SYTB 28: You Own Yourself
No one has a moral authority over your body but you!
Regardless of what label you take or if you take no labels at all, the fundamental principle of Voluntaryism is self-ownership. Whatever you put in your boundaries must start with you!
It means no one has a moral right to tell you what to do with your body but you. Not a king, not if they wear a ring, not on a boat, not if they have a goat, not in a bar, nor if you are driving a car…
Fundamentally speaking, you are entirely responsible for what you do with your body, too. In many cases, you might be “protected” by some kind of state privileges or religious privileges, but in any case, you are still personally responsible for your choices, your behaviors and your actions.
You may have a job that requires you to hurt people. Did you know there’s a job in the USA that requires people to systematically rape other, unarmed, defenseless people all day every day? If you work for a state prison, your job might be to admit new inmates. You make them strip naked in front of you and you may be required to penetrate their bodies with parts of your body. They are not doing this voluntarily. The person will be shot or beat or held down if they do not comply with this violent (from to violate another person) act of rape. But because the job is called a “cavity search” and the rapist is called an “officer of a law,” and because no one has yet considered a more humane way of treating prisoners, every person who comes in to holding, even if merely under suspicion and not yet convicted of a crime in a prison must be technically raped in this system before entering a cage (or detainment facility).
The thing is, we have made exceptions under the law wherein even rape is acceptable. The behavior hasn’t changed. The act hasn’t become more humane. But, it is acceptable to most people. Most people watch cavity search scenes in TV shows and don’t cringe or feel awful in the way they would with any other form of rape. They assume it’s like a doctor’s visit.
Doctors don’t rape people. Doctors may not forcibly and without consent violate another person or lay a finger on another person in most cases. You see how we’ve changed mindsets and definitions, equating the doctor check up by consent to the prison cavity search without consent. It’s all to make things seem less rapey and creepy. If people considered they were entering the orifice of another without consent and with the threat of violence, they might not be as willing to do the job every day and society might not have ever allowed it to be a standard.
The difference between most labels we give things versus what we call them when the state or some other authority does them comes down to one word: consent.
Many people talk about government by consent of the governed. This is a ridiculous notion. Your great, great, great grandparents can’t sign a paper giving the authority to rape you if you don’t follow whatever made up rules came along by someone else 700 years later.
Whatever happens to your body has to happen with your explicit consent. Non violence on the part of the victim is not a sign of consent. If a guy takes a girl to his room and says, “I’ll shoot you if you don’t spread your legs.” the act of her spreading her legs is not consent. If she doesn’t struggle because she doesn’t want to get shot, that’s not consent. If he covers her mouth so she can’t say “no,” her silence doesn’t make her answer a “yes.” There’s no such thing as implied consent. Paying a tax or a fine to the state so thugs don’t show up at your door and shoot you or your kids while trying to shoot you next door neighbor’s dog-is not consent. Nothing the state does is less than violence. They just happen to have a monopoly on the ability or the permission to do it. Ironically, their justification for their monopoly on violence is that if we didn’t let them violate us with impunity, some gang of thieves would. The difference between a gang of thieves or foreign invaders and the state is that there’s only one of these groups in which self-defense is permitted and accepted by “civilized” society. Doesn’t seem so civilized when I put it that way, though.
When you start to accept that you own yourself, your mind, your dreams and your desires, the scales fall from your eyes. You see no more validity in a sales person wanting too much of your time on the phone or the state wanting part of the fruit of your labor. You begin to see that no one is entitled to your body or your property or your time or your attention.
I say this with the utmost love and respect. I also say this with deep understanding for how shocking and bombastic this might sound. You may be trying to find excuses for the state. I get it. I’ve been there, run through them all and ran out of excuses. It’s no different than looking for excuses with an abusive boyfriend. It isn’t.
Until you understand that no one, has the right to your body or property or time or attention in any way ever, you are going to struggle with boundaries.
Like I said yesterday, you can’t make rules for other people, and they can’t make rules for you. However, you can make agreements. Agreements include rentals, labor, services, marriages, etc. These are negotiations you’ve made in which you agree to make an exchange. The most common exchanges are time for money, service for money or goods for money. It doesn’t have to be for money. You could barter various goods and services. Your could use cryptocurrency. The point is that an agreement has an exit clause. In an agreement, you can leave.
Now, I know what some of you are thinking, “If you don’t like America, you can leave.” First, I want to say, not exactly. If you think you can just step off a country (with a monopoly on violence) without their permission, you are very mistaken. Most nations insist you are their property, and if you make money elsewhere, even live elsewhere, your labor is still at their discretion to determine what percentage you might get to keep. They will hunt you down in other countries to take your wages. Bottom line is this is not an agreement with the state. If you have to file a paper that has to be agreed to for approval to say you now own yourself, you never fucking did and you still don’t.
The next issue is that of the definition of property. When a country (gang of violent thugs with impunity) claims a property, they call it “public property.” It’s not property and there’s nothing public about it. You can’t use it. I can’t use it. No one can use it without permissions- UNLESS one is an exclusive member of the state. Then they can rent out the White House for a fundraiser to line their own pockets with little more than a slap on the wrist should they get “caught.” IMPUNITY. They can operate under the adage: it’s better to ask forgiveness than beg for permission. The truth is, they don’t need anyone’s permission. Bottom line though, before we move on: the only true property has one consistent definition. That is private property. We know who paid for it. We know who has the keys to it. We know who has a say over it. There’s no quagmire of confusion or mysticism around it. It’s straight forward, obvious and without obscurity.
Now, onto permissions. For the past two years, we have been subject to mandate after mandate, rule after rule and NONE of the rule makers have obeyed. They all look at their own rules as discretionary. Administrators at school board meetings decrying that masks are imperative remove their own mask to give their portion of the talk at whim. They each walk up to the same microphone everyone else has stood in front of and breathed on and take their mask off as they see fit.
Rule makers behave as though they are above the laws they set.
So, how does this effect you and I.
First, stop bragging that you are a law abiding, tax paying citizen. This is not noble. This is like being bitch slapped and telling everyone you asked for it to prove how much of a hit you can take. Start to see things in the context of what they are. Rape is rape if it is sexual violation without consent, regardless of the context. Murder is murder. Little by little if you begin to call things what they are, you will come to realize that you are more free, just by virtue of acknowledging which laws are legitimate.
Oh, yes. Did I mention some laws are legitimate? Which ones? How do I know? It’s pretty simple. A natural or common law basically indicates one does not hurt another and one does not take the property of another. So, no feeding the homeless without permission: not legitimate law. You can give your stuff to whomever you want, I don’t care if it’s the Czar of Russia.
We do still live in a land of bullshit laws. We do. You can still get shot for breaking bogus, illegitime “rules.” But the state can pretty much shoot you any time they feel like it with impunity anyway. If you think you have boundaries in a world that finds this impunity acceptable or presumed, you are deluded. It’s imperative that you stop talking to others as though you accept this kind of a world. The more of us that no longer presume impunity or accept the impunity of the state acting violently, the sooner people will once again be held accountable for their individual actions and behaviors and the sooner we can all enjoy more safety and freedom.
Try not to get killed. Simultaneously try to live freely, with as little regard for bullshit as you need to do what you need to do to fulfill your dreams. Be safe, but don’t just buckle. How can you ever stop buckling to your uncle Bob taking advantage of your time or attention if you keep acquiescing, without so much as a grunt to the state stealing your money? The least you can do is declare “I do not consent” and tell others what you learn about the nature of freedom.
Respect others in the same regard as you respect yourself in context of the common law. Don’t hurt people and don’t take or damage their stuff.
Speak like you own yourself. Now we’re getting back to the framework of boundaries. What kind of world would you like to create? One based on consent or one based on coercion? Which of these worlds do you see yourself residing in if you could pick an ideal? Speak and act like this is the world you want to live in and are living in as much as possible.
Learn more of the language and principles of self-ownership. There are fantastic resources for this. You can start with a primer such as Freedom Through Memedom by “Mance Raydor” aka Peter R Quinones. It’s a 31 day, one meme a day book to break you out of thinking like a subject of a kingdom and start thinking as someone with something to lose.
Start giving yourself permission. If you think you could plant an avocado tree somewhere that could help feed the homeless, figure out a way around getting permission. My friend, Kieran Pearson suggested wearing a yellow vest, donning a hard hat and carrying a clip board while you plant a food tree in a public park. Feed the homeless directly. My friend, Luis Fernando Mises, noticed police would steal the food donated to the homeless without permission. So he got a group together to carry AR-15’s so police wouldn’t try to stop them from feeding homeless people in Texas. They stuck around with guns defending the homeless people’s right to eat until they’d each finished their meals. It worked! Generally, though, start exempting yourself from bullshit mandates and infringements on your liberty that didn’t invoke your consent. A doorman asks, “Where’s your mask?” Look him or her confidently in the eyes and say, “I am exempt.” Most people will shockingly accept this. The less you try to explain yourself the better. Remember, you owe no one your time, your energy or your attention, much less your explanation. If they still chose to deny you, walk away. No one has to play by your rules and you can respect theirs. But certainly, exempting yourself and not playing along with rituals that make no sense, cause harm to you and/or presume your consent without explicitly getting it from you are in your best interest and in the best interest of humanity in the long run.
If you want to learn more about Voluntaryism as a principle to start to spread around the world or just as something you’d like to share with a friend or loved one, I recommend what is considered one of the top books on the philosophy, The Most Dangerous Superstition by Larken Rose. You will find it practical and illustrative of the power you might have been giving up not realizing you’d been taught your whole life in our society to abdicate your most precious belonging: your self-ownership and your consent.