A New Vision of Self-Government

$25,000 is coming to anyone who can help us realize it

Image by Cai Fang

Write a Constitution of Consent that balances freedom and community self-organization. Contest entrants — individuals or teams — will develop a constitution that is chosen, not imposed—a real social contract.
The winner(s) get $25,000.

Nobody wants to be compelled. But a lot of people want to compel others. 

After all, what are elections but warring groups who use the vote to force a minority to live a certain way?

Most people want to consent. But only a few can see how consent can work at scale. 

Still, how do billions of people coordinate their behaviors peacefully each day without anyone telling them what to do? 

No authority tells you to “drive to the store.” The only rule is to drive on the right (or left in certain parts of the world).

These two opposing concepts—consent and compulsion—represent two stark visions of how societies should be organized. As I write in The Decentralist,

There are only two ways to get another to do what you want him to do--compulsion and persuasion. There is no other way. You can get someone to do something through lying or trickery, but these are just vicious forms of persuasion. You can calmly and gently inform someone that you have a gun, so they must open the till, but that’s just polite compulsion. 

In other words, either one is left free to make her own decisions, or she is not. The world runs on compulsion and consent, and the preponderance of either in a society shapes it utterly. 

If we seek to avoid contradiction and live in a peaceful social order, what should be our fundamental operating principle: persuasion or coercion? More personally, if you got to live in a society of your choosing, do you want others to persuade you or coerce you?

That last question was sneaky.

You probably noticed a fundamental distinction between persuasion and coercion, and perhaps you thought you’d rather be persuaded than coerced. But maybe you overlooked the first clause—If you got to live in a society of your choosing…. 

By framing the conversation this way, I have prompted you to consider three important things:

1. That most people reflexively prefer consent to compulsion;

2. That it is possible to put consent first, that is, make it fundamental; and

3. That even if people choose to live in a situation with comparatively more coercion—for example, in a neighborhood with a strict homeowners association—they still seek, intuitively, to choose that situation.

Under this construal, consent—not compulsion—is fundamental. 

But consent-based social orders are exceedingly rare in a world of Hobbesian monopoly states. Still, I would like not only to persuade you that matters need not be this way but that Hobbesian monopoly states have outlived their usefulness.

Hobbes’s Monopoly 

Back in primary school, most of us learned that monopolies are bad. Maybe you were taught that monopolies generally cause prices to go up and quality to go down. Monopolies also leave us without a choice of alternatives.

I also learned that intrepid regulators called ‘trust busters’ rode in bestride white horses and broke up these monopolies to benefit customers everywhere. Leaving aside the irony that these trust-busters were part of the greatest monopoly of all—the federal government—it should strike us that maybe we ought to question whether monopolies on governance services are just as bad as monopolies on any other product or service.

Perhaps we’ve all been under the sway of Thomas Hobbes for too long. 

In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes argues that humans are fundamentally selfish and that life in a state of nature—without authority—is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.' To escape this condition, reasonable people would voluntarily form a social contract, which requires surrendering one’s freedoms to an absolute sovereign, the Leviathan. This powerful entity imposes peace and social order, making civil society possible—or so the story goes.

The Hobbesians can be sneaky too. 

Hobbes argues that to escape this condition, reasonable people would voluntarily form a social contract… The problem with this line of argument is that it’s unclear whether people would consent to form a social contract requiring submission to an absolute sovereign (violence monopoly). Also, Hobbesian monopolies’ are based on a principle of compulsion, not anything “voluntary.” 

Now, nation-states are monopolies. But didn’t we learn that monopolies are bad? And which monopolies are we talking about? It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about presidents or kings, much less this president or that king. Monopoly states suffer the same problems. 

A New Vision

We can agree with Hobbes on one point, though. Reasonable people will be willing to enter into different social contracts. But these ought not be imaginary or hypothetical. Hypothetical social contracts enable philosopher kings and tyrants to set up systems based on their conception of the good, then impose those systems on us. It has nothing to do with consent.

Reasonable people will opt into real social contracts and sign them as they would any other contract. But in this way, there can be as many social contracts as there are ideas of the good.

The punchline here is simple: Self-government means choosing your government. 

Again, there is no reasonable monopoly on violence. And reasonable people can, of course, disagree about the kind of society they want to live in. Therefore, our new vision should be based on consent—that is, choice and competition.

That’s why The Advocates for Self-Government and Social Evolution are teaming up to bring you a Constitution of Consent Contest. 

The winning entry gets $25,000. Sound interesting? Here’s what you can do:

1. Register free at Underthrow.org to get daily content and reminders leading up to the contest launch on July 15, 2023. 

2. Follow the Guidelines set out on the Constitution of Consent Contest page.

3. Submit your constitution between July 15, 2023, and October 15, 2023.

That’s it. 

Together, we will show the world how to build a consent-based order. We’ll reveal a new vision of self-government.