What is "The Antisocial Contract"?

   You have probably noticed that I have rebranded my channel from the name “spacepan” to the phrase “The Antisocial Contract.” But what does it mean?

   First, it is an invitation to consider that those things which are called “Social Contracts,” which are credited as the absolutely necessary foundation for the rest of human civilization, would be more appropriately credited with the opposite.

   But I understand that we’ve all grown accustomed to using our own words our own ways. So for those who look to the state to define that which is “social,” the invitation is, instead, to reconsider the Social Contract through the construction of a hypothetical “Antisocial Contract.”

   The Social Contract is best identified as a mere thought-terminating cliche, and, therefore, the Antisocial Contract is a thought-generating novelty. The Social Contract is well known, revered, and very serious. The Antisocial Contract is whimsical, mysterious, and a little bit sassy.

   When a modern day person sketches out their political, philosophical, and religious positions, the most useful defining characteristic held across all three categories is not their theism vs. atheism, their preference for left-wing vs. right-wing government, nor their take on free will vs. determinism. The common root of the most prevalent ideological structures is the acceptance of a so-called “social” so-called “contract.”

   I say “so-called” in recognition of the timeless pattern wherein something is named as its opposite, often deceptively. I call these anti-concepts. For example, the “social” contract is clearly anti-social in both theory and practice. The perverse incentives created by governments displace peaceful, sociable alternatives. But even in a neutral sense, the state displaces everyday, mundane social interactions with various systems of bureaucratic automation.

   Yet, remarkably, the use of the term “contract” is even more tenuous. Although contracts are varied and complicated in their non-essential characteristics, they are, essentially, quite straightfoward. That’s why the concept is invoked in the first place. By “contract,” I mean “at least one duty recognized and consented to by all parties involved.” That’s usually what defenders of the social contract say they mean. But the most important objection is that the governed have not consented, and, therefore, these social contracts fail to ever authentically manifest as anything resembling a contract. Curiously, statists avoid simply rebranding the contract as something more appropriate, like a series of mandates, decrees, or threats. That a social contract is perceived as more legitimate or at least more palatable than more blatant forms of extortion in an anarchic context betrays the entire origin myth, especially considering the statist’s tendency to resort to non-sequitur “might makes right” arguments. If statists truly believed in their own justifications, many more of them would not be ashamed to admit that every important difference between the US Constitution and the US List of Threats and Demands should be understood as an expressed preference for cosmetics over consistency.

   It’s worth noting that the involvement of non-consenting third parties in the social contract accounts for the entire appeal of such a system. There is no agent preventing individual consent. This is reflected, for example, in the distinction between welfare and charity. If a person would offer their consent to a government welfare system but not, alternatively, to a charity, then we can say that their preference is based entirely on the non-consent of others. Furthermore, technological advances have made the prospect of procuring the consent of the governed easier than ever, and, therefore, it’s safe to assume that the category of non-consenting parties is predominantly made up not of people who are indifferent to the arrangement but who are generally opposed.

   Rather than simply admitting that a Social Contract is not a contract, these theorists prop up their ridiculous anti-concepts with yet more anti-concepts: so-called “consent” by tacit. I often consider how refreshing it would be if, instead, the feminist standard of consent could be applied. Apparently, in the context of something as simple and transient as sexual activity it is crucial to play it safe- better to keep 10,000 No-means-Yes’s at bay to honor an additional No-means-No. What if, instead, we use the tacit consent standard? Given the modern cradle-to-grave statist experience, a parallel is invited to a horrific scenario where a child is kept in a basement sex dungeon their entire life. Their Stockholm Syndrome could be taken as a form of tacit consent. Should the statist object on the grounds that the consent was caused by duress, then we must seriously consider how long it will take before my comparison between public education and basement sex dungeons is insulting to the latter. Personally, I take the fact that social contract theory and tacit consent are taken seriously as concepts as indisputable proof of the state’s tendency to literally make us all retarded.

   Just as we’d be spared the insult of the presentation of “tacit consent” should statists simply abandon the contract facade, we’d hear less iterations of the “love it or leave it” argument, which relies entirely on a combination of this anti-concept version of consent with a black-and-white demonstration of begging the question.

   It’s perfectly reasonable to forgive misnomers here and there, especially because social contract theory isn’t internally consistent, regardless.

   In these government origin stories, we are expected to believe that a so-called “contract” of the so-called “social” variety is absolutely necessary for the people to function. This suggests that roads, money, and dispute resolution are simply impossible without first legitimizing a particular government via a social contract, but any and all of the actions essential to setting this up in the first place must be possible.  

   Another way to understand this argument is by imagining that in modern democracies, by using social contracts as origin myths, the cart is being put before the horse. What if, instead, we used the same powers that we would have used in establishing a government to just doing it ourselves. After all, any group of people capable of creating something so complicated and nuanced and intelligent as the U.S. Constitution should find the task of running a bank or a school, or filling in a pothole to be child’s play. But let’s discontinue this line of reasoning and just assume that people who are allegedly too dumb to read contracts  absolutely must, on pain of human extinction, write such contracts for themselves and countless strangers.

   In the earlier days of this channel, I would emphasize the importance of the placement of such ubiquitous terrible ideas at a root-level where politics, philosophy, and religion bear no distinction, but lately I have been challenging myself to avoid overestimating the importance of ideas. Doing so often results in a mindset that is fixated on politics and persuasion, the position of one who reduces themself to begging others for permission to live their own life.  

   It’s more important, on an individual level, to reject social contract theory because it is the key to rejecting the most pernicious anti-concepts and to fostering a sense of your relation to the world that boldly asserts your right to exist and rejects original sin, secular or otherwise.