Stockholm Syndrome and the State

by Angelo Mike 

Exclusive to STR

March 27, 2007

Why is it that people will often do nothing when crime is committed in front of their eyes? Why will they not speak up when it is committed against them? Why do they cooperate with criminal aggressors who threaten them with violence should they not live how gangsters wish, and instead laugh with them and act as if their captors are treating them justly? Why, when they have perfectly within their grasp the means to refuse to give in to intimidation and coercion?  

After sitting on a jury panel on March 26, I’m at a loss to answer, other than most people are idiots when it comes to the law. Instead of facing the fact that the government threatened every one of us with violent penalties should we not answer our surveys and show up in court, they acted as if they were getting justly called to give what was owed of them, as if God himself was calling them to service.  

If God did so then I must agree, it is incumbent upon us to give back as much as we can, since everything we have is his and owed back to him. Whether God does any such thing is a matter for the individual’s own disposition and his feeling of revelation of a will that cannot be imparted to anyone else and is necessarily only spoken to him as an inner voice which God alone can reveal to others.  

No, it is a fallible god that we’ve created which we pretend has such an ultimate and unilateral power. Only for the same reasons we allegedly can’t be free, we cannot trust such power in the hands of fallible people.  

It is this god of democracy that we’ve somehow conferred rights to that none of us have, and yet it can confer rights back upon us that it can change from moment to moment. Being the organization of violent means, worship of the state is the worship of force.  

As of March 24, I had the right to do what I wanted, relatively speaking. As of the night of March 25, I was informed that I legally had to show up at a courthouse in order to answer questions from a judge as to whether I’d serve on a jury. Of course, I am led to believe that while I can afford to be coerced into taking out half a day to go to court by a state that ultimately has a right to kill me if I disobey it, the state can’t afford not to extort and imprison me if I won’t serve on a jury to carry out an invasion of an innocent person’s rights.  

Upon greeting our captors in the jury conference room--Edward and Rose, I believe--a spell immediately came over everyone. They talked openly to the bureaucrats, telling them about their favorite sports teams and their families, and joking about trying to get out of jury duty.  

Do these people have any idea who they’re talking to? These people are threatening to fine us $100, imprison us for three days, or both, if we didn’t show up to that meeting. Is this not a display of Stockholm syndrome, in which a hostage starts to identify with their captor and feel affection for them?  

Are these people idiots or insane? And when we were herded into a courtroom in which we were informed that we’d be chosen to hear a case of a doctor who was prescribing his patients pain killers (the state wants a monopoly on pain), why were these people sheepishly giving excuses as to why it might not be expedient to serve on a jury for a case that was expected to last three to four weeks?  

Several people explained to the judge things like, “If the case was three or four days, I could do it. But it’s going to be too hard on my employer and family.”  

At this point I wanted to get up and yell, “Get up, you slaves! Don’t make excuses to you abductors! You’re all free!”  

Literally dozens of people gave explanations such as these, and the judge graciously understood that, while jury slavery is a civic duty (so is murdering Arabs), there were “reasonable” and “unreasonable” burdens to put on people to serve.  

Is extortion ever reasonable?  

When my turn came to speak as to why I’m unfit to serve on a jury (somehow, I think I was more fit to decide a drug dealer’s innocence than anyone else there), I explained that I was a philosopher and had strong feelings about drug laws, and had also been part of certain unnamed drug advocacy groups.  

The judge, being a moron, asked if anyone in the panel had ever worked with a political advocacy group either in favor of more “liberal usage” of drugs, or less usage of them. I wasn’t about to justify myself to anyone, and merely gave a yes and got dismissal. Unlike the other dupes, while I wouldn’t stand up and declare my rights, I decided that, at the very least, I wasn’t going to make the court sound legitimate by explaining specific groups such as STR that I support, and that this might prejudice me. I was giving the state more than its due merely by informing them of anything about myself. Either way, it is none of their business.  

And, being a student, I still wasn’t going to tell them that I couldn’t serve because I would miss class. I wouldn’t have willingly served on the jury, anyways, so I wasn’t about to give them a piddling reason about it merely being inconvenient at this time, but that they can call me up later and I’d be understanding.  

If you want as clear an example of how the state doesn’t give the very basic protection of property that Hobbesian and Lockean theorists advocate, this is it. The state gave none of us protection and is obligated to protect no one but its own. Its only obligation to us is to commit crime against us, disrupt society, and put us in danger. Its job isn’t the administration of justice, but a perversion of justice. And this wasn’t in merely some “excessively” grown branch of the state, but its allegedly fundamental arm, the court.  

The poor defendant in the case has the FBI, US government, and a jury full of people who believe in its drug laws to decide, as I write this, whether his prescription of pain killers was in some way illegitimate.  

My God. All these people stood by and happily cooperated. It seems none of them have an ideology of freedom. Every vote in the world for a libertarian politician will do nothing against such a prevailing ideology. Yet these people, along with the rest of the ideological middle class, believe that voting is the foremost thing one can do to bring change.  

I’m disgusted and heartbroken. These people are free by virtue of their births, and they’re willing to be led like sheep to do whatever the state wants. When will people wake up? Once you concede that any violent intervention into your life by the state is acceptable, no serious objection can be advanced against any other. People will not sacrifice and pay a personal toll for freedom, but will seek to aid, abet, and actively agitate for the state’s expansion.  

No one will have principled objections against state encroachments beyond some level which we have arbitrarily set as the state’s acceptable limit, since, having done this, we’ve already ceded to the state the intellectual and moral justification for any encroachment that a parasite deems a “reasonable” one.  

In the low intensity warfare the state engages in, no cooperation is possible. Every act of such cooperation is a step towards the omnipotent state. Unlike in business, where the businessman maintains his own well being at your service, the state maintains it at your expense.  

As in any battle, we must overcome our enemy, or our enemy will overcome us. Only this battle can’t be won through violence, but must be won by ordinary people like the ones on my jury panel who have an ideological and moral conviction against the state.  

But people still identify with the state. They feel, as voters and concerned citizens, that they and the state are one and the same. This belief is the product of illogic, as is the state. As such, the emotional shock of considering life without the state drives people, when confronted with such a possibility, to desperation, panic, and outrage. In the words of Albert Jay Nock,  

"Republicanism permits the individual to persuade himself that the State is his creation, that the State action is his action, that when it expresses itself it expresses him, and when it is glorified he is glorified. The republican State encourages this persuasion with all its power, aware that it is the most efficient instrument for enhancing its own prestige. Lincoln 's phrase, 'of the people, by the people, for the people' was probably the most effective single stroke of propaganda ever made in behalf of republican State prestige.

Thus the individual's sense of his own importance inclines him strongly to resent the suggestion that the State is by nature anti-social. He looks on its failures and malfeasances with somewhat the eye of a parent, giving it the benefit of a special code of ethics. Moreover, he has always the expectation that the state will learn by its mistakes, and do better. Granting that its technique with social purposes is blundering, wasteful and viscious -- even admitting, with the public official whom Spencer cites, that wherever the State is there is villainy -- he sees no reason why, with an increase of experience and responsibility, the State should not improve."

We have to deal with our own ranks to carry out the thankless task of convincing them that they must defend themselves against monopoly, however infatuated they may be with their persecutors. Society depends on freedom fighters in the midst of the state, whether it acknowledges us or the state as the protectors of society or not.