Who becomes a sovereign citizen? I sort of know, except when I don’t

First, a primer. This surprisingly glossy and well-explained video is an excellent introduction to basic sovereign citizen concepts, UK style, and far better than the “toss you in the deep end and hope you swim” method of peppering you with traffic stop videos. I recommend that you watch the first hour and a half, then jump to the end when you reach the section about avoiding debt collectors.

I say “surprisingly” because sovereigns’ specialty is neither production values nor linear thought. Especially linear thought. It’s one thing to let production values go because the cops are breaking your car window in; one understands that a certain realignment of priorities is inevitable. But when Dan the Christian Man is noteworthy for his clarity…

…the bar hasn’t been set punishingly high.

So who becomes a sovereign citizen? I’m still not completely sure, but I’ve teased out a few classes of people who are drawn to sovereign ideas. They overlap heavily:

1. People with serious money troubles or legal problems. When you’re so deep in the hole that you can’t see daylight any more, you’ll grasp at just about anything that offers a wisp of hope.
2. People who have had way too many run-ins with the police. Some are sick of being detained for Being in Public While Black. Some are assholes who are going to have the cops riding their asses for the rest of their lives because of their charming personalities and/or fondness for intoxicants. The conventional ways of fighting back don’t work for these people, and they’re desperate for something, anything, that can give them at least the feeling of taking their power back.
3. People who resent authority. These come in two flavors:
   • Whiners. Best typified by the string of exquisitely passive-aggressive young white men who take cameras into courthouses and police precincts to conduct “First Amendment audits.” They wander the halls, filming, until someone asks them to stop recording, then they spend the next half-hour needling officials, making demands, and being condescending dicks. Their official purpose is to educate the police in the public’s right to record in public. The payoff they’re looking for, by their own account, is much different.
   • Ranters. A more dangerous wing of the movement, focused on gaining absolute freedom, independence, and the right to resist anyone in authority. At the mild end, Ernie terTelgte, “The Natural Man,” who turned a missing $25 fishing license into a year-plus legal saga with multiple jail stints for contempt. At the serious end, the Posse Comitatus.
4. Conspiratorial nuts. Some people are drawn toward anything that looks like secret knowledge. They want to know what’s behind the curtain, how the world really works. More importantly, they need to feel unique and in control. Sovereign citizens are still uncommon, so being a sovereign is a surefire way to feel set apart from the herd, and the movement’s techniques are all about taking control. It’s conspiracy-theorist catnip.

In the comments to my last post, unidentifiedremains mentioned “martyrbating,” the bliss of being persecuted for your beliefs. Or the bliss of being persecuted, period. (Being persecuted means you’re right, yes?) That certainly plays into some people’s motivations. There are hours of videos of people being KIDNAPPED to JAIL and TORTURED with IMPRISONMENT and DEPRIVED of their LIBERTIES–all of this helpfully noted in captions, to make sure you don’t mistake it for a video of a guy whining at the judge at an arraignment hearing. I’m not sure how it fits into the classes above, though. It helps to keep some sovereigns in the movement, but does it motivate them to join? I’m going to have to poke at the idea, and maybe look at some sovereign forums.

You might think intelligence has a lot to do with sovereign beliefs. What kind of idiot believes this stuff? What idiot keeps believing after it fails again and again? Thing is, belief isn’t intellectual. It’s emotional. People feel the rightness of a statement before they think it. And while stupid sovereigns make for the best traffic-stop videos, most sovereign citizens appear to be of average intelligence, and a few are brilliant. Emotional and intellectual intelligence don’t talk to each other.

Education is 50/50. On one hand, people don’t believe sovereign ideas just because they’re illiterate yokels. (See: Belief is emotional.) There’s no shortage of educated middle-class sovereigns. And sovereign beliefs offer a lot for an active mind to play with: history, religion, etymology, legal rulings going back to the Magna Carta. Sovereigns’ arguments may be misled, but they’re not simple, and they weren’t invented by simple people.

On the other hand, some of the lecturers have a self-taught feel. You get the impression that they’re not used to being around formally educated people, that they’re used to being the most book-smart person in the room. There’s also the sovereign fondness for the word “study.” It’s both a description and an exhortation. They study the law–which usually means watching videos on YouTube–and tell others to study–which means watching videos on YouTube. The word comes up over and over in lectures in ways it never does in real classrooms. The impression I get is that a lot of sovereign groups are made up of people who don’t have much formal education, led by self-taught people who lean on the trappings of formal education to make sovereign ideas feel serious and important.

(You gotta do something. There’s no way to make tax theory sexy.)

It’s hard to say whether that’s diagnostic. I live in a cocoon of stupid-smart, massively overeducated people, so it looks unusual to me, but “not much higher education, not much interest in book learning” is pretty much a universal description of humanity. It’s like the demography of estranged parents’ forums: They’re majority white, Christian, and children of abusive parents, but those generations of English-speaking forumgoers are majority white and Christian everywhere. When you get the same results in an estranged parents’ forum and a fly fishing forum, your observations are less than useful.

But then I’m reminded of the experiences of two friends who are therapists serving poor populations. A couple of questionable churches had started proselytizing in working-class Boston neighborhoods, and some of my friends’ Catholic clients joined eagerly. The churches were Protestant. The clients had no idea. They didn’t know there were other flavors of Christianity. My friends had to give their clients crash courses in religion just to make sure their clients knew what they were getting into. Somehow, there are pockets of people in Boston who are isolated enough to not know there are other denominations beside their own, and large enough that it’s worth shady churches’ while to exploit them.

Are there sovereigns in a similar situation, too isolated to know the nice lecturer is feeding them bullshit? Probably. Are they a majority? Probably not. Is lack of education a predisposing factor in who becomes a sovereign? Well, if you don’t have the background knowledge or analytical skills to pull sovereigns’ arguments apart, you’re effectively lacking a layer of your immune system; and less education correlates to lower income and social status correlates to less ability to handle debt and fend off the cops. On the other hand, there are plenty of educated middle-class sovereigns, which proves that neither money nor status inoculates you against this brand of foolishness.

Ultimately, the appeal of sovereign beliefs is control. You own yourself. No one controls you. No laws or statutes, nothing but the unwritten “common law,” controls you. The police are public servants, which means they’re your servants. You control them. The courts are held together with secret contracts and secret languages. You know the words that snip the bonds, and the courts fall apart at your feet.

When the police pull you over, you control the conversation. Ask questions. Make demands. Lecture them on their duties. When the courts call you to trial, you control the session. Hold the floor. Disrupt any proceedings that don’t involve you. Dismiss the judge for violating her oath.

The fact that your control ends in a cold holding cell in the back of the jail?

Doesn’t compute.

And that’s the question I most want to answer.