Category Archives: Violence

“Freedom is the absence of risk.” -Tyrant

Authority, forced compliance, government, law, Violence, Voluntarism, , , , ,

The government is not in the business of risk-management. This is an institution whose only real function and purpose is to extort behavior and money by means of its superior violence. This means that government represents the greatest risk to man on earth. The irony then that we task the government to keep us safe by managing our level of risk!

The State passes a child seat law,  but legalizes abortion, which destroys thousands of children every year. It demands that our children wear helmets when riding bicycles, then indebts our nation to the tune of trillions of dollars off the backs of the young who will be fleeced and extorted to pay that debt. It passes seatbelt laws and laws forbidding the sale of soft drinks of a certain size, then mass murders whole generations of men on battlefields in pointless foreign wars fought to preserve the financial interests of the plutocratic financiers. You can’t yell “fire!” In a crowded theatre, but you can run rank and object fear-mongering propaganda pieces about everything from a pandemic to presidential treason to the biological-based racism of the white man. The State can crown itself the sage and savior of civil rights while we all conveniently forget that this is the same State that upheld the interests of slave-holders and flesh-merchants for generations and legally enforced unholy segregation laws for generations after those slaves were finally free…but free only after a million men who never owned slaves and never profited financially or politically from slavery were maimed or murdered on battlefields over which the vast majority of politicians never shed a single tear.

Government risk-management? It would be the world’s funniest joke if it weren’t already the world’s most tragic tragedy.

The State’s ONLY  legitimate task, and even this fundamentally is quite specious, is to nurture a geopolitical context in which men are free from coercive force. Where they are free to conduct voluntary value exchange with one another without facing direct violations of person or property. The government can only be of any amount of benefit when its ONLY task is to discourage DIRECT violations of citizens—murder, theft, fraud, and invasion. Period. That’s it. It is a roaring lion; a blazing furnace; a hissing viper; a chained demon, which must be carefully watched with an ever vigilant and suspicious eye, and with hands on a whip which shall strike hard and fast at the first sign of  threat…at the mere hint of movement in the wrong direction. The monster can NEVER, EVER, under any circumstances be allowed to wander into our lives by some unconstitutional conveyance like “risk management”. That is a slippery slope which can only lead to tyranny. Think about it. If it’s the government’s job to keep you from getting sick, to keep you safe, then what part of your life are they not then entitled to have a primary say? What you eat; where you go; who you talk to; what you do for a living; how you travel; what groups you join…do you see how dangerous this is? Certainly isolating and sequestering at-risk populations is a good idea, but isolating the entire nation is NOT making a distinction between those at risk and those not. Everyone is a potential carrier and a potential victim at the same time. Which means that the government, in order to keep us “safe”, must control all of us. This is not public health, it is public slavery. The government has no constitutional right to prevent citizens from attending church, running their private businesses, patronizing businesses, going to parks, going to the beach, going to concerts, or traveling to other countries. The Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, privacy, property, and association. There is no disclaimer which says “except in case of public health crisis”.

Lockdown Hell: Altruism Instantiated (Part ONE)

Authority, collectivism, collectivist metaphysics, Ethics, forced compliance, government, individualism vs collectivism, Man's Ability, Metaphysics, morality, Violence, , , , , , ,

One of the many interesting aspects of the unprecedented and disturbingly open, unabashed, and undisguised unconstitutionality being foisted upon the American public during the fabricated coronavirus crisis, is the novel iteration of the western sociopolitical zeitgeist, altruism. Altruism, in a nutshell, in its sociopolitical context, is the State-forced sacrifice of those deemed “privileged” to those who are deemed “under…or un-privileged”. This of course contradicts the very notion of “privilege” in that it by definition makes the “unprivileged” the greatest beneficiaries of the State’s coercive power, and the “privileged” the greatest victims…which renders the categories quite ironic, in that they are, in actuality, opposite. The ‘unprivileged” are significantly luckier than their privileged counterparts. But don’t strain your mind or credulity by attempting to square that circle. It cannot be done. The ethics of altruism are based on collectivist and determinist metaphysics which are by nature utterly irrational, and therefore in actuality inscrutable, which is why under the authority of the government agents of altruism you are not called to understand anything they say, but to simply obey. They are the enlightened philosopher kings, you are the unwashed barbarian masses. Comply or die. That’s the sum and substance of your usefulness to them and the total value of your existence, period.

When interpreting the categories of “privileged” and “unprivileged” according to our State overlords, we must understand that these, again, are ideas which are rooted in the inscrutable metaphysics of determinist collectivism, and consequently are interpreted according to mystical and thus fundamentally obscure notions, yet paradoxically they are quite  hyper-specific when physically dictated. At any rate, the general description is that being “privileged” or “underprivileged” has absolutely nothing to do with the “why” but only the “what” of human existence. In other words, WHY someone is categorized as “privileged” or “unprivileged” is simply “because they are”.  And by this I mean that it has nothing at all to do with the volitional choices and subsequent actions of the individuals so classified, or those related to the individuals so classified, such as parents or friends, with whom the “privileged” or “unprivileged” individuals may have been in some manner meaningfully related and thus so influenced. It has everything to do with one’s root existential state. That is, if you are “unprivileged” it is because you were born that way, and vice versa. “Privileged” and “unprivileged” is a product of your nature. That’s it. Thus, there isn’t anything you can do to manifest or could have done to prevent or ensure this natural condition. This is precisely why the State must implement equality and equity by force (legalized violence), and cannot rely upon citizens to work out their differences by their own choices and actions. No action or choice can change one’s very nature, for all actions and choices are a product of that nature, and thus all actions necessarily affirm and reinforce one’s “privileged” or “unprivileged” status. At the same time, ironically, or perhaps contradictorily, there is a sense of absolutist ethics which are secondary to the ethical primary of altruism, and these ethics are known as “social justice”, which is imbued and implied by one’s existential status as either “privileged” or “unprivileged”. The “unprivileged” are victims of some great and terrible injustice which though could not have been avoided as it is a function of their nature and not of any volitional action or consequence on the part of themselves or others nevertheless entitles them to ALL the legal benefits the State has the violent power to grant them in the interest of “social justice”, which again is the notion of existential and universal equality, which of course can never be achieved because the distinction between “privileged” and “unprivileged” is ALREADY, a-priori, itself existential and universal. Now, concordantly, the “privileged” are the evil perpetrators of all the injustice to which the “unprivileged” are so tragically subjected, and thus must be “held-accountable” and forced at State-gunpoint to “pay their fair share” in the interests of universal equality, despite the fact that there is no choice nor action which could have prevented the “privileged” from exploiting those who are “unprivileged”, or which could have prevented the “unprivileged” from actually becoming “unprivileged”, or themselves from becoming “privileged” in the first place…because, again, both groups are simply born that way.

And here again we see the inscrutable nature of collectivist metaphysics roaring to the forefront today with predictably disastrous consequences…those disastrous consequences being the complete undermining of the American Republic and the plenary and indefinite suspension of constitutional law, not to mention the irreversible and alarmingly substantial diminishing of the economy and faith in the nation on the whole in service to the “protection” of the public from the latest contrived boogeyman, but this one a phantom, which is supposed to be even more scary, called coronavirus. Once again do not try to apprehend the reasons, do not try to interpret or discern the meaning behind the actions of your government overlords, for it is not yours to know, because it is not you who has been given the “grace to perceive”. For that is reserved for those who have been called to rule. For you, on the other hand, it is forever a cloud of steam in your fist. The metaphysics of collectivism and the concordant ethics of altruism require only your submission. The “unprivileged” are required only to receive, the “privileged”, to sacrifice.

But which one are you?

Now that is a very interesting question. And the answer is predictably enigmatic, as I’m sure you understand: it depends. In the meta, you are both and neither…it is subjective, it is fluid. In context however it is terrifyingly empirical, objective, and corporeal.  And as we are talking about the manufactured coronavirus crisis, here I can provide a much more specific answer. Which I will do in part two.

END part ONE

The Law is at War with You (Part 3, Conclusion)

Authority, collectivism, collectivist metaphysics, Ethics, forced compliance, government, individualism vs collectivism, law, Metaphysics, morality, Violence, Voluntarism, , , , , ,

At the beginning of this article series, I opened with the question: Without the law what is to prevent someone from committing evil action X should they have the opportunity; and what then is the consequence?

From this question, often asked by apologists for legal ethics (those who assume that Coercive Authority, i.e. the State, is utterly necessary for human ethics to exist), two things can be assumed beyond a reasonable doubt. First, that the law is not necessary to declare moral value—indeed, that moral value must be known before the law exists (e.g. law is to prevent evil action X, an action of which its moral evil warrants the creation-intervention of law). And second, that evil has no negative consequence without law.

The idea that there is no consequence for immoral action absent law presents us with a contradiction; this contradiction is “resolved” by rejecting morality entirely, and replacing it with legality. Here is the contradiction: by asserting that there is no negative consequence for immoral action, an immoral action can no longer be defined as immoral. You see, in ethics, it is axiomatic that action and consequence are corollary, yet the law “splits” this corollary by making action a function of moral ethics and consequence a function of legal ethics. But morality and legality are two completely distinct ethical systems, each with its own very specific premises and corollaries and conclusions, and, most importantly, its own metaphysical foundation. (Morality is based upon will and choice, its metaphysics are individualist; legality is based upon authority and coercive force, its metaphysics are collectivist). They simply cannot be merged/integrated in any rational or efficacious way. So what happens is that morality by default becomes merely propagandistic conveyance for the implementation of legality, whereupon morality is discarded by the Authority (ruling class) and replaced with legality as the author and arbiter of the ethical value of both action and consequence. And this is done quite naturally, and is not necessarily consciously conceived by those arguing for the State and the Rule of Law or the ruling class. For as soon as we assume and accept that consequence must be a function of the law, then it becomes impossible to determine the ethical value of an action without also appealing to the law; and this is due to the inherent mutual exclusivity between legal ethics and moral ethics. This is the nature of ethics.

All of this being the case, in response to the question at the top of this article, we are forced to reply as follows:

Wihout law, why should we think that evil action X is in fact evil? In other words, how do we know that action X, or engaging in action X, is a bad thing?

The answer is of course that we do not; we cannot. Because by asking the question we necessarily concede that legality, not morality, is the only relevant and possible ethical system. Outside of the law, there is no ethic. Any action outside the law cannot by definition be called illegal, and thus it cannot be called unethical, and thus it cannot be called “bad”. The law, in accordance with the logical rules of ethics, is both prescriptive and proscriptive. It dictates which actions are good or bad (or said another way, it dictates the goodness or badness value of a given action) and it dicatates the consequences for actions. The law declares what you must do and what you must not (which is fundamentally oxymoronic, because one cannot do a “not”….so the law fundamentally dicates all behavior at root). And this is why law has nothing at all to do with choice and will. Human action is fundametally driven by individual will. But will is not recogniznzed by law, which by nature is coercive, not cooperative, which is why as time goes by, the law—the State, the Ruling Class—becomes more and more oppressive; it smothers humanity, it does not, and cannot, free it. The nature of the law is to dictate, not emancipate. Law rejects human choice and will, it does not provide some kind of cohesive and moral context for them. The “freeing power of democratic law” is just lie you have been told to make you more amenable to the whims of the ruling class, nothing more. You are coerced by very persuasive, euphonious, idealistic indoctrination, which is much cheaper and more profitable than state terrorism, gulags, guillotines, death squads, and gas chambers, and less messy as well. The chattel bear more service and substance if they walk willingly to their cages and pastures than if they struggle or try to run away. Though terror, gulags, guillotines, death squads, and gas chambers, or some manifestation thereof, will eventually appear no matter how ostensibly democratic a system is…and there are reasons for this, but they are a subject for another article.

Finally, I will end with this:

The law does not provide a context for the implementation of efficacious morality. Law is, according to the ethics of morality, entirely opposed to moral behavior.

In other words, the law is categorically immoral.

END

The Law is at War with You (Part 2)

Authority, collectivism, Ethics, forced compliance, government, individualism vs collectivism, law, morality, Violence, Voluntarism, , , , ,

In part one of this essay series, I concluded with the declaration that the law is not a means of enforcing moral ethics, or a conveyance of them, but is in fact a replacement of them. And it is on this point that I would like to elaborate.

Most of us assume, because we are indoctrinated to do so from our very first breath, that the law, as a tool of moral ethics, has to do with willful action and consequence. That is, if your willful action is to break the law, your consequence is punishment under the law. But this is not actually so. When dealing in legality, we are inexorably and necessarily simultaneously dealing in Authority. The law and the authority to enforce the law are indeed corollary…without an Authority to force compliance and punishment according to the law, then the law cannot be manifest. Law, absent authority, in other words, has no consequence…and therefore its commands have no substance, and therefore the law does not exist in any practical sense. Said another way, once people have a choice as to whether or not they will obey the law, then there is no law. The very nature of law is to disregard choice entirely…that’s the whole point. If someone chooses to disobey, then the law shall punish them. That’s how the whole thing works. One’s choice to disobey the law does not get them out from under it…not at all. It merely invites punishment according to the law. The law does not recognize your choice as legitimate, and that is why you are punished according to the law when you disobey it. If your choice was recognized as legitimate by law, then there would be no punishment for disobedience. Punishment exists in legal ethics precisely as a means to nullify choice, not to affirm it. Before your choice can result in a consequence which fundamentally satisfies that choice, the law steps in to punish you. Instead of a natural consequence to your exercise of individual will, you will relinquish your money to the State, or suffer garnished wages, or a jail cell, or a firing squad, a noose, guillotine, cross, electric chair, needle…etc.. At the very least, you spend your days “on the run” and in hiding. In any case, the point is that the law steps in long before any true, natural consequence of your free choice can ever manifest.

But of course this is not what most of us suppose…we are taught that punishment (and also reward) is a consequence of choice. If the law punishes the “evildoer” then it is because he is simply “reaping what he sows”. If he had not chosen to disobey, then he would not have been punished. However, this is not in reality how law works. Obedience, by definition, has nothing to do with choice, yet it has everything to do with law. One does not choose to obey, for that is a contradiction in terms. One obeys legal commands, or else one is punished. The commands are dictated by the Authority; the punishment is likewise and equally dictated by the Authority. Both the commands of the law and the punishment for disobedience of the law are equal manifestations of the Authority. They are One, and man is obligated to it. He will either obey, regardless of what he wants, or he will be punished, regardless of what he wants. Said another way: He will either obey, regardless of what he’d rather choose, or he will be punished, regardless of what he’d rather choose. The command to “obey or else” hasn’t the least bit to to with individual will, and thus hasn’t the least to do with choice. The law is dictated TO man; it is not a product of his will, then, but of the will (and whim) of the Authority, which is predicated upon a collective Ideal into which humanity is to be forced, not Individual agency exercised as choice. Man is born into law—he belongs to it, NOT vice versa. And law is a giant rock which is falling on his head; he may move out from under it, but only by stepping off a cliff and onto the jagged rocks below. In this situation, the choice he makes leads to the exact same conclusion, having nothing fundamentally to do with him or his choice at all. And that’s the whole idea. That’s LAW.

From this, a fundamental truth now becomes clear, where before it was hidden and obscured by layers and layers of misunderstanding, disinformation, misinformation, rationally bankrupt philosophy, and sadistic self-loathing tradition: law doesn’t have anything to do with individual action and consequence. At all. Your actions are compelled, thus denying your will, which denies your mind, which denies your singular consciousness (your awareness of Self), which denies your root individual nature, which denies your existence entirely. Manifestations of individuality, like choice (true, objective freedom) are thus ipso facto illegal…which simply means that they not recognized as existentially legitimate and natural. Law is philosophically collectivist, not Individualist. It compels man against his will by collectivizing him and then directing and defining the collective whole into Its legal obligation to serve the Authority (ruling class). And it compels man necessarily against his will because it does not recognize his will, because it does not recognize his individuality. The law views man’s existence as fundamentally collective, thus making man a function of an Idealized reality, not a rational reality. The Ideal is an abstract, the collective thus likewise an abstract, the collective becomes an ironic monolithic entity, and man the individual is thus forced to live in this dream-reality which the State (the Authority/ruling class) intends to make manifest by coercive FORCE, and the law serves as the blueprint and ethical exuse for the resultant bloodshed. This is how the State excuses its mass murder of millions of men and women on the battlefields of governemnt wars and other places whilst simultaneously condemning every random “lawbreaker”—a tax avoider, a drug dealer, a man operating a barber shop without a business license—as a moral villain to be ridiculed as an affront to human prosperity and progress.

The law, my friends, is not a natural context for action and consequence, as if it is merely an expression of object and endemic human free agency, where we all just get together and happily agree to play by the rules. Without a ruling class, there are no legal rules! Those rules we all followed as kids in our games of backyard sports, or tag, or pretend play, these are not law! They are rules without the ruler…which makes them the opposite of law: cooperation based upon an arrant individual willingness to be part of the game, without threat of punishment, nor any means to effect punishment for withdrawing or choosing not to play, save the loss of maybe a little face, or at worst separation from that particular group of individuals merely due to disparate individual interests, upon which another group may be joined, or not.

This is voluntarism, not collectivism. It is not the State, it is Stateless.  It is not legality, it is morality. It is not obligation to Authority, it is the freedom to act morally.

END part 2

“‘What is Government?’ Answered in One Paragraph”

collectivism, forced compliance, government, Violence

What is government? Well, it’s quite simple.

A group of violent people (aspiring ruling class) threaten the productive people with violence and take their property, then use some of the property to bribe the unproductive in exchange for greater power by which they further exploit the productive. Then the children of both the unproductive and the productive are indoctrinated into thinking that this arrangement mis a sociological virtue and a moral necessity. This goes on until the transfer of wealth from the productive to the ruling class (with the unproductive being the buffer between the ruling class and those they exploit…a combination of hired thugs and cannon fodder, to put it bluntly) must rely upon unsustainable debt, arrant political corruption, kangaroo courts and show trials, unfettered lower class immigration, and the distractions of circuses and sideshows and endless war, shortly after which the ruling class abandons the disaster and moves on to do it again somewhere else.

The end.

The Conflicting Realites of State and Individual Citizen: The ethics difference

Authority, collectivism, collectivist metaphysics, Ethics, forced compliance, government, individualism vs collectivism, law, Metaphysics, morality, Violence, , , , , , , , , ,

All governments by nature and implicit definition are founded upon collectivist, not individualist, metaphysics; and I have discussed the differences between these two metaphysical constructs many times on this blog. Government represents an Ideal, which is simply an abstract archetype for Reality, itself…a superstructure, or meta-structure, if you like, but it is completely subjective. Government is is tasked with organizing the existence of both humanity and its environment into this grand, overarching ideal, which, being subjective, could be anything at all: a Worker’s Utopia; We the People; the Aryan Nation; Society of Social Justice (i.e. Marxist Communism); God’s Chosen People; the Diversity Paradise; the King’s Land…you get the idea. In order to do this, government must first interpret Reality in a collective sense…that is, it must assume that all that is seen is a direct and absolute function of the Ideal, and government’s job is to subdue the ostensibly disparate components of Reality, including humanity, and organize them into a cooperative system which works collectively to singularly serve the interest of the Ideal…which functionally means serving the governemnt—the State—which is the material incarnation of the Ideal, containing the sum and substance of the Ideal’s entitled power of practical utility. To the individual citizen, this power, as it inevitably becomes more and more overt and comprehensive, looks like tyranny; he sees soaring tax rates and expanding government interference in commerce and free market value exchange as theft; he sees the subterfuge, doublespeak, hypocrisy, artifice, racketeering, and general political corruption as bearing false witness; he sees the warmongering, empire building, law-enforcement excess and brutality, the facilitation or outright commission of foreign and domestic political coups, false flag crises, and the insatiable military industrial complex as murder. In other words, the individual, particularly one living in a western reprentative democracy, which is founded upon the illusionary and completely contradictory-to-government notions of individual right to life and liberty…yes, the individual is operating on a different set of ethics, and this is because he is, even subconsciously, operating likewise from a different metaphysical interpretation of reality (usually…I’m speaking in general terms). You see, the individual assumes that he exists as himself, a singular agent and agency, a Self qua Self, with a singular and efficacious and actual Volition, which exists of and for and to HImself, and therefore possesses a innate and inherent right to own himself. And this means that the role of the State—though impossible, representing the very denial of government entirely—is to protect and promote his body, which he owns, and thus the product of his body’s labor, and thus to promote free association and uncoerced value exchange as a means of social, politcal, and economic association. From this Individualist principle the Individual thus assumes that coercive State policy (threats of punishment to achieve political ends) constitutes implicit (and often explicit) murder; contradiction, hypocrisy, pandering, doublespeak, subterfuge, exagerration, and propaganda is lying; taxes (at least in some forms…in reality, however, all forms), debt, economic meddling, coporate and special interest bribery, and subsidization (at least in some forms…in reality, all forms) is theft. The individual feels this way because the ethics to which he subscribes—the ethics of morality, as opposed to legality—demand that he do so. Moral ethics establish the Individual as the Standard of Universal Good and Truth. And since the Individual is defined according to the metaphysics as Singualar, Conscious, Conceptualizing, and therefore fully Volitional/Willfull, then uncoerced value exchange (i.e. trade/contract in all of its various forms, both formal and informal) represents the only ethical means by which the metaphysics can be applied rationally to Reality. The forced removal of ones property, or theft, becomes evil; violations of one’s body become murder; interpreting or rendering reality in ways which violate the Individual’s ability to properly ascertain and thus organize it (hypocrisy, false witness, deception, etc.) becomes lying. Murder, theft, lying…these are all evil according to the ethics of morality; and morality is entirely and only a function of Individualist metaphysics. And morality is NOT legality, and thus, it has nothing to do with the State. And what’s more, murder, theft, and lying only exist as a function of moral ethics. They are not and cannot be meaningful to  legal ethics. In other words, as far as the State is concerned, the lying to, and the murder and theft of the individual do not exist. And this is because the Indivdual, from the frame of reference of the collectivist metaphysics from which the State operates, does not exist. You cannot take from one who does not own himself; cannot lie to one who does not know himself; cannot murder he who is not himself.

And here we begin to see the conflict…the mutually exclusive frames of reference between the Individual Citizen and the State Official is the singular foundation of all social choas, in all forms both public and private I submit, and is implied and necessarily animated and catalyzed by the State, with increasingly authoritarian consequences. The establishment of the State creates a society where individualist and collectivist metaphysics collide. The implicit and natural awareness of the moral right of the individual to own himself is disasterously combined with the implicit legal right of the State to coerce by force the indivdual into a collective reality. The friction begins as a small festering sore which is aggravated by ever increasing government despotism against which the individual rebels in whatever way he can that will not run him afoul of the law, to no avail, as he is hopelessly outgunned by the money and violent power of the State, and marginalized and demagoged by powerful and powerfully dogmatic explicit and implicit collectivist institutions and philosophies which overtly and inadvertently promote collectivist metaphysics, like the media and the scientific and religious determinists. Thus, as more and more individuals wallow in the misery of a marginalized and meaningless existence in an ever-increasing insane asylum of collectivist disciples run by an almost unfathomably powerful and rich ruling class, and as more collectivist polices are inacted to “help” those who suffer from polices designed to destroy them by denying their existence altogether, the moral and psychological foundations crumble. The ruling class implements more and more draconian strategies to deliever on the collectivist “Eden” promised to “the People”, many of the ruling class unaware that they are the only ones who can ever possibly live in it because they are it.  All of these strategies fail, of course, because they necessarily must, because the logical presumption of collectivist metaphysics, whether a given politician knows it or not, is that the eradication of individuals is the ethical Good, and the arrant achievement of the Good is the whole damn point of of the metaphysics in the first place. Through the socialization of just about everything—from healthcare to food to education to transportation to employment to childcare to leisure—indolence is affirmed, promoted, and perpetuated. This subsidized indolence leads necessarily to the irrelevance and forsaking of one’s mind, which leads to the forsaking—implicit or explicit— of one’s Self. Eventually, no longer able to extract any more meat or leather from the tax cattle, and no longer able to pay its foreign and domestic creditors, and collapsing under the weight of debt and infighting and external pressures and threats, and thus with no one left to functionally rule and thus no one left to compel into the Collective Ideal, the ruling class collapses or dissipates or scatters or infiltrates other societies/social networks and so goes the nation. This unavoidable end is often bloody and ferocious and apocalyptic, but sometimes it fizzles with a whimper. Either way, end it shall, and there are always mass graves of some sort or another left behind to remind us of the failure of collectivist metaphysics. Not that anyone really notices because, like the Matrix, it always starts all over again eventually.

You will never convince the State that it is tyrannical, no matter how egregious its excesses or atrocious and self-serving its transgressions, because it simply possesses no frame of reference for its own tyranny. It certainly sees itself as the Authority of the land, but you must understand that it holds to a fundamentally different interpretation of the concept. To the individual citizen (and to the individualist it is explicit and obvious), State authority is simply force—government coercing via violence and threats of violence its citizens out of their life and property. In other words, though they perhaps expect the State to act morally, they comply with the State’s legality. That is, they understand that the way the State operates is to take from the individual against his will, considering will as irrelvant with respect to legal obligation, in the interest of the “greater”, or “common good”. The individual operates from a place of uncomfortable cognitive dissonance for much of the lifespan of the nation, accepting a weird and ultimately unworkable amalgamation of legal ethics and moral ethics. Eventually the people begin to notice the stark shift of social norms in the direction of the legal end of the ethical “spectrum”; this is inevitable, as the whole point of the State is to eventually subsume all vestiges of individualism into collectivist “reality”. There is greater reliance on government violence and coercion to “solve” problems, compromise or cooperation become more and more unlikely as the polarization between individualist and collectivist ideology becomes a “cold civil war”; voters are bribed with government promises to subsidize their concerns away, which inevitably requires higher taxes and even higher national debt, polarizing the nation even more as concerns about the solvency of the economy and the legitimacy of the system on the whole begin to send waves of anxiety and anger throughout the populace. Citizens are distracted from the obvious political corruption and mendacity through the bromide of political circuses, vapid entertainment heavily submerged in socialist ideology, and the corporate and political encouragement to engaged in all forms of hedonism, specifically gluttony and sexual promiscuity, with the destruction of the nuclear family and the epidemc of abortion and single motherhood further destroying social cohesion and trust, promoting even more anger and fear, all of which is naturally exploited by the ruling class towards the achievement of even more power and wealth. The citizenry is also distracted by the wanton and widespread legal double standards which excuse the political and celebrity and corporate classes from everything from child sex trafficking to open murder, whilst the middle class is terrorized by threats of being ostracized, or worse, and called insane conspiracy wackos  for merely pointing this out; and accused of all forms of bigotry for not accepting its “responsibility” to “pay its fair share”, which is simply code for accepting and embracing neo-Marxist ideology and in particular socialist economics. The lower class, whilst being imprisoned in massive numbers for the slightest and most anodyne of infractions, and imprisoned in general in ghettos of institutionalized poverty and nihilism, is used to threaten the middle class…the ruling class will have no choice, you see, but to unleash the hordes of lower/working class “victims” who are just itching to exact revenge upon their middle class slavemasters—the middle class being the bourgeoisie root of all “evil” in the world according to the Marxist collectivists who increasingly own the narrative, and this as the media becomes little more than a State Ministry of Propaganda . Borders are purposefully left porous, as a tacit lower class invasion is permitted by the State, terrorizing the middle class into greater submission. The celebrity, corporate, and political classes are of course safe and sound behind the thick, high walls, bristling with guns, of their ivory towers, so such threats and invasions against the middle class come often and easy, as those who wield power rest imminently secure. After all, worst case scenario, they can always flee to Costa Rica or some other foreign haven, and access their tax-free offshore accounts to finance their lavish lifestyles until kingdom come.

But understand, again, that because the State functions entirely from the ethics of legality and not morality, it does not acknowledge that tyranny is possible for it; it does not accept that its Authority can ever be authoritarian. For the State, theft, murder, and false witness do not exist. It cannot steal from, kill, or lie to that which it owns according to the metaphysical principles upon which it established. Remember, according to the State’s collectivist metaphysics, all of Reality is to be brought into accordance with the Collective Ideal, which is the absolute source of Reality, and the means of doing this and thus the practical (material) incarnation of this Ideal is the State. In other words, the collective Ideal is Reality, and the State’s job is to organize it so that it reflects this Ideal aesthetically. And the “perfect” aesthetics are achieved by making a “perfect” Reality, epistemologically, ethically, and politcally, all beginning with the metaphysics.

The State machinations of this undertaking may to us look like murder, theft, deception, incompetence, and corruption…and in fact they are (for the metaphysics of individualism are perfectly rational, and never contradict, which makes them True and Good; Collectivist metaphysics are thus necessarily False and Evil…and their near infinite rational inconsistency on every level bears this out). But to the State—the ruling class and their corporate/celebrity bedfellows—murder, theft, et al is merely the necessary discharging of its collectivist obligation; the perfunctory disposing of its own naturally-entitled property. Why do you think Eichmann was so blasé about his complicity in the mass extermination of Jews in Nazi Germany? Because as far as he was concerned, it was merely an administrative task…like filing records, date entry, and keeping the books. He said as much himself.  And, to be frank, he was being entirely consistent with the metaphysics which he accepted as absolute and irreducibly true. The State technically owned the Jews and everyone else, in his mind…and therefore it can’t be murder then. After all, the State has a right to do what it wants with what it rightly owns.

And by the by, all of this is true for the Church, which defines God implicitly as a Collective Ideal which it exists to discharge upon the earth by force and threats of hell and torment and excommunication. God cannot sin, you see, not fundametally becaue he is wholly rational and considers all men to be their own agents, entitled to their own lives and property and choice…in other words, not because He is moral. But because He is the Collective Ideal…He IS everything, and therefore owns everything. Thus, there is no such thing as murder, theft, et al for God. It’s all His legal right to exercise the legal ownership of His property. And the Church is His Presence on earth. So to those of you who think they shall find refuge in a some kind of “moral theocracy”, think again. “Moral theocracy” is a contradiction in terms.

END

A Return to Traditional American Values Leads Us Right Back Here

Authority, collectivism, collectivist metaphysics, Ethics, forced compliance, government, individualism vs collectivism, Space, Violence, Voluntarism, , , , , ,

In the midst of the wailing laments over the spiraling socialism and (concordant) growing corruption of the United States government, you will hear many on the right desperately keening about the need to return to “traditional American values”. Now, I do admit that this can mean many things, and it’s not always clear what exactly—and frankly, I’m not sure those yearning for these values really know, either—but I will define them as I generally understand them; and I submit that this is as accurate a summary as one can reasonably expect.

Traditional American values are almost always a political reference to individualism (often “rugged individualism”) and small government. They are the idea that men should pretty much be left alone to work out their own existence for themselves, mostly free from coercive external governing authority, and becoming collectively involved only with the “nobler” associations of church (and this means primarily the Protestant Church) and family and local government, and these only insofar as they can be used to affirm and promote the future dissemination of  individualism and small government.

Now, apart from the uncomfortable and specific contradictions running through these ideals (e.g. Protestant orthodoxy in all its denominational iterations teaches the most anti-individual and anti-liberty doctrines in the world and in world history: Total Depravity and Original Sin). I will concede that these values are ostensibly virtuous and well-intentioned. The problem, however, is that when examined, or when the intentions and understanding of those wishing to return to them are examined, they collapse under the weight of a pervasive and intractable irrationality.

The first question begged is: How will a return to traditional American values not inevitably bring us right back to where we are now? In other words, hindsight reveals that the evolution of traditional American values has placed our nation in the here and now, where it stands as an empire and a culture in embarrassing decline, exhausting itself in an ongoing carnival sideshow of neo-Marxist ideology, ethical relativity, group-think, collectivist bigotry, newspeak, narcissistic and psychotic political officials who see the State as merely an Authoritarian Pez dispenser (which is inevitable as State Power is an absolutely irresistible carrot and stick to such personalities), political gangsterism, man-babies, female entitlement, corporate fad-ism, crony capitalism, marxist feminism, junk science (like “gender fluidity’…and pretty much all social sciences), welfare, morbid obesity, hedonism, stupidity, and cowardice.

But no, they will say.  Traditional American values are not an evolution…they are not a political doctrine. They are a way of thinking about man and his existence and the fundamental philosophical notions of freedom and political equality. These values are the philosophical foundation of our nation, they are not products of that nation.

I aggressively disagree. I do not accept that traditional American values are a-political, or a philosophy which informs government rather than a political expression of government. On the contrary, they are the very essence of politics and government. The founding of this nation is utterly and unavoidably the foundation of this nation–state. Government is the very core of America, and thus it is the very core of American identity, and thus it is the very core of traditional American values. And if government is the very core of America and American identity, then the governing of Americans is thus the very core of America and American identity. And this being the case, there are no traditional American values until an American government is established. Traditional American values are a product of how Americans are governed. The idea that traditional American values don’t have anything fundamentally to do with government and politics is a joke. They have everything to do with politics and government. They don’t exist, having no relevance nor efficacy, until after there is a government in place to manifest them collectively—because the collective practical implementation of ideals is what the government does. That’s the whole damn point. And that’s really what “traditional American values” are: collectivist ideals. And without the practical manifestation of these collective ideals there is no America, and thus there are no Americans, and thus no American values. The values remain infinitely abstract and irrelevant; pointless and meaningless. Thus they are not values at all. They are ethereal mist, doing nothing, and being nowhere.

So traditional American values are inexorably corollary to American government, and government, or governing, is objectively and empirically an evolutionary process. It starts as A and evolves to B, and this is because society changes. The young grow old; the old die; new citizens are born; technology morphs and grows; industry is moblized and changes the landscape and culture; products are created and used and disposed of; capital is made and lost; wars are fought and won or lost; and all of this changes people, changes desires and objectives and ambitions, changes the very makeup of society, racially, sexually, politically, intellectually, and economically; new politicians are elected, new laws are made and passed, national identity shifts, and thus what it means to be an “American” shifts. And what were once just “American values” one day become “traditional American values”, which are somehow and by some mysterious means utterly divorced from the the “current American values”; or as the right thinks of them, un–American values. But the reality is that you do not get the latter without the former. You don’t get today’s “un-American values” except by way and evolution of “traditional American values”.  Traditional American values are not a national philosophy…they are not foundational and underwriting presuppositions concerning the nature of man and reality, which are uniquely and distinctly and infinitely American, as though being “American” has some kind of fixed and absolute and fundamental meaning and essence which is completely distinct from government and governing as it is today, and as it was yesterday, and as it will be tomorrow. Traditional American values are ideals which imply a State which implies a government which implies the evolution of that government.

Since traditional American values are at root state-affirming ideals, they collectivize individuals as an expression of national collective identity. We can speak of “rugged individualism” all we want but individualism really has nothing to do with it. And national collective identity is dictated by government to the people who are in turn obligated by threat of incarceration, sanction, theft, and death to its authority to compel them to the inexorably and unavoidably collectivist “American Ideal”…or “American values” which the government, and the government alone, has the legal and thus ethical (as legality is its own ethical premise) right to manifest upon the earth, no matter what any given individual thinks or wants, ever.

Therefore, appealing to traditional American values can be quite simply and quite rationally defined as whatever values the state happens to be implicitly and/or explicitly dictating at the moment. And currently our American values happen to be the values of violence, stupidity, irrationality, neo-Marxist authoritarianism, and cultural stultification. Our traditional American values are manifest as these things today. It could only have ever been so, and only ever shall be again if we somehow return to them.

*

Now, let’s supppose for the sake of argument that traditional American values are in fact an appeal to some kind of rugged individualism…some kind of philosophy which lauds the egalitarianism of the soul, the efficacy of the will, the right of man to life, liberty, and property; the practical utility of the mind, the ability of man to apprehend truth and good and to efficaciously act upon them of his own volition, and cooperation over coercion. Let’s suppose that they exist somewhere beyond the State, beyond government, absolute and meaningful in and of themselves, needing no authoritarian incarnation to grant them practical utility upon the earth. Yes, let’s just say that that’s all true. The question then is this: Should we ever return to these traditional American values, how can we ensure that our nation won’t end up right back here, smack in the middle of the marxist circus tent revival of violent leftist ideology?

The answer is that you can only do this one of three ways. And none of them I submit has anything to do with the America that was founded in Philadelphia in 1776, or 1787, whichever you prefer.

The first is that we use the power of the State to compel people by force to submit to traditional American values. Put simply, we give them no choice. Submit to the values or die.

However, this undermines the essence and integrity of traditional American values, which are seen as elevating and venerating individualism, self-reliance, responsibility, moral choice, and liberty. Not that hypocrisy ever strays too far from those espousing a return to traditional values. I personally know of several right-wing voters who don’t bat an eye at the idea of compelled school prayer, compelled recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance (a collectivist propaganda yarn if there ever was one), compelled standing for the National Anthem, criminalizing the desecration of the American flag, public dress codes, compelled voting, compelled Christian education, compelled church membership, and significant restrictions on public expression and private businesses. So, it seems that “traditional American values”, when defined a certain way, are much more Authoritarian than is comfortable to admit. The idea of compelling people under threat of government violence isn’t as far-fetched or unthinkable with respect to “liberty” and “rugged individualism’ as we might believe.

At any rate, then, the forced submission of citizens to traditional American values is one way we could ensure a more “traditional” society, I suppose. Of course, only a fool would think that a fascist America, which is what this would be, is any better than a communist one. So I  suggest we can throw away this option, as it isn’t particularly rational nor realistic. It’s certainly a way we could look at things—legal enforcement of values is not in and of itself an arcane idea…hell, that’s the whole point of the State, and is why and how moral ethics are ultimately subordinated to legal ethics, which is a primary reason why nations inevitably collapse. But in light of the common meaning of what it means to hold to traditional American values, it’s relatively safe to call the statist enforcement thereof a bald-faced hypocrisy. To compel people by threat and force to obey, as opposed to choose, traditional American values, gives us an America that is anything but “traditional”. So…option one is out.

Option two is to go in the completely opposite direction, and that means to eschew the legal, coercive enforcement of values entirely. We don’t have the lazy option of the State bailing us out when we fail to convince our neighbors to accept our values and commit to them. All we have is reason, persuasion, empirical evidence, and leading by example. That’s it. No guns. No bombs. No gallows. No gulags. No guillotines. No firing squads. No ovens. No crosses. No chicken-shit cop-out dick-swinging threats of jack boots and jumpsuits. Just you and your powers of persuasion, alone in the arena of public discourse.

Go get ‘em, tiger.

In other words, we reject the State as having anything to do with our values. If we want rugged individualism, we cannot appeal to a giant, nuclear-armed Collective Authority, bristling with prisons and stuffed with ruling class greed and conflicts of interest. If we want to promote liberty, we cannot appeal to the Authority-Submission construct of government, which includes the comandeering and redistribution of labor and property in order—and this singularly so—to promote obedience to the State (via the artifice of Law) and the elevation of the ruling class, and to specifically suppress the exercise individual choice, which is the exact opposite of liberty. We must implore our fellow man to resist the slide into the abyss of today’s neo-Marxist hellscape by asking them to choose freedom over force; individual choice over forced compliance.

These “traditional American values” then have absolutely nothing to do with the government, and thus nothing really to do with the nation-state, and thus nothing to do with America per se. They don’t have anything to do with political representation, the law, “free and democratic” elections, or voting. They have nothing to do with asking people to vote to give the State legal Authority to force those with opposing values to comply with our own. For that is tyranny, and tyranny is not a traditional American value. These values are defined apart from the governing body that declares who and who is not a legitimate American, as a citizen.

Yet this seems to be quite anathema to what it means to hold to traditional American values, which implies a civic duty to vote for things that are considered “traditionally” American. So, all that being the case, option two really won’t get us back to traditional American either. I have never heard of “traditional American values” which did not recognize the need for the nation–state, and thus the government, of America.

Option three is to return to the original, relatively diminutive size of our government as it was first established. We shrink it back down to its minarchist roots, with just a skeleton crew and basic libertarian functions—police, military, courts.

And then what? We just hope for the best? I mean, we already had that, and look where we are now? So how do we ensure that the evolution from a government which is small, well-defined, and unobtrusive to one that is massive, elusive, subjective, militaristic, sadist, and selfish doesn’t repeat itself?

Well, we can encourage people to exercise their free and independent will, emphasizing choice over legal command, which is the only thing that will ever prevent the intrusion of State power into every facet of human existence. We can appeal to utterly anti-government and purely voluntarist ideals such as individual morality, personal responsibility, cooperation, negotiation, and a devotion to the ethics of morality rather than legality.

But…this is simply a reiteration of option two, which voids the state, and thus implies no government, not a shrinkage of it.

So what else? I guess we encourage people to vote for politicians who will use the hammer of the State to force our political enemies to comply with our values; to bend their commie knees to our will, under pain of death and prison…or worse. But this makes us no better than our commie enemies, and accelerates the rise of authoritarianism in government, getting us nowhere near our traditional American values…and is simply a reiteration of option one.

The point here I am making is that option three gets us nowhere except back to options one or two, and as I have already explained, neither of these finds us returning to traditional American values.

So let’s just be honest with ourselves; stop engaging in political and philosophical kindergarten, and bluntly confront the truth. Because the sooner we accept it, the sooner we can recognize our real options, and pull our heads out of the ether of fantasyland and look to actual solutions, instead of childishly placing our hopes in the illusory utopia of yesteryear’s bucolic America with its dewy traditions.

There is no going back!

You and I both know this, and we always have, deep down. The return to “traditional American values” is a myth, because “traditional American values are themselves a myth.

Any “return” to “traditional American values” simply brings us right back to where were are…right here, right now, as it is, as you look around and see it. Because there is no such thing as “traditional American values”…there are only rational ideas and irrational ideas. Period. There is no grand American Tradition that will come down from heaven in a fiery pillar and save us from the avarice of leftists and their godforsaken dystopia of neo-Marxist death squads and overlords. The tyranny that we fear is a tyranny which was with us when this nation was founded, because it is a tyranny which is endemic and implicit in all governments because it is the very essence of government. All governments become tyrannical because government is tyranny, because government is Authority, and Authority is force. My philosopher compadre John Immel said this—“authority is force”—and it continues to be the single greatest truth of government, ever, anywhere, of all time. It is, perhaps, and certainly as far as I am concerned, the only thing you really need to know about the subject,

As hard as it may be to admit it, tyranny is the only possible outcome of the American politcal premise. Government, no matter how small, will grow into tyranny as a child grows into a man. Because fundamentally there is no difffence. At root they are the exact same thing.

END

Why Checks and Balances Won’t Stop Government Tyranny

Authority, collectivism, collectivist metaphysics, Determinism, forced compliance, government, individualism vs collectivism, law, Metaphysics, Violence, , , ,

Government is tyrannical by nature. It doesn’t evolve to tyranny, it is tyranny from its very foundation; and this tyranny follows it to the inevitable societal collapse which is tyranny’s conclusion. Government is authority, authority is force, force means forced compliance, forced compliance nullifies choice as a fundamental means of social interaction, nullified choice means a cancellation of man’s will, a cancellation of will makes thought irrelevant, irrelevant thought nullifies human agency, nullified human agency implies metaphysical determinism, determinism nullifies morality, nullified morality as a function of metaphysical determinism implies the politics of “survival of the fittest” (where politics is taken in the philosophical sense to mean how humanity interacts with itself as a function of accepted ethics), survival of the fittest implies the perpetuation of those with superior power by which to command, control, and/or adapt to their environment, superior power always belongs to the State—that’s the whole idea. Otherwise, the government doesn’t govern…it suggests. It negotiates. But ”suggestion” isn’t “law”.

This is basically the sum and substance of it, in a nutshell.

*

Government isn’t people, government is a metaphysical principle. It is a premise of Determinism—man navigates reality not fundamentally by volition (by thought and action), but by determinative forces compelling him outside of his own conscious existence. Man’s sense of individualism is a false front; a liar. Man from birth lies to himself, according to his nature, which has corrupted him by giving him a sense of “Self”. This sense of Self compels man to always act contrary to the truth, which is that the Self is a lie, and that reality is something outside of this Self, which utterly determines all he is and does…which of course doesn’t include “him” at all. So, because man is born with the “original sin” of Self-Awareness and a natural inclination to defer to his own individual thoughts, ideas, and choices, which always and necessarily act contrary to the truth of determinist reality, he must be controlled. He must be forced. He must be governed. The idea that man could ever live a categorically voluntary existence away from and irrespective of some manifestation of supreme coercive Authority is anathema, by definition, to government, then. Freedom, which can only ever really mean freedom from a fundamentally compelled existence, is inexorably exclusive of government. It simply must be. Even at mere face value this has to be apparent to us. The exercise of individual will according soley and utterly to the volition of the individual is a complete contradiction of the very essence of the State. This is arrant; it is obvious. Any attempt to fuse freedom and force is a rejection of reason and an appeal to madness. And this is itself nothing but tyranny.

*

Again, government isn’t people. Again, government is a metaphysical principle. And again, it is determinist, which means it is collectivist (the inexorable link between collectivism and determinism is pretty obvious; and I have addressed it several times before, so I won’t do it now). Government transcends individuals at the metaphysical root, like all manifestations of collectivism (churches, tribes, gangs, appeals to “objective” class/racial/sexual distinctions, science-as-philosophy, cultural movements, fads and trends, and on and on). And this is why “checks and balances”, while ostensibly an infusion of sanity and sobriety into governmental polity, cannot serve as any kind of truly effective hinderance to the tyranny of the state. You see, whether you gather coercive power into the hands of only one man, or you spread it across a vanguard, and separate that vanguard by distinct institutions and offices, and regulate the terms by which this power may be consolidated with a complicated paradigm of rules and benchmarks, the very fact that it is coercive power we are dealing with makes all of it a mere ceremonial spectacle. Coercive power, being the fundamental and only really meaningful and efficacious aspect of government, cannot be converted into liberty by sticking it in a blender with constitutional hoops and hurdles and pressing “purée”. Freedom is freedom from coercion. Nothing more. Nothing less. Period. Yet the governmental deals exclusively in force…that is its only real currency. Anything else is window dressing; pretend play; an attempt to excuse the inevitable violence and perfidy of the ruler, and to sooth or mask the misery of the ruled. But the truth is that the square peg of  humanity will never be forced into the round hole of government without crushing them both.

*

The operative and ultimate moral issue with government is a priori coercive (violent) ruling power. It’s not about who happens to wield that power, or how many hurdles—“checks” and “balances”—are ostensibly erected in his path before he can exercise ruling power absolutely. Those hurdles are a function of the very same appeal to authority which gives him his ruling power in the first place. Ruling authority cannot be checked because it is fundamental…it is not merely a facet of government, it is government. The foundational principle of Authority establishes the government, the government doesn’t just happen to wield authority as though its power to compel behavior by violence and threats of violence is merely tangential to some greater munificent purpose. The ability to use superior violent power to compel “right” thinking and behavior isn’t a “last resort”, as though the primary purpose of governing Authority is negotiation and compromise and/or the encouragement thereof! See how foolish this is, and yet we all believe that it is indeed somehow the case, even though it defies simple, remedial logic. The necessity of power to point a government gun in someone’s face to get him to do the “right” thing specifically because he is born a rebel and a sinner to reality, itself, and is utterly insufficient to existence if left to his own mind and will, has about as much to do with compromise and negotiation as a ham sandwich has to do with Shakespeare. Getting the “right” ruler or establishing the “right” checks and balances simply cannot change the fundamental purpose and essence of government:

to govern.

And governing is forcing, and forcing is controlling, and controlling, fully and properly realized, is tyranny.

The problem is not getting the right checks and balances in place. And it’s not who rules, but it is simply the fact that they rule at all. Once it is accepted by metaphysical principle that man must be ruled, he will be sacrificed to the State. There is no way to avoid the inevitable conclusion of the premise which demands the governing of individuals in order to integrate them into the “Truth”, which is always merely some insipid and tangential collectivist Ideal (the Nation, the Tribe, the Race, the Chosen Ones, the People, the Workers, the Good, the Just…almost anything can pass for an Ideal).

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Finally, I’d like to address the bromide—the political trope—which is the notion that the ruling class (politicians and other government officials) should somehow be expected to follow the same laws as everyone else. This…is utter and complete nonsense. It hasn’t happened and it will never, ever happen, because it has about the same practical existence as the tooth fairy and the same practical efficacy as a black highlighter. It is foolishness. It’s a contradiction. It’s a fantasy. It is a rank contradiction to government’s essence at its very heart to obligate the ruling class to the laws by which they govern everyone else. By definition if the ruling class is also ruled (and this, impossibly, of themselves) then the ruling class is not the ruling class! And if the ruling class isn’t the ruling class then who is? In other words, if the ruling authority isn’t the ruling authority then by what means can law be established as actually binding upon the men it is supposed to govern? And if it’s not binding then how is it law? Law depends on someone to force men to obey it, regardless of whether men want to obey or not, or choose to obey or not. But if law is to be chosen by men, not forced upon them, then it’s not law. It’s suggestion…negotiation, voluntarism. And this is not governing, it’s merely cooperating.

People think that somehow choosing rulers via “free elections” is the same thing as choosing to be obligated to law.

It isn’t.

The law demands that rulers rule, and that’s what they will do, regardless of who they are, how they were elected, or who voted for them and why. The law is not a function of those “freely elected”, but the “freely elected” are a function of the law, and the law is force, not choice.

Authority—the ruling class—cannot be obligated to itself . And it is foolishness to assert that the ruling class should also be ruled like the rest of us. The ruling class cannot be both and simultaneously the ruled and the ruling. Men are part of one or the other, they are never one and the same. This is merely a contradiction which obscures the truth.

END

A Fulcrum is Not for Balance but Imbalance: Why government implies destabilization

Authority, collectivism, collectivist metaphysics, forced compliance, government, Identity, individualism vs collectivism, Man's Ability, Metaphysics, Violence, Voluntarism, , , ,

The seesaw…a common playground fixture; we’ve all been on one in our youth. It’s a long, often wooden, plank, with a handle on either end, resting on a fulcrum a couple of feet off the ground. Two children sit opposite each other on either end, ideally being of comparable weight, and they proceed to rock the plank up and down on the fulcrum. And this is the entire point of the thing. The fact that either end of the plank does not remain stationary is the purpose of the seesaw. The plank, you see, is not suppposed to be balanced…hence the fulcrum at the center. If the intention was to balance the plank, the fulcrum would be removed and the plank secured to a fixed point. But you cannot do this and still have a seesaw. That is, you cannot balance a plank when the very asserted and accepted fundamental nature and purpose of it is to be imbalanced.

And this contradiction—a fulcrum which is irrationally and contrarily repurposed as a balance mechanism—is a good metaphor for government. Government’s ostensible intended purpose—to bring balance to conflicting groups—is contrary to its use and observable efficacy, and this article will examine why.

The government is a fulcrum which must pivot, but is somehow—for some not too terribly rational reason which is predicated upon some not too terribly rational metaphysics—intended to bring balance (and I speak primarily of Western democracies, like the United States) to either ends of a “plank” (humanity) which is described as being in perpetual conflict (imbalance) with itself according to its nature. The point of the State then, it seems, is to balance that which cannot actually be balanced. By bringing the plank of humanity then to the fulcrum of government, we in fact focus and accentuate the conflicts endemic to humanity as a general function of humanity’s very existence, with disasterous consequences.

The overt and objective incompetency of the government to its purpose—balance—is a clear verification of this. Government fails at balance because of the metaphysics which underwrite its very existence. Man cannot be made passive, moral, or equable, because of the root insufficient nature of his existence, experienced wholly through his own singular consciousness, to apprehend reality. Man possesses an inexorable sense of individual Self which is in endless conflict with the “truth” of a collectivist reality…be this reality defined according to scientific determinism, divine/religious determinism, agnostic nihilism, or simply the depressing endless smorgasbord of politcal-economic theories which incorporate the State.

This contradiction—government which must by its own admitted purpose and presence act as a fulcrum, thus accentuating and focusing the rank vagaries of inexorable capricious and irrational human nature, but is intended as a fixed point of balance—yes, this contradiction, and the constistent stubborn attempts of man to appeal to contradiction as a means of organizing reality, is why the government fails again and again. Healthcare, welfare, education, social integrity and harnmony, equanimity, liberty, international tranquility, justice, transparency…all of the foibles of man it is intended to set right and steady it can only fuck up to the point of mass destruction. It hones and focuses the conflicts—the imbalances—of mankind by implicitly affirming them as ipso facto and then elevating them to the level of supreme ruling Authority, weilding supreme destructive violence as its method of practical implementation. You look at lady (centralized) justice and you see the blindfold and your hopes are dashed as you realized that the fact that she is blinded isn’t because she is fair but because it doesn’t matter. Her “justice” will only affirm the root and infinite injustice of man’s nature. She is blind to what he IS because the death of man—his absence from reality—is the only possible outcome of government in the end. The only way government “balances” the chaos of human existence is by elevating the chaos to the point where the species implodes in on itself and takes governemnt with it. There is great “balance” in the neverending blackness of humanity’s absence, and by extension, the absence of government. The State is the square peg to mankind’s round hole, and the government can only stubbornly force them together, persistently so, until both are ground into dust.

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For the past…well, several millennium, humanity has decided (for reasons we shall not address here) that the State—the formal installation of a supremely violent coercive Authority—is the ideal way of bringing balance and equanimity to all manner of broadscale human conflict; and this conflict due to an inexorable, fixed, and unchangeable human insufficiency to its own existence (its degeneracy into self-annihilation absent someone or something forcing it into “right” thinking and behavior). And yet, for millennium after millennium humanity has remained blind to the slagheaps of contradiction which plague this philosophy like boils. The infinitely irreconcilable difference that men have with one another, which means the inevitable destruction of the race on the whole, are nevertheless sought to be mitigated by an Absolute Authority on High. God is not a reliable Authority because his practical manifestation on earth in realtime is too sporadic, of course, and so men establish the State to serve as God’s proxy—his incarnate Authority on earth, if you will. And we need not necessarily define God according to specifically religious terms, because what he is, really, is simply an Ideal, you see. A collective Ideal to which all men must be categorically submitted and subordinated. They cannot do it themselves, collectivist metaphysics tells us,  because of their infinitely individual perspective (their singular consciousness and volition). Thus men are forced by the violence of the State to accept the dictates of the Ideal, whether it’s “God” or the “gods”, or the “People”, or the “Workers”, or the “Race”, or the “Nation”, or “Diversity”, or whatever…it doesn’t really matter. The Collective Ideal is simply a superficial abstract placeholder for the practical Authority of the ruling class—that is, the Government.

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The intention of the government (particularly in Western democracies) is to serve as a fixed point upon which to bring balance and stability to the inexorable social conflicts endemic to humanity according to humanity’s metaphysical identity (and this according to collectivist philosophy); but because of the inexorability of these conflicts due to the fact that they are a product of man’s absolute nature, the government in practicality becomes not a fixed point, but a fulcrum upon which to focus and acutely assert the imbalances of human existence. This magnifies and  raises the destructive consequences of the conflict by giving competing groups a position of supreme violent coercive power (the State) over which to fight and to use as a giant hammer to smash opposition. By manifesting as a fulcrum instead of the intended anchor, the government actually concedes the inexorability, inevitability, and necessity of man’s self-destructive and nihilistic nature, and wholly surrenders to the reality of it, and thus brings about the very destruction of mankind it is intended to subvert.

The rational foible of the philosophy of government is rather shocking, truth be told.

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The governemnt becomes the hub of human conflict…an intersection where competing groups will meet and are made to to adhere to rules which dictate which side shall yield the right of way and how often and to what degree. Thus, we can already see the failure of the notion of “government-as-balance” or “government-as-anchor”. The basic practical application of the State is not to eradicate the differences between competing groups—for if that were possible according to the prevailing (collectivist) metaphysics then government would be unnecessary in the first place. On the contrary, government is declared indispensable to human kind precisely because humanity is said to be so invariably and utterly contentious according to its most fundamental essence. There is no humanity absent conflict, that is. The two are metaphysically corollary. If men were capable in and of themselves (that is, absent coercive Authority) of reconciling differences and ending conflicts, let alone eradicating them altogether, then there would be no point to installing a supreme coercive Authority to force men to get along—which of course their nature prevents them from doing anyway. (That  man’s nature categorically precludes any lasting conflict resolution is a collectivist assumption which one cannot be reminded of enough.)

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The government is intended to reconcile differences between competing groups by acting somehow as an instrument of compromise where all groups can be heard and represented and differences resolved without having to resort to and experience the mass violence and death which must otherwise inevitably accompany such differences. Yet herein are made two critical  errors of logic which undermine the whole endeavor and validate the common proverb that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”.

First, we underwrite government with the metaphysics that declare man incapable of compromise and conflict resolution according to his most basic and primary nature, thus destining government to fail in its stated objective even before it begins. We can use all manner of authoritative force we want, and we do, yet man can never change his nature any more than a fish can change into a battleship. The force we bring to bear upon man can only lead inexorably to his destruction at the hands of the State, as the eradication, or the absence, of man is the only real solution to the metaphysical problem his existence presents. All governments imply a “final solution” you might say, then, and this solution is carried out to various degrees depending on the stage of evolution a given State happens to find itself in.

Second, we believe that somehow an institution of supreme Authority can have a real interest in compromise and balance; or have any real interest at all beyond that of its own Authority…Authority being, in fact, merely the practical incarnation of a monolithic collectivist Ideal (the People, the Workers, the Nation, the Tribe, the Race…etc.). The State is not an instrument of compromise, but of force. For that is what Authority is. Authority is force, and compromise is the very antithesis of force.

The governent is not a solution to human conflict, it is conflict institutionalized. It is a place where competing groups go to seize power and then use that power to crush their adversaries with the most violently efficacious means man can possibly devise. The State is not an andedote to the chaos of human nature, it is a concession of it, and the implicit acceptance of the idea that man, because his mind and will and his reason are fundamentally at odds with reality, must be annihilated in order for peace to be possible.

Not that there will be anyone around to see it and define it as such.

The nature of government is rank, crass, and uncompromising coercive force which will bring about the destruction of man according to his predestined existential failure due to his insufficient nature. Period. Man is the plank with opposing ends; government is the fulcrum upon which the opposition and imbalance is accentuated. Man’s insufficient nature and the State work together to manifest perfectly the failure of man to his own existence according to the prevailing collectivist metaphysics.

The government is the fulcrum, and remember this well: If the board ever stopped pivoting there would be no use then for governent. And thus for those of you who demand that the State bring balance to the people? Well, the government wouldn’t do it even if it could.

That’s it’s nature.

END

Contradiction Cannot Correct the Excesses of Government

Authority, Epistemology, government, individualism vs collectivism, Metaphysics, Violence, Voluntarism

Lately I have been watching what are known as “first amendment audit” videos. These are videos where a person or a couple of people go out with cameras and video recorders and take photos and video of public buildings…anything from water treatment facilities to post offices, FBI buildings, police stations, and oil refineries. They interact copiously with law enforcement officers and their intention is to educate them on the right of citizens to monitor government officials and their businesses in the course of these officials performing their public duties.

Now, it is obvious to anyone with even a remedial understanding of the meaning a government “of, by, and for the People” that this is not only perfectly legal but also utterly necessary. History has shown us that a government which operates away from the watchful eyes of the public it is supposed to serve tends to grow fat with corruption, vampire-like with blood lust, and irredeemably addicted to power.

Of course we hear a million times that “in this day and age” [of terrorism] the government cannot be too careful nor too diligent in the protection of itself for the sake of its citizens, and so the legal right to monitor the government in public must be heavily qualified, if not occasionally curtailed. Yes photography and videography is legal, but it’s not wise, they say…and I actually heard a cop say essentially this to a cameraman in one of the videos—“Just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.” And what I find so shocking is the fact that not only is this statement so patently false with respect to citizen oversight of government, but this whole line of argument is nothing more than a pretense to the suspension of the first amendment whilst claiming that the suspension shall be IN SERVICE to the first amendment. In other words, the argument is that the government must strictly control the exercise of the first amendment in order that it can protect the people in order that they may continue to live freely, and by “freely” we can presume that this means (in part) to exercise the first amendment.

Do you see the twisted logic here?

This doublespeak is a recipe for tyranny…and though it is shocking it’s not surprising. As I have argued dozens and maybe even hundreds of times on this blog, the premise which underwrites government necessitates that government MUST INEVITABLY become tyrannical. There can be no other outcome; for you will get nothing less than tyranny from a premise which says that the only way to ensure a moral society is to compel men by violence and threats of violence into right thinking and behavior (ethical existence) via a centralized Authority tasked with bringing about some collectivist Utopian Ideal (e.g. The People, Equality, Freedom, Social Justice, Economic Justice, God’s Truth, the Nation, the Workers, the Tribe, the Culture, Diversity, the Coroporation, etc. etc.).

In a “day and age” wherein the world becomes more dangerous for a free nation like the United States (arguably used to be), the solution to whatever problems are faced is not less freedom, but MORE freedom. It is PRECISELY at a time like this when citizens should become INCREASINGLY engaged in overseeing their government, because they understand that it is the habit and the nature of governement to exploit crisis in order to expand its power. Government, like a roaring lion, actively and relentlessly seeks ANY excuse to devour the freedom of the citizen in order that it may indulge its root nature: despotism. This is a FACT, and history is my witness.

I also watched a disturbing video where an off-duty police officer, after a truck driver briefly lost control of his rig and had to perform an emergency evasive maneuver in front of the him, engaged in a fit of road rage whereby this cop chased and terrorized the truck driver for more than 25 miles. Of course the truck driver had no idea that the maniac chasing wildly after him was a cop, as the officer was in his private vehicle and not wearing a uniform, and never showed his badge.

The officer subsequently lied about the situation and brought a completely fabricated charge against the driver of reckless driving and wanton disregard for the public. But because there was absolutely no evidence for this accusation, the charge was dropped and an alternate one for “equipment failure” was submitted instead, which amounted to small fine and no points on the truck driver’s license…but even the “equipment failure” charge was a lie, as the truck had simply struck a bad patch of road and the back end momentarily lost traction and slipped sideways. The fine was literally nothing more than a face-saving exercise for the obviously embarrassed police department. It was also  a “fuck you” to the public in general, I submit. It was a way of saying to us all that if you happen to piss off a cop, on or off duty, for a reason that is entirely false then they will hurt you. Period. You have no redress; you will get no justice. They are the authority, you are the masses. In effect, you are a slave, and they own you. You will NEVER be found innocent if they do not want to find you innocent. If you hurt their pride, you’ll suffer the consequences.

Though the truck driver was found innocent of all charges except for the token “faulty equipment” accusation, which again was nothing more than the police simply refusing to admit their fuck up, the damage had already been done. The mere accusation of reckless driving was enough for this driver to lose his job (which is understandable from the company’s point of view as he specialized in transporting hazardous material); and though the official fine was only $50, the whole affair including lawyers fees and lost work cost him around $2000. The accusing officer retired in good standing with the department and maintains a perfectly clean service record.

Land of the free IF you don’t piss of certain cops, it seems.

Speaking of pissed off cops, let’s get back to the first amendment audit videos. Unfortunately, yet predictably, the vast majority of the time security and the police are woefully unaware of the law that they are supposedly upholding. Even though we do not live in a police state like Nazi German or Stalinist Russia, public photographers are routinely asked to show identification well before any reasonable suspicion of criminal activity has been determined. Photographers are verbally abused, bullied, assaulted, arrested, handcuffed, and thrown in jail on objectively false charges of trespassing, or disturbing the peace, or resisting arrest, or failing to indentify…all manner of false and entirely contrived offenses. And of the dozens and dozens of videos I have watched I have yet to see any ACTUAL violation of the law. None. Not one. Certainly some of the videographers are aggressive and confrontational…clearly they are looking for an altercation. This makes for interesting videos which brings in more views. That makes sense—but I should add that I do not condone this approach. Nevertheless, the fact remains that we live in a society where the freedom of expression means that people are allowed to act like assholes in public. In turn, those of us who reject such personalities are free to act like assholes back, or to ostracize them, or to publicly shame them, or to fight back and/or enlist the police if they get violent. But the State is NEVER justified in making it against he law to be an asshole. A free nation WILL have its assholes…it MUST have its assholes. To regulate assholes out of the public sphere is to criminalize personality, which is to criminalize ideas, which is to criminalize thought, which is the death of the individual, which is the death of freedom, which is the death of the nation.

So here’s a question for you: What happens when the government falls under the control of “pissed off cops”, so to speak. Meaning, what happens when “public service”, which is a natural magnet for narcissists and psychopaths by its very nature, becomes thoroughly saturated with those who wield State Authority in order to satisfy their lust for power, exploit the citizenry for their own gain, and/or merely to feed whatever psychotic craving grabs them at the moment? Indeed, I should add here that, quite frankly, I’m not sure we don’t actually have this already.

What’s the solution? How do you address a government that exceeds the checks and balances of the Constitution because it (inevitably) realizes that the Constitution is utterly dependent upon its own practical authority to wield the force necessary to compel the masses into the right behavior that the Constitution declares and implies? Meaning that absent those in power, the Constitution is less relevant than an dishrag. The Constitution isn’t magic. Absent the practical coercive Authority of the State it’s just a piece of old paper.

Now, I understand already the myriad of responses to this question—what do we do with an irredeemably corrupt government?—which can be  predicted, and all of them can be boiled down to two essential ideas. The first is that the citizens can stage some sort of revolt, perhaps American Revolution style; the second is that they can somehow replace the political class with new members…those who will respect the Constitution and the American people whose rights it exists to validate and ensure.

I’m not really interested in the specific, finer points of each of these solutions to the problem of tyranny. What I want to examine is the underling philosophical premise of them relative to that of the State. That is: what is the root assumption being made about man’s nature and his capacity for and sufficiency to his existence? And the reason why this is so important and so interesting is that within this question resides the most astounding and overt contradiction, a contradiction which has been the bane and the fundamental undoing of the United States since before the ink on the Constitution was dry. For 250 years the United States has been playing a losing game with metaphysical primaries, and now, finally, the wheels are coming off in a most spectacular and terrifying fashion. On the one hand the United States is founded on the enlightenment principle of individual liberty. What this means in summary is that the Constitution acknowledges the sufficiency of man to his own existence; the ability of human will and thus choice to effect moral outcomes and to establish productive social cohesion. In short, man is ABLE, through the exercise of his will, to EXIST. Man is by nature a thinking and thus a necessarily WILLFUL agent, and therefore his natural and most productive state of being is freedom—of life, liberty, and property. FREEDOM, the Constitution implies, is the most efficacious means of ensuring man’s of survival. Man, as an individual, in his natural state, is utterly sufficient to existence. This is why government shall be elected, not appointed by the ruling class; why property and the means of production are privately owned, not loaned to the masses by the State; why terms of governance are voted upon by representatives, not spontaneoulsy dictated to the people and laced with implicit violence; and why men are free to speak their minds up to and including overt and vigorous criticism of the government and its officials. It is because what man thinks actually matters; man’s mind is capable of discerning truth from false hood, and thus good from evil, and therefore is capable of and entitled to a say in how his government behaves and who shall be granted the privilege of running it.

On the other hand, the Constitution ALSO AFFIRMS government. And the metaphycial premise which underwrites government as an entity and renders it an existential ABSOLUTE and a object NECESSITY, and gives notions of its non-existence and lack of necessity the same amount of intellectual credence as most of us would give unicorns and fairies, is the premise which says that man, in and of himself, according ot his nature and residing at the very fundamental core of his being, is utterly INSUFFICIENT to existence; unfit for survival. The pointed necessity of government is the idea that man CANNOT be left alone to exist only unto himself, to and from his own mind, and through his own power to think and to choose and discern and decide between truth and lie, and good and evil. The whole point of government is the metaphysical argument that man simply cannot be trusted to act ethically outside of the auspices  of a supreme coercive Authority which shall DICTATE truth and morality TO him and thereby manifest ethics by FORCE. Authority shall be the purveyor of the LAW (the ethical Standard)…government shall be the Law’s  practical manifestation in the world, and this is the ONLY way to guarantee that man can have any sort of effective, efficacious, and productive existence. Religion calls the great Folly of man’s being which necessitates Authority his “sin nature”; secular philosophy calls it “the will to power”; science calls it “the survival of the fittest”. But they all amount to the same thing: Man cannot  be left alone to decide the terms of his own individual existence. He cannot possibly be expected to live productively and morally and perpetually according to nothing but his own natural capacity. Man must be forced by an external and supremely violent Authority to think and act properly. Government exists PRECISELY because man cannot exist ALONE. in other words, the essential point of the State is to be MAN FOR man.

Think back to the solutions I submitted as the two primary means of rectifying a tyrannical State. Are you seeing the problem? I hope so. Do you see how the contradiction of attempting to synthesize an Individualist Metaphyic (man is sufficient to his own existence) with a Collectivist one (man is INSUFFICIENT to his own existence) creates an insurmountable barrier to any successful resolution of the problem of tyrannny? If man’s nature makes him insufficient to existence absent a coercive authority to compel him into right thinking and behavior, how can he ALSO be sufficient to hold that Authority accountable to a particular ethical standard? If man’s mind and will alone is insufficient to lead a moral and efficacious existence without a government to enable him to do so through its enumeration and codification of “rights” through law and the implementation of that law through force, then how can man claim that his mind and will IS sufficient to ascertain when the government has strayed from its proper duties and needs to be corrected? If man is capable of understanding the difference between right and wrong, and truth and falsehood, to the point where he can tell when his own existence is being violated by the State, AND he is capable of articulating efficacious methods of seeking and acheiveing redress for that violation, then he clearly DOESN’T NEED GOVERNMENT IN THE FIRST PLACE. That is, the fundamental philosophical premise by which the legitimacy of government is established is contradicted by the claim that man has a right and the inherent ability to either terminate his relationship with government or to replace the ruling class with new members IF he deems that government is no longer acting in his own best interests.

Conclusion:

Here is an enumerated summary of the intellectual error of the notion that government shall be held accountable to the people; and this is with respect to all of my aforementioned arguments on the subject:

1.Because of man’s natural existential insufficiency, he requires a government to hold him ethically accountable; yet simultaneously man is required  to hold government ethically accountable when he deems it no longer capable or willing to properly discharge its duty of holding HIM accountable. Clearly this is a contradiction; if man is by nature insufficient to ethical living, then he cannot possibly be in a position to hold the government accountable to the ethics which necessarily elude the very existence of himself qua himself. If man IS capable of holding the government ethically accountable, then man does not need to be coerced by government force into ethical living. He is quite capable of recognizing ethics and acting upon them all on his own.

2. Since there is no Authority above the Authority of the State to compel it by force into ethical behavior, then we are left to hope and trust that those in power will CHOOSE to act ethically in order to prevent the State from exceeding its constitutional mandate and becoming tyrannical. (And, no, Christians cannot claim God is the Authority above the State because Christian doctrine makes the State merely an extension of him. It provides NO fundamental metaphysical distinction between God and Government whatsoever). However, the root philosophical argument which legitimizes government is the metaphysical claim that man is by nature entirely insufficient, in and of himself, absent a practical coercive Authority (the government), to truly apprehend ethics and to act upon them. Man’s mind and will are inadequate to effectively manifest the ethics necessary for him to survive; that is, his ability to choose ethical action is corrupted by his nature. Thus, the idea that we must trust men in government to CHOOSE to act ethically—as a hedge against tyranny—is a contradiction of the very root premise of government.

3. Government is to use authoritative force to compel the people into right thinking and behavior because they are incapable of this on their own, by nature. Yet it is claimed that the people have a right to reject the government if they do not like the way it decides to wield its authority. In other words, man has a right to choose how he shall be FORCED to act. This, too, is a contraction.

4. It is claimed that the people possess an Authority which trumps government Authority should government exceed its mandate and become tyrannical. Yet it is clearly a contradiction to claim that those under the authority  of government have authority OVER government. If we claim that government rules by the “will of the people” then we claim that people are willingly choosing to submit themselves to governmental Authority, which is a contradiction, AND we imply that man’s will IS an effective means of manifesting just and ethical living . But if man’s will is sufficient and efficacious to just and ethical living, then there is no point in submititing it to an Authority which exists BECAUSE of the premise which states that man’s will is NOT in fact sufficient nor efficacious to just and ethical living.

END