A brief history of tomorrow…

How did we get to where are today? How did we get to economic stagnation, the slow strangulation of liberties? How did we get to where we will be tomorrow, with economic collapse and the war of words of all against all?

Here is a very rapid tour through the destruction of rationality.

We start with the ancient world, with Greece and Rome and Carthage. We start with all the hero-worshipping poetry of mass murderers such as Achilles and Hercules. The age of heroism, it is called, with all of its self-mutilating fetish for blood and swords and spilling intestines. The age of heroism is always entwined with the age of magic and gods – and also with the age of rape, where beautiful women, pursued by warriors, dragged off and pillaged. The basic poem is: ‘fight and fuck’, ‘fight and fuck’, and all must worship these Darwinian machines as they knife and rape in service of the creation of a more perfect murderer – these bronzed apes of bloody fantasies. Ulysses will forever be spoken of by stuttering academics as a metaphor for some sort of spiritual quest, as if he is not in fact a sociopathic hired killer turned loose on the world to murder for his master. (A more recent example is that of Macbeth – who the wonderfully corrupt Shakespeare shows slaughtering a hundred innocent peasants without blinking an eye – and then sinking into self-loathing for knifing the head of his criminal ruling gang.)

The age of heroism is also the age of the death cult. Life is portrayed as pain; tortured souls stride the stages, and comedians giggle and spit at the same time. Only three professions are portrayed as noble: the priest, the soldier and the politician. In other words, those who justify murder, those who perform it, and those who profit from it.

The highest goal of the age of heroism is the roar of the crowd, the command of armies and the murder of the innocent. The age of heroism is also the age of liars, since murder must be transformed into honour, cowering youths into murderous demons – and blood-spattered politicians into noble orators.

The age of heroism is always the age of stories, since only in stories can murderous lies be made to glow and roar. It is the age of martial music, false tears and sudden rages. It is the age of incoherence, of ink spilled in water to hide the bodies of children. It is, of course, the age of pomp and manipulation and lies that dwarf cynicism.

Finally, the age of heroism is always worships blood. Family loyalties trump all considerations, since there are no ethics in a world of lies. Fantasies take the place of solid eyesight. Countries, armies and souls rise up to swallow simple humanity. Men vanish in a cloud of blood, replaced by categories and raging labels.

In this age, the merchant is scorned as a coward, since he has not succumbed to the nightmare of a full commitment to self-destruction. The merchant is the man who wants a family, a profession, and a comfortable house. He wishes to trade, not invade. He is bourgeois. He has no spirit. He wishes for nothing but comfort. His love of life and desire for comfort and material success is scorned by the sneering nihilist, who lives only to lie and kill and rape and die. The nihilist supports war and the police and the military and government programs and violence in all his subtle symptoms – and then says that one must be afraid of advertising and voluntary exchange.

Thus Carthage, the trading society, is burned down by the Romans. Thus the false dichotomy between Athens and Sparta arises. Athens is considered rational because its politicians have invented longer words for shorter swords. Sparta is considered martial because they wage war openly – in armour, not robes – and give warning to those they will attack, and do not demand they be disarmed beforehand, as politicians do.

The self-destruction of the heroic societies is always follows the same pattern. The first is that the nihilist needs the producer, but cannot restrain the raging expansion of his own nihilism. The nihilist pillages the farmer until the farmer becomes a nihilist, and then all lay down to starve. The demon of violence, once unleashed, must run its course – often of centuries – until it has bitten the through the flesh of the people and finally broken the bones and lies of their sick imaginings. Only then can the rebuilding begin. In other words, the producers are consumed by the nihilists, so that both die – and then, with the nihilists dead, the honest begin to produce again, only to draw the hungry nihilists back to pillage them, to start the whole cycle once more. (Thus do we get the myth of the vampires who, after consuming the totality of their victims, go to sleep until the victims replenish themselves once more.)

Rome’s self-destruction came from enslaving young men into military service lasting a decade or two – and crippling taxes that, due to transportation limits, could only be levied on those living in towns and cities. Naturally, many young Roman men found the pleasures of city living not worth the price of enslavement and endless theft, and so fled to the country. And so the politicians found themselves with fewer conscripts, and so had to hire more mercenaries – which meant raising both taxes and the length of conscription. This vicious circle grew until, finally, the politicians ran out of money – at which point the ‘barbarian’ mercenaries returned to Rome in search of their paychecks and, finding the coffers empty, sacked the place. The nihilists destroyed another society, and the world returned to a more limited and peaceful existence. During the Dark Ages, men elevated themselves from Roman serfs of war to Christian serfs of agriculture – and, due to Christianity’s hostility to slavery (growing as it did as a religion among slaves), labour-productivity gains could occur without threatening the investment that the ruling classes had in their human chattel.

Then, through improvements in agricultural technologies – shoulder harnesses that did not choke, crop rotations, land consolidation through the Black Death etc. – cities grew again, and so of course did interest in Roman law, since the late Roman war of all-against-all had been forgotten. Laws are the future mirror of society, and yet little critical examination was given to laws which directly resulted in the death of the Republic, and so all the logical contradictions – always exploited by nihilists – were left firmly in place.

The discovery of the value of the scientific method – the true beginning of the Industrial Revolution – by Francis Bacon in the 16th Century marked the death knell of the universal Christian church. The printing press transmitted both the curiously logical rants of Luther and the growing desire to cast aside spurious fantasy for empirical observation.

All this, of course, culminated in the great desire to leash the murderous State and set it to work for the benefit of its traditional victims – to turn the voracious vampire into a placid cook. The growth of mobile capital in the 17th and 18th centuries undercut the traditional power of military might, since gold could be moved and smuggled at will, and did not need or respect the power of the sword. At any given time, only one person can really own a piece of land, and it requires great slaughter to assert and maintain that claim. Gold, however, is fluid, and passes easily under lowered swords. Taxing merchants soon became more profitable than taxing feudal Lords – and traders were far less of a martial threat to boot! Thus laws began to swing to the favour of the merchants, and since the power of the State corrupts everyone, even honest traders, the system which resulted was mercantilism.

Mercantilism was the standard ‘murder for profit’ scheme that always results from the existence of a State. Merchants bribed Kings, who then bribed the military to ensure exclusive trading territories for merchants. The brutal costs were diffused among silent, poverty-stricken and starving consumers, and the gains accrued, as always, to the murderous few.

This all began to die with the birth of the new world, wherein life could begin without the blood-crusted layers of historical slaughterers. The fact of the matter is that healthy people never even think of the need for a State – they are always provoked into surrendering their freedoms by the taunts and provocations of the nihilists, and because it is always their great-grandchildren who pay the most for their failures of integrity.

And then – and then, the nihilists were faced with a true horror, which was that through the success of the new world, it became abundantly clear that the State governed best which governed least. And so – why need a State at all?

And of course the American experiment was fatally flawed, in logic, reality and morality. If all men are equal, who can hold violent power over another? How can a State logically exist at all? The failure of the Founding Fathers to close this loop left it open for constant picking and mocking from the State-fed intellectuals of the Old World.

The slow widening of this logical hole resulted in the two great triumphs of governments in the 19th century. The first was the founding of State education, and the second was the creation of government banks. The first produced State slaves, while the second created a near-bottomless funding mechanisms for State wars.

Thus were the horrors of the 20th century produced. Wars need both money and men – the State banks produced the first, and the State schools the second. Nihilism ran rampant. The First World War achieved everything that was intended – a new class of war profiteers, a clear demonstration of multi-state genocides, and State-dependent women, children and wounded veterans.

And then?

Well, then, women got the vote. Women are many wonderful things, but political economists they are not. Women want food and shelter for their children, and don’t really care about abstract rights. Women have not had the direct experiences of war that men have had, and so did not fear the State to the same degree. The granting of female suffrage was followed within a few years by the creation of the welfare state – more accurately known as bribery politics. This was also made possible by the creation of paper currency and the expansion of State banking powers.

Now that the State could borrow against future multi-generational tax receipts, there was no possibility of preventing the inevitable collapse. Tax revolts were impossible, because the State had trained the children to believe that murder was virtue, and deductions-at-source masked the threat of murder at the root of taxation. The State now owned the poor, the sick, dependent women and children, unions, subsidized businesses, the military, farmers and a thousand other social groups. The average individual now has no chance to stem the growing tide of parasitism and the resulting spread of nihilism.

That is the quick tour – for those with the patience to sink deep into sentences, there is a lot to be gained from review. The source of our current misery and coming collapse is violence, of course, but it is a gang of smiling villains that holds our leash – and they will continue to smile as long as we obey. No society in the history of the planet has ever thrown off nihilism when it has advanced so far – and if anyone doubts this, they should remember that we are now in the terminal stages of our self-destruction, since we have finally entered the age of heroism. Not convinced? Read about the War on Terror and in Iraq, and then reread the first few chapters of this essay. The end is always in the beginning.

A moral journey...

I am always striving to follow the dictates of reason, and not falter from the consequences of logical premises. The path of pure reason has been a challenging, grueling, startling and joyous adventure, since it turns out that just about everything I have ever been taught – or imbibed through modern culture – is pure fantasy. Reason can be utterly counterintuitive, just like physics. Sensually, we experience the world as flat, the sun as the same size as the moon and both as rotating around us. I grew up believing that we need a government, the police and armies. However, none of this is so.

Morality is like science and medicine, in that it is both incredibly powerful – and completely optional. We do not have to be moral, just as we do not have to be rational, scientific or follow healthy habits – but rejecting morality always results in misery and failure. If we fail to follow the dictates of science, the physical world remains a deadly mystery to us – and if we fail to follow the dictates of morality, the social world remains a deadly mystery to us.

Any system of rational thought requires that principles are derived from entities (‘gravity’ from an apple), and then extrapolated to all related entities (all objects with mass). Empirical validation and theoretical consistency must go hand in hand.

Thus if there are any preferred forms for human behaviour (i.e. negotiation versus violence), then they must be preferred for all people. Morality does not change for a man just because he puts on a uniform; theft does not become moral just because it’s called taxation. Calling the sun ‘the moon’ does not make it stop burning.

The principle of non-violence must be at the root of any system of morality, since all human interactions are based on either violence or non-violence. Violence and violence are opposites, like attraction and repulsion. In the realm of gravity, objects with mass either attract or repel one another – they cannot do both simultaneously. Thus any principle which describes an interaction cannot approve both one action and its opposite at the same time, for the same entity.

Morality describes the ideal methods of human interaction. Either human beings should deal with one another through violence, or through reason – both cannot be condoned, since that would be blatant contradiction, and so both illogical and anti-scientific.

Any moral theory must then either be for violence, or against violence. If a moral theory is against violence, it must be against violence under all circumstances. There can be no situation under which violence is an acceptable solution to human interactions.

The principle of self-defense raises no problems; since violence is evil, it must be opposed. Self-defense has the same relation to violence that surgery does to random stabbing. If health is the goal, destruction (e.g. amputation) may be the means under certain circumstances. If a person has declared himself cancerous by attacking those around him, he may be retaliated against.

Through my articles, I explore the logical consequences of a morality which bans any individual from using violence – as well a scientific epistemology which forbids any elevation of concepts above instances. What the latter means is that if the principle of gravity is derived from the observation of physical entities, no principle of gravity can contradict the properties of any single physical entity it describes. Concepts, in other words, are always derived from tangible instances. In any conflict between the properties of physical objects and a theory which describes them, the theory must always give way. If your theory says that all apples fall down, and one apple falls up, your theory must be amended, or rejected.

What does this mean in the realm of morality? Well, if morality is a principle, it must be absolute and universal – just as scientific theories are. Morality must be derived from the desired actions of individuals, and then abstracted to apply to all individuals. In other words, if you do not use violence in all of your interactions with others, you must choose which path to take – should you use violence or non-violence in all your interactions with others? You can continue to ‘mix and match’, but you cannot claim morality as your justification, just as no pseudo-scientist can claim the support of the scientific for his contradictory and unverifiable claims.

If you choose non-violence as your moral absolute, then all human beings must be subjected to such morality – with no exceptions. Since concepts are always derived from instances, no aggregate of people can escape the moral absolute of non-violence – any more than a bushel of apples can escape the gravity that each individual apple is subject to.

What does this mean in practice? Here is where things get really fascinating. Since concepts such as ‘government’, ‘army’, and ‘police’ do not exist in reality – just as a ‘bushel’ does not exist – then all individuals these concepts describe are subject to the same moral absolutes as everyone else. The only alternative to this view is to say either (a) that all people should have the same rights as government representatives, or (b) there are no moral rules whatsoever. In either case, creating special rules for certain people is both illogical and immoral.

This brings us to the following principle: whatever is allowed to one, is allowed to all. Whatever is disallowed to one, is disallowed to all.

Are individuals allowed to carry guns? If one person is, then all are. If one person is not allowed, then none are allowed. If no one is allowed to carry guns, then policemen and soldiers cannot carry guns. If policemen and soldiers are allowed to carry guns, then everyone is allowed to carry guns.

(Although it is not essential, the argument from absurdity does help here. If the police are not allowed to carry guns, how are they supposed to arrest armed criminals?)

What about nuclear weapons? Remember: there is either only one moral rule for all individuals, or there is no morality at all, and everything is whim, fancy and brute short-term desire. Since there is no such thing as the ‘government’, if you say that the ‘government’ can own nuclear weapons, then what you are really saying is that individual ‘A’ (some leader) can own nuclear weapons, but that individual ‘B’ (some citizen) cannot own nuclear weapons. Why? How can two rules exist for the same species? It’s like saying that one apple is subject to gravity, but another is not.

A corollary of the rule that what applies to one must apply to all is that whatever judgments are applied to one, must be applied to all. If you say that some apples are fruit, then all apples are fruit. If you say that gun use must be restricted because people are hot-tempered and will shoot people indiscriminately, then your judgment also applies to policemen, since policemen are people too, and you have not solved the problem. Similarly, if you believe that governments must regulate businesses because businessmen are greedy and destructive, you must then accept that government bureaucrats will also be greedy and destructive – and with the power of the police and army to boot! Again, you have not solved the problem.

Regarding property rights, again, it is a simple binary proposition. Either property rights exist, or they do not. Since property rights regulate the use of physical objects, this means that either physical objects can be used, or they cannot be used. If no property rights exist, the no one has the right to use property of any kind – including food or shelter – since any use requires ownership. If property rights do exist, then all individuals possess them. Since aggregates do not exist, no aggregation of human beings can possess the ‘right’ to violate the property rights of any other individuals. Taxation, therefore, is immoral – the unholy combination of theft and propaganda. The very concept of ‘government’ also becomes immoral and illogical, since it is a conceptual entity which claims ‘rights’ for certain individuals which are not possessed by other individuals. I can call an apple a pear, but changing its name does not affect its nature and properties. I can call a man a ‘policeman’, but that does not change one atom of his being. The act of putting on certain pieces of clothing does not eject a man from objective reality and his common humanity.

Does this mean that all policemen are evil? Well, to the degree that policemen act to support the self-defense of others, they are moral – but they are no more moral than any other individual who performed the same actions. And if they perform any other actions, they are as immoral as anyone else. A policeman who drags you off to jail for tax evasion is as immoral as a Mafia thug who breaks your legs for failing to pay ‘protection’.

This should be enough to give you a good understanding of the nature and content of my articles. There is only one other aspect of my writing which I should warn you about, however, since gaining a true understanding of morality is not for the faint of heart – as anyone who knows the story of the life and death of Socrates can well appreciate.

Those who advocate separate ‘moralities’ for different groups of humanity are corrupt – even more so than those who advocate prayer as the only effective treatment for cancer, since those who advocate prayer do not demand that those who disagree with them are shot. If those among your friends and family advocate violence in any form – support for the State, taxation, social programs, the military, wars etc. – then you are duty-bound to exclude them from your lives. This is often the hardest pill to swallow from a personal standpoint, so I wish to warn you fairly up front. Living with integrity is not easy, since we are all social beings, but it is the natural and logical conclusion of rational morality. If you are committed to opposing violence, you can make the case to your friends and family, but if they continue to resist your arguments without reason or evidence, then they must be discarded, since a moral man’s loyalty must first and foremost be to rationality, truth, morality and the health of his own soul.

We cannot ask the world to reject irrationality in general if we are not prepared to reject it in our own lives. It is a hard road – as both my wife and I can testify – and all we can say is that there are near-inexhaustible joys on the far side! The truth is the greatest challenge – and the acceptance of it the greatest reward that life has to offer.

I wish you all the best, and look forward to hearing from you. Enjoy.

Stefan Molyneux
Sunday, July 31, 2005
6:03:53 PM

Ahh, the media...

So I read an enjoyable – but terribly predictable – book this weekend called ‘Weapons of Mass Distraction’, about how the media ‘dropped the ball’ on Iraq. Naturally, the writer was shocked and appalled, and hinted at dark conspiracies regarding the FCC, and its impending liberalization of the media marketplace. The networks were expecting to lose $200m in their war coverage in Iraq, he glowers, and so were expecting the FCC to open up the markets so they could recoup their profits after the war. The guy heading the FCC was the son of the guy heading the military – Mr. Powell Jr. – and that media ‘liberalization’ after the war was payback for its positive war coverage and this was all terrible and so on and on.

And what did the author advocate as the solution? All the old left-wing chestnuts that will absolutely amount to jack-shit. ‘Grassroots activism’. Right. Grass is what people walk on. Letter-writing campaigns. Community participation. Argumentative distractions. The appearance of doing something – which is far worse than doing nothing. All such a load of blind, self-righteous nonsense.

Don’t get me wrong (though I admit that that’s rather easy to do!). There’s nothing wrong with speaking out and arguing passionately. In fact, it is essential! But life is short – and so, for the sake of all that is holy stop wasting your precious time! The more powerful your enemy is, the more you have to undermine the very roots of its power! Nagging the buds will never uproot the tree.

Why is the media so complacent about the government? Why, because almost everyone in the media has been educated by the government. This is at the root of it all. It’s really not so very complicated. I mean, how would critics approach the media’s portrayal of GM if every child in the entire country world was educated at GM schools? What they’d say is that the first thing you had to address was the fact that GM spent fifteen years straight pouring its shall we say limited perspective into the delicate brains of impressionable children!

Let’s say next that everyone was forced to buy a new GM car every year. What would the result be? Poor service, of course, and crappy cars. Would intelligent critics say that the solution for this was to write letters to GM demanding more quality and then go and picket GM dealerships appealing for a more positive customer experience? Of course not! They’d say: the problem, my fellow citizens, is that we are being forced to buy a new GM car every year. Get rid of that stupid rule, and GM will reform of its own accord. We won’t have to lift a finger. In other words, voluntary taxation is the only way for citizens to control the government.

The second major problem is that the media must be licensed by the government – licenses which must be re-approved every year. In other words, if you operate a radio or television station without permission from the government, you will be shot. Sure, there are rules about keeping your license, but who cares? If the government yanks your license and gives it to someone else, you’ll be out of business before your lawyer even returns your panicked message. Remember – the government has made it impossible for all but the largest institutions to use the court system, which is exactly what large institutions (and the government) want. Monopolies aren’t granted by ‘single charter’ any more – they grow like cataracts – through slow, rising, chilling misty layers of evil laws. Licenses are first among them.

The third major problem is that there are so many stupid and corrupt laws that the government can make absolutely anyone’s life a living hell. Feel like being audited? Want a health and safety inspection of your home or business? How about being implicated in a drug bust? Can the cops find something in your car or home if they really want to? No one wants to piss of the government, because you just never know where it might end up. There are swarms of mean little civil servants out there with time on their hands and bile in their hearts. So who’s really going to piss the government off? Why take the chance? So if you’re a reporter, ask the easy questions, or attack specific policies – never anything important, like the income tax or any form of media regulation.

Which brings us to – government regulation of the media. All the FCC crap. Of course government regulations end up serving the powers-that-be. What do you think the government creates regulations? To help you? To protect you from the media? I mean really! Turn it off if you don’t like it. Try that with the tax man.

No, media regulation only serves to ensure that the government will grant operating licenses to those outlets which praise it the most. And like all unholy deals, not even a whiff of it will ever make the airwaves. Not even a hint. Everything runs smooth as silk. Broad smiles and hearty cheer. Concern over things going wrong. Tough questions, drinks together afterwards. All the plump self-indulgence of the pretty and the amplified, leaning slightly forward and explaining everything to you.

All that violence requires is what Ayn Rand called ‘the sanction of the victim’ – the cloaking of civility over the sword. They force you, but they want you to believe that you have chosen.
Forget it. No salvation will come from the media, so forget about nagging it. It is owned and operated by the State. If you’re interested in freeing the media from the clutches of violence, then you must advocate the following:

1. abolishment of State education
2. abolishment of the FCC
3. abolishment of the income tax
4. and, eventual abolishment of government

Which media critics will take on the above? Only those who wish to join me in the lonely wastes of the Internet’s ill-visited corners – the crannies farthest from the mirage of power, but closest to the sun of truth.

Why Write..?

So. Interesting weekend. I lazed around a good deal, and read ‘Into the Buzzsaw’, which is a fascinating look into the world of self-censoring news organizations. To every Libertarian, this is standard stuff – i.e. why do the important questions never get asked? – but it also gave me food for thought in a few areas that I rarely deal with.

The first is the realm of lawsuits. Everyone knows that lawsuits are largely foolish, but reading this book this weekend really helped me understand the degree to which large organizations use lawsuits to keep smaller organizations from disseminating unpleasant facts (particularly in England, which has no constitutional protections for the freedom of the press).

The sad and funny aspect to all this is that journalists who get sued invariably end up taking those who sue them to court as well. In other words, those who are abused by bad laws end up trying to use those bad laws to avenge themselves. Of course, it never works.

It also helped me with another personal agony that I’m sure all Libertarians face – the feeling that I should be doing more to help ‘the cause’, but feeling that nothing I do will ever really change anything. Take Harry Browne – a great speaker, and strong thinker, and an excellent writer. Been hacking at things for decades. Nothing. Not a scrap. Not even a tiny part of the national debate. He takes his stabs where he can, but the fact of the matter is that the State is a closed, self-healing system. Nothing lasts, everything goes down the memory hole in a blinding rush of absence. Iraq has no WMD’s – change the story. Prisoners get tortured? Next story. Foreign aid a catastrophe? More foreign aid! The minds of the citizens are crippled by brain-busting, droningly dull education, and then distracted with celebrities, empty whiz-bang movies, false seriousness and sentimental throat-lump patriotism.

So old Harry didn’t get much done – and neither did Rand, or Rothbard, or any of the other major activists for liberty. I’ve read, written and argued for over twenty years, and all I’ve noticed is that people don’t fight back any more – not because they’ve becoming convinced, but because they just really don’t care. They know the deal. Our society was dead before we were even born. Our society died in the First World War – the age of the Fed, the income tax, and the rise of pensions. The Libertarian experiment lasted just over a hundred years. By the time I was born – 1966 – the government controlled nuclear weapons, education, old age pensions, energy, the poor, the farmers, the media – and many corporations to boot. Getting upset with the government is like trying to apply a defibrillator to a corpse from the 19th century. It’s all done and gone. There is no rescuing our societies as they are, as they stand. It has never been done in the past, and it will not be done now. You can’t fight the degree of violence that our society has descended to. Billions of dollars, millions of guns. You can never fight violence with words. You can only expose violence with words – and if that does not galvanize the population, then the society is dead. We’ve been decapitated – all that remains now is the final, spasmodic dance.

So why am I writing? Why, for the same reason that Winston Smith did. Not for me. Not for now. For those who come after.

All that is required, really, is just to hate violence. Just hate it. That’s the one thing that drives me more than anything. Violence is the furnace at the center of my fire. I grew up in a violent family, and I know how destructive and corrupting violence is. I know how no one ever survives using violence. I must have been a pacifist in the womb, since I never retaliated, and have never hit anyone in my life – the very idea makes me nauseous. I have a wonderfully peaceful and loving relationship with my beautiful wife, and have worked hard to get all the crazy people out of my life, both personally and professionally. That is what is required if you are to really oppose violence. You have to ditch the crazies. I have no contact with my family any more, and couldn’t be happier for it! (My wife is the same way.) I can’t do anything about the State, except write and think and talk, and I can’t do anything about the casual violence, instability and unreliability of the average person (read: almost everyone). The only think I can do is live my life as strongly, passionately and peacefully as possible, and say to everyone who will listen that I truly hate violence, and that they should to.

If that’s the only drumbeat of mine that reaches out of this current jungle into the future, beyond the ruins of what is to come, then that is worth everything to me.

Cultural Observations

When you begin to realize how central the issue of freedom is to every human soul – and how much propaganda is required to obscure the simple desire of everyone to live a life free of violence – you can easily begin to see the true undercurrents of what is commonly called ‘culture’, and how it serves to obscure State violence. Three major components are required to legitimize violence – the first are the figureheads, the second are the thugs, and the third are the flatterers.

Money generally flows from the thugs to the figureheads, and then back down to the thugs and flatterers. The police steal your money and give it to the politicians, who then give it to the media, so they can praise the police and politicians. Of course, this cash can flow in many other directions. The thugs can steal your money, then give it to the politicians, who then give it to artists, who use it to praise power, ridicule the population, or focus on inconsequential minutiae. Or, the thugs can steal your money, which then the politicians use to threaten the artists with revocation of broadcasting licenses, obscenity charges, funding cuts etc. Or, the artists can take the money from the politicians and use it to praise the thugs, as can be seen in any number of cop-worshipping shows and movies. Or, the thugs can take your money directly for their own use, as in the case of asset forfeiture, property seizures and other types of fines.

What we call ‘culture’ is simply the fog that the sword hides behind. Artists and intellectuals have always served the State – and once you begin to understand what they’re up to, it’s pretty simple to unravel the hidden messages.

Examples

The ‘Wild West’

When America was founded, the government – State and Federal – was tiny. During the twentieth century, it grew ferociously. How could such a
radical departure of the founding principles of the country be swallowed? Why, by inventing a myth called the ‘Wild West’ – a wondrous land where villains prey on settlers right at the edge of civilization, and all disputes are solved with guns, until grim noble sheriffs (the State) ride in to clean up the town.

Even a moment’s thought quickly reveals how ridiculous this scenario is. Criminals are drawn to cities, not frontier areas. Cities provide a constant stream of fresh victims, endless hiding places, fences for converting stolen goods to cash – and anonyminity.
Rich victims live in cities, not freshly-broken farmland. Goods gather in cities. People use money in cities, not barter. The idea that criminals spend weeks riding out into the dusty wilds to prey on dirt-poor settlers is laughable. But a growing government always needs to portray the world of smaller government as violent, so that people can more easily accept the increasing violence of expanding State power.

Of course, the government did not make Wild West films, but it certainly spent years educating everyone who made them – and watched them.

The desperate need to believe in a more dangerous past always accompanies growing violence in the present. ‘Freedom was fear – slavery is peace!’ It’s how cowards always reconcile themselves to their surrender.

Cop Shows

Cop shows have undergone an interesting evolution over the past few decades. In the Fifties, the pattern was clear – the ‘orderly majority’ of society was disrupted by some chaotic element – a drunk, a drifter, a beatnik – and the cops flexed their muscles to restore that order.

That all changed in the Seventies. Society was no longer orderly, but chaotic and violent. Cops could only hold back the tide a few drops at a time – and they were often as crazy as the criminals. There were
several reasons for this change – the drug war had begun, of course, which meant that cops were always destined to lose. But more importantly, State power grew enormously throughout the Sixties – and so naturally society had to be portrayed as more dangerous than it really was. It was the old cycle of guilt and blame, inherited from communism and fascism. The starvation created by communism was blamed on everything but communism – in fact, communism is portrayed as the only source of food, not of hunger. Similarly, the expansion of State power made society more dangerous – and so the State had to pretend that increasing State power was a response to rising crime – not the cause.

Cop shows are also portrayed as self-reforming, in that corrupt cops are usually apprehended and honest ones take their place. The fact that no government system or program has ever reformed itself internally is naturally lost on the show’s writers, who were also raised and trained by the State. Governments expand, start wars (either against other governments, or their own citizens) and go bankrupt. They don’t ever shrink or reform from within. The fantasy of the ‘honest’ cop exposing a corrupt system is both funny and sad – it’s funny, because it’s so surreal – and sad, since it’s also a hangover of totalitarianism, or the idea that ‘if only Stalin knew how power was being abused out here in the provinces, he would put a stop to it!’ The idea that corruption is some sort of ‘middle layer’ between honest front line workers and honest leaders is a mad fantasy. Always and forever, the higher you go, the worse it gets.

These days, cop shows also follow a dismally predictable pattern. One aspect of State power that most people have direct contact with is
permits, or a piece of paper that gives you the ‘right’ to open a store, drive a car, build a deck – or even, as I found out recently, put grass in your back yard(!). So naturally, State-worshipping drones have to justify why these permits are so great. No one can appeal to safety any more, not with governments taking half our money – and so now the cops always have the same conversation with the same seedy men:

Cop: I’m looking for Bob Deadly

Seedy Bar Owner: Never heard of him.

Cop: Oh really? Should we come inside then, and check that all of your permits are in order?

Seedy Bar Owner: Ok, ok! He’s out back.

So now permits aren’t just another form of brutal taxation and control – they’re excellent weapons enabling cops to get information just by threatening people! Aren’t we lucky that they’re able to bypass due process this way?

Also, have you ever seen a show where cops agonize about the question: should we really enforce this law? Of course not! Laws are handed down from courts, and just have to be enforced. For instance, recently the Supreme Court of the US ruled that real estate property could be stolen from citizens by local State authorities for the ‘social good’ – I can promise you that you’ll never see a show where a cop quits the force because he can’t stomach dragging grannies out into the mud. Ask any cop you know: what law would you refuse to enforce? You’ll just get the blank stare of a programmable thug.

Killer Robots

Another cultural corner where our terror of government is nicely sublimated is in our persistent and generalized anxiety that our technology will someday turn from ‘tool’ to ‘master’. Yeah – at 50% taxation, I really have to worry about my laptop…

Of course, government is nothing more than a species of social technology, designed to serve citizens (government by and for the people) – and governments always turn from tools to masters, enslaving the very citizens they were supposed to serve. What we invent to protect us always ends up enslaving us… Could the media help us understand that we are afraid of our government? Of course not. Instead, they give us killer robots.

This is clearly our fear of State thugs, sublimated into a fear of technology through conditioned cowardice and conformity. We fear that
our machines will end up treating us as livestock – but the violence of State power turns all who tangle with it into machines – parasites, without empathy, who act automatically to retain their power – by treating us as livestock. The ‘battery power’ of the Matrix and the taxation/regulation of modern nanny states is united in our unconscious

Real Robots

People often wonder why the 20^th century was so bloody – and the explanation is simple. The genocidal conflicts were the direct result of the intersection of three unprecedented elements: state self-financing, state education and capitalistic technology. After governments took over the money supply and banking system in the late 19^th century, they could loan to themselves, print money and perform all sorts of other dastardly tricks. Roughly around the same time, governments took over education, which meant that the young were raised by the State, and as a result naturally viewed the State as a benevolent, protective and all-powerful entity (and really, how could a parent warn a child about the danger of State power while sending him to a State school every day?). Previously, private schools regularly warned children about the danger of the State – all that was now gone, and the State was endlessly praised in State schools – both explicitly and implicitly.

Inevitably, this combination produced over-patriotic young men and near-limitless State funds – the heady brew that was to prove the undoing of the 20^th century. The First World War, for instance, required both shallow, hot-headed youths and staggering financial resources – both of which were finally available to governments for the first time in history. Putting those two factors together with the weapons that capitalistic manufacturers could now supply rang the death knell for tens of millions.

The fault does not lie with the manufacturers, of course, no more than with the man who buys a stolen watch unwittingly. The fundamental problem is that freedom makes citizens lazy about protecting liberty – yet the financial and technological fruits of freedom are so powerful that if liberty is not constantly secured, catastrophes such as world wars, universal famines and concentration camps are the inevitable result. Just as when we are freezing to death, it is when we are getting the most comfortable that we have to be the most active in order to survive.

Inconsequentialities

Finally, the one aspect that overshadows all of the above is the relentless inconsequentiality of our culture – the cannonballs of trivia that are constantly fired into our brains. I don’t mean ‘celebrity culture’ – that is simple gossip, wherein we can garner scraps of advice on how to live by learning about the troubles and foibles of pretty people – and where we learn more truth about life than those around us, who lie continually about their successes and failures.

What I mean by ‘inconsequentiality’ is that we are certainly within the last decade or two of the Great Western Experiment, or the Mixed Economy, which will come crashing down around us all too soon – and yet so many artists – even the most intelligent – are producing nothing but well-written trivia.

Runway models are understood to be pretty but empty – and the same is true of the prose of modern writers. Striking phrases are wrapped around empty characters – vivid metaphors illuminate hollow souls. The same is true for non-fiction writers. Think of the great herd of ‘nagging pundits’ who think they are doing something important by wagging a disapproving finger at the all-powerful State. ‘Oh, we should really reduce agricultural subsidies’ – ‘Oh, we really should increase foreign aid’ – ‘Oh, we should really find health care more’ – ‘Oh, we should have been more careful about the war in Iraq’ – the list is endless, and an utterly destructive waste of time.

Frankly, the government does not give a shit about what you say. The government is ringed by the police, prisons and military. The guns are
all pointed at us. Politicians like power, sure, but even if they get tossed out, they have gold-plated pensions for the rest of their lives. If you cannot threaten them directly – and by that I mean physically – they have absolutely no interest in what you say. If you want George Bush to listen to you about the Iraq war, then bring charges against him – and I don’t mean impeachment, I mean war crimes. Something that will end up with him being thrown in jail.

Of course, I am not advocating tossing bombs, since that is useless. Simply based on military hardware, the State is far more powerful than any combination of its citizens – and so, like the Soviet Union, or Communist China, or the Weimar Republic, we can only watch, speak and wait for its collapse and possible reform. We can no longer avoid catastrophe – we can only speak the truth about the State, and hope that when it collapses, our just predictions and moral judgments will give us credibility when we say that the State must never be suffered again to exist.

And lastly, think about all the movies and TV shows you have seen in the last year – have any of them talked about the danger of the State? Maybe ‘Farenheit-911’, but that’s just a left-winger complaining about a right-wing policy (I’d use the power of the State differently!) I watched part of ‘Veronica Geurin’ last night, and just rolled my eyes. It’s about a woman who goes about exposing the drug dealers in Ireland, and the dangers she goes through. It’s all the purest nonsense – I mean, if she really wanted to solve the drug problem, she wouldn’t put her own life in danger – she’d just advocate for the legalization of drugs! It’s not like it’s some unprecedented, kooky idea – I’m sure she knew about Prohibition, and the disaster that was. I’m sure she was aware that the drug problem is a new phenomenon which arose directly after criminalization. I’m sure she knew how much money there is to be made in drugs simply because they are illegal. I’m sure she was aware that drug dealers want to get kids hooked on their foul wares because that guarantees them a constant source of money – one of the addicts even tells her as much at the beginning of the film: ‘the first hit is free’.

So she knows all of this, but just wanders about the underworld stirring up trouble until she gets attacked. Of all the idiocies! You don’t fight slavery by nagging slave-owners or exposing their abuses! You fight slavery by eliminating slavery! What’s the point of exposing drug dealers? To eliminate them? To create a market vacuum where great profit can be made? To increase the price of drugs by eliminating suppliers? Gee, I wonder what might happen then?

So even when movies try to deal with any sort of real issue, they get all soft-minded, melodramatic and trivial. I often wonder what artists and intellectuals will say to themselves when the State collapses… Will they wonder why they spent so much time on such inconsequential nonsense? Will Stephen Spielberg wonder why he wasted his talents on aliens and airports? Will Margaret Atwood ponder why it was so important to write about eating disorders and neurotic women? Will Clint Eastwood frown and try to remember why spunky boxers and lonely housewives were so important?

I do consider it unlikely. The fact of the matter is that, when it comes to culture, you can only rise to prominence if your work is a scintillating series of polished inconsequentialities.

After all, we must be distracted as our pockets, souls and futures are picked clean.

National Defense

The last resort of the State is the realm of National Defense. Briefly put, National Defense is defined as the need for a government to protect citizens from invasion by other governments.

This is an interesting paradox, even beyond the obvious one of using government to protect us from governments. If you were able to run a magic survey throughout history, which government do you think people would be most frightened of? Would it be (a), their local State or Lord, or (b), some State or Lord in some other country. What about ancient Rome – would it be the local rulers, who forced young Romans into military service for 20 years or more, or the Carthaginians? What about England in the Middle Ages? Were the peasants more alarmed by the crushing taxation and strangling mobility restrictions imposed by their local Lord, or was the King of France their primary concern? Let stop in Russia during the 18th century, and ask the serfs: “Are you more frightened of the Tsar’s soldiers, or the German Kaiser?” Let’s go to a US citizen of today, and demand to know: “Are you more frightened of foreign invaders, or of the fact that if you don’t pay half your income in taxes, your own government will throw you in jail?”

Of course, we have to stop at the Second World War, which has had more propaganda thrown at it than any other single conflict. Didn’t the British government save the country from Germany? That’s an interesting question. The British government got into WWI, helped impose the brutal Treaty of Versailles, then contributed to the boom-and-bust cycle of the 1920’s, which destroyed the German middle class and aided Hitler’s rise to power. During the 1930s, the British government supported the growing aggression of Hitler through subsidies, loans and mealy-mouthed appeasement. And then, when everything had failed, it threw the bodies of thousands of young men at the German air force in the Battle of Britain. Finally, it caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands more British citizens by defending Africa and invading France, rather than let Nazism collapse on its own accord – as it was bound to do, just as every tyranny has done throughout history. Can it really be said, then, that the British government protected its citizens throughout the first half of the 20th century? Millions killed, families shattered, the economy destroyed, and half of Europe lost to Stalin… Can we consider that a great success? I think not. Only States win wars. Never citizens.

The fact of the matter is that we do not face threats to our lives and property from foreign governments, but rather from our own. The State will tell us that it must exist, at the very least, to protect us from foreign governments, but that is morally equivalent to the local Mafia don telling us that we have to pay him 50% of our income so that he can protect us from the Mafia in Paraguay. Are we given the choice to buy a gun and take our chances? Of course not. Who endangers us more – the local Mafia guy, or some guy in Paraguay we’ve never met that our local Mafia guys says just might want a piece of us? I know which chance I’d take.

Here in Canada, all this talk of foreign invasion is patently absurd. If the US suddenly decided to appropriate our natural resources, what would happen? We’d hand it over with a barely-audible whimper, because the US would just threaten to nuke Ottawa and then walk over the border. So the idea that we need our government to protect us is utterly foolish.

There is a tried-and-true method for resisting foreign occupation which doesn’t require any government – which we can see being played out in our daily news. During the recent invasion, the US completely destroyed the Iraqi government, and now has total control over the people and infrastructure. And what is happening? They are being attacked and harried until they will just have to get out of the country – just as they had to do in Korea and Vietnam, and just as the USSR had to do in Afghanistan. The Iraqi insurgents don’t have a government at all – any more than the Afghani fighters did in the 1980s. So even if we were invaded here in Canada – and we didn’t like the invaders – we could just take to the sewers and pick them off one by one until they were forced to leave.

(Of course, if some foreign government invaded Canada and cut my taxes in half, well I’d still fight them – but it sure as hell wouldn’t be to restore our current band of bandits!)

But let’s look at the Iraqi conflict in a slightly different light. It’s crucial to understand that America was attacked on 9/11 because the American government has troops in Saudi Arabia – and because it caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children through Clinton’s Iraqi bombing campaign. Given that the US government provoked the attacks, how well were the innocent victims of 9/11 protected by their government? Even if we don’t count the physical casualties of the war, given the massive national debt being run up to pay for the Iraq war, how well is the property of American citizens being protected? How much power would Bush have to wage war if he didn’t have the power to steal almost half the wealth of the entire country? As I have written elsewhere, the government does not need taxes in order to wage war; it wages war because it already has the power of taxation – and it uses the war to raise taxes, either on the current citizens through increases, or on future citizens through deficits.

This simple fact helps explain why there were almost no wars throughout the West from the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1915 to the start of WWI in 1914. This was largely because governments could not afford wars – but then they all got their very own special Central Banks and were able to pave the bloody path to the Great War with printed money and deficit financing. World War I resulted from an increase in State power – and in turn fed State power, and set the stage for the next war. Thus the idea that we need to give governments the power to tax us in order to protect us is laughable – because it is taxation that gives governments the power to wage war.

For pacifist countries, this ‘war’ may be a war on poverty, or illiteracy, or drugs, or for universal health care, or whatever. It doesn’t matter. The moment you give one man the power – and moral ‘right’ – to force money out of others, you set the stage for the eventual destruction of your society.

So the question arises – how does a citizen keep his property and person safe? It’s an interesting question. The first answer that I would give is another question, which is:

Which sector does more to protect you and your property – the public or the private?

Let’s look at the security mechanisms the private sector has introduced in just the last 40 years:
- ATMs (less need to carry cash)
- Cell phones (can always call for help)
- Call display (virtually eliminates harassing phone calls)
- Sophisticated home security systems
- ID tracking tags
- Credit card numeric security
- Pepper spray
- and much more...

What has the public sector done? Well, they shoot harmless drug users and seize property. They’ll shoot you, too, if you don’t pay the massive tax increases they demand. The police are virtually useless in property crimes – and many violent criminals are turned loose because the courts are too slow, or are put in ‘house arrest’ because the prisons are too full of non-violent offenders.

So, who has most helped you secure your person and property over the past twenty years? The government, or your friendly local capitalist? Those who have stepped in to protect you, or those who have doubled your taxes while letting criminals walk? Have capitalist companies enraged foreigners to the point of terrorism? Of course not – the 9/11 terrorists attacked the World Trade Center (for protest the financing of the US government), the Pentagon, and the White House. They didn’t go for a Ford motor plant or a Nike store – and why would they? No one kills for shoes. They kill to protest military power, which rests on financing.

Thus the most effective securer of our person and property is the private sector. And even if we never get a private-sector army, it doesn’t really matter. Even without an army, the most effective method for keeping foreign invaders out of Canada is for us to get rid of our government. Then, no foreign invader has a clue as to how many of us have rifles, or bombs, or landmines lying around. If you’re some foreign government looking to pillage, are you going to set your sights on some weak government which has disarmed its citizens, or a land with strong private security forces, and where no records exist as to who is armed with what?

In summation, then, it makes about as much sense to rely on governments for security as it does on the Mafia for ‘protection’. The Mafia is really just protecting you from itself, as are all governments. Any man who comes up to you and says: “I need to threaten your person and steal your property in order to protect your person and property” is obviously either deranged, or not particularly interested, shall we say, in protecting your person or property. As long as we keep falling for the same old lies, we will forever be robbed blind for the sake of our supposed property rights, and sent to wage war against internal or external ‘enemies’ so that those in power can further pick the pockets of those we leave behind.

A Perfectly Legal Tax Revolt

It falls upon certain generations to wrestle liberty back from an ever-expanding State. It happened in England in the 17th century, America in the 18th century – now, in Canada, in the 21st century, our time has also come. For the sake of our freedoms, our futures, and our children, we must now take a stand against the increasing predations of our leaders. To save a once-noble system, we must cut off the supply of money to the politicians – just as one must stop serving liquor to an alcoholic.

Therefore, in order to protest the crazed pillaging of our public finances, I invite all my fellow Canadians to stop paying the GST and PST. It is time for us to understand that the Federal Government will never reform itself, populated as it is by corrupt, selfish and power-hungry autocrats.

How can this be achieved? Why, quite simply! All we have to do is take advantage of one perfectly legal method for avoiding the GST and PST. One simple little trick which will withhold billions of tax dollars from corrupt politicians. It is, perhaps, the simplest and easiest tax revolt in history.

How can you avoid paying the GST and PST? The trick is as simsple as this: stop buying stuff.

Buy groceries, pay your mortgage, fill your gas tank, buy presents for children too young to understand our struggle – but apart from that, stop buying stuff. No clothes, furniture, cars, cell phones, vacuum cleaners, mittens, shoes, computers – anything you can conceivably live without – live without!

What will this achieve? First of all, it will cut off a vital source of revenue for the government, forcing them to stop wasting our money. Secondly, it will propel leaders of industry – who have far more access to politicians than you and I – to sit down with the government and hammer out an agreement to truly cut spending and waste. Will this harm the economy in the short run? Of course – but what harm does out-of-control government spending do? Far more!

Our goal? For me, the existence of the income tax is the entire problem. First introduced in 1917 as a temporary war measure, it has swollen to mammoth proportions, and gives politicians a near-bottomless pit of money to plunder. Thus to secure our liberties – both now and in the future – I want nothing less than the abolition of the income tax. Your goals might be more modest. That’s fine! If all you want is for government to be less corrupt, or less wasteful, then we are fellow-travelers, and should aid each other any way we can.

Therefore, my fellow citizens, join with me today and stop shopping! Go on strike as a consumer until the government reforms itself. Close your wallets! Cut off the drug that turns leaders into bandits!

In our current crisis, if we fail to act, we shall deserve our eventual fate. However, if we rise and act as one, we can take back control of our government, our lives, our incomes – and secure our children’s liberties, which surely is the most precious gift we can bestow upon the future.

The Vanity of the Leftists

One of the questions I have heard asked over and over is just why intellectuals tend to be so left-wing? (A similar question is: why do people with verbal skills tend to be left-wing?)

I find this question rather perplexing. Intellectuals are an utterly useless lot – as are people with merely verbal skills (usually honed by compulsive lying). Intellectuals are know-it-all bores who think the world owes them a living. They are vain, shallow and entitled. Why do they tend to be left-wing? Good Lord – for the same reason that a bad worker tends to favour unionization! If you are an unproductive leech stuffed with fantasies about your own wonderful self, are you really going to be in favour of the free market? Of course not! Deep down, everyone has an innate and honest sense of their own objective value – if they did not, then vanity would inflict no emotional penalties, and if you have ever known a really vain person, you would know the horrors they suffer.

Anyone who comes out swinging against the free market is driven to protect his own ‘value fantasy’. He thinks he’s great, but he doesn’t want to put it to the test. Most intellectuals, without the blood money provided by the State (for which they sell their souls!), would end up working as temps, or baristas, or ESL teachers in Bali. They would not end up with well-paid and socially-respectable positions like professor, reporter, or publisher – not because these positions would not exist, but because their own vanity would make them terrible at them. As I once wrote in a novel, vanity is the natural enemy of statistics. It is also the natural enemy of customer satisfaction – and so of the free market. If you’re touchy, and smug, and falsely superior, you can’t be empathetic. You can’t work for the pleasure of others, because your vanity will turn the act of selling into crushing humiliation. People should just know how wonderful you are. You shouldn’t have to prove it – how base!

It is the old aristocratic instinct – I am born into greatness, and should never have to negotiate, or prove my worth.

The simple fact is that being good at language is, in and of itself, just not that valuable. It’s not like being able to build a bridge, or set a broken bone. If you have other emotional skills such as empathy, you can use your language skills in advertising – if you are creative, you can write. If you are funny, you can be a comedian. But being just ‘verbally acute’? So what? It doesn’t add much value. You might think it does, but you have to mix it with something a lot more valuable in order to really make it shine. I work in IT, and I am a good writer and speaker. But you have to have something to write or speak about – in my case, software. It’s better to be a geek who can speak than just a geek – but the ‘geek’ part is far more important. (In fact, those with only verbal skills give software a bad name, since they get into sales without a clue about what they’re selling.)

In short, the answer to almost all questions about social motivation is: follow the money and/or the power. The answer to the question: why are intellectuals usually socialists is – because the State pays them a hell of a lot more than the free marlet would.

Who Is Evil?

The word ‘evil’ is thrown around rather carelessly. George Bush is regularly called ‘evil’, as is Hitler of course. There seems to be little or no distinction between those who perform violence and those who counsel violence. This muddies the moral problem of good and evil – and obscures those who are actually evil.

So – what is evil? It’s simpler than you might think. Let’s look at a couple of examples.

If I write up a list of people I wanted killed, and tuck that list away in a filing cabinet in the basement of my house, am I evil? Of course not. What harm have I done?

If I write up that same list, and give it to a friend of mine, who goes out and kills those people – without instigation from me – then am I evil? Of course not. I neither condoned nor encouraged my friend’s actions.

Let us say that I stand in my backyard and say that I am declaring war against Antigua. Am I evil? Of course not. What effect do my words have? None. I can point at people over my fence and say: “I conscript you and you and you to fight my war against Antigua!” Now I have declared war and I have a draft. Am I evil? Of course not. No one is likely to pay me the slightest attention.

So – words and letters and intentions and speeches are never evil, since they can just be ignored. We don’t have to dig much deeper to get to the grist of the matter.

Let’s look at the war in Iraq. Who is evil? George Bush? Good Lord no! What has he done? Made some speeches, signed some papers. So what? You and I can do that too. Morality is not circumstantial to the degree that two men can both do exactly the same thing, and only one be called evil. If it is, then there can be no such thing as principles.

If Congress evil? No – being windy, dull and overly white is not evil.

What about the recruiters who go out and get young men and women to sign up? Well, have you ever been to a job fair? Lots of companies go out and canvas for people to come and work in dangerous positions – logging companies, for example. What’s the innate harm in that?

The soldiers are paid through tax money. Are the tax collectors evil then? If I don’t pay my taxes, they send me letters. So what? I can just throw their correspondence out. If I send a letter to someone telling them that they owe me half of their income from last year, they’ll probably just laugh and crumple it up.

The difference between what you and I do and what George Bush does is really quite simple: George Bush has enforcers. If I declare war on Antigua, who cares? If George Bush declares war on Antigua, he has men in uniform who will go around and shoot anyone who refuses to pay the money he needs to wage his war. These men are not acting in self-defense. They are the enforcers, who will take aim at whoever their leader points at. Don’t blame the leader. Pointing is not evil. Blame the enforcers, who are willing to murder on command.

These vicious parasites – the police and military – are usually portrayed as noble heroes. Perhaps some of them are. But the question to ask these men and women is: what law would you refuse to enforce – and why?

I bet not one in a thousand would be able to answer that question. A few would raise issues about torture – but that’s irrelevant. The State enjoys its power and privilege because we are all afraid of being imprisoned, not of torture.

If you want a clear view of the police, talk to minorities. Talk to illegal immigrants. Talk to drug users. They are under constant threat from the enforcers. They are on the front lines of social terror. They know what makes the cop tick. They know what he’s in it for. Brute power and humiliation.

Another interesting question to ask a cop is: what level of taxation would you refuse to enforce? So far the police force has had no problem enforcing tax rates rising from 10-60%. Would they enforce a tax rate of 70%? 80%? What about pure communism, or 100%? So – what, really is the difference between our police force or the SS or the NKVD? It’s only in degree. Not kind. There are almost no laws that a policeman would refuse to enforce. They are not heroes. They don’t have any real moral opinions about the violence they inflict on society. They are paid thugs, well-paid to wave their guns at the helpless.

So – George Bush is not evil. The war in Iraq involves only two groups of evil people. The first is the soldiers, who will go and gun down Iraqi citizens just because they’re told to. The second is the cops, who will shoot anyone who refuses to pay for the war. Take away those two ingredients, and George Bush is just a guy at a desk – a rather sad little rich boy making rather mediocre speeches and declaring ‘war’ in the privacy of his own imagination.

'Humanity’s Curse' – It’s Not What You Think

(a response to the article Humanity’s Curse in the National Post, Saturday, April 30, 2005)

Well, here is another fine article pondering the mystery of Hitler. Weighty words, post-modern musings, looking for the silver lining in the very blackest cloud – all of which obscures the real point in a very dangerous way.

Hitler is irrelevant. Stalin is irrelevant. Mao is irrelevant. These men were mere individuals, who had no power whatsoever to kill millions of people. Hitler did not start a war all by himself. He did not personally murder millions. He did not run concentration camps. All he did was sit around and issue orders. He sat on top of a vast and brutal social fiction called the State – the State which had violently educated him when he was a child, forced him into war when he was a youth, and then destroyed the economy when he was a man.

And why were Hitler’s orders obeyed? For three main reasons: first, because if you didn’t obey his orders, a State representative would shoot you. Second, because the State paid you to obey Hitler’s orders, and you had to put food on the table. And third, because the State had educated you as a child, filling you with propaganda about how obeying the State was the greatest virtue. Are we seeing a pattern here?

Hitler was a brutal nobody, unworthy of close examination. The atrocities of World War Two occurred as a result of a poisonous fantasy – the fantasy that the State should rule over society. The fantasy that any group of individuals should have the power to force others to do their bidding has been the cause of most social horrors throughout history.

“Humanity’s Curse” is, therefore, the State itself – and corrupting effects of arbitrary power, as we have lately seen here in Canada, were not confined to the totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century alone.

Why We Are Where We Are

I am reading a book at the moment called ‘Fatherless America’, which is, like most sociology texts, strong on effects and hopeless on causes.

The stunning rise of fatherlessness in North America over the past 30 or so years is perhaps the most obvious symptom of escalating State power – and yet I can think of no prominent academic who has made the obvious connection between effects and cause.

My own particular ‘big picture’ theory about social causes is deep, far-reaching – and unproven. However, I think it’s a useful framework for discussion. Here is, in my view, how we got to where we are.

The beginning of the end of liberty took place throughout Western society in the mid-late 1880’s, when the State engineered a violent coup and gained a coercive monopoly over the education of children. From that moment, the destruction of freedom was utterly inevitable – and it will continue to be inevitable until parents wrest back the education of their children from the State.

It is no accident that the First World War – as well as the introduction of the income tax and the centralization of monetary policy in the hands of the State – occurred within a single generation of the introduction of State education. Children who are taught by the State will inevitably become tools of the State, since they will never be taught the truth about the State. Also, the children logically reason, if only the State is allowed to teach us, it must be the most noble social institution.

After the First World War, State power was further extended because so many soldiers had been murdered that millions of families and individuals were dependent on State benefits. The manipulation of currencies and interest rates produced the boom of the 1920s and then created and extended the Great Depression – which in turn produced the Second World War.

After the Second World War, millions of ex-soldiers went to colleges and universities through government programs. Before, State education only turned children into State slaves –subsequently, State-run or State-controlled universities produced an entire new cohort of relativists and philosophical cripples through the corrosive anti-rationality of university courses. In lower schools, rationality was merely ignored – in higher education, rationality was directly attacked and undermined. Instead of being merely starved, students at State schools were now being actively poisoned.

The children of these new State-slaves became the hippies of the Sixties. Hippies hated and feared both rationality and naked power – and thus opposed science and war simultaneously. They supported State power in the form of social programs, but opposed the Vietnam war, because they might actually get drafted. Of course, many of them escaped the draft by going into University – a neat reversal of the Second World War. Instead of war causing people to become further mis-educated, people submitted to mis-education in order to escape war.

The result of this mis-education was that the massive expansion of State power throughout the Sixties and Seventies went virtually unopposed. Taxation went through the roof – largely because the computer revolution facilitated a massive expansion of both State and personal credit, so that individuals and governments could escape the natural limits of earned income. The productivity gains of the information revolution went straight into the coffers of the State – the result being that, starting from the early 1990s, real incomes began to decline.

The State was wise enough to refrain from regulating the software field – and also ensured continual innovation through generous tax breaks for start-ups and R&D. The State desperately needs improvements in information technology in order to suck up the extra income provided by improved processes – also, improved computers help the State further tax, regulate and spy on its own citizenry.

From the 1980s, the massive expansion in credit made possible through information technology provoked an orgy of State borrowing and spending. Citizens could temporarily escape the effects of higher taxation through borrowing, increased real-estate prices, and inheritance. However, for those at the bottom, unable to take advantage of these middle/upper class benefits, the losses began to mount.

Now, of course, we are waiting for the inevitable crash, which is not more than 10-20 years off. As the day of reckoning gets closer and closer, States will attempt to tax their citizens more and more. This will drive citizens into the grey market, or into low-income jobs, or welfare, or into early retirement, or communal arrangements. This will cause real estate prices to crash. The State will also raise inheritance taxes, which will wipe out the final source of supplementary income for the middle classes.

This kind of massive financial convulsion represents the strenuous attempts of an economy to shake off an excess of parasitic coercion – much as a fever must peak before breaking. Citizens will reduce their spending, expectations and circumstances, hunkering down as the State convulses and collapses all around them. State parasites – from unions to teachers to tax collectors – will have to change and evolve, casting aside their lust for power and violence. What will emerge will be far healthier – and, hopefully, with the memory of such a catastrophe – especially the effects on the aged – society will finally have a built-in set of anti-bodies against the accumulation of State power. (With a great deal of luck, society will emerge from this convulsion without a State of any kind, which would be the start of a real golden age for mankind!)

The great risk, of course, is that this convulsion will lead to totalitarianism. This has been the pattern throughout human history, but for various reasons I remain optimistic that this will not be the case. The current and growing cynicism about politicians may be strong enough to resist the final expansion of State power.

As can be seen from the above, these problems all begin with State education. Why is that?

The most obvious problem with State education is that State teachers will never teach children about the violent nature of the State. How could they? Imagine a teacher telling her students: I am paid with money taken from people by violent means – your parents must pay me or they will be thrown in jail – this entire system of instruction is based on violence – the State uses coercion to achieve its ends. Can you picture any violent system – other than organized crime – being honest about coercion? Of course not. No parent says to a child: I am beating you because I am frustrated, or because I am a drunk, or because I was beaten when I was a child. Instead, they say: I am beating you because you are bad – and it is for your own good.

On a recent trip to Florida, my wife and I attended a time-share presentation. I asked the presenter – a woman who had gone to college – whether she knew that America was founded on a tax revolt? No. I asked her if she knew that the Founding Fathers had specifically banned the income tax in the Constitution? No. Did she know that it took about forty years to bring the income tax about? No. Did she know which three powers the Constitution granted the Federal government? No. (Anti-piracy, anti-counterfeiting, and the postal service, in case you were wondering.) Did she know that the President had to ask Congress to declare war, and that the war in Iraq was unconstitutional? Nope.

This woman had gone to public schools, of course, and knew nothing about the genesis of her own freedoms. This is entirely natural. Throughout history, the State has employed legions of well-paid intellectuals (and priests) whose sole job is to obscure the brutal reality of State power. The sequence of fall-back arguments of these ‘State-sluts’ is, generally:
the State does not use coercion
the State does use a small amount of coercion, but the use of that coercion is approved of by the vast majority
the State uses some coercion which is not approved of by the vast majority, but that is because they don’t know their own interests
the State uses extensive coercion, the only alternative to that coercion would be civil war, mass murder and/or invasion by a malignant foreign power

Prior to all these arguments, of course, is an enormous cloud of murk obscuring the simple question what effect does State coercion have on the choices of individuals?

The first – and most obvious – fact is that State coercion destroys the choices of individuals. Adapting to violence is not the same as having choices. However, academics fell entire forests obscuring this simple fact – for the simple reason that they themselves have robbed those who pay them.

What does this mean? I was watching a show about whales the other night, and heard the story of a man who had spent the last twenty years studying humpback whales. How is this possible? I assume that he is not the recipient of voluntary checks mailed directly from whale enthusiasts. He is either an academic – paid by tax dollars – or paid by a charity, which can take advantage of tax-deductible donations. This really irritated me. I would love to write books for a living – but I would never assume that others must be forced to support my desires. This man wants to study whales, and will take blood money from the State to support his preferences. How abysmally selfish is that? Why must I be forced at gunpoint to support his whale fetish? Don’t get me wrong – I like whales. I’d be happy to rent another whale documentary. If he can support himself from my rental fees, great. More power to him. But I resent being held hostage so that he can sail around the Caribbean playing with whales. I have less chance to pursue my dream because my money is being taken so he can fund his.

Sociologists are in the same boat. They are funded by the State, and so they cannot hope to be objective about State power. This is for many reasons, not least of which is laying themselves open to the charge of hypocrisy for taking State money and then correctly identifying the State as a violent institution. Also, the State is their only source of funding. We can expect more objectivity from an advertising company. If the CEO of an ad company finds out that one of his client’s products is harmful, he can drop that client without closing his company. But an academic cannot really criticize the State – i.e. the institution, not specific policies – without putting his entire livelihood and career at risk.

The closest analogy would be to imagine a group of intellectuals paid by slave-owners to write articles and teach children. You can write any articles you want, say the slave-owners, but we can fire you or cut your funding at any time. Oh, and by the way, if we cut you off, you will never be able to find another job again. Now off you go – and be free to be as intellectually independent as you like!

How many of these intellectuals would take the position that slave-owning is an unadulterated evil? How many of them would start any lecture by pointing out that all money earned from slave-labour is stolen, blood money?

The answer is: almost none. These intellectuals are just another one of the slaves owned.

These slave-intellectuals, however, are fascinated by social trends. They are very interested in the fact that slave-families seem to be very unstable. One argues that slaves have a ‘culture of irresponsibility’ which contributes to family break-up. Another argues that male slaves feel irrelevant, since the slave-owners are the actual providers. Another argues that male slaves are lazy, or ‘under-socialized’. Another argues that male slaves, since many of them are fatherless, never learned how to be fathers.

Do you see how sad and insane all of this is? The simple fact is that slave families are regularly broken up because they are sold off in parts. The slave-intellectuals are simply describing the effects of slavery, and pretending that they have discovered something about causes.

In a free society, morality and self-interest are one and the same. In a coercive environment, the two split into myriad and contradictory fragments. Everyone studies the effects of the wound, without mentioning the real cause, which is the stabbing knife.

Why has fatherlessness become so prevalent? Simply because woman are rewarded for having children, and punished for getting married. Similarly, men suffer no negative consequences for fathering children – and are punished for being fathers – especially if they have a job. It is really that simple. State violence is at the root of any and all general social trends – because only State violence changes the incentives and punishments throughout the entirety of society.

How are women rewarded for having children? Simply: they are paid welfare by the State to have children. How are they punished for getting married to a man with a good job? Well, their welfare drops according to their husband's income. In other words, a man with a good job who wants to get married is a net negative for a young woman, since his income – split between two people – is less than the income she gets from the variety of social programs designed to pay her for having children. (It is probably true that if she has children later in life, when the man’s income is greater, she will do better – but we are generally talking about young women here.)

Furthermore, having children on welfare avoids the central problem for women contemplating having children, which is the problem of risk.

In a free society, having children is a very risky venture for a woman – and especially for a poor woman. If she chooses a man who abandons her, then she is stuck raising children for twenty-odd years on her own, which is truly the portrait of a ruined life. Thus she must be very careful about the man she chooses to start a family with. He must be loving, productive and dependable. She must also possess desirable characteristics, since an honourable man cannot love a selfish, needy or demanding woman. She must be hard-working, supportive and affectionate to win and keep his love and commitment.

Thus freedom supports and rewards all that is best in human nature. However, violence corrupts and undermines such luminous morality. The woman does not have to be a good person to get checks from the State. She does not have to develop her own goodness. She does not have to worry about choosing the right man. In fact, if she chooses a good man, who wants to get married and stick around, she will be worse off, since she will have less financial support initially – and will now be dependent on his goodwill. Thus economically – though not morally – she will be far better off choosing an unreliable man who does not want to get married.

That is the simple truth of the interaction – everything else is just static, noise and nonsense. Families are unstable because people are paid to be unstable – and, on the other side, forced to fund instability. The coercive power of the State tears families apart by reversing the natural incentives of freedom.
Suppose the State stopped arresting rapists, and instead started paying them $10,000 per rape. Would it be a great mystery if rape increased? Would the increased rapes result from some foggy ‘change of values’ or ‘sea change in social mores’? Would we examine men’s perceptions of women, or wonder if video games or movies had something to do with it? Would we be surprised if men and women colluded to fabricate rape in order to collect the 10 grand? Of course not. We’d just say: huh, well if you’re going to reward people for doing something they were previously punished for, of course their behaviour will change.

This is not to say that there is no place for sociology. As long as sociologists are funded voluntarily – and confine their studies to areas where human beings are really free, or to studying the effects of admitted coercion, then the profession is an honourable one.

However, we are a long way away from that at present. Currently, since academics are all paid by State to obscure the brutal reality of State power, we shall get no truth from such owned-and-operated State whores.

Are People Just Stupid?

There is one thought that has occurred to every libertarian at one time or another:

Are people just, like, stupid?

It’s a fair question. The news is stuffed full of government failures. No one likes paying taxes. Everyone knows that politicians are corrupt. Everyone is sentimental about the death of this monstrous Pope – the doddering bigot who covered up pedophiles and condemned homosexuality and birth control. (A good friend of mine, when asked what he thought of the Pope’s death, replied: “It’s a good start!”) The great mystery is: why on earth are people so blind to the tyrannies that rule them?

Another way of asking this is:
If we’re so right, why do so few people agree with us?

My wife and I have come up with two solutions. Mine first, since hers is better.

In the turn of the last century in China, girls of a certain class went through a tortuous process known as ‘foot binding’. Through years of excruciating manipulations, their toes were curled inward, towards the balls of their feet, so that in the end they could barely walk. This was done because men apparently liked women with little feet. (Naturally, it was the result of a lack of free markets – women could not earn their own way, so they were utterly dependent on the whims of men.)

Let’s suppose that you were a little Chinese girl at the time, and for some reason, you escaped this brutal practice. You can walk easily. But all the women around you are hobbled, and can hardly get around. Is this really such an incomprehensible situation? Are you the fittest, most athletic woman around? Of course – but only because your feet were never bound!

It is exactly the same with libertarians. For some reason – the subject of another article, surely! – we escaped the general ‘mind-binding’ inflicted by church doctrine, State education and cultural bigotry. (Just as a hint, for the most part it seems to do with having unconvincing authority figures early in life.) The natural intelligence that is the birthright of every child flowered in us – and makes us now tower over the general herd, just as a free-footed Chinese girl sped in circles around her groaning and crippled companions. It is not our intelligence that makes us so much smarter, but the general crippling of others.

So people cannot understand freedom because their minds have been crippled through religion, dogmatic cultures and State schools. That is my explanation. My wife’s is, I think, much more complete, since it incorporates an elegant solution that I need a entire separate article to articulate!

For my wife, everything comes down to the family. People can quite easily understand freedom, but the social cost for them to do so would be far too great, so they scorn it and pretend ignorance. As she puts it, if people grasped freedom, what would happen to their relationships? They’d have to break with their families, end their marriages – quit their jobs perhaps. Everything would have to change!

Thus it’s not that people are stupid – they just can’t handle the effects of letting even a hint of real freedom into their lives. If they have children, they’d also have to take an honest look at their own parenting. And at their own parents of course.

But so what? What’s the problem with shaking things up? Why is it so difficult for people to break out of unhealthy or unproductive relationships?

The answer is, in my view, because mental health has always been defined in social terms – a combination of sustained relationships and productive work. In other words, a popular Auschwitz guard with a long marriage is the very definition of mental health. Moral considerations do not form the basis of mental heath – a compliant Nazi is considered more ‘healthy’ than an outcast one. This form of ‘social ethics’ is largely due to the Jewish influence over psychology. It would be hard for a Jew to say that individual morality is more important than social acceptance, since to be ‘Jewish’ is to automatically place the authority of the group over the conscience of the individual – just as Christians, socialists, Muslims and soldiers do.

This problem of ‘social approval’ is a cancer right at the root of modern psychology. ‘Solitariness’ is always considered sick. Therapists generally consider that a patient who is terminating a multitude of long-term relationships is acting in an impulsive and self-destructive manner. In particular, breaking off relationships with family members is considered only a last resort, usually reserved for physically abusive parents or spouses. Everything else is supposed to be ‘worked out.’

Of course, quite the opposite is true. Of all the relationships in your life, your relationship with your parents and siblings is by far the most likely to be completely screwed up. Not only that, but you also have absolutely no power to improve these relationships.

Harsh? Not at all. Merely logical.

When raising children, parents have absolutely no idea what they’re doing. Why should children obey them? Because parents are right? Hell no – ask parents why they hold their beliefs, they don’t have a clue. How could they? The last competent philosopher was probably John Locke, over three hundred years ago. The general social stream of ideas is just muck and confusion, designed by evil people to baffle and paralyze any good souls that accidentally emerge from the sick swamps of modern thought.

Average parents can no more reinvent morality from scratch than they can build a Space Shuttle in their backyards. Still, they have to get their children to obey them – how do they do it?

Oh, the usual suspects. Guilt, shame, withdrawal, criticism, bribery, bullying, manipulation – the usual crap that has passed for parenting throughout history. Guilt, shame and bullying always rush to fill the void when logical morality loses favour, because children must be taught, and if no carrots are to be found, sticks will always just have to do.

So face it: your parents were bullies, or weak curriers of favour, or manipulative emotional infants themselves. You have no respect for them, for respect requires courage, and courage requires logical morality. You do not love them, since love demands virtue, and manipulating children into blind obedience is not at all virtuous. There are only a few possible responses to modern parents:
- Contempt
- Indifference
- Boredom
- Hatred
- Empty conformity

These are usually mixed into an over-stimulating frappe of conflicting emotions, leaving family gatherings fraught with tension, alienation, dissociation and emptiness.

You are told to repair things with your parents, but that is an impossible task – a complete waste of time that will also make you crazy. Since they hurt you when you were young, you cannot fix the relationship. To make the point with an extreme example, if you are raped by a man, you cannot cure him of his desire to rape. Maybe someone else can, but you cannot. Since your parents bullied or bribed you into blind obedience, you cannot help them become better people. Maybe someone else can. A therapist perhaps. But not you. You have no hope, since their guilt about how they treated you will always muck up any attempt at honest communication.

And really, it is impossible to forgive someone who has bullied a child. Forgiveness is for repairable events, like being distracted or breaking a vase. A bad childhood cannot be repaired or returned intact. Where restitution is impossible, forgiveness is impossible. Don’t even try.

Does this sound too radical? Do you think it extreme for me to say that almost all parents are horribly bad? Perhaps it is. However, if you look at the state of the world – the general blindness and the slow death of our liberties – the challenge you take on by disagreeing with me is this: if it’s not the parents, what is it?

Either the world is not sick, or parents are. Because, as my wife says, it all starts with the family. If you want to perform the greatest service for political liberty, all you have to do is turf all of your unsatisfying relationships. Parents, siblings, spouse, it doesn’t matter. If you can do that, you can speak honestly about freedom.

If you can’t, well, then you have no right to complain about the government. You can’t ask people to give up their illusions about remote political tyrannies if you can’t escape your own domestic tyrants.

Gomery and the true source of corruption...

So now everyone is pretending to be shocked and horrified over the Gomery inquiry. Sum total misspent: $200 million – a drop in the bucket of State spending. Not a few years ago, an HRDC scandal topped $5 billion – naturally, the 200 million is getting more attention, since the math illiterates that State schools churn out probably think 200 million is more than only 5 billion.
Of course, everyone knows that the entire system is corrupt, but we love to focus on the party in power – thus maintaining the comforting illusion that somewhere out there, someone exists who can handle billions of dollars of scantily-documented taxpayer cash without becoming corrupted. Our general inability to think in terms of principles is also shown by the fact that when the Liberals made it legal to take taxpayer dollars to fund their party (i.e. through campaign contribution ‘reforms’), nary a voice was raised in protest. In other words, it is not the behaviour of those entangled in the sponsorship scandal that is objectionable, but the legality of that behaviour. If memory serves, this approach to law – that whatever the government makes legal, is right – got the Germans into significant trouble a couple of generations ago.

So now we are faced with three unpalatable choices. We have the power-hungry Liberals, utterly corrupt; we have the spend-happy NPD, utterly socialist – and we have the Progressive Conservatives, who are only fairly spend-happy, somewhat socialist – and very Christian. Thus it is now officially safe to predict the coming demise of our current form of mob-rule democracy. Like the German Weimar Republic of the 1930’s – and French Third Republic of the same decade – no government will now be able to hold on to power for more than a year or two before being consumed by the corruption that is already endemic to the system as a whole.

To anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of history, it is all grimly predictable. Once any government gains the power to tax income, State spending, debt and corruption always go through the roof. More and more parasites are drawn to the mountain of money the government guards. The simple greed of money-lust gives soon way to the more sinister corruption of the manipulation of State power to favour individual groups – farmers, unions and manufacturers, to name just three. Protective and biased legislation is passed. Taxes continue to rise. The economy begins to slow, causing more people to flock the relative safety of State payouts. Limiting State spending becomes almost impossible, since so many voters now depend on State largesse – in one form or another – to survive.

This all paralyses a sequence of individual governments, resulting in cynicism in both the general population and those in power. Knowing that proactive action is impossible, and that the system is doomed to failure, everyone at the top just grabs whatever money they can as fast as possible – which accelerates the coming collapse.

The relevant question is thus not whether our current democracy is doomed – or when – but rather: what do we want to come afterwards? Most failing societies take entirely the wrong approach, mistaking the collapse of mob-rule democracy for the failure of freedom, and thus fleeing into the false security of an authoritarian system. Those societies which flourish, however, recognise that State power – especially the brutality of the income tax – always leads to the collapse of the State – and, with clear eyes and strong arms, work to rebuild a new society free of such destructive tyrannies.