The Little Cataclysm

How a citizenry becomes ungovernable

How do you start a parallel society?

It should be simple. A group withdraws their consent to be governed by the state, and begins peacefully establishing alternative governance structures. Their freedom is at stake, and tyranny must be resisted.

Given the increasingly tyrannical behavior of governments in the West, one might expect to find many examples of this process underway, but there are few. Why is this?

I propose that history demonstrates that such radical activity - even if peaceful and gradual - requires strong catalysts: events which I call ‘cataclysms’. Without cataclysms, would-be dissidents are like frogs in boiling water: increasingly imperilled but never spurred into action.

To illustrate this, we can contrast the influential 1577 proto-libertarian essay ‘Discourse on Voluntary Servitude’ - which makes naive demands for the citizenry to resist tyranny by simply withdrawing their consent to be governed - with actual examples of the inception of breakaway communities.

My hope is that using these lessons we can then bring into being ‘little cataclysms’: events which are powerful catalysts for separation without the terror and violence of the ‘great cataclysms’ like the French Wars of Religion and the Holocaust.

Pan Haowen by Jumbo Tsui for BLUE ERDOS Fall / Winter 2020

The fundamental political question is: Why do people obey a government? The answer is that they tend to enslave themselves, to let themselves be governed by tyrants. Freedom from servitude comes not from violent action, but from the refusal to serve.

— Étienne de La Boétie, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude

Étienne de La Boétie was a French magistrate, classicist, and political theorist. His 1577 work ‘Discourse on Voluntary Servitude’, published clandestinely after his death, was influential on successive generations of separatist thinkers: the embattled French Huguenots, the European Anarchists like Simone Weil, and the American Libertarian movement (Murray Rothbard wrote an introduction to a 1975 edition).

The central thesis of the work is that a citizenry are ultimately responsible for any tyranny that they are subject to - because dethroning the tyrant is as simple as the mass withdrawal of consent.

…so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him; who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him.

There is some truth here, but taken as a whole the argument is naive. The model is too reductive. But perhaps by identifying the flaws we can correct them, and identify a more productive path forwards.