Published
- 9 min read
They're Not Crazy, We're Just Fucked: The Sovereign Citizen Delusion
You’d have to have been hiding under a rock to not have heard the media’s breathless coverage of Dezi Freeman, the self-proclaimed sovereign citizen who allegedly murdered two Victorian police officers. The death of any law enforcement officer is tragic, but let’s be honest, the wall-to-wall coverage reeks of the kind of performative outrage we’ve come to expect from our media establishment, because the only thing that matters is ‘engagement’, not reporting a meaningful truth. Where’s this energy for Indigenous deaths in custody? For the endless parade of women murdered by partners despite having AVOs? Oh yeah that’s right, no-one cares beyond a 24 hour news cycle so it’s on to the next one.
But I’m not here to dissect the media’s ghoulish obsession with every salacious detail. The real story isn’t the violence or the courtroom circus of people declaring themselves “living men” immune to law. It’s what drives someone in the supposed “lucky country” to decide they’re not part of it anymore. The sovereign citizen movement - both here and abroad - is not just a collection of legal fantasists. It’s a symptom of systems that have so spectacularly failed to provide even the the most miniscule pretence of fairness, to the point that people are literally trying to opt out of reality itself.
A Brief History of Delusion
The sovereign citizen movement is what happens when American libertarian brain rot meets Australian tall poppy syndrome and produces a particularly virulent strain of pseudo-legal cosplay. Born in the fevered swamps of 1970s America, where the Posse Comitatus movement and various tax protesters decided that if they just said the magic words in the right order, they could omit their societal obligations while keeping all the benefits. Like everything great in the US-of-A (neo-liberalism, colonial wars, racial subjugation) this delusional framework has somehow managed to infect Australian shores. What started as desperate schemes by broke farmers and tax dodgers to avoid foreclosure and the ATO, has metastasised into a full-blown alternate reality where grown adults genuinely believe that writing their name in ALL CAPS or declaring themselves a “biological entity in transit” rather than a “person driving a car” will somehow unlock the cheat codes to society whilst absolving them of their latest motor-vehicle infraction. It’s like watching someone try to use Monopoly money at Woolies and getting genuinely confused when security escorts them out.
The Australian mutation of this particular brain worm is especially fascinating in its stupidity. Here, the movement awkwardly grafts American constitutional fantasies onto a Westminster system they clearly don’t understand. This results in a truly baffling word salad of declarations about the Magna Carta, maritime law, and the Constitution of Australia (which they haven’t read, or they’d know it doesn’t work like they think it does). COVID acted like petrol on this dumpster fire with ASIO reporting a significant uptick during lockdowns, with numbers potentially reaching into the tens of thousands. From a few hundred conspiracy theorists in the early 2000s to packed Telegram channels and Facebook groups spreading “freeman on the land” templates faster than a Bondi outbreak. We are unfortunately watching the rapid proliferation of people so disconnected from civic reality that they think legal jargon sprinkled with some Katterisms will get them out of paying council rates. The tragedy isn’t just that they’re wrong; it’s that their desperation to escape a system that’s genuinely failing them has led them straight into the arms of grifters selling them sovereign citizen starter packs and get-out-of-jail-free cards that work about as well as you’d expect.
When Systems Fail, People Fantasise
Here’s the thing nobody in power wants to admit; when you systematically exclude entire swathes of the population from any hope of prosperity, you don’t get to act shocked when they start excluding themselves from your system. The sovereign citizen movement isn’t just a collection of delusional dropkicks who failed Year 10 legal studies, it’s an extremely alarming canary in the (latest government approved) coal mine of democratic collapse. In this case the fumes choking us aren’t just gas related, but the dumpster that is the hyper-financialisation of every service and safety net in the country.
Let’s start with the bleeding obvious: economic inequality in Australia has reached French Revolution levels of obscene, with the wealthiest 10% holding 44% of all wealth—that’s 126 times what the bottom 20% possess. Meanwhile, the housing crisis has transformed home ownership from birthright to hereditary privilege, with property values rising 22% in a single year while real wages fell 4.8% below pre-pandemic levels. But don’t worry, 91% of CEOs still got their bonuses, because apparently driving companies into the ground is hard work that deserves rewards 55 times the average worker’s salary. Add in government corruption so blatant they don’t even pretend anymore, Robodebt, anyone? That algorithmic extortion racket that drove people to suicide while raising 794,000 false debts? No wonder we are at a point where social cohesion has hit its lowest point in 16 years.
When you’ve created a system where basic dignity is a luxury good, where algorithms chase the poor for fake debts while executives get bonuses for breathing, where neoliberalism has turned every human interaction into a market transaction, don’t act surprised when people decide your laws are as fictional as your promises. The sovereign citizen movement is what happens when the social contract hasn’t just been broken, it’s been put through a shredder, set on fire, and the ashes have been securitised and sold to offshore hedge funds, only to be liquidated in a crash and then the subsequent debt sold back to the public. Sovereign citizens may be wrong about the law, but they are right about being systematically fucked over. From cradle to grave.
Symptoms and Disease: Missing the Forest for the Conspiratorial Trees
The sovereign citizen movement isn’t some isolated outbreak of legal stupidity, it’s just one pustule in a full-body rash of societal breakdown. While we’re pointing and laughing at people who think declaring themselves a “living man” will get them out of a speeding ticket, we’re ignoring the fever that’s cooking everyone’s brains. Far-right extremism has metastasised across Australia, with ASIO warning that extreme right-wing groups now comprise around a third of all counter-terrorism investigative subjects. The National Socialist Network is marching in our streets, QAnon has infected millions globally with the belief that satanic pedophiles run the world, and 19% of Americans now believe in core QAnon theories, rising to 32% among Trump supporters. Here in Australia, wellness influencers are using pastel colours and essential oils to spread neo-Nazi conspiracy theories to suburban mums who think they’re just learning about organic eating.
Meanwhile, if you’re not smoking the conspriracy hookah it’s now better to just check out completely rather than subject one’s living body to the meat grinder of neo-liberal life. The Chinese “lying flat” movement has gone global as “quiet quitting”, with up to 50% of the US workforce potentially engaged in some form of silent resignation. In Australia, 42.3% of people aged 15-24 are psychologically distressed, up from 18.4% in 2011, with mental disorder prevalence in 16-24 year-olds rising by 50% to reach 39% in 2021. Social trust has collapsed so thoroughly that departments experiencing quiet quitting show a 41% reduction in trust metrics within six months. When your choices are grind yourself to dust for a system that despises you or opt out entirely, is it any wonder people are choosing door number two?
And into this trust vacuum rushes the strongman, promising simple solutions to complex problems. Build a wall, stop the boats, drain the swamp, hang the pedophiles, eject the non-whites. It’s the same authoritarian playbook whether it’s Trump, Bolsonaro, Dutton (pour one out for the potato) or whatever discount fascist we’re brewing locally. Focusing on the “crazy sovereign citizens” while ignoring WHY people are susceptible to this nonsense is like treating a fever with ice cubes while ignoring the raging sepsis. The infection isn’t people believing stupid things about the law, it is a system so fundamentally broken that believing stupid things starts to seem like the only rational response. We’re not dealing with isolated lunatics; we’re watching the immune system of democracy attacking itself because the body politic is riddled with neoliberal cancer.
The Lucky Country’s Unlucky Citizens
So here we are, in the “lucky country,” watching citizens literally trying to magic themselves out of a social contract that’s become more extraction than exchange. The sovereign citizen movement is what happens when legitimate grievances meet YouTube University and desperation breeds delusion. Every person falling prey to this world view is a data point in the collapse of social trust. Every QAnon believer waiting for the pedophile elite to be arrested is expressing - however wrongly - a correct intuition that the powerful operate by different rules. Every young person lying flat has made the rational calculation that the game isn’t worth playing when the house always wins.
The danger isn’t in dismissing these movements as delusional; it’s in refusing to acknowledge the conditions that make delusion attractive. When your actual government runs illegal debt schemes that drive people to suicide, is it really that much crazier to believe the government itself is illegitimate? The sovereign citizens are catastrophically wrong about the solution, but they’re right about one thing: the system is colossally fucked. Until we address the true rot - the systematic hollowing out of democracy, the transformation of citizens into consumers, the financialisation of basic human needs - we will keep getting symptoms. Today it’s sovereign citizens, tomorrow it’ll be something worse (and we are already seeing a future Australia in outrageous violence in the UK and US). Because when your society makes people feel so powerless that declaring themselves sovereign seems rational, maybe it’s time to ask who’s really living in a fantasy.
Banner image by Black Forest Labs
Model: Flux Ultra v1.1
Prompt: A fractured, abstract composition where legal documents dissolve into digital static. The background is a chaotic collision of muted grays and institutional beiges, shot through with aggressive streaks of fluorescent yellow (like legal highlighter gone mad) and deep crimson. Geometric patterns resembling official stamps and seals fragment and scatter across the canvas, their edges glitching into pixelated noise. In the center, bold black text characters - some in ALL CAPS, others in various fonts - float and overlap in impossible ways, creating an unreadable word salad. The bottom third shows a distorted grid pattern (suggesting forms and bureaucracy) that gradually breaks apart into chaotic brushstrokes. Thin lines of electric blue cut through like circuit boards or flowcharts leading nowhere. The overall style is harsh and disorienting, with sharp angular shapes colliding with organic decay, creating a sense of systems breaking down into meaningless fragments. The palette emphasizes the contrast between cold institutional colors and hot spots of anarchic energy.