This article was originally published by Michael Matulef at The Mises Institute.
“The State is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”—Frédéric Bastiat
Bastiat’s insight grows more prophetic by the day. Watch what happens in any crisis. The reaction is predictable: people fracture into warring tribes, each certain it’s fighting for survival. Neighbors become informants, families split over ideology, and communities turn against themselves. While citizens exhaust one another in moral crusades, something else advances quietly—the concentration of power. Bureaucracies expand, authority tightens, and the machinery of control grows ever more intricate.
This is no accident. A system built on coercion needs division like oxygen. It must invent internal enemies to justify its dominance, to keep people dependent on its “protection.” When citizens are busy fighting one another—over politics, culture, race, or faith—they are not asking the fundamental question: why should anyone rule them at all?
Every orchestrated “emergency,” every financial panic, or culture war, serves the same purpose: to make the expansion of centralized power appear both natural and necessary. Randolph Bourne was right—war is the health of the state—but in our time, war takes subtler forms: propaganda, inflation, surveillance, and fear.
The only antidote is self-ownership, voluntary exchange, and the refusal to play the game of masters and subjects.
The Architecture of Manufactured Crisis
The mechanism works because it attacks the foundation of voluntary cooperation. When the future becomes unpredictable, people retreat into tribes that promise certainty. The state doesn’t need to impose order directly; it manufactures chaos until you beg for chains. Uncertainty becomes the pretext for control.
This is the logic of all monopolies: break the alternatives, then present yourself as the only solution. The state degrades money through inflation, creating desperation. It regulates commerce so that only the well-connected can operate. It monopolizes justice until people accept its courts as inevitable, then points to the resulting disorder and demands more power to “fix” what it broke.
Every culture war, every financial panic, every “emergency” follows the same script. While you rage at your neighbor over flags, slogans, or party lines, the central bank drains your savings. While you argue about which scandal matters more, regulators quietly entrench the monopolies they serve. While you drown in outrage and distraction, public-private alliances construct the machinery of surveillance and control.
The genius is that you participate willingly. You accept restrictions you once would have rejected. You inform on dissenters. You cheer when the “wrong” people are silenced. And all the while, as attention is harvested, power concentrates quietly—until compliance feels like virtue and ownership becomes an illusion.
This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s the natural behavior of a system that produces nothing and can only survive by extracting from those who do. A parasite must keep its host alive enough to feed, but confused enough not to notice the blood loss.
The Death of Voluntary Exchange
Civilization rests on a simple premise: two people trade only because both expect to benefit. That exchange presupposes, not just self‑ownership—the claim that you control your body, your labor, and the fruits of your work—but a minimal mutual recognition of that same claim in others. As Hans‑Hermann Hoppe puts it, any attempt to justify norms presupposes property in one’s body, and denying another’s self‑ownership while engaging them is a performative contradiction. Even when we disagree on everything else, the very act of peaceful interaction signals a thin but vital respect: we concede each other’s standing as owners of ourselves, and with it, a right to live and to pursue our own ends.
War liquidates that respect, not just war between nations, but the permanent war‑psychology the state cultivates. Under its spell, the other side stops being a potential partner in exchange and becomes an enemy to be broken. Your neighbor stops being a peer and becomes a threat. Disagreement stops being a difference of judgment and becomes disloyalty and betrayal.
This inversion is not a side effect; it is the point. Voluntary exchange and free association are the only forces that reliably limit political power, because people who can move, trade, and reorganize their lives retain leverage. Once you are herded into hostile camps, suspicious of outsiders, and dependent on central authorities for security and survival, that leverage disappears. Governance ceases to serve as umpire among equals and assumes its preferred role: master of a managed conflict.
From there, the priorities follow logically. Attack money, and you can insert yourself into every transaction. Attack communication, and you can script what coordination is possible. Attack property, and you can decide who may accumulate, keep, or lose the means of independence.
The resulting breakdown is portrayed as accidental: institutions “fail,” systems “collapse,” trust “erodes.” In reality, decay is the predictable outcome of policies that displace consent with command. As the old systems crumble under their own contradictions, the state grows more desperate—more authoritarian—cloaking its decay in patriotic slogans and moral crusades. Yet no volume of coercion can conjure what has been systematically undermined: a society grounded in self‑ownership, reciprocal respect, and the willingness to deal with one another as equals rather than enemies.
The Illusion of Control and the Reality of Decay
Here’s the paradox: the state claims to grow stronger, more efficient, more necessary. This is theater. The underlying systems are collapsing. Money loses value, trust in institutions evaporates, and the infrastructure of control requires constant maintenance and ever-increasing funding, both becoming harder to sustain.
The surveillance, censorship, and financial controls aren’t signs of strength; they’re admissions of weakness. A stable order doesn’t need to monitor every transaction or police every word. It earns consent through performance. But when the order can’t deliver—when inflation erodes savings, when services deteriorate, when competence becomes scarce—the only recourse is coercion.
And coercion requires enemies. It requires permanent emergency. It requires you to believe that without the state’s intervention, society would collapse into chaos. So the state manufactures the very chaos it claims to protect you from, pointing at it as proof of the need for more authority.
People sense this, even if they can’t articulate it. The cycle of crisis and failed solutions breeds exhaustion. Therefore, the state must keep the population divided, afraid, and focused on fighting each other. If people ever stopped fighting their neighbors long enough to ask why the system keeps failing, the jig would be up.
This is the death spiral of all coercive systems. They must keep extracting more to maintain control, but each extraction weakens the productive base they depend on. The end is inevitable. The only question is what replaces them.
Stepping Outside the Game
The path forward isn’t seizing the state’s machinery or finding a better faction within it. The path is to recognize the game as rigged and stop playing.
This means building economic relationships that don’t require state permission or currency. It means counter-economics: trading in private money, using encrypted communication, establishing reputation systems outside government control. It means mutual aid networks that bypass welfare bureaucracies and private arbitration that outcompetes government courts.
None of this requires political change or violence. It only requires you to cooperate directly with others rather than through the bureaucratic middleman. Every transaction you conduct outside the system—every bitcoin payment, every handshake deal, every favor traded in a network of trust—is a vote for a different world.
It also means refusing the tribes the state creates for you. You don’t have to choose between corrupt political factions. You don’t have to participate in culture wars that keep you distracted. You don’t have to treat your neighbor as an enemy because you disagree about which emergency to panic about.
Most importantly, it means recognizing that your consent is expressed through participation, not voting. The state claims legitimacy through elections and constitutions, but these are theater. Your real consent is shown when you use its money, obey its regulations, and accept its courts. When you withdraw that participation—when you build alternatives—you’re not being destructive, you’re being constructive in a way the state cannot tolerate because it operates outside its control.
The Only Direction That Makes Sense
The old order is visibly coming apart. The manufactured crises are reaching saturation, where people become numb rather than mobilized. The promise that “if we just obey harder, believe longer, sacrifice more, everything will work out” rings hollow because it always rings hollow in the end.
What emerges from this collapse depends on what we build before it’s complete. If we spend our time fighting each other, a new strongman will step in to “restore order.” If we spend our time trying to reform the system, we simply delay its failure while it extracts more wealth and freedom. But if we spend our time building alternatives—real alternatives based on voluntary cooperation and private property—we create the possibility of something genuinely different.
This isn’t a call to passivity. It’s a call to redirect your energy away from defending the indefensible and toward building the possible. Stop trying to win arguments with people trained to see you as an enemy. Build something they can join instead. Stop waiting for the right leader or perfect policy. Build the world you want to live in, one transaction, one conversation, one community at a time. That is the only revolution worth having. That is the only one that actually works.
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