25A033 States' Rights, Revisited by Jim Davies, 8/19/2025

It's such a vastly important subject, today I want to re-visit the question of whether a State (=nation, city, county...) has a natural, basic right to exist. If it does, then it has also a basic right to defend itself; if not, it has no such right. The ZGBlog of 1/30/24 considered this, but I'd like to amplify that a bit.

Once again, this is not about whether US States have greater or lesser rights than the Federal State they created; obviously they have greater ones since they did the creating, but that is not the subject here. I'd like us to see whether any State anywhere has any real rights at all.

The wake-up call came from President Putin of Russia. More than once since 2022, he and his colleagues have called attention to the "Russian Nuclear Doctrine." That says that if the Russian State is facing an existential threat, it will use its nuclear arsenal.

Translated: if we the government of Russia are faced with imminent defeat in war, we will kill several hundred million of "your" people, even while expecting a retaliation on scores of millions of "ours." And yes, we know that if you were to over-run our ruling group you'd put one of your own in our place that would differ only slightly from us as rulers over Russians.

Put that correct way, it's brutal and profoundly anti-human, right? - but I'm not picking on Putin. Any and every nuclear-armed government would do the same, even if they lack the candor to say so in advance. Of all the world's presidents today, Putin is in my view the least villainous, except Milei of Argentina.

So the question of whether a State has the natural right to exist, and so to defend its existence, is central to the future of our race. Nothing could be more important. Notice further the huge chasm between the State on the one hand (the small number of rulers, who over time have arranged that they control the society) and the society they rule, on the other (that's everyone else, who work for a living in an approximation to a market.) Tom Paine wrote of that chasm: "Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is... evil."

Yes, he also wrote that it is a "necessary" evil, and there he was dead wrong; it's not necessary at all. The only rules needed in society are the contractual obligations its members individually choose to undertake.

People - individual humans - certainly have a natural right to exist, because the fundamental fact of reality is that each of us is here; we do exist. Our existence is the result of every act of nature over nearly four billion years, in countless random steps of evolutionary change (or, if you prefer, the deliberate acts of a supreme Creator.) "I think, therefore I am" as Descartes succinctly expressed it; in Latin, so as to clarify that it applied universally: Cogito, ergo sum.

But no such fundamental right entitles a State to exist.

A State (a cabal of rulers, a government) did not evolve over four billion years; in fact the first sign of one occurred a mere 10,000 years ago soon after fixed agriculture was discovered. That's one four-hundred thousandth of the age of the Planet Earth. Or, taking the age of mankind, with the level of intelligence we now have, as 50,000 years, one fifth of the age of our species. Right: our forefathers got along without government for four-fifths of our history, populating most of the Planet and co-operating by consensus with little or no sign of violent conflict.

"Natural right" for government? - forget it. All of those sociopaths built themselves ways to exercise domination and obtain unearned wealth, by deception piled upon deception over many generations; one of the deceptions was that in some mysterious way it was the other way round - that "we the people" had created them, or It the State.

No, we did not. If we had, there would be a contract, signed by members of the State and by every participant in the population, specifying exactly what the State was to do (and not to do) and at what price. No such deal has ever been made. The natural, rightful condition of human beings is a zero government society.