Understanding Underthrow
An Introduction to Anti-Authoritarian Thinking and Practice
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
–Thomas Jefferson
Nonviolence is a weapon of the strong.
–Mohandas Gandhi
When Jefferson wrote the words in the above epigraph, he was somewhere in France. He had written a letter to William Stephens Smith, the son-in-law of John Adams. Jefferson worried his compatriots were making too much of this whole business of putting down rebellions. Just twenty-two years before, he had helped inspire an uprising of his own. Jefferson saw this rabble with their pitchforks and muskets as the last stand against the powerful.
“And what country can preserve its liberties,” he wrote, “if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?”
Jefferson was a revolutionary. Some, like the little-known twentieth-century anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre, thought Jefferson was nigh an anarchist despite his serving as Secretary of State and two terms as President. Channeling J.R.R. Tolkien, Jefferson resembled not a whiskered-men-with-bombs anarchist, but rather a skeptical-of-authority anarchist. De Cleyre saw in the American colonists a tradition of mischief-making against the powerful:
The revolution is the sudden and unified consciousness of these traditions, their loud assertion, the blow dealt by their indomitable will against the counterforce of tyranny, which has never entirely recovered from the blow, but which from then till now has gone on remolding and regrappling the instruments of governmental power, that the Revolution sought to shape and hold as defenses of liberty.
How long and to what extent can the instruments of governmental power be used to defend freedom before the powerful degrade them and turn them on the people?
Such questions troubled Jefferson, too. Far from warming him to power, Jefferson’s own political life seemed to stiffen his skepticism.
“Never did a prisoner, released from his chains, feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power,” wrote Jefferson in a separate letter.
Still, one can imagine poor William Stephens Smith receiving Jefferson’s tree-of-liberty missive and thinking the statesman somewhat flip about bloodshed. But in 1787, the threat of popular uprisings was the last check after all other measures had been exhausted. In some respects, it still is. The path of the American Whigs had been to overthrow the tyrants, at least on American soil.
In an 1887 letter to Madison, Jefferson wrote of three primary societal forms—no government, participatory governments, and governments of force. The third, he thought, “is a government of wolves over sheep.” The second, he believed, “has a great deal of good in it.”
But the first?
“It is a problem not clear in my mind that the first condition is not the best.”
We need not take Jefferson’s anarchistic streak as illiberal or disorderly. We need only show that he and the antifederalists were right to warn us about the Constitution. They were downright prescient. With the arc of history bending as it has, we can still have Jefferson as a main character in the American story without committing to any principle of periodic bloodshed. And that’s where underthrow comes in.
But first, a detour.
From Subject to Citizen, Citizen to Customer
One thing their adversaries hated about the Whigs was their insistence on the march of progress. Their progress was not the fever dreams of so-called progressives but rather a belief in the inevitable improvement of society through time. The horrors of the twentieth century militate against the idea of inevitable progress. Yet progress has directionality. Despite lurches, detours, and cycles of decline, humanity tends to transmit—and build upon—knowledge. The totality of that knowledge includes recipes for improving our lives.
Humanity benefits from the collective intelligence embedded in the simplest things—including this very page. Happily, there are compounding returns to knowledge, especially when entrepreneurs offer to instantiate recipes in their products. We can sustainably access such bounty thanks to competitive markets. For example, few of us know how to build a set of headphones. Despite our relative ignorance of electroacoustic transducers, most of us get to enjoy music.
Because knowledge is distributed among billions of people worldwide, it’s the job of entrepreneurs and innovators to put together the people and resources necessary to unlock that knowledge and build on it for society’s benefit. But society isn’t a monolith. It is a complex churn of competing perspectives, preferences, and needs.
Educational entrepreneur Michael Strong postulates a law to this effect:
Ceteris paribus, properly structured free enterprise always results, over time, in higher quality, lower cost, and more customized products and services.
Strong’s Law applies in areas people traditionally think of as being firewalled from enterprise, such as governance and welfare functions. Strong argues that, far from being segregated from the market process, visionary entrepreneurs would radically improve these areas in a milieu of competition.
So, my related hypothesis is:
Society will evolve towards greater peace, freedom, and flourishing to the extent that people treat other people as customers—instead of citizens or subjects.
The upshot here, bold but tentative, is that if the market is a decentralized discovery process, surely we can use it to discover better social systems. In seeing governance as transactional instead of transgressive, a million possibilities arise. Yet status quo bias prevails. It’s hard to imagine governance innovations not yet born, but it’s easy to imagine creative founders blazing new trails.
I realize that, for many readers, this thesis might be a record-scratch moment. After all, didn’t Aristotle say that a citizen is a person who possesses the virtues of ruling and being ruled? He did, but please hold your tomatoes. The great political scientist Vincent Ostrom warned that “the most radical source of inequalities in human societies is the ‘ruler-ruled’ relationship.” Ostrom argues that those who want a truly free world must figure out how to build fundamental infrastructures that allow people to govern themselves. We shouldn’t forget that true self-government had been the Founders’ ultimate objective, too. De Cleyre reminds us that, beyond the battles they fought,
[T]he real Revolution, was a change in political institutions which should make of government not a thing apart, a superior power to stand over the people with a whip, but a serviceable agent, responsible, economical, and trustworthy (but never so much trusted as not to be continually watched), for the transaction of such business as was the common concern and to set the limits of the common concern at the line of where one man’s liberty would encroach upon another’s.
Such an inversion had been exceptional in human affairs, launching new republics. But the more power accretes around a central authority, its gravity builds.
So, what does all this have to do with viewing citizens as customers?
Most associate the word customer with commerce rather than politics. Our mandarin class will no doubt also associate the word with something bourgeois and spiritually vacant, like a used-car salesman who wants you to buy a lemon. But consider three basic ways an individual can relate to a separate organization:
If the primary relationship is one of obedience, then one is a subject.
If the primary relationship is obedience behind a thin veil of voting, then one is a citizen.
If the primary relationship is one of consent, then one is a customer.
Abstracted away from the dirty traffic of the merchant classes, most people can appreciate that consent is the healthiest way to relate to other human beings. Indeed, we might find it useful to map the above relationships onto Jefferson’s three types of society I mentioned above. In so doing, we can sacralize the word customer more than we do—at least allowing it to have one foot in the profane and the other in the sacred.
Consent is the key.
Whatever the stories we were told in civics class, when too much of society gets built on the interests of a ruling class, citizens and subjects become an afterthought. That is, if, as citizens, we have no choice but to associate with a coercive state bureaucracy, the question is, Why? Is it because taxing authorities—people with guns and jails—force our compliance? Otherwise, why can’t you or I choose to associate with an organization, say, a provider of governance services? If we did, wouldn’t we expect good service, especially if such service were our counterparty’s contractual obligation?
Unhappy customers can take their business elsewhere.
Persuasion and coercion are fundamentally different kinds of relationships. The health or dysfunction of society gets determined by the mix of these. It would seem that good governance must arise from the political realm and not the commercial. But couldn’t that just be the story the powerful have always needed us to believe?
New vectors of change, unavailable to the American Founders, allow us to become a countervailing force without violence. We must never forget, then, that we launch our attacks against unjust authorities from the highest ground of all: consent.
Our enemies have to operate from the low perch of compulsion.
Understanding Underthrow
It’s a coincidence that the title of this book sounds like another word, but it turns out the coincidence is fruitful.
Think of the sea at night. The moon reveals the surf’s fury, which pounds the dunes and sprays the beach. What monsters lurk beyond the waves? What slithers beneath the foam? The swimmer fears the answers, but as she enters the water, an undercurrent recedes as new waves approach. She’s nearly swept off her feet.
That’s undertow.
It’s powerful, so much so that more swimmers should fear it, though too many underestimate its power. They focus on those crashing breakers, full of sound and fury. And so do our enemies.
Underthrow includes undertow.
Like receding ocean waters, we can start to appreciate how unexpectedly powerful we can be when we move together. Like water molecules, we must find each other, bind together, and flow as dark waters rushing back into the deep. We are not supremely powerful, but powerful enough to topple ogres.
Consent as Means and End
We’ve already said that there is something important about consent. We know at least that, in its absence, we get compulsion. It seems reasonable to think that the use of compulsion by any person against another ought to have limits, especially if we’re talking about some compelling others who have done no wrong.
So the first thing to stress is that consent is both an objective and a strategy. Consent is an objective in that, following Jefferson, we too seek a consent-based social order. Consent is a strategy because, increasingly, it is possible to make societal change through a series of implicit or explicit agreements. In fact, the more parties to an agreement, the more formidable the constituency.
Take the simple example of software development. With open-source code, software developers organize themselves into teams to make useful software product x. The teams organize themselves this way because they have a shared mission. Yet the end product is not proprietary. It’s controlled and developed by a community of people who share a commitment to a mission, so there has to be a consensus mechanism for making unitary decisions.
But software developers have disagreements, especially when it comes to what direction the development community will take to realize the mission. If a major disagreement can’t be resolved within the community, some subset of developers will break off. Such is known as a hard fork. When there is a hard fork, the break-off group of developers makes a copy of the existing codebase and changes it as they see fit, but they leave the original codebase unchanged. The team that remains continues in the way they see fit, as well. The result is two competing software products. When the competing forks launch, users have the option of choosing which product they want to use.
Why can’t society be this way?
That is the question before us and, in great measure, the raison d’etre of this book. But before we close this introduction, I want to emphasize that underthrow has a psychological dimension. Some might even call it spiritual. Pluralistic governance is liberation technology, and liberation is not just a process. It is a psycho-social endstate that peaceful people crave. Underthrow is thus subversive social change. Whether you share values with the left or the right doesn't matter. Left/right is not the relevant axis for questions of consent. Anti-authoritarians operate on a different axis.
Localism
Most reform efforts start small or local, or both small and local. As Voltairine de Cleyre reminds us:
Among the fundamental likeness between the Revolutionary Republicans and the Anarchists is the recognition that the little must precede the great; that the local must be the basis of the general; that there can be a free federation only when there are free communities to federate; that the spirit of the latter is carried into the councils of the former, and a local tyranny may thus become an instrument for general enslavement.
Even non-anarchists can get behind the idea of community and local authority. But enough anarchist talk. Like the word liberal, the A-word has been abused, appropriated, and bastardized to the point that the simple concept of rules without rulers has been lost. Noam Chomsky identifies as an anarchist for heaven’s sake.
“Localism does not claim to be able to produce a Utopia through means of government,” writes author Mark Moore. “Rather, it claims to be the best way to protect us from the delusions of madmen…”
There is something about localism that cuts through the fog. We all understand intuitively that we can be more helpful to our neighbors, demand accountability from our leaders, and enjoy the fruits of cooperation when the important decisions stay with our communities. That’s because individualism is communitarian.
We trust the institutions we choose to build together.
Written to Inspire
Humanity is yet to realize its potential. Therefore, [our ultimate purpose for this publication] is not to startle you with controversy but to inspire you. We must break out of our comfortable confines and shed our psychological servitude. Only then can we build a new society. Following Jefferson, Paine, and Spooner, we hope this publication will arouse a new generation of revolutionaries committed to a specific form of nonviolent action, which we call underthrow.
Despite the risks of ugly criticisms and one-star ratings, we hope to persuade the fearful and the complacent to join up with those of us with an anti-authoritarian disposition—if not for us, for our children.
UNDERTHROW is for the brave, the determined, and the free.
(The above was excerpted from the author’s book, Underthrow. Buy it here.)