An interview with author, Max Borders

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Editor’s Note: Max Borders is an advisor to the Advocates for Self-Government. He’s just written a book about, well, self-government. But this work represents a different approach to the subject. The Decentralist ([link removed]) pushes the envelope, challenging readers both to rethink our strategies and our moral commitments.

Editor: What is the core message of The Decentralist?

Max Borders: If I had to distill it, the message would be this: Political power is the problem. Personal empowerment is the solution. We will succumb to the authoritarians if we keep laboring in the illusion that politics and politicians will save us. We must never walk away from the task of liberating ourselves–and of rolling up our sleeves to build our communities. This takes discipline and practice. If we’re going to challenge all this power, we need to serve the mission, embrace morality, and seek meaning in the process.

Editor: You refer specifically to mission, morality, and meaning. What is the mission?

Max Borders: A world in which the governed give their express consent, which is not some hypothetical social contract or Rock the Vote scheme. It’s a future in which we make real agreements for governance services. In other words, the American Revolution never stopped. We still don’t have “the consent of the governed,” even though that’s what we demanded and were promised.

The mission, therefore, is to create a consent-based social order—true self-government.

Editor: Will that world be libertarian?

Max Borders: That depends. While the Venn Diagrams overlap, Decentralism doesn’t assume everyone will suddenly decide to institute some idealized form of limited government to blanket the world. Instead, we assume some experiments in governance will not be as free as you or I might like. Otherwise, we recognize that the politically powerful exist – and will continue to exist – like hurricanes and Malaria. They will always have to be checked, countered, or circumvented with Decentralism. We counter them by creating new niches, which present opportunities to exit bad systems and enter better ones. So we have to become subversive innovators committed to decentralization through nonviolent means.

Editor: Can you give a concrete example?

Max Borders: I’ll offer a couple…

First, where possible, we need to carve out new jurisdictions that comport with our ideas of the good. Libertarians will want to create jurisdictions that balance freedom and responsibility, like Próspera ([link removed]) – a new special economic zone in Honduras. Others will attempt to create less libertarian systems. The key thing is that these jurisdictions should remain relatively small and start out rather like startups so that people have more opportunities to vote with their feet and bad systems can fail early. Decentralism doesn’t assume there is an ideal system. People have different governance preferences. Decentralism’s ideal is for entrepreneurs to create a thousand experiments in living. The best systems will attract customer-citizens. The best will survive – but due to persuasion, not compulsion.

Another example is what I refer to as “cloud governance,” of which Bitcoin is a good example. Here we have a new system of money, a kind of jurisdiction created in the “cloud.” One need only buy bitcoin to exit the fiat monetary regime and enter the decentralized Bitcoin network. If you don’t like Bitcoin, there are a thousand competitors. Through programmable incentives, innovators develop alternative systems that compete with one another. The benefits of competition that we find in markets extend to governance.

Editor: Many classical liberals and libertarians think theirs is a purely political doctrine. Their philosophy amounts to ‘Don’t hurt people and don’t take their stuff.’ Do you agree?

Max Borders: I certainly agree that we should neither hurt people nor take their stuff. And that’s fine as far as it goes, but I don’t think that goes far enough.

Editor: Can you elaborate?

Max Borders: Sure. In one chapter, I discuss Six Spheres of morality. These are not exhaustive, but they are essential: nonviolence, integrity, compassion, pluralism, stewardship, and rationality. To show just how essential these are, I discuss contrasts in what I call the Six Offenses, which are the vicious mirrors of the Six Spheres. These are: violence, corruption, callousness, monomania, negligence, and casuistry.

Interestingly, the Six Offenses are virtues to those who worship in the Church of State. Consider that government is founded on the threat of violence. The corrupt are the most likely to “win.” Political activism is more about seeming than being compassionate (and a truly callous person turns away from collateral damage in unconstitutional wars). Our national debt is a monument to negligence. And political discourse requires the abandonment of reason in favor of rhetoric. The more people embrace the ethos of political power, the more they’ll live by the Six Offenses.

In an important sense, this book is a call to return to morality.

Editor: This is not a religious work, but there are elements of spirituality and ritual in The Decentralist. Can you talk about why you included these features?

Max Borders: Free people must be sovereign people. But sovereignty requires practice. You have to practice being self-responsible. You have to practice being moral. And you have to practice being a subversive innovator. But good practice requires true self-possession, which can only be achieved when our inner lives are in balance. Modern man is woefully out of balance. We must learn to control our hearts, minds, and guts to find balance within. Rituals such as prayer and meditation can help. To some readers, this might seem a bit out there. But in my view, when it comes to the need to find centeredness, any number of 4000-year-old traditions can’t be wrong. And in the face of all this authoritarianism, we need all the help we can get. Just imagine the wisest person you know. How does this person behave compared with someone on Twitter? The wise cultivate their inner lives. And if we are to rescue civilization, so must we.

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Get The Decentralist here ([link removed]) .
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Best Regards,

Mike Sertic
President
Advocates for Self-Government
[email protected]


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