Mutualism: The Ground State of Society

Mutualism is both the precursor and a civil alternative to government.

Behind every government is a mutual arrangement, or are mutual arrangements, of the rulers taking place, which is, or are, responsible for their collective success. In Rome, it was the Cult of Mithra and other such fraternities. In America, it is Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, Oddfellows, Ku Klux Klan, B'nai B'rith, Skull and Bones, Scroll and Key, Phi Beta Delta, Nations of Gods and Earths, etc. Fraternities, or mutualistic associations, such as these, have always had influence on the rulers of the nation. The United States was initiated by Freemasons in the Saint Andrews Lodge and their more exoteric presence, the Sons of Liberty. It would later be infiltrated by Rosicrucian, Jesuit, and Martinist influences.

But mutualism is also the source of anti-state sentiment and, indeed, anarchism, the belief that state and government are better dealt away with. It was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a mutualist, who was first to declare himself an anarchist as such. Proudhon did this upon the example established by the prior mutualists led by Pierre Charnier and the mutuals surrounding his Society of Mutual Duty, who had attempted to establish a syndicalist republic in the Canuts Rebellion, the first seriously organized workers’ revolt in modern times.

This being so, mutualism is both the proto-state potential that the state relies on to exist and the state's antithesis, but is not its actualization. That is, mutualism precedes and concludes the state, but cannot define a state. It cannot define a state because a state includes parties to whom it is not voluntarily subscribed and reciprocally benevolent toward. What is the state? A monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. As such, it can use legitimate violence and you cannot, and, by extension, it can do illegitimate violence and you cannot stop it with legitimate violence, lest it cease to be a state in losing its essence. While the state is a mutual institution for the rulers, and owes its power to the mutualism behind its being, its essence is not mutuality, but agonism (and antagonism). The state is characterized, then, by a conflict of interests, the absence of mutuality. Still, every state depends upon at least one center of mutual aid to exist, but finds also in mutual aid a source of competition.

While owing its being to mutuality, the state is the infringement of mutuality, the conflict resulting from the absence of mutuality, and must fall to mutuality. It should be clear that statism, then, is pathogenic. Mutualism is the ground state of society, an equilibrium at the best that can be achieved, the attempt to do better being an absurdity leading to harm through disbalance.

When one fraternity—one instance of mutualism— is behind the state, competition is minimized, but multiple organized factions in a state leads to a mutual exchange of blows only, to agonism. In such an arrangement, a republican or democratic state, those who govern are also governed, leading to the Rule of Law. But so long as that law represents the interests of usurers, it will be the Law of Usury, the second Golden Rule, "those with the gold make the rules."

It is theoretically possible for mutualism to supplant the state altogether. This would require...

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You can find more like this on my real blog, Ambiarchy Blog, where I cover topics such as:

• Pantheism: The Belief that Nature is God
• Mutualism: The Belief in Anarchy and Cooperation
• Antapodism: The Belief in Friendship Between Humanity and Nature 

... as well as other topics related to natural philosophy, natural theology, science, and history, including but not limited to:

• Witnessing Shell Theory: An Alternative Natural Cosmology
• Henogenic Volution Out-of-Everywhere: An Alternative Approach to Evolution
• Ambiarchy: An Alternative to Neo-Anarchism