The stateholm syndrome is the use of an ambiguous collective ("we," "us," "them," "our") to hide and evade the difference between ruler and ruled. It is a coinage based on the well-known Stockholm syndrome suffered by prisoners and kidnap victims. When someone says, "We bombed Baghdad," they are revealing their mental victimhood to rulers. After all, the speaker (unless he's part of the ruling junto) did not bomb anyone, or order flunkies to bomb anyone - the ruling elite of the US state did. By identifying with mass-murderers, those who use this slave "we" are trivializing moral culpability and accepting undue blame. By such identification with the rulers, they unduly accept responsibility for the act, and make it psychologically harder to condemn it or correct it.

Another example is the slogan "Support Our Troops." First of all, they are the rulers' troops, not "ours." Secondly, such troops are almost always engaging in the killing of hapless foreigners, most of whom are non-combatants. Thus, they deserve condemnation, not support. Finally, "troops" is a sugar-coated word for what these people are - "hired thugs" is more apt. Thus, the libertarian translation of "support our troops" is "condemn the rulers' hired murderers."

One rough way to measure the libertarianism of a speaker is simply to count the number of times he uses "we" or "our" when he really means "the rulers." At best, this is catering to the statism of the audience, at worst it is mental surrender to the dark side. Either way, it does not help our case.

If there is one single thing that can free our minds, and the minds of others, it is the ruthless elimination of the slave "we" from our thoughts and speech. This is easier said than done - even the most libertarian people sometimes slip up. This shows how ubiquitous the statist programming of our lives has been, and how habituated we are to the statist paradigm.