Category Archives: Voluntarism

Masks for Chaos; Masks for Control: YOU are the real virus

Authority, collectivism, collectivist metaphysics, forced compliance, government, government violence, individualism vs collectivism, Metaphysics, tyranny, Violence, Voluntarism, , ,

If you are diagnosed with coronavirus, you are ordered to isolate; you must stay home and avoid contact with the public. Even if you wear a mask you are not permitted to occupy or traverse a public space. And the reason why you’re not permitted to break your quarantine, even if you’re wearing a mask, is because it’s understood both by the state and their medical advisors that masks do not prevent the transmission of coronavirus (or other microbial respiratory infections for that matter, which is why we’ve never been mass-ordered to wear them in public until now, where certain sociopolitical and economic conditions have altered the state’s approach to public health.)

If masks do not halt the transmission of coronavirus, and this is evidenced by the government demanding that those who have tested positive for the virus be isolated, and cannot breach their quarantine even if wearing a mask, then what is the point of mask laws?

Well, there is of course no medical answer to that question. The answer is purely political.

Some may argue that while masks do not halt the spread of the coronavirus, they reduce it, and this is why mask-wearing is compulsory. But there are a couple of critical problems with this. The first, and I believe simplest, is that if we know that masks do not prevent the transmission of coronavirus, then we simply cannot say that any reduction in coronavirus cases is due to mask-wearing. Again, masks are NOT preventative…this we know. Therefore mask-wearing can never reduce the virus transmission rate to zero. Even if we say that masks are a reductive measure, we know that because they cannot reduce to zero, “reduce” becomes an entirely meaningless concept—infinitely relative. Masks do not prevent the spread of coronavirus, therefore it will spread in spite of mask-wearing laws. Infection rates will continue to increase as a trend, even if people wear masks. Even if the infection rates were to slow, it could never be known with any degree of certainty that this is due to mask-wearing. It would be impossible to rule out all other factors and determine that the decrease in infection rates is because of masks. All we can know for certain is that masks do not prevent the spread of coronavirus. Thus, we cannot make any logical inferences from mask-wearing other than what is ALREADY known, which is, again, that masks do not prevent the spread of coronavirus. And this is why all those boxes of masks you are now seeing piled up  in stores all over the country come with disclaimers on them which read something to the effect of “THIS IS NOT A MEDICAL DEVICE”. Even the mask-making companies know that masks do not prevent the transmission of coronavirus. This should tell you everything you need to know.

Another problem is this: Because the coronavirus by its nature continually spreads (at least until it runs its course through a population and then self-limits, as viruses tend to do, or there is a vaccine), and there is no known cure or objectively preventative measure, then there is always at any given moment an unknown number of coronavirus cases circulating in public. Therefore, even if you introduce a reductive measure, like a mask-wearing law, you can never know to what degree that measure is effective in reducing cases of the coronavirus. You cannot calculate a percentage from a reference number which is unknown. What is 20% of an unknown quantity? 10%? 60%?

Exactly.

My point here is that the laws passed by the state in order to ostensibly mitigate the threat of the coronavirus are based on utterly subjective and un-verifiable assumptions. We are unable to know whether or not any of these laws actually have any relevant effect of any kind, let alone a statistically significant one. We do know that measures like mass lockdowns and the inconsistent and random decisions on what constitutes an “essential business” which may remain open to the public have a degenerative effect on the economy and on social cohesion, and we do know how destructive and lethal this is to people. But the state doesn’t care about that. Because here is the reality: In any crisis, the first and foremost problem as far as the government is concerned is always the people. Always remember that.

At any rate, the fundamental coercive nature of the state makes it impossible for it to ever manage a health crisis like SARS-CoV-2, because it precludes the possibly of gathering any objective data which might be useful in combating it. The state, you see, above all, wants to control…it doesn’t seek to understand, to research, to analyze, to think. It wants to control; it wants to consume. That is its only real purpose. Control and consume the individual Self…incorporate the individual  into the Collective Ideal, whatever that may be (e.g. The People, the Nation, the Race, the Church, the Class, the Culture, etc.). The state is not wisdom, it is not truth, it is not life, it is not health, it is not help, it is not science. It is force, and force is violence. Period.

And here is where we get to the truth of what is happening with respect to the coronavirus—a truth is so inexorable that it defies the intentions of even the most benevolent members of government.

What we assume is that the state wants to destroy the virus and preserve the individual. But this is a lie. The state wants to use the coronavirus, like it uses everything else, to eliminate the individual, who represents the only real and relevant threat to government, The individual exists as a thinking, self-actualizing, self-aware, self-volitional agent whose nature as such challenges the state’s presumption of its own Absolute Authority. The self-aware individual has a nature which precludes a natural willingness or even fundamental ability to be controlled and to have truth dictated to him, and this is an unforgivable offense to the state, whose only existential purpose is to do just that: control and dictate. And this is why government measures to manage the virus are seemingly contradictory, chaotic, and irrational. The state’s actions are completely irrational and meaningless with respect to science and medicine, but they ARE COMPLETELY CONSISTENT with its true and ineluctable objective of exercising absolute authority over the individual; to consume him, control him and thereby destroy him.

*

Only men and women who are free to exercise their fundamental and existential core of self-agency, reason, awareness, and volition can ever engage in actions which will truly eliminate threats to their lives and property, because only by this can a truly objective outcome of such actions be achieved: the preservation of humanity as it invariably and necessarily manifests according to its fundamental nature, which is the conscious, volitional Self. Once the individual is redefined by the state as an abject, existential threat to state power, and humanity’s root nature as a thinking, conscious, self-aware, volitional agent is cast as an aberration and as anathema to reality, not an expression of it, then the resolution of all national crises will necessarily involve the increased restriction and subjugation of individual freedom. For the state, the root of all evil is what it considers the great Lie of the Individual, and this is the audacity of human beings to consider their own singular conscious minds and wills as somehow rational, natural, and entitled to some kind of existential consideration, much less promotion and affirmation. You see, all crises, like pandemics for instance, which are not state artifice, are to the state a reflection of the root evil of the individual. Thus, to control and consume the individual is the solution to EVERY problem, be it a pandemic, or foreign hostility, or domestic rebellion, or natural disaster, or whatever, which is why government responses to these crises always involve an expansion of government power over its citizen. The answer is never more freedom, but AlWAYS less, even when more freedom, such as in the case of the coronavirus, would encourage measures that could actually work FOR the individual, not against him, and thus real scientific data could be collected and efficaciously utilized. In a truly free (that is, a stateless) society, we would not attempt to protect people whilst simultaneously reject the very thing that makes them people in the first place—their conscious Selves; their minds, their wills. Only an institution of pure contradiction  and violence, like the state, does this.

So what do the masks represent?

Fundamentally, they are reminder that you are owned. They are an expression of state power; they are another example of the government’s natural instinct to wage war against its citizens—against the individual; against the Self. The implementation of irrelevant and contradictory legal demands is how the state continues to foment the ethos of the mainstream mass acceptance of absolute Authority. The state does not mitigate or prevent crisis—that is neither its purpose nor its nature. It creates crisis, or exploits it, in order to undermine individual human existence by delegitimizing and marginalizing will and thought and reason, all things which affirm and validate human consciousness, and replaces these things with itself. The governing of human beings is, specifically, the subordination of their individual wills and minds, their very natural SELVES, to the external Authority of the state, which is established as the practical and materially efficacious incarnation of the Collective Ideal, whatever that may be—the labels are endless, but they all mean the same thing in the end: totalitarian chaos and the death of man, leading, ironically, to the utter collapse of the state, itself, until the cycle starts all over again

The state exists to become humanity for it; to own it; to subsume it, and consume it, and this is done though the systematic and persistent creation of chaos, the normalization of crisis, the fomenting of a public mindset of abject fear and mistrust, the initiation of utterly irrational and unrealistic legal obligations and threats, and the dissemination of contradictory ideas (e.g. wear a mask to protect others from the coronavirus; it is not safe to breach isolation even with a mask, because a mask will not prevent the spread of coronavirus). These things are intended to demolish humanity’s ability to rationally interpret and thus manage realty in general, and any given environment. This precludes the individual’s successful and productive association, negotiation, and cooperation with his fellow man. The state exploits the chaos for the sake of its own power. It creates crisis, promotes chaos, wages war against its citizens and the rest of the world (to whatever extent it is able) in order to slake its lust for control and wealth and hedonistic whim, all the while telling itself and the rest of humanity that it is doing a broad, benevolent service for mankind, which, if left ungoverned, uncontrolled, and un-coerced, could never exist on its own merits, because it is existentially insufficient. The consciousness is a charlatan; the will ineluctably foolish and barbaric and self-serving, the truth and morality infinitely elusive to the human character. In short, the state assumes that humanity’s metaphysical nature is utterly useless to existence, and then invents or manipulates scenarios to “prove” its assumption.

The state is an intractable psychopath and an insatiable vampire, and it is in charge of protecting your health.

Good luck with that.

END

The “New Normal” is a Euphemism for Indefinite Lockdown: Why the lockdown will never end

Authority, collectivism, collectivist metaphysics, Determinism, Ethics, forced compliance, government, government violence, individualism vs collectivism, Metaphysics, tyranny, Violence, Voluntarism, , , ,

If you have spent any time reading this blog, it is likely that you have an understanding of the nature of government, and by that I mean: the metaphysical foundations upon which government is built. If you are new to this blog, you may not yet grasp these foundations, so I will summarize them for you now. This will not be a detailed examination of the metaphysics of the State, but for the purposes of this post, it will give you a basic framework as context:

There are basically two kinds of metaphysical archetypes, Individualist and Collectivist. Individualist metaphysics allow for few if any variations of political iterations beyond the type which is pretty well obviously implied by the archetype itself. Almost exclusively Individualist metaphysics imply categorical voluntarism as the political iteration. Individualist metaphysics presume that man is ultimately a function of Himself…that is, His own ability to exist as Self, which implies Self-ownership (one’s body is owned by one’s Self, and therefore so is one’s labor), thus individualist metaphysics simply do not and cannot accommodate the existence of Coercive Authority as a means to organize humanity sociopolitically. There is no such thing as Government or the State within the politics which proceed from individualist metaphysics. All interaction and all value exchange are done ONLY at the level of the individual, and thus categorically voluntary value exchange is the only possible means of ANY value exchange of ANY kind whatsoever. The use of coercive violence to compel behavior does not exist in Individualist philosophy…at least, not a rationally consistent individualist philosophy. Coercive violence IS permitted in the case of preventing or mediating direct violations of individuals, but due to the nature of individualist ethics, this does not constitute a violation of the Self of the one violating his fellow man, and thus it is not a violation of voluntarism. I will not describe the full complexities of individualist ethics here, for obvious reasons.

Collectivist metaphysics on the other hand not only allow for the existence of governments and states but necessitate them, because the politics implied by collectivist metaphysics are rooted in violence (force) in order to compel behavior. In collectivist metaphysics a human being is not a function of himself—his own ability to exist as Self—but is instead a function of some essentially ethereal, fundamentally indescribable, inscrutable determinative force, which ultimately defies human understanding, because its infinite nature is is perfect and absolute whilst man’s is vulgar in comparison…graceless, rudimentary, and starkly finite. This determinative force can come in many iterations, an almost infinite variety or combination of them, really, from a deity, to deities, to mathematical or natural law, to evolutionary forces, biological forces, cosmological forces, ideals based on race, or culture, or national identity, tribalism, social class, economic class, mystical caste systems, etc., etc. It can even come in the guise of individualism, such as the Ideal of The People we see in the United States, where “People” is ostensibly meant to be the collection of INDIVIDUAL citizens, but, due to the a-priori presence of the State, really amounts to nothing more than another collective ideal into which individuals must be compelled by State violence.

Collectivist metaphysics, because they reject the efficacious existence of the individual, necessarily reject the efficacious existence of individual consciousness, and thus they reject the idea that the individual is fundamentally capable of making efficacious use of his volition and choice. Therefore has no ability to behave ethically as ethics are defined according to collectivist metaphysics, and thus he must be compelled by law—where the law is merely the sublimation of State violence…that is, the law gives ethical legitimacy to the State as it commits violations of individuals in the interest of the collective Ideal. Now, in the same way, the collective Ideal is the sublimation of the State, meaning that the Ideal, such as “The People” here in the U.S., doesn’t exist in any real way except as manifest by the State, itself. So the State IS the very tangible existence of the Ideal on earth. Thus, politically, the real point is to SACRIFICE the individual to the State, in service to the collective Ideal (the ideal being the determinative force which created all people and all things in the first place). And this is NEVER seen as some kind of ethical violation on the part of the State against the individual because in collectivist metaphysics, the individual doesn’t actually exist at all, remember? Consciousness, the Self, Will, Choice…these are all illusions at best, products of the unenlightened barbarian who is simply unable to grasp the truth that he is not actually HIMSELF at all. The “sinful nature” of the individual which is his fundamental existential core is his insistence that he EXISTS. Law and the State violence which accompanies and is corollary to Law is used as a means to ultimately eradicate the Self and bring the physical body into line with the Truth, which is the collective Ideal. Once a State is established, the State is all that matters because, metaphysically, the State is all that can be said to actually MEAN anything, BE anything, or DO anything of any practical value because the State is the ONLY legitimate incarnation/representation of the collective Ideal which is a function of the Determinative Force which created everything in the first place.

So what in the hell does any of this have to do with the current lockdown?

I’m glad you asked.

First, let me say that the reason I expend so much blog real estate on discussing the metaphysical roots of the State—the nature of the State—when discussing the coronavirus situation and the lockdown is that these roots of the State are where one shall find a truly meaningful explanation for what is going on in this ostensibly irrational lockdown situation. IF you understand the philosophical fundamentals upon which the State is established, then you can see that what is happening is not merely insanity run amok, or western narcissism and societal fracturing manifesting itself in response to some perceived global existential threat, or even simple political corruption perpetrated by the large number of “bad seeds” we’ve unfortunately elected to represent us. In short, if you understand the true and irreducible WHY, which is the philosophical WHY, then you can truly understand not merely what is happening now, but what will happen next—at least generally. Though what specifically will come next may reveal itself in an unforeseen way, you will readily perceive it as a necessary effect of what came before. And furthermore you will understand what is happening now in the overall context of not only the existence of the State under whose authority you find yourself at present, but the existence of the State since its inception, and indeed, the existence of ALL States. You may not be happy with what is happening, but at least you need not be confounded and frustrated at what seems like rank madness. You will see that all the “madness” actually makes sense, and you will understand that what is happening is really the only thing that could have ever happened.

Now, referring back to the metaphysical roots of government, we now know that based upon how the State defines individuals (as not fundamentally being themSelves and having no legitimate individual existence), that the State cannot actually do anything FOR people, but only TO them. The purpose of the People—the individual people that make up a given nation’s citizenry—is to be subordinated to the collective Ideal, and this means, in practicality, to the State. This is the whole point of law. Individual choice and volition is bypassed and obedience instead is the means by which the ethics of society shall be ultimately realized. What you want is irrelevant; that you OBEY is what matters to government. We can distract ourselves from the truth of our place and purpose with the bromide of rights and liberty and representative government and free elections, but since an option in any election is NEVER “no government”, then all elections are merely a reinforcement of the right of the State to exist. And the right of the State to exist implies the right of the State to pursue its purpose. And its purpose is to COMPEL individual behavior into collective action by force. Period. As a philosopher named John Immel once put it, “government is force”, and that is all you really need to know to understand government in its entirety. Thus, the only thing we are ever really voting for is the right of the State to rule us. Which makes voting itself an arrant rejection of our own volition and the efficacy of our own choices, and thus our own existence, making voting an exercise in abject Self-nullification. And we wonder why we have a deep State. Voting, ironically, implies the existence of a deep state (an unelected group of rulers who govern absolutely and indefinitely). The deep state does not exist to subvert voting; it exists as voting’s most perfect and rational conclusion.

This brings us to the salient question of this article: Why will the lockdown never end?

At this point, I’m sure you, being astute, have already discovered the answer, but I will give it here in the interest of rounding out my thoughts. The lockdown was instituted in service to the one thing that ultimately matters to the State, and represents its most basic and salient purpose:

Control.

The lockdown was applied as a means to exercise State control over the masses, which makes the fundamental reason for it the same as the reason for every other regulation. Control. Certainly the ostensible rationale was to protect public health, but this is merely a superficial apologetic for the underlying tyrannical interests of government. All State regulations have a veneer of “public interest” which is meant to imply that they are FOR the citizen, but when we remember that the term “public” is always in reference to the collective Ideal and that the State IS that Ideal incarnate, whatever is done for the public is really done FOR the State, and thus is done TO the citizen…that is, at the citizen’s expense.

Why could citizens not be left alone to deal with pandemic in their own way? Why was it assumed that the State MUST intervene with rule, regulation, and decree? Well, the reason is fundamentally found in the metaphysics. The reason man NEEDS government in the first place is that he is entirely insufficient to his own existence. The individual functions from a frame of reference of Self, of I, and instantiates this via volition and choice. But the Self is an imposter to reality according to collectivist metaphysics. Choice and Will and Self are sinful and wrong in that they contradict the State, and the State is rooted in the collective Ideal, and the collective Ideal is the Determinative Force, and THAT is what is the essence of reality is. Not the Self…not the individual. The citizens, left to themselves, will always fail, because they cannot understand reality, because they see if from an infinitely flawed frame of reference.

The reason for the lockdown, again, is control, as control is the reason for everything the State does TO the people it rules. Thus, if we ask the question “When will the lockdown end”, the answer is that it will only end when the end represents a greater measure of control. The government cannot relinquish control any more than the viper can stop slithering on the ground and begin to fly. It simply isn’t its nature. You will notice that every seeming compromise of the State with the people is merely an expression of government power…it is in the interest of power that the State makes any concessions, which makes “concession” merely a manifestation of power. Whenever the State relents here, it inevitably doubles down over there. The State never relinquishes control because control is what it IS, and it cannot BY itself DENY itself. Even if the lockdown were to be ended, what has happened? Wrecked economy, shattered societal cohesion, health crisis in every medical arena in addition to the coronavirus, explosions of alcoholism, drug use, suicide, domestic abuse, gutted lower classes, atomized populace, inner city chaos, all of which the government will predictably move in to manage, thus exponentially raising the level of State control to atmospheric heights. Add to that, we have set an irreversible precedent of plenary government control of everything and everyone in response to a crisis, which will be defined by the State, of course. Our government, in response to situations IT decides are sufficiently threatening, now openly presumes the right to dictate religion, social interaction, association, travel, commerce, business, and property ownership.

So when will the lockdown end?

At this point we can see that this question is entirely meaningless, and was always going to be meaningless. We could answer “never”, but that simply doesn’t do the profound backdrop of such a question any justice. It’s a facile answer…it’s dust. The lockdown is control, and control is the State. The lockdown is simply a necessary manifestation of existence as it is defined by collectivist metaphysics.

In other words, lockdown isn’t a lockdown, per se…

The lockdown simply is.

END

Lockdown Hell: Altruism Instantiated (Part TWO)

Authority, collectivism, collectivist metaphysics, forced compliance, government, government violence, individualism vs collectivism, tyranny, Violence, Voluntarism, , , , ,

So, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, which one are you, “privileged” or “unprivileged”? Are you the sacrificed-to or the sacrificed?

Like I sad in part one of this article series, the answer when examined in the meta is: both and neither, meaning that at any give time, depending on the whims of the ruling class and on general political expediency, you could be the perfidious, mendacious, exploitative, oppressive, naturally and institutionally privileged one, who became privileged off the backs of the unprivileged which you exploit, and this according to your nature (you could never have chosen to be anything other than the oppressive monster you were born to be), and thus your property and your body shall be processed and commodified and sent as spoils to the “unprivileged” in the name of “social justice”; or you could be be the innocent victim, whose misfortune to have been born a certain way and into a specific collective identity determines that you shall ever be the unprivileged prey of the rapacious and dead-eyed privileged class. But never fear, the State shall swoop in on your behalf with its bristling guns, anxious bombs, and itchy trigger fingers to seized the collars of the petulant privileged, flip them upside down and empty their pockets straight into your gaping mouths.

But in the specific context of the coronavirus, the answer as to who is “privileged” and who is “unprivileged” is simple: If you are not in the at-risk group (elderly and/or with a comorbidity) then you are “privileged”. If you are, then you are “unprivileged”.

Notice the altruistic mantra of those vacant souls who defend the lockdown as necessary and justifiable—we can’t allow people to put other people at risk. Just because YOU may not suffer any significant effects of the coronavirus, doesn’t mean that we can allow you to infect those who might. This is markedly different from what we were first told, which was that this was an extremely deadly and dangerous virus that does not discriminate between men, women, or children, and we were regaled endlessly in the earlier days of the lockdown with horror stories of all manner of young and middle-aged people who were suddenly finding their birth date no hedge against the tiny, invisible enemy. Yet now the REAL data is in, and has managed to circumvent the editors of the Department of Propaganda and Psy-Ops, otherwise known as the mainstream media, and the findings of rational, objective, non-partisan experts are proving this pandemic to be nothing more than a relatively harmless influenza-like illness with mortality rates on par or even lower than that of the flu, and which not only DOES INDEED discriminate between the elderly and the young, but discriminates so severely that virtually no one under the age of 21 will even notice that they have it should they catch it, and anyone under 65 will almost certainly recover fully, with symptoms more likely to be mild than not. In the face of REAL facts and REAl data, which reveal that there is simply nothing to panic about, let alone worth destroying the economy and the lives of millions along with it through the seizure of all manner of life and property by the executives of the states who think that the best thing for them to do in service to public health is to channel Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin, the narrative has shifted from “we are all in this together, because we are all at risk”, to “we cannot allow YOU to put at risk those who are not so privileged as you to be young and healthy”. In other words, we have gone from “we all benefit from the lockdown” to the idea that the “privileged” must be rendered  ‘unprivileged’ so that we can all be equal and social justice satisfied. And since the State, being purely an agent of violence, coercion, and thus destruction, and is completely incapable by nature of fundamentally doing anything FOR man but only TO him, the only way to achieve equality is for the State to wreck life to the point where it is miserable for EVERYONE (except the ruling class, of course) EQUALLY, regardless of one’s choices or one’s particular natural circumstance.

In summary, as it pertains to the faux exigency in which we find ourselves, the socialist altruistic platitude has gone from “We are all in this together,” to “You must be sacrificed for the common good.”

END part TWO

 

“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”.

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

How Democracies Inevitably Redefine Freedom to mean Slavery

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

It is about what a person is, not what a person feels, that fundamentally determines the collective mindset of a people. What is felt is subjective…capricious and fluid. What one is, morally defined by society—and by “society” we mean the State; for society is a function of the State, not the other way around, as we often erroneously assume—is that which is implicitly accepted as constant and objective. That is, what one is, according to the metaphysical premises of the State, ultimately determines how one shall think of himself, and thus how one shall act, and this determines the nature and morality of a society on the whole. Further, what one is, according to the metaphysical premises of the State, is often a conflation and confusion of concepts…contradiction presented to look consistent in order to convince both the ruler and the ruled of the legitimacy and morality of the system. In other words, a nation engages in mass cognitive dissonance (one might even categorize it as a form of mass psychosis) where citizens believe themselves to be free, and rulers believe themselves to be dispensers and guardians of freedom, and yet they both act and speak in ways which fundmentally contradict this belief.

I submit that we should get our emotions out of our analysis of our society; demand nothing less than rational consistency from our interpretations of what is going on around us. Ignore the vapid, gauzy distractions of patriotism and tradition and platitude and collective presumption (e.g. “One nation under God”) and judge what we hear and see by reason alone. Demand that it make sense. Don’t judge your nation and your place in it according to how you feel, but rather what you truly are in the cold, hard, logical sense, as a component of the Collective. Judge your society and your nation according to how your rulers interpret your existence metaphysically…that is, fundamentally. Only then will you truly understand your place, purpose, and future in the Collective.

The first thing you should realize is that your individuality has absolutely nothing to do with it. The State has nothing to do with You qua You. And in a nation-state, even a western representative democracy, “freedom” doesn’t mean “for the individual”; and that you must understand as a first principle of collective sociology. A collective, like the nation-state, can only ever consider freedom collectively, never individually, because the metaphysical principles of man (how man is defined as a component of reality, itself) are entirely collectivist. Man is not himself…that’s the whole point. He is utterly a product of a Collective Ideal (e.g. the “People”, as in “We the People”), or he does not and cannot exist at all. The metaphysics which underwrite the State, in other words, entirely contradict the idea that you are a singular Self. There is no You…there is only the group; only the nation on the whole, at root. The individuals who make up the group do not functionally exist except in theory. I know this is a strange thing to process and accept, but take a look around. All law is common law…which means it applies to all people at all times, equally…and this, frankly, is terrifying. The law, by definition, makes no distinctions amongst men, and in the nation-state the law is fundamental. The law considers all men criminals—it is no respecter of persons in this sense, thus. Whether you as an individual will ever rob another man is irrelevant, the law exists as a means to prevent YOU from stealing as much as it exists to prevent the thief; that is, it does not make the distinction between you and the thief in terms of whose behavior it exists to coerce and curtail. The moral man does not need the law, for he does not need to be threatened by an Authority in order for him to forsake theft. But the law is entirely ignorant of this. It doesn’t see you; it only sees humanity collectively, and humanity needs to be governed, which means it needs to be coerced, because it is metaphysically depraved, and thus ALL men are criminals by nature, in general, and thus if one man is found a thief, the other is just as likely.

“Freedom” in the context of western democracies  simply means “political representation’ for the People; and “the People” is, again, a collective Ideal. “Freedom” does not imply an existence for the individual which is empty of coercion, legal obligation, demands for obedience, punishment for rejecting the ruling class, authoritarianism, class conflict, and exploitation. It doesn’t even imply a paucity of such things; it merely implies a reinterpretation of how such things are leveled against the citizenry. And know this: the concept of freedom which follows this reinterpretation does not actually make the citizen more free, but easier for the ruling class to rule. A citizen who thinks he is free buys into a narrative which makes him more compliant. For that which he is convinced is for his own good he will do willingly; he will act as a partner, not a slave, and this makes ruling him much more efficient.

“Freedom” in the western geopolitical sense means that the government allows the citizen (and “allows” and “freedom” are mutually exclusive) to vote for those who shall rule them. And there is a certain logical flaw imbedded in that idea which is pretty obvious..anyone with even a tenuous grasp of logic can see the glaring contradiction. Notice how “representation” means that a citizen (and not even necessarily a citizen these days) may choose between candidates running for political office, but there is never a choice for “no office” and “no candidate”. One may choose between candidate A or B or C, etc. but there is no choice to have none at all. Political office is constant, and thus someone must fill it. There shall be Authority…you get no choice about that. In other words, there is no choice to not have the choice to make in the first place. If the citizens fail to make a choice, then one shall be made for them. There will be government; there will be rulers; you will be ruled. The rejection of that premise can be considered treasonous, we are told. The State itself is not up for a vote, therefore the choice you make with your vote isn’t a choice at all. It is merely a more efficient, less expensive method  of shepherding the livestock.

The reality is that via the vote a political official is being forced upon you at gunpoint, but you don’t see this because it is obscured by the bromide of “free elections”; you think this is freedom because you vote for it. You act as a partner in your own subjugation, and it’s much more fun and relaxing to be a ruler when one can rule implicitly, rather than explicitly. One is free to indulge all the opulence and trappings and fawnings of leadership without being bothered by the messy nuisance of dissent. They say it is better to be feared than respected, but it is better be be thanked and appreciated for oppressing than feared. The citizen who brcomes a partner in his own slavery will thank his master for all the master does for freedom’s sake.

Notice how in a representative democracy the government may change—and it does, and always for the worse—but it never goes away. There is always Authority; always rule; always forced compliance; it is constant. Though most assume that democracy is the essence of freedom, some assume that it is some kind of stepping stone towards true and perfect freedom, with each day bringing the nation just a little bit closer to frolicking in the verdant Eden of completely unfettered bliss. And yet with each passing day even in the “freeist” of societies the State always gets bigger, never smaller. But we accept this as a mere necessity of freedom; for with greater freedom comes greater collective responsibility (another contradiction), and because it is collective that which must be in charge of this responsibility is the State, because collective responsibility is rooted in collective metaphysics, which inexorably implies that the individual must be coerced. And legal (which is implicitly taken to mean “moral”) coercion is the purview of the State.

Collectivist metaphysics presumes that the freer an individual becomes, the less devoted he is to his collective responsibility, and this has to do with his endemic and natural rejection of the truth of collective reality. And so his increasing “freedom” within his “representative democracy” must be manifest through more and more collective obligation. Thus, ironically, with more freedom comes more regulation; and thus a “free society” becomes one where everyone has their education paid for, their healthcare, their education, their children, their housing, their food, their cars, their feelings. The “truly free” are those whose lives are entirely subsidized so that they may run off to the fields and do absolutely nothing except enjoy their freedom, just like children. For even thinking, about anything of any substance at all, is a burden they should not have to bear. And thus “freedom” and “personal responsibitly” are completely mutually exclusive inside the great playground of enlightened western democracy.

*

In a free and democratic nation you do not get to vote for no government. The very idea is a contradiction in terms. This is because “government” is a metaphysical premise. Government is not simply a tool: it is not a means to an end…it is the end. It is the apogee and incarnation of the Collective Ideal, Itself, from which all people and all reality is spawned and determined. “The People”, “The Nation”, “The Workers Utopia”, “The Race”, “The Culture”, “The Church”, “The Company”, “The King”…these are metaphysical premises from which all reality is to spring. They are immutable. They are All. The Collective is Reality, you see. The Collective is everything…the root; You, the Individual, are merely an epiphenomenon at best, your very conscious awareness of Self is purely illusory, a lie, and thus irrelevant in the grand scheme of truth and reality and existence. And this individuality thus must be expelled by State force so that you may indulge your “freedom” productively, for the good of the Collective, not yourself…the State, which exists to dictate the terms of existence which you shall obey…so that you can be free, you see.

And thus, no matter how free you may think you are or feel you are, actual freedom is nothing, obedience is everything. Rank obedience to Law, to the ruling class, is your first and only real responsibility and purpose…not choice, not ambition, not personal responsibility. (And it is hilarious that we should believe that “personal responsibility” as a citizen is something to which we should rationally aspire. The entire metaphyscial premise upon which the State is built is the premise which declares that man is entirely insufficient by nature to his own existence. Man must be governed because he cannot govern himself. For if man were to assume such personal responsibility, he must surely degenerate into a churning, blood-filled cauldron of self-destruction. The whole point of the establishment of the State is that man is existentially incapable of “personal responsibility.) So, you can vote all you want, but obedience to Authority, not freedom, is all you are ever voting for, and all you shall ever get through political representation. The only real freedom there is, when all is said and done, is ironically the only freedom you cannot vote for, and thus you shall never have, in any democracy, anywhere, ever, because it is in direct opposition to the very premise of the State, because it is not freedom by the State, but freedom from it. And this is the freedom which says that no vote, ever, anywhere, by anyone, shall be considered a legitimate moral excuse to put a gun to your head, or mine and force us to act. This freedom is the only one that matters, and it is not up for a vote. Because the State is not the vote; not the ballot; not representation. The State is a gun, period, that exists solely and exclusively to compel human action in support of a Collective Ideal that man shall obey or be punished, up to death. And there is no rational definition of “freedom” in the world which is consistent with that scenario, except in the minds of madmen. And though all the rights you may granted by your democratically elected government, you shall never be granted the right to be free of the institutions which claim the sole Authority to interpret your existence and thus define what your “rights” are in the first place.

Yes, in our western representative democracies our cage may be larger and more comfortable than those of overt autocracies, but they are cages nevertheless. So let’s at least be honest with ourselves about it, and cease all this fatuous talk of freedom. Freedom is not what’s going on here.

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

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