Who Owns Your Body?

Guest Post by Grizzly Bare

“For each of us social cooperation is of course not the ultimate end but a means. … But it is a means so central, so universal, so indispensable to the realization of practically all our other ends, that there is little harm in regarding it as an end in itself, and even in treating it as if it were the goal of ethics. In fact, precisely because none of us knows exactly what would give most satisfaction or happiness to others, the best test of our actions or rules of action is the extent to which they promote a social cooperation that best enables each of us to pursue his own ends.

Without social cooperation modern man could not achieve the barest fraction of the ends and satisfactions that he has achieved with it. The very subsistence of the immense majority of us depends upon it.”

Henry Hazlitt

“If not by looking to the individual, how does one determine in the first place that home and hearth is superior to hammer and sickle?”

Adam Martin

I’m going to throw my mea culpa out before I say anything else, which is that I lack any formal education beyond the ninth grade and this is my first attempt at writing any sort of an article, so if this is hard to follow it is not that the concepts are esoteric or difficult it is merely my inability to coherently convey my thoughts. I am also still learning how to structure sentences and paragraphs as well as how to use grammar and punctuation, so for those errors I apologize in advance.

I’d also like to thank all the other authors who post to this site, Mr. Jim Admin Quinn, Robert Gore, Uncola, HSF, Stucky and all the rest. I am in awe of you all, and you’ve been a huge inspiration for me to try my hand at this. I’ve been debating with myself for quite a while whether or not to spend the time and effort, but I felt that something needed saying, and I’m not hearing it from anyone else, so here goes.

I’ve had something on my mind for a while that has been troubling me, and I’m hoping that the TPB brothers and sisters can help me try to understand a disturbing trend I’ve been seeing here and at other sites around the web, but before I get to that I want to lay some foundation by asking a simple question, and then expanding on it. That question is, who owns your body?

Do you lay claim to your own body or do you give up that ownership to some other entity? I know for a lot of you here your immediate response will be Jehovah owns my body, or Jesus Christ owns my body. All very well and good, but for the sake of keeping this article on track I’d like to keep the discussion confined to the surface of the planet Earth and it’s human inhabitants. If you are a minor under the care of your parents or other guardian, they may claim ownership of your body until you are of sufficient age and experience to claim it for yourself, but that’s a topic for another day and again for the purposes of this article I’d like to confine it to terrestrial adult humans.

So do you claim ownership of your self, or do you give up that right to another? You may ask yourself if I don’t own myself who else would own me? In an age where private ownership of other human beings is immoral and predominately illegal, the obvious answer would be collective public ownership. Ownership by the governments of nation states, otherwise known as THE STATE. Do you claim ownership of yourself or do you cede that right to the state?

Outside of the realm of spirituality this is potentially the most fundamentally important question that a person can ask oneself. The answer to this question has direct and profound implications for your life and the world in which you live. If you claim ownership of your self then it logically follows that the fruits of your labor, otherwise known as your property, also belong to you. It also follows that you have the right to defend yourself and your property against anyone who would harm you or attempt to steal or harm your property.

On the other hand, if the state owns your body, by extension they also own the fruits of your labor. The state may decide to allow you to keep a certain amount of property you have worked for and earned, depending upon what they feel they can get away with before you decide to object. If the state decides to allow you to keep part of the fruit of your labor it is not because of any benevolence on their part. It is merely that the more they steal from you the more likely you are to make a fuss.

If enough people make a fuss it becomes inconvenient for the state to deal with, so most of the time it is in the state’s best interest to allow it’s subjects to keep a certain amount of what they work for and earn. Allowing subject to retain a portion of their production also gives them an incentive to keep producing. If you don’t claim ownership of your self and the state owns you, then you have not only given up the right to your own private property, but also the right to defend yourself and whatever property the state deems it will allow you to retain.

In the absence of your self ownership the state may deny you the right to self defense, then step in to defend you at it’s whim. They give no guarantees that they will protect you. They merely find it more convenient in most cases to protect the producers from criminals because if they didn’t there wouldn’t be as much largess for the state to confiscate, so like a farmer protecting his livestock from predators, they have an apparatus in place known as the criminal justice system, part of which helps protect the honest hard working people who produce bounty for the state. Sometimes the criminal justice system actually works to protect the subjects, but being a bureaucracy of the state it is rife with corruption, as all things by, for and of the state must be, so maybe you get justice from it or maybe you get abused by it. It’s a crap shoot.

Before I digress, I’d like to toss out a little quote about the nature of the state and why all things by, for and of the state are inherently corrupt. this is important to know before you cede your claim of ownership of yourself to the state.

“The state — or, to make matters more concrete, the government — consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get, and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time it is made good by looting ‘A’ to satisfy ‘B’. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advance auction on stolen goods.”

H.L. Mencken

All natural rights are derived from the premise of self ownership. Those same rights the founding fathers of the United States enumerated in our bill of rights. The right to self defense. The right to speak one’s mind freely. The right to assemble with whomever and whenever one chooses. The right to worship as one chooses, or not. The right to the ownership and sanctity of one’s private property. The right to travel freely. A lot of you are probably quite familiar with them. Without self ownership they are no longer rights that are inalienable and naturally inherited at birth, they become privileges granted by the state, to be granted or revoked at the whim of the state.

If you do not have self ownership, then as your default owner, the state my deem which substances you may ingest. Like a farmer tending his livestock, it may decide what your diet will be, which medicines and vaccines you will take. It may decide what other health care you will or won’t receive and which substances are approved to alter your state of mind. As your owner it might go to such lengths as assigning you your living quarters , assigning your vocation, determining when and where you may travel, and even perhaps whether you shall live or not. Without self ownership you do not retain the right to make choices concerning your life.

Self ownership is the bedrock principle of libertarian philosophy. Every bit of libertarian thought is derived from the concept of self ownership. Property rights, self defense, free markets, free association, freedom of speech, the non aggression principle, all of it stems from, and is logically deduced from the concept of self ownership. If you ever hear a “libertarian” advocating anything that contradicts the concept of self ownership he’s not a libertarian. (I’ve noticed a lot of leftists lately claiming to be libertarians that sound much like Marxists.)

Self ownership is the basis for libertarianism. Every tenet of the philosophy is logically deduced from that premise. When you reject libertarianism you deny your self ownership. You hand the ownership of your body, mind and whatever you produce to the state. Without self ownership you no longer have a reason for natural rights to exist. Without natural rights all you have are privileges granted by the state that can be revoked at any time for any reason. The state and natural rights are incompatible.

Which finally brings me to my point. I’ve been reading a lot of articles and comments (here and on other blogs that were in times past solid advocates for liberty) that blame libertarians and the libertarian philosophy for the plight that the white race and western civilization finds itself in after decades of cultural marxism. The first thought that comes to my mind is why wouldn’t you place the blame for cultural marxism at the feet of, well, Marxists, rather than the one school of thought that has done more to combat marxism than any other?

The second thought that comes to mind is cui bono? Who benefits? Who does benefit from the defeat of libertarian philosophy? The leviathan criminal gang known as the government. THE STATE. Certainly not western civilization or the white race. How does giving up self ownership to the state benefit anyone but the state? The only logical conclusion I’ve been able to reach is that this rubbish is being produced and spread by agents of the state. To my suspicious mind it does seem to be exactly the sort of propaganda the CIA would produce and promote.

I have yet to hear anyone make a coherent case for why the mess we find ourselves in can be laid at the feet of libertarians. It usually goes something like libertarians are for individualism and against tribalism. That’s why. This shows a profound ignorance of the libertarian philosophy. I haven’t exhausted the Mises library by any means, but I’m working my way through libertarian philosophy from the likes of Mises, Rothbard, Hazlitt, Rockwell, Sowell, Hayek, Block, Hoppe and never have I read anything about individualism being a tenet of libertarian thought.

Libertarians advocate for the sovereignty of the individual, which is another way of saying self ownership, and individual rights. We are not in any way opposed to tribalism or forming groups or co-ops. On the contrary, free association is one of the main tenets of natural rights and libertarian philosophy. We only ask that our association be voluntary and not coerced. Someone pointed me to a YouTube video of some guy who explained with a wonderfully beautiful British accent how libertarianism is harmful to the white race and western civilization because of individualism.

It sounds very convincing, but again he shows a profound ignorance, or more likely a deliberate deception of what the libertarian philosophy actually stands for. Another argument goes “libertarianism only works in a homogeneous nation of White Europeans. In a multiracial society, it is a disastrous philosophy that only brings more losing for Whites.” This is not explained or justified just presented as if it were a fact. I have to ask again, how does giving up self ownership benefit anyone but the state?

Others have pointed out the non-aggression principle claiming that libertarians are spineless pacifists. Again sheer nonsense. The NAP merely states that you can’t expect to have self ownership and property rights without allowing everyone else those same rights. Anything less and you are nothing but a hypocritical tyrant. Boiled down it merely means leave me and my stuff alone and I will pay you the same courtesy. Nowhere does it say that I can’t use violence to protect myself and my property. Forming militias, forming self protection coalitions or hiring protection firms are all perfectly compatible with libertarian thought.

The most puzzling argument I’ve heard against libertarian philosophy is, “The truth of Libertarianism is that the Jewish Elite know that ethnic survival is a TEAM SPORT. They are happy convincing Whites to become Libertarians, because it dissolves the OPPOSING TEAM into INDIVIDUAL PLAYERS that do not coordinate. When Whites play as INDIVIDUALS against the Jews playing as a TEAM, we LOSE.

Ethnic survival being a team sport may be the truth about the Jewish elite, but the idea that the Jewish elite are trying to convince whites to become libertarians is ludicrous. First of all libertarianism has nothing whatsoever to do with being an individual player. It is about individual sovereignty, which is the concept of self ownership and individual rights. Show me one thing written by any of the elder statesmen like Mises, Rothbard, Hazlitt, Hayek, Rockwell, Paul, Block or Hoppe,who have built the libertarian philosophy where they advocate acting as an individual.

That is a myth. It is pure unadulterated disingenuous misrepresentation, otherwise known as a bald faced lie. This link will take you to an article that shines the light of reason on that lie, https://mises.org/library/what-we-mean-individualismmay . To the contrary it is not hard to find statements in support of social cooperation. They suggest that the government get the hell out of the way so individuals can take care of themselves. They may suggest that folks ought to have personal responsibility. They may advocate allowing folks to invest their retirement funds into individual accounts rather than the Social Security slush fund, but nowhere will you find the suggestion that we are to isolate ourselves from one another.

Second of all, if the Jewish elite were trying to convince whites to become libertarians there might be some indication of it to be found somewhere. The overwhelming evidence I see in print media, radio, television, Hollywood, the vast majority of the internet, public education and the government itself is that the power elite are doing everything within their power to convince us all to be collectivists. Socialism, communism, cultural Marxism and neoconservatism are all at the top of the menu. Furthermore what motive would the power elite have for advocating a philosophy that undermines the power of the elite?

It just doesn’t add up. This nonsense not only needs to be put to rest, it needs to be killed and have a stake driven through it’s heart. If you want to blame someone for the plight of the white race and western civilization, collectivists seem a much more worthy target than libertarians. We are not the enemy.

So who do you trust with the ownership of your body?