"Collective states are constitutionally incapable of reliably producing anything but corpses"
About this Quote
A sentence like this isn’t trying to persuade so much as detonate. L. Neil Smith, a libertarian science-fiction writer steeped in Cold War anti-statism, compresses an entire worldview into one brutal image: the state as a machine whose most dependable output is death. The phrasing is deliberately clinical. “Collective states” sounds like a category in a lab report, and “constitutionally incapable” borrows the language of design specs and legal structure. The subtext is that mass politics doesn’t merely drift toward violence; it is built for it. If you get corpses, that’s not a bug, it’s the product working as intended.
The rhetorical trick is the word “reliably.” Smith isn’t claiming governments never produce roads, vaccines, or art subsidies. He’s arguing that those achievements are contingent and fragile, while killing is the one function that scales with certainty. It’s a line aimed at the 20th century’s ledger - total war, gulags, genocides - and also at the softer coercions of bureaucracy: conscription, policing, taxation, surveillance. By calling the state “collective,” he frames even well-meaning public action as a moral laundering operation, where individual responsibility dissolves into committees and flags.
It’s also polemic-by-overreach. The absolutism (“anything but”) dares the reader to object, which is the point: the quote is a provocation meant to rewire the default assumption that legitimacy flows upward from the crowd. Smith’s intent is to make the reader feel the price tag of “we,” paid in bodies.
The rhetorical trick is the word “reliably.” Smith isn’t claiming governments never produce roads, vaccines, or art subsidies. He’s arguing that those achievements are contingent and fragile, while killing is the one function that scales with certainty. It’s a line aimed at the 20th century’s ledger - total war, gulags, genocides - and also at the softer coercions of bureaucracy: conscription, policing, taxation, surveillance. By calling the state “collective,” he frames even well-meaning public action as a moral laundering operation, where individual responsibility dissolves into committees and flags.
It’s also polemic-by-overreach. The absolutism (“anything but”) dares the reader to object, which is the point: the quote is a provocation meant to rewire the default assumption that legitimacy flows upward from the crowd. Smith’s intent is to make the reader feel the price tag of “we,” paid in bodies.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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