Non-aggression principle

The Non-aggression principle is treated in the book as a rule whose apparent commitment to nonviolence collapses when property and hierarchy are placed beyond challenge. Its central contradiction, in this account, is that it condemns interference with ownership while allowing ownership itself to include the control and exploitation of human beings.

Definition and Natural Limits

The book tests the Non-aggression principle against the jungle rather than against an idealized marketplace. In that setting, no general rule prevents predation: every creature may become another creature’s food, and survival depends on fighting, killing, or fleeing. The argument therefore rejects the idea that nature supports either the Non-aggression principle or voluntaryism. Peace is not treated as nature’s default condition, but as an achievement requiring a social power capable of restraining aggression.

This challenge is also directed at libertarian claims about human nature. The book asks why human beings should be imagined as fundamentally different from the rest of nature when it describes right-wing politics as selfish, rapacious, hawkish, and lacking empathy. It contrasts supposedly peaceful principles with the assertion that hawks cannot live at peace, while suggesting that a cooperative society would be possible only among people characterized as doves.

Property, Slavery, and the Confederacy

The book uses the American Civil War as its principal historical test. The Union is described as holding that slavery was wrong and had to be stopped, whereas the Confederacy claimed that the state had no right to interfere with business or private property. Because enslaved people were legally treated as property, the defense of property rights became a defense of the slave system. The Confederacy’s resistance to the Union government is consequently presented as an application of the principle rather than as a departure from it: violence was considered legitimate when used to protect ownership from state interference.

The resulting reversal is central to the book’s moral argument. The Confederacy portrayed itself as resisting tyrannical government, yet the book identifies the slaveholders as the tyrants because they had enslaved other human beings. On this reading, the Non-aggression principle is not morally protective when it treats property as inviolable without first asking whether the property relation itself is violent. The principle can condemn state action against an owner while leaving the enslaved person exposed to the owner’s power.

The argument extends beyond African-American slavery. Women and children are described as having been treated as the property of Christian husbands and fathers, with the Bible presented as a handbook for that proprietary family order. The book therefore interprets private-property absolutism as a recurring structure in which persons can be converted into possessions and domination can be recast as liberty.

Voluntarism and Capitalist Coercion

The book links the Non-aggression principle to voluntaryism, which it condemns as an extreme doctrine of non-coercion. If abolishing slavery requires the slaveholder to volunteer, then righteous state force could never be used to end the institution. The book presents this implication as proof that voluntaryism protects the wrong party: it restrains the power that might abolish domination while preserving the owner’s power to continue it.

The same logic is applied to capitalism. In a capitalist system, the book argues, those who possess all the capital are the only people who are fully free; everyone else enters the system under material compulsion. Employees are described as slaves under capitalism’s preferred euphemism, with employers cast as masters, owners, and slavers. The claim is not that every employment relation is identical to historical chattel slavery, but that the language of voluntary participation conceals unequal dependence and narrows freedom to the position of the owner.

The principle’s protection of private property is thus said to preserve the power of capitalists, religions, and right-wing families against public regulation. The book portrays right-wing politics as seeking to weaken the state so that it cannot abolish slavery, regulate exploitation, or intervene in patriarchal authority. In this framework, the demand for no laws, rules, or rulers does not eliminate power; it transfers power to those already strong enough to impose their will without effective restraint.

Political Allegiance and Hierarchy

The book places the Non-aggression principle inside a broader critique of obedience to wealth. It describes the Ownership Class as ruling through the submission of the majority and uses Hegel’s master-slave dialectic to explain the relation: one party risks everything to seize power, while the other values survival more than power and accepts subordination. The wealthy elite are characterized as willing to use force and risk in order to dominate, while the larger population is portrayed as wanting masters who will direct its life.

This account is connected to support for Donald Trump. The book argues that people who support a billionaire plutocrat cannot simultaneously claim to stand for the 99 percent against the 1 percent. Their political allegiance is presented as support for the Ownership Class, even when it is expressed through the language of freedom, anti-government resistance, or defense of property. The Non-aggression principle consequently appears not as an escape from hierarchy but as a vocabulary through which hierarchy can be defended.

The text also describes resentment among Trump supporters as directed downward rather than against the elite. Their hostility is said to target Black and Hispanic people, immigrants, women, and other subordinated groups, while their attachment to a wealthy leader remains intact. This makes the principle’s political function, in the book’s analysis, inseparable from selective ideas of freedom: protection from government is demanded for owners and dominant groups, while the freedom of those beneath them is left vulnerable.

Moral and Narrative Significance

The book presents the Non-aggression principle as the opposite of morality when it permits human beings to be treated as private property. Its repeated language of treason and moral conflict turns political disagreement into a loyalty test: readers are told that one must support either the people or the billionaires who prey upon them, with no legitimate middle position. The principle is therefore framed less as a technical libertarian rule than as the ideological core of a struggle over whether law should protect ownership or human beings.

Its final significance lies in the contrast between formal non-aggression and actual social power. A state that refuses to intervene may appear peaceful while leaving employers, slaveholders, religious authorities, and patriarchal families free to exercise coercion. The book’s conclusion is that the Non-aggression principle becomes an instrument of predatory capitalism when it defines aggression only as state interference and excludes the violence embedded in ownership, dependency, and domination.