Category Archives: Nonaggression Anthropology

If you came across a blog post entitled “Očajne škole za ceo svet,” and like me you don’t speak or read Serbian, it might not look relevant to Invisible Order in specific or to libertarian writing in general. But if you scroll down all the way to the bottom, you’ll see my smiling face.

Indeed, this blog post turns out to be the recent Serbian translation of my 2012 article in the Free Market, “Horrible Schools for the Whole World.” In it, I explained the horrors and absurdities of the UN “Education for All” program.

The president of the Serbian libertarian youth organization Libertarijanska Asocijacija, reached out to me last week to ask if his organization could translate and repost the article. Of course, I was honored to consent. Click here to see the article in English on the Mises Daily, and click here to see the website of Libertarijanska Asocijacija.

What happens when the state tries to control culture and education — whether by isolating a “primitive” tribe from the dangers of modern civilization or by ripping children away from their tribal cultures to protect them from their parents’ traditions?

See our own Mike Reid’s article “Culture in a Cage” at the Freeman for an anthropologist’s analysis of government’s war on culture.

The great antifascist scholar Ludwig von Mises warned that government schools are an inevitable source of ethnic conflict, because dominant nationalities can use them to indoctrinate children from other cultures, pulling them away from their parents and communities.[1] In Canada, this was explicitly the aim of the Indian residential schools, which sought to “kill the Indian in the child.”[2]

The Canadian government began the schooling of aboriginal children in earnest by setting up the residential-school program in 1883. The goal was to take kids away from their disobedient, barbarian parents and make them into submissive, civilized British subjects.
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The state is at its most arrogant when it tries to protect us from ourselves. And there is perhaps no group of people subjected to a more absurd policy of state "protection" than the Jarawa tribe of India. They are confined to a reserve and forbidden to interact with outsiders, ostensibly for their own good.

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Anticapitalists like to use examples of supposedly selfless gift exchanges in “primitive” societies to contrast with the greedy behavior of modern markets. But a closer look at one famous exotic gift exchange, the Trobriand Islanders’ Kula, actually reinforces libertarians’ claims about the universal power of the profit motive.

In the elaborate Kula trade among the islands off the eastern tip of New Guinea, men sailed for many miles to receive ceremonial gifts of shell jewelry, apparently for the sole purpose of giving those gifts away again within a year or two.

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