What is Voluntaryism?
Voluntaryism is the belief that human beings can and should base our societies on the non-aggression principle, which states that force, violence, and coercion can never be initiated legitimately (and the same goes for fraud). Religious and spiritual teachings throughout history and across the world support this belief. Kindergarteners are taught to not hit and to not take things that do not belong to them.
Voluntaryism is based on common sense and a basic ethic that can be understood by everyone:
Every individual should be free to live a life without the fear of violence and theft. What is government if not an institution based upon violence and theft? Government it requires revenue to operate, but it is unproductive. The theft (some people call it taxation) funding its operation are taken with the threat of violence, and those stolen funds are often used to fund violent, destructive operations.
Voluntaryism promotes peaceful and productive relations for self evident reasons (and for reasons stated above) which are preferable to other politico-economic ideologies in that dispute resolutions do not come at the barrel of a gun (or the threat of a cage), but rather are achieved through mutually agreed upon contracts that fully cognizant, rational human beings voluntarily agree to and abide by (or else).
Dictionary definition:
Voluntaryism is based on common sense and a basic ethic that can be understood by everyone:
Every individual should be free to live a life without the fear of violence and theft. What is government if not an institution based upon violence and theft? Government it requires revenue to operate, but it is unproductive. The theft (some people call it taxation) funding its operation are taken with the threat of violence, and those stolen funds are often used to fund violent, destructive operations.
Voluntaryism promotes peaceful and productive relations for self evident reasons (and for reasons stated above) which are preferable to other politico-economic ideologies in that dispute resolutions do not come at the barrel of a gun (or the threat of a cage), but rather are achieved through mutually agreed upon contracts that fully cognizant, rational human beings voluntarily agree to and abide by (or else).
Dictionary definition:
- The use of or reliance on voluntary action to maintain an institution, carry out a policy, or achieve an end.
- A theory or doctrine that regards the will as the fundamental principle of the individual or of the universe.
- The metaphysical opinion that all existence and all actual happening is of the nature of an individual effort (against a resistance) which has on each occasion a peculiar conscious quality and is also discriminative or, at least rudimentally, purposive, and so cognitive. In so far as this opinion makes cognition essentially purposive, it agrees, in effect, with pragmatism from which, however, it differs in being a metaphysical hypothesis founded on arguments drawn from psychology, instead of being a maxim of logic deduced from an analysis of the nature of signs.
- A type of psychological theory, which regards the will as fundamental, and accordingly emphasizes the volitional rather than the intellectual aspect of our nature: ordinarily opposed to intellectualism.
- Any theory which conceives will to be the dominant factor in experience or in the constitution of the world; -- contrasted with intellectualism. Schopenhauer and Fichte are typical exponents of the two types of metaphysical voluntarism, Schopenhauer teaching that the evolution of the universe is the activity of a blind and irrational will, Fichte holding that the intelligent activity of the ego is the fundamental fact of reality.
- the principle or practice of depending on volunteers to support institutions or perform some desired action.
- a political philosophy opposed to dependence on governmental action or support for social services that might be performed by private groups.
- a reliance on volunteers to support an institution or achieve an end; volunteerism
- a doctrine that assigns the most dominant position to the will rather than the intellect