One of the worst feelings in the world is the dread you feel in the pit of your stomach when you hear about some new political candidate who thinks  the State is the righteous track to some ethereal and impossible utopia.

Immediately the anxious waves of “what ifs” crowd my brain. ‘Oh my god,’ I think. ‘The hellscape we can expect if THAT person gets elected.’ And on I go, understanding all too well how my literal life could be in the hands of a person who holds objectively false ideas and philosophical premises, the error of which guarantees that I will in some measure, always more, never less, be sacrificed to those ideas. And it really doesn’t matter the political affiliation, though I understand that some candidates hold ideas more ostensibly rational than others.

Why doesn’t it matter?

Because merely the belief that ruling other human beings is a rational and noble enterprise to be pursued is proof that the ideas which they would like to lay upon their fellow man, when applied, always increase both dependency and misery, and death.

In fact, come to think of it, it’s pretty much a daily occurrence where some number of the governed die at the hands of government policy/action, be it war, or law enforcenent, or willful negligence such as we see in the arenas of immigration, foreign policy, healthcare or other social services; political propagand…heck, abortion funding alone could fill a thousand cemeteries.

Death, you see, is a corollary to rule. It simply must be. In fact, we all at least tacitly accept this as a necessary and perfunctory function of the State–to dole out death in the interest of social cohesion. After all, what is the practical root of the rule of law? To force compliance to the collective moral standard….choice is irrelevant. Authority commands, it does not ask. And to force the life of man is to presume to own it. That is, man’s life is not really his own. This we understand, all of us, on some level.

To sacrifice men to a specific external moral standard (the Law) and ultimately to a given collectivist ideology (all governments are metaphysically collectivist by nature) is what WE demand of government…lest we are tempted to ignore the log in our own eyes, so to speak. To rule is to force. And to force is to kill, fundamentally. So killing is always a necessary and unavoidable part of ruling. If the government is not killing (under the auspices of the Law, we hope, but sometimes not), then we understand it’s not doing its job. Individuals are by definition self-willed. Otherwise they aren’t individuals, they are just things. Their obedience then must always be compelled, because WILLFUL compliance is choice, not obedience.

But can’t we choose to obey?

There is no such thing as freely choosing to obey. Choice is simply not obedience, period. I understand that this is unfortunately not intuitive in a culture that is driven ultimately by fear of punishment mixed with the political artifices of “rights”, and not the wisdom of true morality. I know we, particularly as Americans, love to think of ourselves as self-governing, and therefore willfully, autonomously obeying our authorities, but the fact is that a greater oxymoron than “self-governing” does not exist. To govern self BY self is a contradiction in terms. You are either convinced by reason to freely act in a certain way or you are compelled by threats of punishment to act in a certain way. One is choice and the other is obedience. And government can only recognize the latter.

Choice acts utterly in service to the Self; obedience disregards Self and concedes an outside moral and epistemological standard, like the Law. Since individuals cannot BY the Self disregard the Self…cannot BY the Self truncate or limit or end the Self, because the Self is absolute (I’m speaking metaphysically here–foundationally, not figuratively as in “self-control”, or “self-discipline”), then the Self must on some level accept death in the service of Its obligation to obey the Law; which really means to obey the State. And if you think that death does not manifest literally and frequently, as a function of man being ruled, then you are either asleep, incapacitated, or mad. The government must kill men in order to rule them, because men–and this is the real kicker–CANNOT REALLY obey, and I mean literally, at any level. Obedience is an abstract idea. It does not exist empirically.

And yes, all obedience of which you are thinking right now in objection to my claim I promise you is entirely figurative.

Men are entirely moved by their own will, you see, as conscious, self-aware moral agents. Since their actions are FROM themselves, absolutely, then they can only be ultimately TO themselves, absolutely. Every action is by the Self and thus is in service to the Self. And this makes literal self-sacrifice impossible because one cannot by his Self destroy his Self. And since obedience is at root the sacrifice of the Self to authority–the limiting or ending of the Self–it contradicts man at the level of his root nature.

The point of the State, though, is to compel obedience. But since man cannot ever truly obey, calls for obedience are really calls for death. Therefore, practical, normal, daily application of government ends up manifesting a matter of working out which men will die at any given moment in order to maintain and maximize State rule without eliminating all men and thus contradicting governement by leaving the State with no one to govern. That is, government cannot sacrifice all men because then it doesn’t RULE anyone. And a government which doesn’t rule isn’t government (though, the death of all men is the inexorable march, which Government at root cannot halt because death is a LAW unto itself in this paradigm; so it either destroys everyone eventually or some pointless revolution where death is resisted with more death happens and resets the whole process ala the Matrix). But it cannot destroy NO men because to rule men necessarily means to kill them, since ruling is compelling obedience and man, being utterly self-willed, is incapable of obedience in any way that can satisfy the Law, which is THE collectivist moral standard, and exists wholly outside of man, which is why he must ultimately be forced to it. Since the Law is wholly moral, man, then, is wholly immoral. Thus, they are incompatible, and the result is that man must die. Therefore, the whole of government is really the destruction of man, which manifests itself usually in a drawn out process where the inevitability and necessity of the death of all mankind is mitigated by various contradictory policies about “rights” and “freedom” and “elections” and “representation” implemented in the ironical interest of keeping government from self-destructing due to the inherent irrationality of its root ideological premises. But make no mistake, a government which is killing is a government which is doing its job. It’s simply an unfortunate fact of the underlying philosophical principles.

Please understand that this is not a blame game; I’m not pointing fingers at “bad guys”. I’m not calling for any action beyond the acceptance of the simple, de facto rational processes to which thinking creatures are obliged. I have no interest in offering “practical” solutions, quite frankly. I have no ambition to solve the problems bad ideas cause in societies en masse. It’s not my bag. I wouldn’t even know where to begin. Plus, I’m way too cynical. Reason is the beginning and end of what motivates me. My only point is that ideological and philosophical root premises WILL see themselves through to their logical conclusions. Death and rule are corollaries. This is simply the objective case, period; illustration of this truth is the only objective to which I am dedicated.