Dear to all modern men is the Voluntary Principle, which states healthy and ethical relationships are those based upon consent. Upon this principle stands our condemnation of slavery, which the righteous Abraham Lincoln struck down along with the backwards Southern barbarians. Upon this principle stands our condemnation of King George the Third, whom none of us voted for and which our forefathers so bravely fought against. Upon this principle we declare that taxation is theft, as theft is nothing other than taking property without consent. Upon this principle stands our condemnation of tradition, the evil fiction that men of today are somehow beholden to the wishes and desires of men long since dead, wishes and desires we had no hand in, nor would have had our hand in if we could go back in time. Upon this principle stands our condemnation of the family and the ridiculous notion that a child can ethically be brought into a cruel world by force (note the child is literally brough into the world kicking and screaming, and that he immediately recoils at the world) and is then expected to obey the adults who forced him into this world. Upon this principle stands our condemnation of God, the tyrant who created heaven and earth without our asking and then proceeded to place us in it and establish a moral code, again without our consent, and then demands us to follow it and to love Him.
What appears as a noble and moral principle can easily be shown to be an anti-civilizational force. If we take the Voluntary Principle seriously and apply it consistently, we must condemn the family, tradition, and, consequently, civilization itself. Do you dare to say that bringing a child into the world against his consent, and then making him obey his parents against his consent, is okay because the parents love their child or because it is good for a child to obey his parents? Slave holders claimed that their slaves were part of their family and that it was good for them to be ruled over…are you going to make the same argument as them? Surely, this is a ridiculous comparison, right? We know that parents treat their children better. Wait! Are you saying that having a family is okay if you treat your children well? Would this not mean that having a slave is okay if you treat him well? Children, unlike slaves, are not labor mules that we profit off of; does this not differentiate the two? Okay, you might not be having children because you want them to work the fields, but you are having them for some other reason that they did not, nor could they, consent to and this is, by definition, selfish because you only care what you want.
We could continue this imagined dialogue, but what has been said should be sufficient for you to see that consistently applying the Voluntary Principle leads to at least one evil conclusion: the condemnation of the family. There are academics at this very moment who are feeding such poison to the next generation of public-school teachers and counselors. Condemning the family by way of the Voluntary Principle is not a reductio ad absurdism for everyone…for some it is simple the noble and logical thing to conclude. Tradition has been criticized for violating the Voluntary Principle for a while, at least since Thomas Paine wrote The Rights of Man.
Foundational to society is the family and tradition. Without the family, a society will die with the passing of the current generation. Without tradition, a society would be, to paraphrase Edmund Burke, like flies of the summer, wandering aimlessly without any memories or lessons to provide guidance. It is true that a child is brought into the world involuntarily and made to obey adults he never consented to. It is also true that tradition makes the present generation beholden to the past generations, irrespective what the present generation wants. What is also true is that these two pillars, family and tradition, hold up civilization. Insisting that only voluntary relationships are healthy and ethical is one of the chief cancers that has afflicted civilization. Is it any surprise that from the time of Thomas Paine introducing the Voluntary Principle to the English-speaking world en mass1 to the current year there has been a noticeable decline in communal bonds? Is it any surprise that after slavery was abolished in American, eyes were then quickly turned on the family and tradition? De-civilization has a cause, and one leading cause is adhering to the Voluntary Principle. Doubtless there will have to be a new paradigm by which to diagnose healthy and unhealthy relationships but is can no longer be that of the Voluntary Principle.
Note: By criticizing the voluntary principle, I am not arguing that slavery was a good thing, nor that the American Revolution was illegitimate. What I am criticizing is a very specific moral argument that, while seemingly sound in some cases (the condemnation of slavery), if universalized leads to the condemnation of tradition and childbirth.
The Voluntary Principle existed long before Paine, but never before had it been disseminated on the scale matching Paine’s pamphleteering.