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.
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.
Étienne’s argument relies on a simplistic distinction between the tyrant (a single man) and the dominated (an oppressed population comprising of everyone except the tyrant). The tyrant is “…a single little man. Too frequently this same little man is the most cowardly and effeminate in the nation, a stranger to the powder of battle and hesitant on the sands of the tournament…”
Of course it is rarely so simple, especially in a post-monarchical society in which power is diffused across a web of aligned institutions (government, media, academia, civil society…). Together, these tyrannical actors comprise a substantial, organized, and well-resourced minority.
In contrast to the tyrant, Étienne imagines an oppressed population with a coherent identity and naturally aligned interests. Again, it is not so simple: an oppressed population can still be riven with deep political, religious, class, and ethnic distinctions, and the extent to which these groups are oppressed and their vision for an ideal future will vary greatly.
As with other texts in the libertarian tradition, the separation between a free and oppressed population is all too neat and abstract. In Étienne’s mind, a people is free once they have overthrown their tyrant - but is it so straightforward? Once the tyrant is overthrown, will not another regime take its place, and implement its own rules and its monopoly on force? And even if freedom from governance were possible, are all people suited to rule themselves?
It is only when you account for all these flaws in his argument that it becomes clear why his central demand for the people to rise up and cast off their shackles has not already occurred. This lack of revolutionary action leaves him somewhat bemused:
All this havoc, this misfortune, this ruin, descends upon you not from alien foes, but from the one enemy whom you yourselves render as powerful as he is, for whom you go bravely to war, for whose greatness you do not refuse to offer your own bodies unto death…
You sow your crops in order that he may ravage them; you install and furnish your homes to give him goods to pillage; you rear your daughters that he may gratify his lust; you bring up your children in order that he may confer upon them the greatest privilege he knows—to be led into his battles, to be delivered to butchery, to be made the servants of his greed and the instruments of his vengeance. You yield your bodies unto hard labor in order that he may indulge in his delights and wallow in his filthy pleasures; you weaken yourselves in order to make him the stronger and the mightier to hold you in check.
And yet the people do not revolt.
Why? Because for a grand revolution to gain momentum it requires the overcoming of inertia, disorganization, distraction - all of which are compounded by the fractured nature of the populace and the reality of political trade-offs for which Étienne fails to account.
How, then, do we spur a genuinely oppressed people into action? We must address and resolve each of the challenges above in turn. A recent discussion on The Practical Realities of Building a Parallel Polity between my friends
, , (both of the Dutch Reformed community in Canada) and (of the Afrikaner community in South Africa) provides useful lessons in this regard, which I will attempt to distill below and unite with my concept of the cataclysm.In each of the examples I give you will see that it is not a majority that gains freedom, but a well-defined minority; that it is not freedom that is achieved but self-subjugation to a chosen governance structure; that it is not wealth that is gained but elective hardship; and that the catalyst for action is a cataclysm which must be suffered.
In order to achieve a breakaway society you must first know who you are. In a fractured society, it is not enough to merely conceive of yourself as a member of that society - you must inhabit a definite, specific identity, typically referencing an ethnicity and belief system. If asked ‘who are your people’ your response should be natural and concise.
Caracal makes this point with reference to the Afrikaners, but other potential examples abound: I am a Hasid, I am a Mormon, I am Amish. I anticipate that as American fragmentation continues various WASP subcultures will gain this level of definitiveness.
In places like England this question takes on a slightly different form: the English ethnicity is present but lacks a coherent belief system or faith. Increasing hardship may correct this: persecution strengthens faith.
It is only once you have an identity that is specific enough to bind you more closely to the other members of that identity than other members of your society that progress becomes possible. In fact: it is only once you are a member of a group that is well defined enough to be specifically persecuted that separation is possible.
Next: you must know what you want. Freedom is not the answer: in many ways, decaying Western society affords its citizenries freedoms that few others in history have ‘enjoyed’, given the erosion of moral expectations. Maximalist freedom is an illusory objective: the goal should be moving from unchosen to chosen laws; from subjugation to self-subjugation.
Here an illustrative example can be found in the communities that have formed around the radical Catholic priestly fraternity of the Society of Saint Pius X (‘SSPX’). This traditionalist movement has their own churches, seminaries, schools, and lay communities - including cities in which the SSPX faithful comprise the majority of the population, like St. Mary’s, Kansas.
Importantly, the binding factor in this movement is not freedom; indeed in many ways it is anti-freedom, given that the movement is a reaction against the perceived laxity introduced by modernist reforms in the Catholic Church. Rites are strictly adhered to, a rigorous liturgical calendar is followed, and a traditionalist morality is enforced. This discipline is key, because it ensures that the actions of the community post-separation are convergent (binding them together) rather than diffusive (an over-emphasis on freedom leading to fragmentation and dispersal).
Finally, the successful separatist society must know when to act. This comes with the cataclysm.
“The Afrikaners had a very definite moment when they realized the state didn’t belong to them… But there are a lot of people in the Western world for whom this moment has not yet occurred… And if that moment has not yet occurred you haven’t begun the process of forming a community which is capable of parallelism.”
— Black Horse
The cataclysm is a psycho-political turning point - undeniable in its intensity - that awakens the population to the need for independence regardless of the resulting hardship.
Caracal gives the example of the political handover in South Africa leading to a complete loss of Afrikaner institutional control. In this pivotal moment, their entire political existence was upended. With the SSPX, the cataclysm was the Second Vatican Council, which cleared the way for the rites that traditionalist Catholics loved to be abolished. For Zionists, the Holocaust was an existential threat that necessitated the creation of an independent state.
Without the cataclysm - the pivotal moment - the frog sits in the boiling water, and the temperature continues to rise. As long as tenuous hope remains that the existing system can be reformed, inaction will continue.
Are we condemned, then, to wait for a moment of persecution so intense and so harmful that true parallelism becomes possible? I hope that the answer is no. I believe that the path forwards is to engineer and amplify little cataclysms.
The little cataclysm is an existentially threatening but non-violent event. It is the pivotal moment at which all the supports that underpin the continuation of our present mode of existence are cut - and a replacement existence must be found. There is no alternative.
The canonical example of this is the ‘move to the wilderness’ of a few vanguard families. This vanguard - representing only enough families to make a basic unit of community possible - moves, like the Afrikaners of Orania, to a remote geography that is disconnected from mainstream society and infrastructure.
Geographic separation is not the only option, though it is the simplest to illustrate. The adoption of sufficiently alienating spiritual and cultural practices can serve the same end, if they lead to the strong separation of the group from mainstream support (see the Hasids of New York).
This represents a break from the tyranny of oppression - yes - but also a break from the tyranny of support.
There’s freedom in the desert.
— Conscious Caracal
Parallel societies which rely on the institutions and infrastructure of the present regime are impossible; in time they will converge back to the status quo. The little cataclysm pre-empts this by ripping the bandaid off; rather than awaiting persecution, self-persecution is undertaken, and deprivation is adopted in the place of violent punishment.
This is a theme which I will continue to explore - in anticipation of my family making such a move in the near future.
Watch this space.
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Sic transit imperium,
Johann
If you've not read it, please read Eric Hoffer's The True Believer. It outlines the making of a mass movement requires great inertia from a tireless cadre of True Believers who tap the human religious impulse to motivate. Even with this cadre, it can take ten years to generate enough inertia to start mass change. These are factors to consider in making a parallel society.
As far as the abuse people will take, consider the British Royal Navy in the 18th century. The crews had to be sooooo horribly abused that when they finally did mutiny, the Admiralty had a policy of automatically putting the captain on trial (assuming he was still alive.) They knew for a captain to lose his ship, he must have been such a monster as to drive the crew to rebellion. This didn't stop the Admiralty from hanging every mutineer, however.
There is also a vague analogy in a dog's body that is useful to consider. It takes a lot of dog to have a small bite; consider the proportions of the size of the dog to the jaws. The rest of the dog never rebels against the head, drawing its ire and being bitten. The rest is not disorganized or disinterested; the rest of the dog is simply organized in such a way, it doesn't rebel. A vaguely similar organic phenomenon is present in human societies: they are organized to support the whole of the body, not to become teeth and brains and nerves. Human beans are the 'cells' if you will; some rebel, going cancerous, and have to be policed. Most human beans are going to go along, Royal Navy style, with the body even unto death. The value of the dog analogy is in understanding what gives birth to another dog. For us to create a parallel society, we need the body of the society to birth us into being a new dog.
Here is a fundamentalist sect of Christians that are highly successful in metropolises across the South East USA. They are brick masons by trade, McGee Brick Co., and are the best that I worked with. Before local govt shut down this practice, male youth began masonry at age 13 or so. Some of their earnings were put in a savings account. At age 18, every male with the funds would have a house free of mortgage. The church land was donated, the funds bought materials, members gathered and built the house with free labor. The male then could marry at age 18 with zero debt slavery.
The workers were cleancut Boyscout-types. Clean uniform with shirt tucked in, no cursing, and Old South polite.
https://www.truelightfellowship.org/whatwebelieve
https://www.mcgeebrick.com/