A Walk in the 5th Empire

We went for a walk along the river Douro today; down where the river meets the Atlantic. The area is called Foz, which means river outlet in Portuguese.

Half our walk was along the river. The other half was along the Atlantic. Our destination was a seaside restaurant where we sat down for lunch.

The sky was thinly overcast. Temperatures were neither too hot nor too cold.

There were people everywhere enjoying the day just as much as we were.

That's when it struck me once again how miniscule the state is relative to the immensity of nature and voluntary cooperation.

Everywhere around us, people were engaging in peaceful and voluntary interactions. The state was nowhere to be seen. It might as well have been non-existent.

That's not to say that I don't recognize the fact that an orderly town requires some sort of central organization. The parks, roads and other infrastructure are all organized by the town hall. However, a stateless society isn't necessarily without any central organization. It too will have institutions dedicated to the well functioning of towns and neighbourhoods.

My point is that there was nothing about our surroundings that told us that we were not in the 5th Empire; that mythical place where all interactions between people are purely voluntary. Hence, we were de-facto in the 5th Empire, and so was everyone else.

The state is just as much a fiction as the 5th Empire, so there's no reason to believe that one exists but not the other. In fact, the 5th Empire is way bigger than the state, because the state only exists when we're dealing with force. That's typically only when we're forced to pay our taxes, or forced to play by some rule or other that has nothing to do with the golden rule.

The 5th Empire on the other hand exists whenever the state is non-existent, and with the state nowhere to be seen along the banks of the river Douro, or along the Atlantic, our Sunday walk was spent in this voluntary society.

The same can be said for everyone else. They too were in the 5th Empire, and all their dealings with others were inside it as long as no-one insisted on bringing the state into their affairs.

For all the pessimism that exists related to our freedoms, reality shows us over and over again that we are free most of the time. The state has agents in various strategic positions, but they are far from ubiquitous.

The 5th Empire is huge in comparison. It operates everywhere with no need of force. Most of our lives are spent in voluntary arrangements. Only rarely are we confronted with the state.

Once there's a general awareness of this, the state can be replaced by voluntary organizations, because everything worth doing can be done voluntarily and without force.

But we don't have to wait until everyone wakes up to this fact. Once we ourselves are aware of the world as it really is, we can arrange our affairs in such a way that we hardly ever have to deal with the state.

Our success will in turn inspire others to do the same, and the state will fade away as a consequence.

View of Porto and Gaia towards Foz