Can Consent Coexist With Obedience?
Published on HivePostify by @muhshrooms · Mon Aug 31 2026
Can You Comply With “The Authorities” Without Granting It The Right To Rule Over You?
What does it mean to consent?
A simple question over a word we use constantly during discourse over relationships, contracts, medical procedures, transactions, agreements, and countless other arrangements between people. Yet when the subject becomes about political authority, the meaning of consent seems to change without notice. Suddenly, consent can supposedly be demonstrated by voting, obeying "the law", paying extortion taxes, remaining within a particular territory governed by invisible lines drawn on the sand, using public services, accepting government-issued documents, contracts, participating in an economy regulated by the State, and much more. However none of those things, by themselves, establish consent but behaviors.
In short, consent is a voluntary agreement. It is the coming together of senses and accord. It is to yield when one has the right and power or will to oppose. It is a voluntary acceptance of what is proposed and what is to be done. It defines two separate requirements: agreement and voluntariness. Remove either one and the concept changes entirely.
If I invite you to my birthday party and you accept because you genuinely want to attend, you have voluntarily agreed to the invitation. If you decline because you do not want to attend, you have voluntarily refused it.
Now change the circumstances.
Suppose I tell you that you are coming to my birthday party and threaten to beat you if you refuse, and you believed it, strongly enough so that you show up out of fear.
Did you consent?
You physically attended, sure, and you may have even smiled, sat down, eaten the cake and joked around with the others there. Anyone observing only your behavior might conclude that you agreed to be there, but you didn't. You complied.
Francisco de Goya, Shackled Prisoner, c. 1815. Black chalk, red chalk and brown wash on laid paper. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Public-domain artwork.
That distinction becomes even clearer when the threat is unmistakable. For example, if someone points a gun at you and demands your wallet, and you hand it over, nobody with any understanding of the word, would seriously argue that you consented to being robbed. You chose to hand over the wallet, but your choice existed within a coercive circumstance. The mere fact that you complied with the demand does not transform the demand into a voluntary agreement.
This seems obvious when the coercion is personal and immediate, yet the distinction becomes strangely blurred when the coercive relationship is institutional, widespread, or socially accepted. For example:
A police officer pulls you over tells you to produce your license and registration. You comply either because out of fear for your safety or out of some twisted delusional idea that you have a moral duty to do so. You may be told that refusing can result in arrest. You comply, of course. You are told that resisting arrest can result in physical force, sometimes that goes without say because you know this already. At some point, someone may look at your compliance and say, "you chose to obey." Perhaps you did, but that still leaves the question unanswered.
Did you consent?
Those are not the same question and that difference matters because political authority is, supposedly, frequently justified through the "consent of the governed", which is another strangely bizarre phrase that we'll get into later. Authority is and always has been, assumed, enforced and never proven. If consent is to have means of voluntary agreement, then obedience cannot simply be substituted for it by any stretch of the imagination and faith.
Before we can determine whether anyone has legitimately consented to be governed, we have to determine what consent actually requires.
That means asking questions that are far more fundamental than politics:
What is voluntariness?
What makes an agreement voluntary?
What is coercion?
Is the ability to refuse necessary for consent to exist?
And perhaps most importantly:
Can consent exist where refusal is possible only at the price of coercion?
Those questions come before the question of who has the right to rule, because if consent is the foundation upon which authority claims legitimacy, then we should probably establish that consent actually exists before we build an entire political order upon it.
The Problem With "You Always Have a Choice"
One of the first objections that appears when discussing coercion is deceptively simple:
"But you always have a choice."
Technically, that is true. The person being robbed can refuse to hand over the wallet, a prisoner can refuse an order. Someone being threatened can refuse an arbitrary demand. The driver pulled over by the police can refuse to provide the requested documents, but does the existence of a choice mean that the resulting action is voluntary?
When there is coercion hidden or otherwise obvious, I would probably say absolutely not. If it did, then coercion would become almost impossible to distinguish from voluntary action. Every victim of coercion could simply be told that they were free to choose otherwise. The fact that they chose the less dangerous option would then be used as evidence that they voluntarily accepted the demand. As is oftentimes the case, and absolutely absurd.
Imagine someone points a gun at you and says, "Give me your wallet." You obviously have a choice. You can hand over the wallet. You can refuse. You can attempt to run. You can fight. You can even simply stand there and do nothing. However, the existence of these possibilities does not tell us whether you consented to surrendering your property at all. What matters is the circumstance in which the choice exists, and quite possibly the intent behind it.
Your vast options have been deliberately altered, and confined by another person's threat and your own limited ability to defend yourself. The person holding the gun has introduced a consequence for refusal that did not otherwise exist, "give me your property or I will use force against you."
You still possess a decision, but what you do not necessarily possess is a meaningful ability to refuse without being subjected to the threatened consequence.
Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Slave Market, c. 1866. A historical depiction of coercion and the absence of meaningful choice.
This is inherently important because we often confuse having alternatives with having meaningful alternatives. A prisoner has alternatives. They can obey the guard or refuse the order and accept whatever punishment follows. A robbery victim has alternatives, because they can surrender their wallet or refuse and risk being shot. Someone threatened with violence always has alternatives. They can comply or accept the violence. So yes, in each case, there is technically a choice, but if the existence of a choice were sufficient to establish voluntariness, then the word "coercion" would have almost no useful meaning.
This is why I have become more interested in the question:
Does the person possess a meaningful ability to refuse?
That question does not mean that every undesirable consequence makes an action involuntary. Consequences, whether good or bad, are unavoidable and oftentimes ignored beforehand.
If you refuse to work, you may not receive a paycheck, likewise, if you refuse to buy something, you don't receive the thing you declined to purchase. If you refuse an invitation, the person who invited you may be disappointed.
Nobody else necessarily imposed those consequences upon you for the purpose of obtaining your compliance. There is a difference between reality/life/universe imposing a consequence unto you and another person intentionally imposing a consequence upon you in order to make you comply.
If I offer you 100 dollas to mow my lawn, you are free to accept or refuse. If you refuse, I keep my $100 and you don't mow my lawn. Neither of us has been coerced simply because the offer had consequences, but suppose I tell you that you must mow my lawn and that if you refuse, I will break your windows on your beaten up 1976 Corvette.
The consequence is not merely an unavoidable result of your refusal. I have intentionally introduced it as a means of obtaining your compliance.
Do this, or else.
That "or else" is where the nature of the interaction changes. It is the foundation of all commands laid upon us all from "the authorities". And this is where the question of political authority becomes considerably more difficult, because governments also impose consequences for refusal. The question, then, is not whether laws have consequences, obviously they do, but the question thus becometh, What makes those consequences legitimate?
If a government says, "Pay this tax or we will seize your property," the fact that you ultimately pay does not by itself establish that you voluntarily agreed to the tax, nor does it establish that the tax was legitimate. If the answer is that you agreed to it by participating in the political system, then we have returned to the original problem.
Where was the agreement?
If the answer is that you agreed by voting, then what exactly did you agree to?
If the answer is that you agreed by remaining within the territory, then when did remaining inside imaginary borders become acceptance?
If the answer is that you agreed because you receive benefits from the system, then when did accepting something that was offered become an agreement to every condition attached to it, and when was anyone properly informed of all the enormous myriad of consequences for such frivolous agreements?
We cannot simply assume the conclusion into existence. If consent requires voluntary agreement, then the existence of compliance cannot be used as proof of consent without first establishing that the compliance itself was voluntary. In the political world, it never was.
If such things are true, then we have created a circular argument: You consent because you obey, and you must obey because you consented. That doesn't establish consent, but merely assumes it.
Tags: #hivesuite#consent#authority#coercion#political#philosophy#ethics#government#anarchism#tribes