Disconnect II
Every man must have a state.
Alone among connections between man and man and thing, one connection must stand out: the line of responsibility. Every man must have a return address where claims against his actions can be sent. Whoever lives at that address is responsible for the other man and the other man’s actions. The line of responsibility must be bright and clear as it connects action to other man and other man to responsible man.
There is no sovereignty without responsibility. Sovereignty is violence and cannot be refined. Sovereignty is an effective preponderance of violence exercised over real things. It is not an empire of the imagination. It is a very real boot heel pressed down on the back of a man’s neck by another man on the scene with the rifle.
Of the two flavors of power available to man, influence and violence, sovereignty does what it must about violence while it does what it can about influence. The ideal of the state is: what happens in the state stays in the state. Ideally, the state allows nothing to escape the limits of its sovereign reach. However, influence is diffuse like gas and easily drifts across boundaries. The state is doomed to radiate influence. It does what it can but limiting influence is only something the state must try to do.
The core responsibility of the state is keeping any violence within the state from spilling over its boundaries. If violence is allowed to leak than amen to that leaker’s sovereignty. Failure to restrain violence within a state means is the abolition of sovereignty. If sovereignty is abandoned, neighbors have a right to exercise it in their place. They can treat the sovereign possessions of what was (and may still claim to be) a sovereign state as unclaimed property that has reverted to unclaimed nature.
No man may commit violence without wearing the livery of the man’s state. This marks the state the man belongs to and under whose authority he commits his actions under. Allowing violence by the unliveried and unstated creates ambiguity in violence. If violence can be committed by anyone unliveried and unstated, the logic of escalation will drive everyone to commit violence unlivered and unstated. The race will be on to blur and eventually erase the line of responsibility connecting violator and those responsible for the violator.
The line of responsibility divides the guilty from the innocent. Once the line of responsibility is erased, the innocent and the guilty blur together. As violence spills over now nonexistent border lines, guilty and innocent suffer alike. The end of sovereignty is the end of innocence and baptism into a state of universal guilt.
