Thanks (But No Thanks) For Your Service

It seems as though even the most fervent statist is capable of recognizing the ineptitude of government almost across the entire spectrum of its grasp. We know it is wasteful, corrupt, and intrusive. Of course, if you see these failures and remain a statist, your solution to this obvious, widely accepted problem will likely be more elections to try to fine tune government to become the machine it has never, ever shown any promise of achieving. 

To the statist, the government is like a man who shatters your kneecap with a baseball bat, hands you a pair of crutches, demands you pay him for the crutches, lest he break other bones in your body – your skull, perhaps – and then expects you to be gracious for his generosity. And “The People” are grateful. That analogy is absolutely flawless – indeed, if government is good at anything, it is good at engineering the fear, crises, and artificial scarcity it uses as justification for itself. The deception is obvious, we know it, yet we refuse to transcend it.

Exit the Matrix

The more my philosophical outlook on life evolves, the more I am coming to realize that the concept of collectivism is likely very near to the root of all evil in this world. It’s not that the Maos and the Stalins and the empires of the world murder people en masse, and ravage and pillage the environment; it’s our collective belief that the mechanism – the State – these monsters use to commit these crimes is actually necessary.

The State is collectivism, writ large. It is the monster that is created by the concept of “we”: “We the People”. “One nation, indivisible”. “E pluribus unum.” This idea that we are all in this together, that we all have collective responsibilities. It sounds noble on paper, because fundamentally we all have the same wishes – to be happy, to be free from sickness and suffering – but we are, each of us, one of 7.3 billion people, with our own ego identities, our own experiences, our own distinct levels of consciousness, ripping each other’s eyes out over the best way to make the world a better place. It is this, it seems to me, that makes the world such an increasingly appalling place as it continues to be.

Empowerment and Entitlement

It is both an alarming and sobering fact that most people are indoctrinated with an indomitable and terminal sense of entitlement. Even those who fashion themselves as aware, who identify many of the problems of the world, often still cling to the establishment paradigm, cling to "democracy", groupthink, and collectivism to solve their problems, unable to comprehend that their solutions are actually the source of the problems.

The fundamental reason democracy (and whatever child of democracy we've tried - "republicanism", whatever) has failed is, aside from proxying out our own personal responsibility to our own lives to people no sane person could ever believe would have our best interests at heart, is that slowly, incrementally, over many generations, money powers have bought off nearly every aspect of society. This became inevitable with the birth of central banks, most notably the United States Federal Reserve system - a private banking cartel with a monopoly on fiat currency creation. Sane people can imagine the power one would have if he could create as much money as he wanted, and dole out that money without oversight, scrutiny; with impunity. Our entire government is bought and paid for, so that there is virtually no distinction between corporation and State.

Most "activists" can see this disease, but their cure is to continue to petition the government. In every issue imaginable, they can see that corporate interests not only own the vast majority of our politicians, but worse, own the fascist alphabet bureaucracies, the unelected bodies that make most of our "laws". And yet, rather than call to opt out of this fake system, time after time, as politicians and bureaucrats move to guard corporate profits and suffocate the free market, the call is to contact your "representatives", or the relevant government regulatory bureaucracy (the FDA, USDA, etc). It's a sickness, an insanity, that is painful to watch.