Response post to @Valued-Customer: The Ability to Say No

Demonstrators gathered in protest, holding signs challenging the political and social system that governs them.

@valued-customer left a rather interesting comment on my previous post, Can Consent Coexist With Obedience?, which brought up something I hadn't really explored in that post.

Valued Customer wrote:

You are quite correct. The problem is that slavers coerce and the threat of violence with overwhelming force looms over free people, whom dare not defy tyranny lest they die and leave their loved ones without their protection.

For me, this is why the transcendence to decentralized production is so vitally important, because it is centralization that lies behind the threat of overwhelming force we face. Decentralization has changed the equation significantly. Previously, a centralized military power ruled hapless populations because it could field >$B bombers, and there was nothing the hapless could do to secure themselves but flee. Today <$50k drones defeat >$B bombers, and recently <$100 manpads that can be printed on your kitchen table were published that can secure you and yours from $50k drones and $B bombers alike. Centralized production no longer creates overwhelming force.

It will take time for the new infrastructure to disperse and saturate the population, but we see in Iran what is going to happen, as the decentralized government of Iran has utterly defeated the pinnacle of global centralized military force, USrael, and the many military bases USrael had in the ME have been rendered useless and will be abandoned. Decentralization has already proved indomitable, and time and engineering yet to be undertaken remain between us and freedom.

A better world is coming, my friend.

Thanks!

His argument, essentially, is that centralized production creates centralized power, and centralized power creates the possibility of overwhelming force being used against people who have very little ability to resist it. If individuals and small communities become capable of producing, communicating, defending, and sustaining themselves without depending entirely on a centralized authority, then that authority has less leverage over them.

I would certainly hope decentralization can move us in that direction. Frankly, I don't think humanity has ever managed to do it on a large scale. Human behavior is... troublesome. Humanity has a terrible track record when it comes to having a majority of people wanting to be ruled over. However, smaller communities have managed forms of self-sufficiency and cooperation throughout history, and there are certainly examples of it still happening today, even if they received occasional backlash for being free from the control freaks. Whether we could somehow scale that up without recreating the same centralized structures we were trying to get away from in the first place is another question entirely.

What interests me isn't whether decentralization magically creates freedom. It doesn't. What interests me is whether independence creates the conditions in which freedom can actually be exercised.

I've already argued that having a choice isn't necessarily the same thing as having a meaningful ability to refuse. You can refuse, sure, but what happens after you refuse? If refusing means you lose everything you need to live, then the fact that you could have said no doesn't tell us very much about how free that choice really was. Rather, it tells us how restricted the number of choices we had. And that's not including whether the person is aware of such choices.

This is where I think his argument becomes particularly relevant to the question of consent. Imagine two people who are both told, “You can leave.” The first person has somewhere else to go. They can produce or acquire what they need elsewhere. They have skills, resources, relationships, and enough independence to continue living without the person they're leaving. The second person has none of that. They can technically leave too, but leaving means they don't eat, they don't have shelter, they can't protect themselves, and they can't support the people who depend on them. Both were given the same choice. Were they equally free to make it?

Perhaps freedom isn't merely about whether someone has the legal or theoretical ability to refuse. Perhaps it also has something to do with how capable they are of living with the consequences of that refusal.

If I have no alternative to you, then your power over me is enormous even if you never threaten me. If I can walk away from you and continue living, your ability to control me becomes considerably smaller. That doesn't mean I will walk away. I may genuinely choose to stay. A slave who knows nothing more but to be comfortable with his slavery will probably never leave his comfort.

The more capable we are of leaving, the more meaningful our decisions to remain might become. Maybe that's part of what makes consent meaningful in the first place. Not simply that we said yes, but that we possessed a real enough ability to say no.

What does it actually mean to be free?

Free from what? Free from another person's commands? Free from political authority? Free from economic dependence? Free from society's expectations? Free from responsibility? Free from suffering? Free from McDonald's goyim meat grinder?

I don't think simply being alone answers the question either. If you want to be completely independent, you're going to need the skills to actually be independent, and not merely enough to survive. Enough to thrive. Otherwise we've simply exchanged one form of dependence for another.

Maybe the goal isn't to create a world where nobody needs anybody. Maybe that's impossible, and perhaps undesirable. The goal could be to create a world where needing another person doesn't automatically give that person the power to rule over you. Obviously, we all need each other, but there's a meticulous line between need and forced coercive obligations.

Workers participating in a collectivized workplace during the Spanish Revolution of 1936–37, when CNT-organized workers took over and reorganized production under collective management.

If decentralization can help accomplish that, then perhaps its greatest promise isn't technological at all. Perhaps it's just simply giving more people the ability to say no.

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