If you can stomach the last half of this video, you are a grade-A, certifiable sociopath. This is what governments do:
(YouTube link)
Toward the end of watching this video, I was sobbing uncontrollably and wondered, "What the hell is wrong with me?" The answer came to my mind like a laser in the dark: "Not a thing. Not a single fucking thing." And I let myself feel it some more, because burying rage, hatred, and fear inside yourself doesn't make it go away, but only makes you a raging, hateful, and fearful person.
This is what governments do: They find a problem, point guns at people, and call it the final solution to that problem. "Want mail service? Give us your money. No seriously, [poke of gun in the ribs] give us your money." And then they write laws and point guns at anybody who tries to compete with their 'service.'
At least the mugger doesn't tell you it's for your own good. "I'm stealing this money to open a bakery for you to enjoy, you see?" Implicit is that you wanted a bakery to go to in the first place, and that theft is a moral way to build one.
This is what governments do: They grab your head and point your eyes at anything they can construe to be scary. They tell you you're completely powerless to fix the problem and that you need government for that purpose. While they're holding your head in position, the other slimy hand wriggles into your pocket and takes what it pleases. When you're no longer scared, they find something else to scare you with. The theft of taxation is their income, and FEAR is the product they supply in exchange. Packaged and delivered at no cost to the government by the mealy-mouthed publishers of the mainstream media.
At least a weasel doesn't try to tell the hen that he's right to steal her eggs.
This is what governments do: They start a war and call it necessary. Their sales pitch is identical to the one above. They kill foreign soldiers and call it necessary. They destroy cities and call it necessary. They ruin peoples' belief in human decency every day, and call it necessary. They murder children and call it necessary. Then they point at all that blood and guts and destruction--the pulsing, screaming, slopping mess of human misery left in the wake of the machines of war--and they say, "See? This is why we must control people. They're a wretched mess." They point at the results of their destruction, and call it sufficient cause for further destruction. Because we are wretched beings.
Fuck you. I am not a wretch. And neither is anybody I associate with. And neither were the million dead civilians in Iraq before they were blown up, shot, tortured, and left bleeding to death in the desert. And neither is anyone who hasn't been consistently and systematically beaten into submission. If you beat a dog every day for six thousand years, are you going to say it's within the dog's nature to be a cowering, whimpering, helpless mess?
This is what governments do: They beat people in worse ways than dogs could ever be beaten. You can only humiliate a dog so much, but the capacity for humiliation of humans is nearly infinite. The government tells you what you can and cannot eat. You're far too stupid to come up with a way of figuring that out on your own, or through cooperation with others. The government takes your money to save for your retirement. You can be such an idiot about that, sometimes. The government decides for you, what is moral and immoral. You're dumber than a bag of babbling idiots on the subject, and have no way to figure it out on your own. The more central control, the more the government is telling people that they're helpless, ignorant fools with no hope of running their own lives. Hardly anybody is actually as stupid as governments would have us think, but it's a highly effective model because it's inflicted on our formative brains from day one by families unwilling to break the cycle.
This is what governments do: They capitalize on child abuse. Only weak-willed people would submit to the humiliations of government voluntarily, gladly, patriotically. Only abused people become so weak-willed in the first place. Only sociopaths would capitalize on that abuse for personal gain. Only monsters would call the whole thing moral.
This is what governments do.
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
This Is What Governments Do
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14 comments:
Feel free to leave your own "This is what governments do:" idea in the comments section of this post. I'd love to see what you have to say!
I think "This Is What We Do" is a more honest statement, isn't it? America...you, me, everybody. We spend as much on our defense budget than all the other nations in the world combined or nearly so. We (citizens of the developed world) also allow millions of people to die from preventable causes every year. In the time you've spent reading my lame post a child has died because we don't give a shit. Every three seconds. Is death by a bullet morally worse than somebody who contracts malaria, or dysentery, or starvation, or take your pick? You and Stephen give 'government' too much credit...it is US - the human animal.
@anon -- if you're claiming a personal share of responsibility for that mess, I recommend that you strongly consider punishing yourself. Many of the rest of us are aware that assigning blame and responsibility based on real world actions is FAR more productive in the long run than some muddle-headed kumbaya-shit about how the whole human race is to blame for the misdeeds the ruling class commits.
This is what govts do: They always say "We" instead of "I". It's like a mugger, who robs you of your wallet to buy himself a drink, saying "We need a drink". (Except, of course, that a mugger is far too decent to actually say that.)
The State's minions are also always around trying to make everyone feel guilty that "we" are not doing "our duty" to the "society".
How to recognize a statist troll? He/she never takes personal responsibility, only keeps ranting about "our" responsibility to "ourselves".
@anon (the first one) -- I recognize the temptation to say things like that, but don't you think it's fundamentally unfair to decent people like you and me to say that "we" do all of these terrible things? For instance, I don't have a defense budget. I just have money taken from me at the threat of imprisonment. Does that make me a bad person?
The point of my post is that almost nobody wants to do terrible things, but as long as governments exist people will do terrible things because they're called moral on pieces of paper. The strategy I take here is to keep saying that it's immoral, because nobody will ever do something they think is wrong.
As for malaria, dysentery, and starvation: These problems are only problems when controlling governments are around. Just take a look at the world as it exists today--the freer the society, the safer its citizens are from these deadly problems. I completely understand your capacity for empathy and rage at how people could let or cause things like this to happen, but I'm not sure taking some of the blame is going to help people like you and me change the world.
@mcla - That's the spirit! I hope more people take up the "This is what governments do:" idea. I had more, but kept them out in the interest of keeping my post to a reasonably short length.
Genocide. I am convinced that at the end of the day, all that the US will have accomplished in Iraq is genocide. I admit that I was shaken, but not to tears, by the end of the video. Maybe it says something about how heavily medicated I am. But I was not shocked, or surprised. As a student of holocaust and genocide studies, I heard echoes of Rwanda, Cambodia, and Albania in those statements. During war, dehumanization is the rule, not the exception, and it is disgusting.
You write so honestly and beautifully about such horrible realities. I have always admired this about you. Keep it up, someone has to.
Kumbaya-shit and muddled thinking upon your courageous stands against tyranny by sitting at your keyboards and sharing deep, profound thoughts with each other. What a joke. Taxpayers of America have bloodied hands. With billions around the world living on $1 - $2 a day, you fools ARE the RULING CLASS, like it or not.
To the person who claims I am a ruling class doesnt know shit. I am robbed to support government and enslaved by that same government. War is a government program and we are their plastic army men or bottomless bank accounts.
The media is their brainwashing cneter along with government schools.
I broke from up and the point is to break as many people off from their control mentally.
The USA will prolly collapse under it's own weight then you can feel better about yourself.
I am sure no one in your bloodline or heritage ever committed crime against humanity.
"It is not in the stars, Brutus, but in ourselves that we are underlings." There are other forms of government available at present and recorded in the past: which would you prefer?
Can an empire only survive if it changes from the democracy that works well in a City State into a bureaucratic monarchy with a republican facade?
Pelagian: Asking which form of government I prefer is similar to asking a slave which plantation he'd prefer to live on. The slave will be beaten by his masters no matter which plantation he is sent to. Abolition is the only solution to the problem of slavery. I have no doubt that governments will go the way of slavery in time, but at this point, we're in the infant stages of simply helping people recognize that government, like slavery, is founded upon the moral evil of the initiation of the use of force. That is one of the primary purposes of Ibidus. Thanks for reading!
Sorry to my subscribers and regular readers for the hiatus, I'll be back at the blogging soon, after I work a few things out for myself!
Focus not on the differences of my opinion and yours but what the truth is.
Mclaughlin, I watched your video and I feel that it does not show us anything we should not have already known. The American people should know what's going on, it's our counrty!
I may not be black but I find it offensive that you and other posters continually compare the government and their place in it to slavery. I understand that you feel the country is not fair- for I do too! I hate that I work hard everyday to have my money taken out of my pocket to fund something I am 100% against. But MY GOD, slavery is on a completely differnt deal all together, we're talking the rape, disrespect for human life, toture, robbing of heritage and history, the setting of a race against eachother, promoting hatred among brothers, thr robbing of the natural right to be called HUMAN. I mean throw in some stuff from your video and the list is still not comparable!
To Azraelsjudgement: please! we as American's are a ruling class, like it or not admit it or not- if not us then who? Our soldiers [bless them all] made a decision to support this country, they were not forced to join the force after high school or leave their families at home to die for nothing. I certainly wish members of family had not chose that path, but they did. Now if you want to make a difference then make one, make a video yourself, publicize it whatever, but don't pretend to be the victim here especially after watching a video like that.
For those who think this is not a 'we' situation- guess again. Like it or not, YOU FUND IT. Not only that but you continue to fund it. Look at the video again, look at "our" soldiers, "our" commanding officers ordering those horrid things, they all came from the same place you did, America.
God Bless it huh?
@ Mssr./Madame Bordeaux: I'm absolutely and completely interested in looking at the truth, instead of personal opinions, as a guide for how we should make moral decisions. One main concern I have with this blog is to help give the strength of truth back to morality, which has lately fallen into the confusing realm of subjective opinions.
Can you please tell me how the statement "people within governments should have the authority to use force on others to get what they want accomplished" falls within the realm of objectively established truth, rather than within the realm of personal opinion?
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