regarding human nature is also not surprising. Either the anarchist was not abused as a child, or they processed their abuse in a productive manner and came to realize, on some level, that aggressive violence is not endemic to human nature. Certainly that its institutionalization into a massive system would only make things worse. The opposing views that human beings are basically evil, or on the other hand that human beings are basically good people corrupted by abusive parents, teachers, and institutions, will for the most part be irreconcilable. Their political manifestations are merely pathologies, either of the person’s abuses or of positive experiences throughout their life.

Observe this pathology in the voter who as a child was dominated and whose brain created the pattern “he who is in power dominates he who is not in power”, and must therefore lash out and control others lest they control him. Or a politician who takes a more hands-on approach in controlling the life of others by acting out his unresolved childhood issues in the form of an entire career. Many politicians are sociopaths, and it has been clearly established that sociopathy, characterized by endless deceit, attempts at manipulation, and a lack of empathy for other human beings, stems directly from abuse as a child.

When an anarchist attempts to convince a statist of the error of their ways by using reason and critical thought to describe the reality around them, he encounters an obstacle that cannot be budged with reasoned arguments, because the anarchist is talking to someone with a fundamentally different mind. To the statist, politics is a self-defense mechanism. Is it then surprising that the arguments the statist uses are so emotional in nature?

"People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character." - Ralph Waldo Emerson