link to original reddit post by /u/Anenome5

Last night I finished a brilliant series on the history and end of the Inca communist state in Peru, one of the most striking places in the world and in history.

When the finally Inca ruler was murdered by the Spaniards who'd taken him captive to ransom him for gold, it is witnessed that ten-thousand native Peruvians mourned loudly moments before his death. And I thought for a minute just why those people, those people, were sad at the imminent and then actual death of their tyrant ruler.

And frankly there are a lot of answers wrapped up in that.

But more than that, there have been many times in history where foreign rulers have ruled a land and the people have absolutely come to hate that foreign rule.

In the grand history of humanity, foreign rule is generally hated and rule by one's own people is generally tolerated, even where that rule is far, far more despotic than foreign rule was. Who among us today wouldn't trade King George's 2% tea tax for today's federal tax and burdens system.

The difference seems to be nationalism. People seem to think one of their own will give them a fair shake.

This goes all the way back to the Romans, who discovered they could rule foreign provinces effectively by putting a local puppet-ruler, a quisling, in control.

Those 10,000 Inca Peruvians mourned the Inca ruler's death because, for one thing, he was being killed by a foreigner, but more than that because they were receiving benefits of his rule through his subjugation of the people, and also because of the mythification of Inca rule, a form of mind-control used on pre-modern uneducated peoples to convince them that their rulers were gods.

The Inca were one family or tribe that began conquering others around them, extracting heavy taxes from all people, and engaged in massive wars of conquest throughout the Andes, eventually ruling an empire as big in square footage as the Roman empire or Chinese empire before them. We seldom think of the Inca as being an empire on this scale, but it is true, and they did it without writing, without iron, and without the wheel.

But they were utter despots. As an Inca subject, you had virtually no say in your life. You would be assigned a wife when of age and given two llamas and a plot of land to farm. If you had kids you'd be given more land to support them. There was no concept of private property in their society, the Inca owned everything, the people included. Peasants were not allowed to own more than 10 llama.

The Inca civilization is often called communist because of how the Inca ran the economy, using taxation to create wealth and guarantee people a living essentially, in this manner. A portion of earnings every year would be given to the Inca, and some to the gods. If you didn't farm but wove, you'd be taxed in the form of woven goods. If you made pottery, you'd spent part of the year making pottery for the Inca and for the gods. This would mean literally leaving your home and doing what you were directed to do by the Inca, not like they would just take some of the pottery you'd normally produce.

They would organize people into groups and place captains over them, over 10, over 100, over a thousand and ten-thousand, etc. They would often move people's housing so they could not organize resistance. They could break up entire towns and send them a thousand miles away.

One of my favorite stories about first contact with the Inca by the Spaniards is about a strange looking cloak of Inca emperor Atahualpa. He told them that it was made of bat leather. He said the peasants have nothing better to do than catch bats and make clothing out of it for him. Probably took months to make. He'd wear it a single day, then it was burned.

That is what we are fighting. People who use other people as their means to personal ends. But this notion of someone being part of your people group so it's okay if they rule you because people think they need to be ruled stands in the way of liberation.

The belief in the need for authority, the need for someone to be in charge, is the ultimate enemy of liberation. It is why the state continues to exist. People think that without someone in charge, the result will be pure chaos.

They're not wholly wrong about that. The question is whether we can develop a third way, a stateless society that can ALSO produce law and order.

If we can do that, we win and the world is immediately changed by it.

If the 19th century was one of libertarian from foreign rule, perhaps the 21st can be one of libertarian from the state itself, from being ruled by one's peers.