The state is, first and foremost, an institution whose overarching goal is the forcible subjugation of all the people who inhabit a given territory. However, what makes the state different from other coercive entities, such as organized crime groups, is that it enjoys some form of popular legitimacy. In other words, in addition to enslaving its inhabitants physically, it needs to secure their mental servitude as well.

defeating statism requires recognizing its nature not only as the ideology of permanent conflict but also as the most potent driving force of institutionalized unreality. In other words, accomplishing this task requires realizing that the “great fiction” in its fully developed form is equally fictitious in the realm of solutions that it claims to offer and in the realm of problems that it claims to identify. As soon as this realization becomes sufficiently widespread among liberty-minded people, their efforts will become genuinely robust, meaningfully inclusive, and solidly pragmatic—which is something that we should all welcome given how impactful our action or inaction is likely to be at this late stage of the fight.