I understand hating the government, and not liking to pay taxes. But what the hell?
I’ve seen a few of these Sovereign Citizen videos on YouTube, and I can’t make head or tail out of why anyone would want to make their own life a living hell by refusing to put a license plate on a car, or renouncing your social security number. The videos show a lot of loud ridiculous incoherent arguing with police and judges, for which car windows are smashed, and contempt of court sentences are handed out.
I should talk. As a Jehovah’s Witness when I was younger, I would’ve refused a blood transfusion if I had needed one. Lots of people think that’s stupid, and it is. But Bethel says God said don’t have blood transfusions even if you die because you didn’t have one. And to one of the faithful, what God says goes, regardless of human laws, or common sense come to that.
As far as I can tell, the Sovereign Citizen motivation is all political and tightwaddery. They never mention God in their ranting. Why would anyone follow this nonsense? All those fake driver’s licenses written on cardboard, and being shot by police over not buying a $26.00 fishing permit, and then, fishing in the municipal fish stocking pond. (That was something I heard from the videos, I don’t know which one.)
It all seems like your life would steadily get worse and worse doing this stuff, and for what? So you can say, “I know the Constitution better that you ever will.”? Who cares, you’re not going to win. They must know that.
I was under the distinct impression that the Sovereign Citizen gameplan is to be able to get all the benefits they want from society and then declare the government has no authority over them to make them do things like pay taxes and obey laws and annoying things like that. It’s dumb as shit, but you can’t deny that if they actually managed to pull it off and make the government back down they would come off better for it.
Bottom line, they’re morons with a deep, fundamental, and complete misunderstanding of exactly what the government is and how it functions. They erroneously believe they can exist outside of the government’s authority, yet at the same time benefit from it. They are completely ignorant of the law and yet believe they can manipulate it to their advantage with “magic words” and trivial technicalities like capitalizing certain words in documents. They are near perfect examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
I think they get the same benefits that every other conspiracy theorist gets.
The ability to feel that they are better than everyone because they know THE TRUTH.
That they are heroes fighting against evil shadow powers and so their life has meaning.
The camaraderie from talking with those who believe the same things they do.
etc. etc.
What SCs get out of it is a sense of power over their own lives. It’s actually kind of like the crazies who believe in QAnon. Both conspiracy theories allow a person to pretend, or maybe quite believe, that they understand things that are actually way too hard to understand; that the government, impersonal and complex and powerful, can be reduced to a very simple set of good buys, bad guys, and simple rules, like it is in the movies.
I believe you will find that sovereign citizen types are very disproportionately likely to be people who have recurring problems with the law in a sort of minor civil / misdeameanor way - tax problems, failure to pay child support, can’t get a disability benefit, traffic tickets, recurring income/property tax crap, stuff like that, things that tend to most affect people who just cannot quite get all their shit together. Dealing with this is frustrating, and if a person feels THE SYSTEM cannot be beaten or even reasoned with, the idea that the system can be defeated though some back channel/magic word type thing - again, like you might see in a movie - can be really, really appealing. People will hold on to those sorts of beliefs with a fervor that defies all logic, because the alternative - to truly admit their own problems and the hard work it takes to fix them - is so much more difficult.
By all indications, they exist for the purpose of taser-testing. I expect the mentality, though, is comparable to any conspiracy-theorist in that they feel special because they know The Truth, putting them above all of society’s sheeple.
And as others have stated, they want the privileges of living in a free society without any of the responsibilities.
I think that’s really all it is. They’re taking the constitution and applying it incorrectly. Fueled by keyboard commandos, they end up taking way too far.
The best example is the ‘right to travel’. Sure, you have the right to travel. No one is arguing that point. In fact, I couldn’t tell you if ‘right to travel’ is an actual right, but again, no one has an issue with that. The problem is when you’re traveling, by motor vehicle, for which you expressly don’t have a right to do (it’s a privilege) and you’re doing it as illegally as possible (ie no plates, no DL, ignoring officer’s directions etc).
I do like it when the cops say that they really don’t care about SCs. If they want to meet in chat rooms and message boards and talk about how much they hate the government, so be it. But when they decide to run down a cop because they don’t want to get pulled over, that’s a problem.
It seems to come down to them deciding that they don’t want to play our game, but than being angry when the police won’t play their game.
A lot of it can be solved by the officer saying (and I’ve seen them do this), ‘show me where it says that in the constitution and then we’ll talk about it’. Too many of these people are parroting what they read online without going through the simple task of fact checking to make sure it’s true. The constitution is pretty easy to find on the internet. If you’re going to (possibly, literally) die on that hill, you should have good grasp of what’s contained in it.
Conspiracy theorists need a combination of two traits. They must possess negative ignorance, e.g. not knowing how the government works. And they must possess positive ignorance, e.g., believing they have knowledge about a system that is wholly imaginary nonsense, in this case that capital letters have meaning in defining a person’s name or that fringe on flags determines the legitimacy of a court.
Everybody has negative ignorance about many things. Spouting off on a topic without knowing much about it is the bane of our society. But that’s just random and uncoordinated dumbness, which is manageable.
What CTs buy into is a system of positive ignorance. Sovereign citizens share an entire mythology of looniness that is identical to a religion, with common beliefs, benefits of having those beliefs, people to accuse of persecution if they counter the beliefs, and superiority to those who do not believe. The power of a religion is that it can’t be refuted from the outside. People have to voluntarily and internally give up the belief. That’s extremely hard for most people. Evidence shows that the majority of believers would rather die than give up their beliefs. (Figuratively, today, except in some parts of the world.)
The best aspect of sovereign citizens is that they’re lousy proselytizers. But that just means that a new belief system will replace them, and it will be just as loony and as mysterious to outsiders.
There was a thread a while back talking about the nature vs nurture debate. The science generally shows big chunks of our personality are a mix of both typically falling in the 40-60% explained by genetics in twin studies. Authoritarianism seems to be about 48% heritable rather than environmental or learned. Out at the other end of the distribution we’d expect to find people most predisposed towards a strongly anti-authoritarian (or libertarian) approach to society. Mix those way out towards the extreme end of that tail in the distribution of genetics with the right environmental factors and it’s probably not surprising that there’s sovereign citizen types.
Around half of sexuality also seems to be accounted for by genetics in the same types of studies. Even in societies far more overtly repressive and violent towards their genetic predispositions, people have been gay. The answer is quite possibly the same. Some people are born with a pretty strong predisposition to be gay. Some are born with a pretty strong predisposition to be sovereign citizens.
Seems to me that if you believed the state has no legitimate authority over you it would be liberating. Some people get joy out of bucking the system. Others would rather go with the flow and live more comfortably.
I think you’re approaching this from the wrong direction. Sovereign Citizens don’t start by studying the Constitution and then develop an ideology that says they don’t have to follow any rules. Instead they start with a belief that they don’t want to follow any rules and then they seek out an ideology which supports that belief. And they’re able to find people who will tell them what they wanted to hear.
