Imagine a fairly primitive tribe of people living on a big island somewhere, getting along with each other pretty well and managing to thrive and prosper. Then along comes an outsider—a nasty guy who is not big and strong, but who is very clever. He wants to be the boss so he can take whatever he wants and do whatever he wants, and basically control the rest of them. But how could he possibly do that? The people of the tribe hugely outnumber him, and they will probably naturally distrust him since he is a stranger. He can’t acquire power over them by brute force, and what possible reason would they have to willingly give him such power?
Fast forward on our hypothetical island a few years, and now the “outsider” is the king of the tribe. He gets whatever he wants. The biggest members of the tribe act as his guards and enforcers. His every whim is called “law,” and any who resist him are demonized and attacked, not just by his hired guards, but by most of the other people in the tribe. They fear him, some hate him, but nearly all obey him, and pay tribute to him.
If you think that that could never happen in real life … turn on CNN.
It already did.
The crooks in Washington, DC—the ones who call themselves “the United States government”—are vastly outnumbered and outgunned by the people they tax and regulate. The American people don’t trust politicians, or like them, and yet the people keep handing over ridiculous sums of money to them—trillions of dollars every year. And most people keep complying with all manner of stupid, destructive, unjustified laws and regulations. Worst of all, it is the people themselves who enforce the will of the politicians on each other. The guy who will wipe out your bank account if you don’t pay your “fair share” to the IRS, or the guy who will kidnap you at gunpoint if you possess a plant without the politicians’ permission, is not a president or a congressman; he is an average Joe. He is a fellow victim of the ruling class, who also does their bidding, forcibly punishing any fellow subject who disobeys the masters.
How could such a situation ever come into existence? Simple. “Politics.” The crooks in DC know what the “outsider” on the island knew: if you want to control people, and you can’t do it by brute force alone, then you need to scare them, divide them, manipulate and deceive them, and always tell them that the way for them to be safe, the way to have the innocent protected and the wicked defeated, the way to make the world what it should be, is to give YOU lots and lots of money and power—power over everything and everyone, including them. To make this scam work, you must constantly use divide-and-conquer tactics, pitting various groups against each other, so they all distrust and resent one another, and all clamor to be first in line to throw more power at you in the hopes that you will use that power to serve their interests and harm their enemies. Never let up on your message of fear-mongering, so that they are scared of all sorts of dangers—poverty, crime, invasion, disease, etc.—to the point where they will willingly, even eagerly, discard their own freedom in exchange for loyal subservience to you, in the hopes that you will save them. (It doesn’t particularly matter whether you scare them with threats that are real, exaggerated, or just plain made up, as long as they believe them.)
Every successful tyrant in history has convinced his subjects that they, the people, would be the ones to benefit from him having power—that all of his authoritarian control-freak plans were for “the people” and “the nation,” and that the oppression inflicted upon the public was “for their own good.” Become a master at telling that lie, and you will soon have large numbers of serfs who not only obey your every whim and throw massive amounts of money at you, but who will hate and attack anyone who doesn’t. Do it right, and your human livestock will be meek, obedient, and will be existentially terrified of the idea of life WITHOUT you "in charge."
If you doubt this—if you think people would never be that gullible, that foolish, that easy to manipulate—just browse through some of the comments under any voluntaryist article on Steemit, or video on YouTube, or article on Facebook, and you will find no shortage of people expressing existential terror—complete with dire predictions, emotional tantrums, and even insults and condemnations—at the mere suggestion that maybe we don’t need a political ruling class forcibly extorting and controlling the rest of us “for our own good.”
