Tag Archives: government

The Metaphysics of the State: Why Biden’s Supreme Court pick, based primarily on race and sex, was completely rational

Authority, collectivism, collectivist metaphysics, government, individualism vs collectivism, Uncategorized, , ,

I have heard heard conservative and libertarian media pundits, academics, journalists, and intellectuals complain about Joe Biden’s recent U.S. Supreme Court pick of Ketanji Brown Jackson. Biden’s criteria was simple and straightforward—his nominee was to be, first and foremost, a black female. This was in keeping with his campaign promise to nominate a justice upon such criteria should he get the chance. He did, and here we are.

The problem, were are told, is that we should not be choosing those who shall serve on the highest legal court in the land, for life, according to immutable characteristics such as race and sex, but rather on “individual merit”.

I just have to laugh, here. I mean no disrespect, but seriously, the government wouldn’t exist if it acknowledged that individual merit was actually a thing. My goodness…I’m incredulous every time I think about just how unaware conservative and libertarian thinkers really are.

Anyway…

This assertion that Supreme Court nominees should be assessed on “individual merit” is of course rooted in what is ultimately a metaphysical premise regarding the nature of human beings. To declare that people must not be judged as members of a collective, exhibiting the proper, yet spurious, group-identity marker, or markers, such as race and sex, is to declare that what really makes a human being a human being is their individuality.

Well, what does that mean?

One’s singular, conscious frame of reference—that’s what it means to be an individual. What makes you uniquely YOU, is that you observe, interpret, and manifest your existence from a single existential frame of reference. This frame of reference is, functionally, the distinction between YOU and OTHER, where OTHER is other persons (other individuals), and the environment (the material context for the practical manifestation of Self-ness).

The distinction between Self and Other is the inexorable distinction between all human beings, and is why every one of us is morally equal to everyone else. No one person is any better than any other person, because “better” would mean possessing greater existential value. This of course is impossible since each individual is a function of an absolute and singular conscious frame of reference. In other words, each one of us is, at root, absolutely ourselves, and thus each one of us equally exists as Self. No one person has more or less existence than any other—to assert otherwise is obviously ludicrous. Thus, one cannot make an existential value distinction between individuals. Everyone, by dint existing as a singular Self, is morally equal. They have equal value and relevance to Reality,

The argument which naturally follows is this: Does this mean that the murderer and the thief, for example, are as “good” as anyone else? If all of us are morally equal at root because we all equally exist, what difference then does it make what a person does with his existence? How can we judge the murderer and the thief as evil if the plumb line for moral value is simply existing.

Here is the answer: The murderer and the thief have, by their choices and actions, utterly rejected themselves…that is, they have rejected their own existence as Self. In doing this, they no longer have meaning nor purpose, and thus can have no value.

Let me try to explain.

By violating the life and property of their fellow human beings they have forfeited all of their existential value by declaring, implicitly or explicitly, that such value is a lie. In other words, he who commits murder and theft rejects, first and foremost, their own individuality, and by this, their own fundamental worth. Having utterly devalued themselves, and so stripped themselves of any rational meaning and purpose to anyone or anything else, the criminal forces others to deal with him as a rank existential aberration—an object threat to individuality, not an expression of it. In other words, once the criminal rejects his own existence by engaging in theft or murder, he can be of no meaning, purpose, or value to others, and thus others have a moral right (and a moral obligation) to restrain him, and if needs must, eliminate him. To boil it down to a simplistic metaphor: If the glass refuses to hold water, then it has become nothing to me, an I shall throw it away.

There is much more to be said about this, but I will move on to the main point of this article.

The argument is that we should be selecting Supreme Court candidates based on their individual characteristics—how they think, how they interpret the law, their personal philosophies and morals, their individual experience in this or that school, this or that post, etcetera, etcetera—and not on collective, superficial, identity markers such as race and sex.

The problem, however, and one which our conservative and libertarian friends never seem to quite grasp for reasons that escape me, is that government is a collectivist institution, not an individualist one. In other words, the State simply cannot judge anyone according to their individual merit because the State does not and cannot recognize that individuality actually exists.

When I say that government is a collectivist institution, I mean that its very establishment is rooted in collectivist metaphysics, not individualist metaphysics, and these are mutually exclusive. The government exists to govern, and to govern means, fundamentally, to coerce behavior by violence and threats of violence. There is no such thing as government outside of this. None. There is no other real purpose for government besides coercing human behavior in order to serve the interest of a given Collective ideal.

In the case of the United States, the government claims in its founding documents to act on behalf of what it calls “The People”. However, one should not take this to mean “the persons”…even if the Founding Fathers intended it to mean this, because, given the nature of government, it can’t. No, no…these are completely different categories, rooted in completely different metaphysics. “Persons” are a group of individuals. “People” are a a sociopolitical entity to which individuals are inexorability fused. Put simply, the individual is a function of the People, not the other way around.

Government is Authority and Authority is Force. The government cannot consider one’s individual merit because as far as government is concerned, there is no such thing as the individual. It cannot consider one’s individual experience, because individual experience is by definition a function of one’s individual existence, which the collectivist metaphysics of government do not recognize.

Government does not and cannot and never will act in the interest of the individual, but only in the interest of the Collective Ideal it represents. This makes sense even on a the most rudimentary of logical basis. I mean, think about it. Think about the nature of your individual existence—what makes you YOU—and the complexity of it, and then see how stupid and ludicrous is the idea that somehow all which makes you individually you can be compelled/coerced by some third party Authority outside of you, which you most likely have never met and will never meet, and which knows nothing about you as a person. Think about the thousands of choices you make per day; your fleeting whims; your changing opinions; your capricious tastes; the fundamentally unpredictable nature of your environment from moment to moment; your fluid schedule, daily, weekly, monthly, or at the very least yearly. Even the most organized and regimented among us is faced with a thousand options per day and a mind that is constantly analyzing and assessing, evaluating and critiquing; and though it may seem like many of us simply operate on rote in some meta existential context, I can assure that this is not the case. Existence is contextualized to the individual…you observe and manifest your life from a singular conscious frame of reference. You are, at root, an “I”, not a “We”, and you know this in your heart. There can be no such thing as a fundamentally plural existential frame of reference. The relative relationship between environment and observer, which is a necessary prerequisite for Reality, Itself, can only work if the observer is singular. A “plurality of root observation”, or, simplified, a “plural observer”,” is a contradiction in terms. Sometimes you hear it called a “collective consciousness”. It’s complete nonsense.

For the government to presume that it can control the individual without denying individuality is a lie; and until we all understand this, government will continue to reduce humanity to corpses and chaos, just as it has always done and will always do, because that is all its nature can allow.

All this being said, it is a farce to think that the government can ever fundamentally judge a person based on their “individual merit”, as though the State is able to acknowledge that such a thing exists, let alone care about it. For the government to acknowledge individual merit—to acknowledge that the indiviudal is capable of any meaningful manifestation of his or her existence without the presumption and intrusion of the State—is for the government to deny its own legitimacy and thus its own existence.

The government will always and forever collectivize humanity…and, again, this is entirely unavoidable because it is a function of government’s nature at root. If the government is not collectivizing humanity, then it is not the government. The government will never consider one’s “individual merit”, for the simple reason that it doesn’t accept “the individual” as a legitimate existential concept. The government will judge, vet, review, examine, and consider every single of one us, be it a Supreme Court nominee or the guy selling oranges on the street near the quarry, only according to whatever Collective Ideal it decides it is manifesting and expressing at any given moment—in modern U.S. terms, Social Justice, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. The government will value each and every one of us based upon the degree to which we serve and affirm this Collective Ideal, and this means that it will not judge us according to the complexity of individual characteristics, but the superficiality of group identity—that is, whether we are black or not. and female or not, with respect to the case of Biden’s Supreme Court nomination.

The government will never consider a Supreme Court nominee, nor anyone else, for a position on the basis of “individual merit”, and it has never really done so. Just because the Collective Ideal which makes one valuable to the State happens to be more ham-fisted, less nuanced, today (i.e. skin color and genitalia) than perhaps in the past doesn’t mean that the government is any more tolerant of the individual.

Biden simply did what was, in fact, the most rational thing he could do in picking a Supreme Court nominee: Promote the interests of the State over those of human beings.

What else is new?

END

Questions Which Can Have No Answer…:Why benevolent government is impossible (part two)

forced compliance, government, individualism vs collectivism, law, morality, Uncategorized, ,

Explaining how the inherent contradictions of the questions I listed in part one relate specifically to government is the purpose of the remainder of the posts in this series. Today’s post will examine question one.

1. How shall we enslave them to set them free?

A wise man with whom I used to regularly associate, John Immel, once said that government is authority and authority is force—his point being that coercion is not merely a characteristic of the State, but is in fact the state’s most fundamental characteristic, and likely the only truly relevant one. Absent force there is literally nothing about the State which has any meaning whatsoever. I agree with this completely, and the only thing I would add to John’s aphorism concerns the Law. I might put it this way: The Law is government, and government is authority, and authority is force. Meaning that once Law is declared or implied as the guiding societal principle then government is established to compel obedience…because law absent forced compliance is not law, but suggestion. Government is the physical incarnation of the Law’s right, or Authority, to compel obedience. No citizen gets decide for himself whether he shall obey or not, for if this were the case then the law would, again, not actually be law, but suggestion.

This goes to the heart of why I have for the last several years assiduously asserted that legality is a fundamentally distinct ethic than that of morality, and that, in fact, the two are mutually exclusive. To build a society rooted in the ethic of legality—that men’s behaviors shall be bound and constrained by law—is to ensure that that society is not and never shall be a moral one.

Morality is an ethic that necessitates that men must will and choose; legality is an ethic which declares that choice and will are fundamentally irrelevant…men will do what the law demands or they will be disabled or destroyed. Period. Legality deals in punishment; morality in consequence…and the difference between them is not in the least bit subtle. Consequence is earned; punishment is meted out. You cannot earn a punishment; you cannot be dictated a consequence. The law cannot acknowledge that you earned your punishment precisely because it does not acknowledge the legitimacy of your will and choice. You will obey or else; what you want, what you will, and thus to what end you shall exercise your choice, is utterly meaningless to the law. The law dictates your behavior, and you will act. You have no choice in the matter. Law is not cooperative. “Cooperative law” is a contradiction in terms. You don’t earn. You act, or you are in some sense or literally erased from society. You act as the law demands or you don’t exist. There is nothing for you to earn. The law IS, you act. That’s all. There is no “consequence”, nothing is earned; nothing is given to you or happens to you because you don’t have any real individual autonomy under law.

The law says how you must or must not behave, period. Further, any behaviors not specified by the law are still obliged to it, for the entire context of all behavior is framed by the law. If the law can demand your compliance in one behavior, it can demand it in all of your behaviors. At the root of all your relevant actions is your volitional Self, and this Self is utterly singular. Thus, to claim to own just one of your behaviors is a claim to the ownership of all of YOU, entirely. The law implies that at any point it may demand any behavior from you, full stop. The law is the basis for the authority over the race of men by those who are called, elected, installed, etc. to enforce it.

Let’s look at the following example:

Person A attempts to rob person B; person B shoots person A as person be B defends his property.

Now, both Morality and Legality will value the act of robbery and the act of self defense according to a given standard, and the standard is simply that which the action can be said to ultimately serve. This is where the two ethical systems diverge, never to be reconciled—where their utter incompatibility is illustrated. With morality, the standard is the individual, and thus is likewise that which must be preserved in order that the individual may have actual, rational, objective, meaningful existence. In other words, the moral standard is that which must be preserved in order for the very existence of the individual to be possible on both the physical and metaphysical levels. The moral standard then is Self, and, by extension, that by which the Self is made manifest in reality: life (being alive in the world), liberty (being consciously and willfully active in the world), and property (the means by which being alive and being active can efficaciously occur). In short, the individual is the moral standard, which necessarily makes choice an integral component of ethics, as choice and will are ineluctably integral to the individual. We can therefore value the action of defending one’s property as being a moral action because it is in service to the individual; and the consequence of being shot in the attempt to rob another person as being a moral consequence.

Legality offers us a different interpretation of the scenario entirely. The Law, as I have explained, rejects choice and will as having any ethical meaning whatsoever. The law is about obedience, and obedience is by definition the rejection of choice. “Choose to obey” is a contradiction in terms, as one cannot choose to have no choice. One can choose to cooperate, but not choose to obey. Slaves obey, free men cooperate. And no sane person would ever equate slavery and choice, because “freedom” and “slavery” are opposites. To say one is the other is, to put it mildly, complete nonsense.

So what is the ethical standard according to legality? Well, the ethical, or legal. standard is not the law, precisely, it is fundamentally the Collective Ideal, incarnate via the government (Ruling Class) and which forms the metaphysical basis for legal ethics, but for any truly meaningful purposes we can presume that the Law itself is the standard. We really don’t need to get bogged down in metaphysics to make the point here.

What is the point, then, you ask?

The point is that the action of defending one’s property and the action of getting shot whilst attempted to rob that person of their property are going to be valued according to the degree to which they are in compliance with the Law. The law is the legal standard. If this seems circular, or redundant, well, that’s because it is. The law is, I submit, a wholly irrational ethic…untenable because it’s at root perfectly senseless.

At any rate the law is the legal standard, meaning that if the law says that one must not rob, then the act of robbery shall be unethical…”illegal” is to legal ethics as “immoral” is to moral ethics. Similarly if the law says that one may, or must, shoot someone trying to rob them then the act of shooting the robber shall be deemed ethical. The act of getting shot whilst trying to rob another is thus likewise deemed ethical.

Notice that I did not make getting shot a consequence of the attempted robbery…there is the act of shooting and the act of getting shot. Legally speaking, there is no such thing as consequence. No two actions are necessarily ethically connected in this regard. There is no action-reaction, or choice-consequence, only action-action. There is no necessary ethical value which can be logically drawn from any given behavior to any reciprocal behavior.

Let me try to clarify this point.

The law may declare it unethical (illegal) to rob someone, and likewise declare that one may not defend his property. The law may declare that the act of defending private property (there is no such thing under law, by the way, but that’s besides the point) is the sole purview of the State, for example…the police we could say, and that while it is illegal to rob it is also illegal to defend one’s property. There is no contradiction here…the law demands what you shall do in service to the law, and if the law decides that it is in service to the law for you to both not be robbed and also to not defend your property then that’s what shall be demanded of you. The law defines the context for your behavior and thus your existence, and whatever it declares you must do you will do. If those things seem contradictory or incongruent to you…well, what is that to the law? The law doesn’t care what you want, it doesn’t give you a choice, and thus it doesn’t care what you think. It rejects your consciousness as having any legitimacy at all, so what things seem to you with respect to the law is utterly beside the point.

On the other hand, morality is not like this at all. In morality, it not only is possible but necessary that there be ethical value shared in actions which are reciprocal to other actions. Morality accepts as axiomatic cause and effect, choice and consequence, action and reaction, and this is because morality implies will and choice as necessary to human existence, and thus it understands that there are natural outcomes of behavior which are driven by choice, and that those outcomes are thus necessarily tied in value to one’s behavior. If it is considered to be of value that a man shall own property then it must, morally speaking, be of value that man shall defend his property from theft, which means that if a man must shoot the robber in order to defend his property then getting shot is a moral consequence of attempting robbery.

Now, I certainly understand the moral question of whether or not one should use deadly force in the prevention of the theft of some inexpensive thing, like a pencil or marble, for example…but that actually furthers to illustrate my point. The reason we can have ethical conversations like this is because of morality; such questions are not a remonstrance of it. It is because morality fundamentally values the individual that we can ask questions about things like whether it is a good thing or not to shoot a person who is trying to steal a pencil. With the law, the answers to such questions are simply dictated to you and I. If the law declares that yes, you must shoot, or are allowed to shoot, one who is attempting to rob you of your pencil, then that’s settled. The law says it, you obey. It’s not for you to ask questions…and don’t think. It’s not for you to think.

What has all of this to do with the question, “How shall we enslave them to set them free”?

Well, it may not be entirely intuitive, but it’s not complicated to see the error implicit in the idea of the “benevolent State” as it applies to the rule of law…and I submit that law is implicit, if not explicit, in a slave-mater relationship. The master declares what behavior the slave must perform…this is the law for the slave. The slave obeys. It’s no more complicated than that…the only real difference is that in the state-citizen relationship, with our “free” and “democratic”, and “representative” government, with the smokescreens of “elections” and “constitutional rights”—the U.S. Constitution being the prototypical blueprint for the “benevolent state”—there are many masters and many millions of slaves.

Within the “benevolent state”, like every other state, there are rulers and there are the ruled, and this authority-submission dynamic is the very essence of the most basic forms of slavery. The benevolent state is nothing more, unfortunately, than a master who demands compliance from his chattel. The relationship is rooted in law…behavior is dictated, and obedience, not choice, is the only value the citizen brings to his government.

I understand that this is not a popular idea anywhere, not even in politically conservative or even libertarian circles, which stop short of declaring the state entirely bereft of morality and legitimacy. My perspective that it is entirely bereft of morality and legitimacy is said to be naive, oversimplified, myopic, purely ideological. I wish that were true…honestly I do. Unfortunately, a cursory look around the turgid nation where I reside, the U.S.A., reveals the objective reality, which is this: that what was once arguably the free-est nation on earth, the rights of the individual codified in its most fundamental of governing documents and heavily informed by individual-empowering enlightenment philosophy, has dissolved into nothing more than a pseudo-tyrannical, bloated, perpetually indebted, foolhardy, war-mongering peddler and exporter of neo-Marxist racist dogma which has decided that the apogee of virtue and virtue’s only meaningful objective is “social justice”, and that “social justice” is nothing more than at best doing to innocent white people the very same thing which was done to innocent black and brown people, which is about as lazy and stupid and hypocritical as is possible, and is literally less effective at creating a just society than doing absolutely nothing at all. Yet here we are. We fought a revolution over stamps and tea, but 30 trillion in debt, exploding inflation, World War Three, disintegrated borders, state-compelled “vaccinations” with experimental drugs, perpetually subsidized unemployment, government-sanctioned riots, and abortion rates of up to 70% in certain communities…well, hey, nothing one more election can’t fix. Give Trump four more we’ll be positively drunk on freedom.

The idea of the benevolent state and the rule of law is the idea that no one is above the law. Sounds good. We all cooperate together under law for freedom’s sake. No slave; no master. The government is a mere steward of that law which is established to enfranchise men to act out their natural rights. Law protects and promotes freedom…without it we are at the mercy of the whims of evil men.

Sounds good. However, it’s all just platitude. The hard, gun-shaped truth is that law is nothing without an authority to enforce it. That authority is the government, and the government which must enforce the law in order that the law can have any relevance and meaning whatsoever cannot simultaneously be obligated to that law. It is simply a contradiction and cannot work…which is precisely why it doesn’t. The reason the United States has dissolved into a black hole of corruption, greed, cognitive dissonance, and totalitarian fantasy is because of the fundamental philosophical premises which underwrite it, not because we simply don’t have the ‘“right people” in power. “If the slaves just had a different master they’d no longer be slaves” is a ridiculous claim, yet we continue to think that if we just elect the right men and women to political office we can turn the ship around and return to the halcyon days of beautiful individual freedom. No we cannot, because freedom does not and cannot proceed from the foundational documents which inform this nation. At root these documents speak to only two truly relevant things, and only one if we consider them mutually inclusive of one another: A government shall be established, and there shall be law. This demands, inevitably, that no matter how benevolent the intentions of the Founding Fathers, the nation will inevitably find its way to totalitarianism and collapse, just as we have seen time and time again in virtually all nations and all governments throughout history in all the world.

You cannot and will not free men by enslaving them…and government means slavery. Period. Benevolent or not. Benevolent government may be a benevolent master, which is preferable to a hateful master, surely, but a benevolent master is still a master, nonetheless; and you are still a slave; and just you wait and see how long your master remains benevolent once you decide that you no longer want to be a slave.

END

Questions Which Can Have No Answer are Not Actually Questions: Why benevolent government is impossible (and the lie of “free democratic elections”, and touching upon Is-Ought), part 1

Authority, government, individualism vs collectivism, tyranny, Uncategorized, ,

The ruling, or political class, in order to establish and preside over a benevolent State must answer some questions first. As you will readily deduce, these are questions for which answers are impossible, because the nature of the questions precludes them. Thus, they are not real questions. And yet, they must be answered in order for the government to be benevolent…hence the unsolvable problem, as it were.

Here we shall define “benevolent” as that which promotes, nurtures, and defends individual life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, the codification of which can be most readily seen in the United States Bill of Rights, I submit. However, if you don’t accept this definition of “benevolent”, then I presume you have another frame of reference for moral value other than that of the individual. That would be a hard thing to justify as you’d necessarily be advocating for a collective moral frame of reference (i.e the Greater, or Common, Good), as opposed to an individual one, because if not an individual moral frame of reference then your only alternative is a collective one. Yet you’d necessarily be advocating this collective moral frame of reference from your individual existential frame of reference.

See the contradiction?

The problem is that you’d be splitting up knowledge and value into two completely different, and further, mutually exclusive, frames of reference. The individual has knowledge, as evidenced by the fact that you are, as an individual, making a truth claim (i.e. collective moral value), but only the collective is able to make value judgements.

Here is the error: Without value judgements, the individual cannot actually apply his knowledge…but un-applicable knowledge is not knowledge. For example, you cannot know that an apple is different from a rock unless you, as an individual, which is what you are, know what you shall (not can, nor must, nor may, nor should) do with them. To know that if you are hungry you shall eat the apple and not the rock is a value judgment. Meaning that if you only know the definition of “apple” and “rock” but have no purpose for apple and rock at any given moment as it applies to you (i.e. from your own individual existential frame of reference), then the definition becomes irrelevant. An irrelevant definition is a meaningless definition; a meaningless definition is a contradiction in terms. To say that you know something (e.g. that morality is collective, not individual) but not how to value it (e.g. that we shall thus organize a government which serves the Common Good) means that you cannot actually know it. To know something but not what to do with the knowledge means that you don’t actually know it. Knowledge without value is knowledge without purpose is knowledge without relevance is knowledge without meaning is meaningless knowledge…which is a contradiction in term.

Those of you familiar with the Is-Ought problem of morality, as expressed by David Hume, I think it was, will see how the inexorable relationship between knowledge and value makes this quite a problem for the Is-Ought problem. In other words, there is no real Is-Ought problem unless you presume that one can posses knowledge but not value…or, as it is often put, real knowledge is always objective but value is always subjective. This just a fancy way of saying that only knowledge actually exists. You know that the apple is an apple and a rock is a rock, but not how to apply that knowledge in a way that validates it as being actually knowledge (i.e. Truth). Or, in other words, in a way that validates that the knowledge is actually relevant, and thus meaningful, and thus actually knowledge, as “meaningless knowledge” is again a contradiction in terms. “Meaningless knowledge” is the same as “meaningless definitions”, and that? Doesn’t’ make sense. In other words, the Is-Ought problem isn’t a problem unless you A.) confuse “shall” with “should” or “ought”, and B.) erroneously presume that knowledge (or Truth) and value (or Ethic) are mutually exclusive. As they are not, but are in fact corollary, there is no problem.

The Is-Ought dilemma is just a proxy for the determinist assertion that consciousness doesn’t exist. That the willful application of truth is utterly subjective, because it’s rooted in value judgements—in “shoulds”, or “oughts”—which are mutually exclusive of objective Truth—the “is”…that, say, the rock is a rock—and therefore individual consciousness, which is the root of utterly subjective value judgements, is a lie. In other words, there is perception without real awareness…we are but biological computers mathematically programmed by evolution, natural law, etc. etc….but more on that peculiar brand of mysticism at a later date.

By the by, I plan on doing a post on dismantling the imaginary Is-Ought dilemma in an upcoming post…I did a few posts on the subject a while back, but they were clumsy and confusing, so I deleted them. I have since come up with what I think are much better arguments and much clearer ways of presenting those arguments.

At any rate, if. you define “benevolence” with respect to government as something other than that which promotes, nurtures, and protects the life, liberty, property, and happiness of the individual, you’re quite mistaken.

So here are the questions the ruling class, or would-be ruling class, must answer in order to to establish a benevolent State (NOTE: “Them” refers to the citizens.)

1. How shall we enslave them to set them free?

2. How shall we rob them to protect their private property?

3. How shall we torment them to comfort them?

4. How shall we make them sick in order to keep them well?

5. How shall we coerce them to cooperate with them?

6. How shall we hate them to love them?

7. How shall we deny them to affirm them?

8. How shall we murder them to save them?

These questions are the impossible burden of the “benevolent” State. As they cannot be answered, because they are meaningless due to their inherent contradiction, any attempt to implement such a State inevitably dissolves into rank tyranny, despite any benign intentions. We are of course, in the West, witnessing this in stark, shocking real time reality. The “freest” nation in history, the U.S., has dissolved into an object, mostly Huxlian, totalitarian financial/techno-oligarchy in less than two years. It has never been more clear nor obvious in any part of our history than now that our “leaders” are not in fact the organ grinders; and never before have so many of us had the truth of our enslavement projected into our faces with barely a cursory nod to propagandistic deception whilst so few of us seem to feel that we are either capable of doing or should do anything about it. However, I will not spend time on this point. This is a blog not so much about praxis, but theory. Until we can to some significant degree understand the nature and failures of our theological, philosophical, and political environments, our praxis is limited. And, somewhat ironically, given this point, I believe that we will come to realize that speaking, reasoning, preaching, conversing, and writing, is and has always been the best offense and defense with respect to tyranny. So, yes, maybe this blog is about praxis after all.