Tag Archives: morality

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

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

Legality and Morality: Completely opposite ethical systems

We often see law and morality, or legality and morality, as corollary, or interchangeable. However, the category of Value, speaking philosophically, known as Ethics, is not an admixture of morality and legality, but rather may contain either/or, depending on how we define the nature of reality, and from that how we define truth and falsehood (metaphysics and epistemology, respectively), but never both. Because the truth is that Legality and Morality are mutually exclusive ethical paradigms. The former is an ethical structure which exists outside of the individual at the metaphysical level and consequently is something to which the individual must be coerced by an Authority which necessarily disregards his will. The individual’s will comes from inside himself, and the ethical primary, the Law, is outside of him…he is obligated to it, irrespective of his will. That’s why its the Law, you see.

The latter, morality, is an ethical paradigm and system where the individual is the ethical standard, and individuals cooperate—which implies the use of individual will, not its rejection—in service to each other’s success and happiness. A violation of morality is a violation of the individual’s essence…his conceptualizing nature, and thus his will, and from that his choices, and from that his labor and property. Consequence for moral violations can range from a refusal to cooperate with the perpetrator of the violation, up to his destruction or restraint depending on the level of severity. This can be done cooperatively by moral people, and this cooperation does not necessitate or constitute government. Rather, it is a group of individuals who recognize their individual worth and will cooperate with each other in order to protect and promote it.

Much more can be said about morality and its practical application specifically, but I will leave it for now. I will only add that A. Morality is fundamentally a much easier ethic to define, contrary to opinions about morality being categorically subjective (Hume’s guillotine and whatnot), and much less prone the kinds of chaos and confusion and irrationality which lead to things like 2500 page bills being put to a vote in the US Congress whilst giving no conscientious representative any reasonable amount of time to read it. And B. That to reject law is NOT to reject ethics. Lawlessness does not necessarily mean the absence of ethical value. It can, and should, if we are being rational, mean that one rejects ethics via coercion and violence by an authority of the group in favor of ethics via cooperation and mutual appreciation for the individual at the root existential level. In other word, morality is through love of the individual, legality through the hatred of him. If you will permit me a slight irony, morality is the “Law of Love”.

The Law is a collectivist ethic—a set of ethical values that affirm a Collective Ideal (the Nation, the People, the Tribe, the Race, the Socialist Utopia, etc,). Because this Law is collective, the individual is disregarded for the group—conformity to the group is something not intrinsic to the individual’s nature, so he is compelled into it by the authority of the State, which acts as the incarnation of the Collectivist Ideal on earth. When I say “State”, of course, I primarily mean the Government. (For philosophical purposes, the two are usually interchangeable.) When I say “Government”, I mean any individual or set of individuals which claim authority over the group to compel the group by force into “legal obligations”. Authoritative force is corollary to Law; without this force, the law is nothing more than suggestion. “Suggestion” and “Legal Obligation” are about as synonymous as “freedom” and “slavery”, or “life” and “death”. Appeals by the State to an individual’s legal obligations, codified or merely asserted, are often couched in manipulative terms such as “collective good”, or “social contract”, etc. etc.. In realty, there is no such thing as the “collective”. Human beings are metaphysically individual. We have a single and singular conscious frame of reference. We say “I”. The group is nothing more than individuals who share a conceptual framework for reality in language, and in turn, may cooperate to achieve individual ends which, taken in aggregate, may, and usually will, benefit the group of individuals. “Collective responsibility” is an appeal to some esoteric, ethereal, utterly subjective, and utterly abstract “Collective Ideal” which no individual can ever access because their frame of reference, as an individual, is mutually exclusive of it; and yet he must somehow recognize its virtue and sacrifice himself to it. If he does not, he will be sacrificed to it by the Authority. Government officials should more realistically be considered as a mystic priest class, which claims to possess some transcendent knowledge and connection to the divine Ideal which you, the mere pew sitter, cannot possess, because, well..just because. That’s the thing, there is no explanation that you can understand because your very existence precludes this. It’s about faith, you see, not actual understanding.

The idea of a separation between church and state is a noble one, but utterly impossible to achieve. The church is the state; the state is the church. There will never be any other way.

Rights are a Slavemaster

There is no such thing as rights. As George Carlin once said—“We made them up. Like the boogie man.” There is only Truth and Death…and I define Death as anything which denies the Truth; and I define Truth as the whole of ideas which do not contain or imply contradiction.

But that’s a separate issue.

For now, let’s just say that, speaking of rights, for example, mankind must freely associate or it must die. Man’s singular “I”, or “Self”—his absolute awareness of an utterly singular existential frame of reference—implies an incompatibility with forced ethics, and “forced ethics” means Law. And authoritarian-compelled restricting and compelling association is a cornerstone of Law, despite what the ideals of western democracies might tell us. Under law, then, man is made a slave. And slavery will destroy the Individual because it demands that the Singular Self commit itself to a frame of reference outside itself—to an external will, or “Authority”, which it cannot possibly do because it is, itself, the Singular frame of reference for Reality and Existence. The Self, then—man, the Individual—will thus necessarily be crushed to dust by Law, as punishment for inherent disobedience or as a product of Its own futile attempt to obey, where obedience is impossible because it requires a denial of Self, which the Self cannot do because, again, it is absolute.

In an ultimately pointless and vain attempt to mitigate the Law’s fatal flaw, “rights” are employed as a political solution. In other words, “rights” are a function of the Law, not the other way around, as most of us assume. Despite the perhaps benevolent intentions of rulers, rights are merely a transfer of the indiviudal’s existential political-moral status and station in Reality as a general, categorical, natural principle of his life to the State. The State, being the Authority over man, must then define man’s rights for him; and having defined them, must thus dictate them. And “dictated rights” is one of the head-scratching oxymorons which nevertheless implicitly forms the backbone of all “enlightened” democracies. Since the State by definition has Authority over man, because it is Authority by definition, being the practical incarnation and motivation of the Collective Ideal (e.g. the People), it will necessarily then have Authority over all of man’s “natural rights” which are said to be a function of his existence. It is a noble attempt at merging individual freedom and collectivist sociology , but clearly this cannot work. Man outsources his rights to the State, which exists to govern man. It governs man because he is, by nature, incapable of governing himself, as an individual, pursuing moral living via his individual will and choice alone. Man as an individual is depraved…societies functioning thus by strictly voluntary association with no central authority to compel behavior must then collapse into exploitation, chaos, and death. Because of this inherent natural depravity—the inability to manifest a moral society through the will alone, without Law—whatever good man can “possess” must be dictated to him by the Authority in spite of himself. His “natural rights” then are whatever the State decides they should be at any given moment. To claim that man, who is not good in and of himself, which is why he must have government to compel his behavior, has an inherent morality which implies rights which should be safeguarded in order that he not become a victim of government tyranny is a complete contradiction in terms.

To put it frankly, rights are nothing more than a form of political expediency. Man, being depraved in nature, has no individual rights. Further, the concept of “natural human rights” implies that man should possess some form of existential autonomy. But that autonomy is incompatible with the State, which exists specifically to compel man’s behavior against his will. So by what logic do we say that the State can possibly recognize an individual’s rights?

To square this circle:

The State defines man’s rights for man; and since the State is Authority, these rights are therefore entirely dictated by the State, making them in practice, if not also in theory, a direct consequence of the State, and not of man’s own natural existence. And notice how everyone in society who is clamoring for this right or that at any given moment is concordantly demanding that it be enforced—canonized by Law, and thus thrust into the category of “that which shall be obeyed or forfeit your life”. Rights and government violence are not only politically hand-in-hand, they are undeniably corollary.

“Rights”, therefore, far from being a marker of a benevolent State safeguarding and championing the cause of individual liberty, is merely a digestif given to the people to make government tyranny easier to absorb. And the irony should not be lost on us that that which claims it exists to uphold and secure our “natural rights” is that which cannot exist without completetely dismissing them.

Property rights? Taxes obliterate the very notion.

Speech rights; rights of association; privacy? I am not permitted to reject the Authority of the ruling class…I am bound by the coercive, legal obligation to obey the outcome of the vote, no matter how unjust or stupid or pointless or irrational it may be, otherwise I forfeit my life…thus all my “rights” to speech, privacy, association, property are subordinated to the governed (coerced) society at all times and in all circumstances. I am a slave to the Collective Ideal forced upon me by the Agency of Violence known as the State. I have no individual rights as far as it is concerned, because I, myself, do not exist and do not matter as far as it is concerned.

This is not hyperbole…it is not a screed or a conspiracy theory or some hypothetical injustice. This is what the metaphysics—the fundamental philosophical primaries—necessitate. There is only an immutable, inexorable, inevitable, and immediate consequence of the organization of society, and by extension Reality on the whole, under the umbrella of institutionalized Authority: the marginalization and suppression of the Individual.

The concept of “rights” is merely  politcal bromide…lubricating us up to smooth the application of tyranny.

The very fact that in the “enlightened” American democracy we need to insert “rights” as a hedge against what the Founding Father’s admitted was inherent government tyranny illustrates the inherent evil of government. And from this we can extrapolate the futility of rights. Because government is Authority and Authority is force, and Authoritative force is manifest by the supremacy of violent power, rights cannot possibly serve as a hedge against excessive government power. Also, there is no such thing as an excess of power from that which exists, fundamentally, to wield power absolutely.

And here we therefore must ask the obvious question begged:

Without government what need is there of rights? My objective existence, objectively as an individual, is why I am free. Your individuality is why you are free. Government can only serve to nullify that freedom, then, not manifest it. When we consider reality from the perfectly rational, morally perfect frame of reference of individualist metaphysics, then freedom is a metaphysical fact, not a right.

Finally, we say that rights exist as a necessary hedge against government, and this because government, being Authority in essence, is tyrannical by nature. Therefore, think about this: Since government is the monopoly of coercive force, which is legal violence, and legality (as opposed to morality) is the ethical plumbline of societies which are governed by institutionalized Authority, then rights cannot possibly serve the purpose for which they are ostensibly intended. That is, rights do not, and cannot, and shall not, and should not (if we are being consistent in our logic) protect us from or serve as a hedge against that (the State) which exists specifically to compel man against and in spite of his own will/choice into his legal obligation. The very fact that man does not get to choose to follow the Law is proof of the implicit assumption of legal ethics that man’s will is insufficient to ethical existence. Thus, who man wills to associate with, or what he wills to speak, or what he wills to own, or wills to pay is entirely subordinate to government Authority. Rights thus— to free speech or free association, movement or property, etc—are a complete fabrication with regard to bulwarking the individual against government oppression and suppression.

Rights at best are a well-intentioned palliative, which serves to do nothing more for the individual than encourage him to passively accept the State; to make it appear as though the State has anything of any value, practical or philosophical, to offer the individual, instead of revealing the truth, which is that the State and the Individual are mutually exclusive agencies.

END

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

END