Essays in Anarchism and Religion

206 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1

Yet, we “persist in this definite condition” with our will. The
state is “no reality that exists independently from the people.
There is no ‘state’ on the one hand, and people who live in it on
the other. The ‘state’ much rather belongs to what people do and
understand. People do not live in the state. The state lives in the
people.”^27 It is not the state which creates a people but a peo-
ple which create and organise symbols and ideological systems
as their mode of self-interpretation, shaping social relationships
accordingly. In other words, the state is the externalisation of
the self when its internal reference points cease to have meaning,
functioning as its substitute.^28 The state is there,

to create order and the possibility to continue living amid all this

spiritless nonsense, confusion, hardship and degeneracy. The state,

with its schools, churches, courts, prisons, workhouses, the state

with its army and its police; the state with its soldiers, officials

and prostitutes. Where there is no spirit and no inner compulsion,

there is external force, regimentation, the state. Where spirit is,

there is society. Where unspirit is, there is the state. The state is the

surrogate for spirit.^29

It is “not a particular type of the state that causes oppression, but
self-coercion, self-denial, and the worst of all emotions: mistrust
towards others and oneself. All this is engrained in the notion of
the state itself...”^30 Thus, Landauer asked, “Is it not like a game of
echo? What are the people afraid of? The people. Who obstructs
the masses? The masses. You are your own enemy!”^31 Eventually,
Landauer argued, symbolic reality is substituted for reality itself.
While the state is a human creation, it requires its creator’s con-
stant service in order to maintain itself, on account of not be-
ing an invention made at a single point in time, but a continu-
ous process of self-denial. Repetition, ultimately, consolidates.^32
Therefore Landauer described the state as an illusory construction
(Scheingebilde),^33 a “perfected nothingness,”^34 and its politics as
an illusion of reality (Schein der Wirklichkeit).^35 His critique was
not directed against archos, the ruler, but against arche, which,
as Benjamin Tucker writes, “comes to mean a first principle, an
element; then first place, supreme power, sovereignty, dominion,
command, authority; and finally a sovereignty, an empire, a realm,