This Is What Governments Do

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.

We Are Not Born Small

What was carved on our foreheads that says "Cannot grow?" What was carved on our foreheads that says "Stay small - Stay little - Don't attract attention - Don't offend - Don't upset people - Don't contradict - Don't confront?" I don't believe that that's carved on my god damned DNA, and I don't believe that that's carved on your DNA either. I think that's just frightened people boxing us in because they're small, and I've had it with that...I've had it with that.

There is nothing in our DNA that says we cannot speak the truth because people will get upset. So they get upset, so what? So what? You don't want to go to your grave--I don't--I don't want to go to my grave saying to myself, "Well, I didn't ruffle too many feathers. People liked me. They didn't know me well, and I certainly didn't reveal my true self to them...didn't even know what it was. But I got along. I sort of passed through life like a javelin into a still pond with barely a ripple. That is my legacy." That about 18 minutes after I die people say, "Oh yeah that guy," and without the aid of photographs they can barely remember my face. And without the aid of letters and e-mails, they can barely remember my words.

That's not what I want for me. That's certainly not what I want for you. There is nothing written into anything within us, deep within us that says we must be small.

- Stefan Molyneux

A YouTube video on the lovely mammoth largeness that humanity can achieve:


(YouTube link)

This video by Nielsio contains audio from a podcast by Stefan Molyneux. Molyneux has an amazing way of picking out the perfect metaphors to describe ideas, which the writer in me loves. This video has no shortage, as he explains that humans are not naturally timid, but must be ground into submission. The way out of this seeming natural timidity, of course, is to deny those who would grind us down the opportunity--to instead sharpen our swords of virtue, reason, and integrity on their grinding stones. To save virtue in humanity, we must actively seek out what is virtuous and then live it. To bring reason to humanity, we must know logic and its consequences and then live it. To give the world integrity, and to preserve and foster our own, we must be willing to understand virtue and reason. And then...then we must be willing to live it. Fully, invitingly, publicly, we must live it.

I'm having a particularly heavy day from a cognitive dissonance standpoint. I hold a number of philosophical ideas in the abstract that I'm not living out as completely as I could. It's ironic, considering my history (and therefore length of preparation and amount of knowledge) on the topic. With aesthetic problems like a desire to lose weight, cognitive dissonance has always popped up but never motivated a change. With lifestyle choices like being drawn to video games when I feel like I might more productively use my time, it's only ever been a passing anxiety. But not living according to the logical consequences of a reasoned philosophy is completely crippling. I feel it all: confusion, doubt, anxiety, self-hate, depression. I feel it all, but I know these emotions are not my own, they have been inflicted on me by those who would grind me down.

I do not hate myself, but simply display the projected hatred others show in the face of my allegiance to rationality. It's not me who doubts myself, but teachers from the past who doubted me to stew confusion and uncertainty into my young, curious brain. I'm not confused. In fact, I've never been more certain of the definitions of virtue, integrity, and of the power and accuracy of logic and the scientific method. This confusion belongs to someone else, and it's high fucking time I give credit where it's due. If I don't, I'm stuck with all of this crippling scar tissue of depression, anxiety, and last night's late entrant to the race, insomnia. If my certainty is upsetting to some people, so what? They can either show me where I've gone wrong logically, or we can talk about the roots of their feelings, or they can be the ones to shut up for a change. It's high time I step beyond thinking and talking philosophy, and into the living, breathing, and doing of philosophy.

Living to the best of my ability does not mean doing the best I can given the social constrictions of the world. It means staying consistent with my values even when--especially when--it makes me uncomfortable. Philosophy can be a dangerous tool for those who know it and willingly misuse it, but just as dangerous is for those who know philosophy and still refrain from living it.

In the Beautiful Brains of Children: God vs. Einstein

Here's a short video of kids responding to the question, "What does God look like?" You can see from their responses that it's akin to asking the question "What color is a unicorn?"


(YouTube video link)

I find kids to be amazing and fascinating creatures of logic. They're so dang smart, it puts most adults to shame. I think the video above is amazingly telling of the abuse inherent in religious instruction. The kids at the beginning of the video are completely honest. When asked "What does God look like?" they respond that they don't know, or that they don't understand the question.

They have to be pressured to even answer such a nonsensical question. This is because children who are subjected to religious instruction are never asked whether or not God exists. They're told he does exist as an objective and solid fact. They're forcefully told it's true over and over again because there's not any way to arrive at belief in God through rational observation. Someone schooled in everything but religion does not arrive at a belief in gods on their own. It might sound strange to some of you to hear someone talk about religion as abuse inflicted on children, but it's hard for me to see it as anything else. Any system of belief that forces children to lie to attain the praise of their elders is corrupt.

In the video above, the children struggle to answer the question in the way that they figure the interviewer will want to hear. They often seem to be unsure of their statements, which they inflect as if they're questions. Several of the kids have goofy grins and look up and to the sides when ascribing fairly non-controversial physical traits (such as 'bearded' or 'tall') to this imaginary invisible being. Simple description of a real man they've seen before would never elicit such dodginess or evasion from kids. They'd just straightforwardly describe as much as they could remember about him.

Here's a video of kids explaining who Einstein is. Where they don't know, they just say so. None of them are embarrassed or shifty about their answers because they're based in reality. No goofy grins, no sidelong glances, no unexpressed uncertainties.


(YouTube video link)

These kids understand that the concept of describing a god is ridiculous. It's clear by their responses that they're made uncomfortable and embarrassed by the question. When asked to explain Einstein, it's a complete reversal. Weird...

As always, if you have a better explanation for this phenomenon than I do, hook me up with a comment!