In today’s Seattle IPC class, we talked a little bit about community security and legitimacy; specifically the battle for it. In any power vacuum, whether it’s caused by a catastrophic event or some other collapse scenario, we may end up being locked into a battle over who our communities look to for guidance.
A just government derives its power from the consent of the governed. Without that consent, especially on a local or regional level, the government becomes illegitimate in the eyes of the people. (Which is why withdrawing consent is such a powerful tool in our non-violent arsenal.) And once a government becomes illegitimate, there will be powers who seek to fill that gap. One of the greatest threats to our communities and regions, then, is that the good guys fail to shore up support for Rightful Liberty and you end up trading one tyranny for another.
Providing security and stability, along with empowering citizens to defend their natural rights, should be our top priority. Without legitimacy — if our neighbors and regional peers don’t see our efforts as legitimate — then those efforts will be short-lived. The populace will give their consent to someone else and we’ll wind up back in the same position we’re in now.
Credibility is a key part of legitimacy. To many of us, fewer and fewer in government remain credible. We elect Congress to overturn or defund Obamacare and many of them end up supporting it. Same with amnesty; same with net neutrality; same with just about everything it seems. Corruption also kills credibility. Congressional approval is at all-time lows for a reason: many of them are nothing but crooks. So if we’re to have a legitimate regional government, we have to enforce corruption laws. There must be real and severe penalties for our leaders breaking the law; I would say they need to be much, much stiffer for elected leaders than for the average citizen. Right now, it’s about the exact opposite.
Legitimacy, in most ways, is more about soft power than hard power. It’s more about our ability to influence than coerce. Hearts and minds isn’t about how many people we can kill, but about how many people we can save; to how many people we can bring security and stability. The ironic thing is that folks who don’t understand hearts and minds are going to try to win the populace through hard power, which is actually going to end up alienating them. They’re going to lose legitimacy, just as the police are right now, because they’re more interested in exercising their spears than their brains.
