-Caveat Lector- -[cont]- <http://www.buildfreedom.com/tl/tl07b.htm> THE NATURE OF GOVERNMENT by Frederick Mann Two Tribes Consider two different isolated tribes somewhere in the jungles of South America. Call them Tribe 1 and Tribe 2. Each has its unique language with its own structure. The language of tribe 1 (language 1) tends to be very literal. A man who fishes, for example, is called "man-who-fishes." The same man, while sleeping, is called "man-who-sleeps"; while talking, "man- who-talks"; while running, -"man-who-runs"; while eating, man-who-eats"; while writing, "man-who-writes"; while making a chair, "man-who-makes-chair"; while giving orders, "man-who-gives-orders"; etc. In language 1, distinctions are made between different kinds of words: "Thing-words," "Do- words," "How-words," "Story-words," "Funny-words," "order- words," "Panic-words," "What-words," "Who-words," "Why- words," "When-words," "Where-words," etc. Abstractions are rare in language 1. To the people of tribe 1, any word that doesn't refer to something physically perceivable, is highly suspect. Their test for reality is physical. The language of Tribe 2 (Language 2) is very different. A man who obtains his wherewithal mostly by fishing, is called "fisherman." (This system of nomenclature would seem absurd to the people of Tribe 1 - how can you call someone a "fisherman" when he is not fishing, but sleeping?) Language 2 contains many abstractions - like "happiness." People from Tribe 2 can talk for hours about "happiness." (To someone from Tribe 1, this would be incomprehensible - they only talk about "woman-who-is-happy" while she is happy, and "woman-who-is-sad" while she is sad. The notion that you could separate "happiness" from a real person being happy, and talk about "happiness" as if it existed by itself, would be completely unthinkable to someone from Tribe 1.) To the people from Tribe 2, any word being used is automatically assumed to be part of existence, otherwise people wouldn't use it. (To someone from Tribe 1, the word "existence" would be a meaningless absurdity, because in their mentality only particular objects exist.) In Tribe 2, the test for reality is agreement. If other people agree with a word and the way it seems to be used, then that word is automatically accepted as valid and useful. They suffer from hypostatization. One day a strange man arrives at the place where the people of Tribe 1 live. They ask him: "Who you?" He: "I King". They: "your name King?". He: "No; my name John." They: "Why call self King if name John?" He: "I special person, agent of God." They: "You look different but not special; who God?" He: "God creator of world." They: "Where God?; How create world?" He: "God everywhere; God all-powerful." They: "How we see God?" He: "Can't see God." They: "You speak crazy." He: "No; I special; I show you." Whereupon the stranger performs various tricks like apparently making objects appear and disappear. They: "You clever man-who tricks." He: "I special; I King." They: "You speak funny; you clever John-who-tricks." He: "I King; my word law." They: "What law? - special word?" He: "Yes; my word law - you must obey." They: "Ah! You mean order-word!" He: "Yes; I King; I make law." They: "No; you speak order-word?" He: "Yes; I special". They: "What special? - Anybody speak order-word?" He: "You not understand." They: "No." Eventually John-the-stranger gives up trying to convince the people of Tribe 1 that he has a "special status" and that his words are different from the words of anyone else - so he leaves, to search for more gullible and impressionable victims elsewhere... For many days and nights he trudges through the jungle before discovering the people of Tribe 2. They: "Who you?" He: "I King." They: "Your name King?" He: "No, my name John." They: "Why call self King if name John?" He: "I special person, agent of God." They: "You look different; what God?" He: "God creator of world." They: Where God?; How create world?" He "God everywhere; God all-powerful." They: "Show special?" Whereupon the stranger performs various tricks like apparently making objects appear and disappear. They: "You King, agent of God." He: "Yes, my word law." They: "What law?" He: "Law special word of God through me; you must obey." Whereupon the people of Tribe 2 bow down and kiss the feet of John - they do not habitually test abstractions against reality, so they readily accept John-the- stranger as their "King" and his word as "law." Thereafter all he has to do to control and dominate them, is to open his mouth... "Government" is a Form of Parasitism or Cannibalism The reason why people call themselves "government" is because it provides them with advantages - if they can get away with it. In the case of tribe 1, John-the-stranger called himself "King," but the people didn't buy it, so he left. However, the gullible people from tribe 2 believed him, so they became his "subjects" - meaning he could live off their effort - like a parasite. The "state" (so-called) has its origin in a gang of looters making an agreement with a tribe: "We'll protect you from other gangs if you give us part of the food you produce." ("Government" is a Mafia-like protection racket.) It's much easier to live off the values produced by others than to create your own values. Being a parasite is easier than being a producer. Being a value destroyer is easier than being a value creator. Now if we take it a step further, and regard the fruit of our labor as part of ourselves, then we're talking about cannibalism. That's why the American Declaration of Independence talks about "eating out our substance." "Government" is a form of cannibalism. "Government" is also a form of "self-cannibalism." It continuously eats out its own substance, eventually destroying itself. It may start off only moderately destructive - like after the American Revolution - but gradually (but sometimes with big jumps) it becomes monstrously degenerate and destructive - like in modern America. "Government" is Kept in Place by Certain Fraud-Words Politicians and bureaucrats use mostly words to impose their will upon others - even when physical violence is involved, they use words to attempt to justify their actions. Thomas Szasz wrote in The Second Sin, "Man is the animal that speaks. Understanding language is thus the key to understanding man; and the control of language, to the control of man." The language used to control and dominate others I collectively lump together as "Newspeak." The word Newspeak was invented by George Orwell and described in his book Nineteen-Eighty-Four. I use the word in essentially the same way that Orwell did, but within its domain I subsume words that I don't think Orwell would have: "state," "government," "law," "king," "constitution," "queen," "president," "prime minister," etc. Newspeak, as I use the term, has developed over many centuries. I contend that the use of Newspeak by freedom lovers as if valid (i.e., without questioning its validity, and without considering its consequences), may easily become counter-productive. I specifically use Newspeak in the sense of Orwell's "B vocabulary": "The 'B vocabulary' consisted of words which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them... the 'B' words were a sort of verbal shorthand, often packing whole ranges of ideas into a few syllables... even in the early decades of the Twentieth Century, telescoped words and phrases had been one of the characteristic features of political language; and it had been noticed that the tendency to use abbreviations of this kind was most marked in totalitarian countries and totalitarian organizations... the intention being to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness... ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centers at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word 'Duckspeak' meaning 'to quack like a duck.'" I'm also introducing here the concept of "fraud-word." I'm saying that certain words are fraudulent in themselves. You don't even have to use them in a sentence; the word itself is a lie. For example, the word "King." We have a perfectly good word "man." When a man calls himself "King," he's lying as did John-the-stranger above. The word itself is a fraud. In his superb book Restoring the American Dream, Robert Ringer devoted an entire chapter to how "government" is kept in place by certain words - Chapter 8: "Keeping It All in Place." Here is my list of statist fraud-words: "government," "state," "country," "nation," "U.S.A.," "empire," "commonwealth," "republic," "society," "emperor," "king," "queen," "prince," "princess," "president," "prime minister," "law," "constitution," "public interest," "national interest," "fair share," "common good," "national security," "social contract," "public policy," "mandate from the people," etc. Two of the Worst Fraud-Words: "Constitution," and "Law" If you think about it, you will realize the role of language in practically all coercion: be it parents or teachers coercing the young; or those masquerading as (so-called) "state" or "government" coercing (so-called) "subjects." Politicians and bureaucrats have an armory of weapons they use to coerce their victims. I put it to you that fraud-words are the most formidable weapons in their armory - not guns and explosives. Do politicians and bureaucrats use guns or words? I further put it to you that next to "government," two of their most powerful fraud-words are "law" and "constitution." Most people believe that some of the noises and scribbles emanating from the mouths and pens of the lawyers, politicians, and bureaucrats (masquerading as "government" so-called) are somehow special and constitute "the law." This is a grotesque superstition. The criminals who masquerade as "government" use "the Constitution" as their shield - they claim that "the Constitution authorizes or empowers them" to perpetrate their destructive acts. They use the word "law" as their sword. Because you broke their so-called "law," therefore they are authorized or empowered to punish you as they see fit. "It is illusions and words that have influenced the mind of the crowd, and especially words - words which are as powerful as they are chimeral, and whose astonishing sway we shall shortly demonstrate," wrote Gustave le Bon in his classic The Crowd, a hundred years ago. About two hundred years ago, Jeremy Bentham wrote, "Out of one foolish word may start a thousand daggers" - Bentham's Theory of Fictions by C.K. Ogden. And 160 years ago Jonathan Swift wrote in Gulliver's Travels: "There was another point which a little perplexed him... I had said, that some of our crew left their country on account of being ruined by 'law'... but he was at a loss how it should come to pass, that the 'law' which was intended for 'every' man's preservation, should be any man's ruin. Therefore he desired to be further satisfied what I meant by 'law,' and the dispensers thereof... because he thought nature and reason were sufficient guides for a reasonable animal, as we pretended to be, in showing us what we ought to do, and what to avoid... I said there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, accordingly as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are slaves." "Government" is Kept In Place by Superstition The first superstition that keeps "government" in place is the belief that because practically all of us use certain words without any thought as to their validity and the consequences they produce - Duckspeak - therefore these words are valid and represent reality. The second superstition is the notion that certain words constitute "the law" (so-called). This is a most grotesque absurdity. The third superstition is that because certain naive and gullible people put pieces of paper into "ballot" boxes, this action transforms, transmutes, transubstantiates, or transmogrifies, certain people into "presidents," "congressmen," etc. This is primitive magical "thought." The fourth superstition is that because some people call themselves "government" - or organize themselves into structures called "government" - therefore they acquire magical powers to perform miracles. "Government" is Kept in Place by Idolatry George Bernard Shaw wrote that "He who worships a King and he who slays a King are idolaters alike." Shaw was greatly influenced by Nietzsche, who wrote a book called The Twilight of the Idols. My Webster's definition of idol includes the following: A representation or symbol of an object of worship; A false god; A pretender or impostor; A form of appearance visible but without substance; An object of passionate devotion; A false conception or fallacy. In my opinion, both worshipping and hating "government" can be forms of idolatry. In the latter case, it depends on exactly what it is you hate, when you say, "I hate government." Could it be that the libertarian or patriot who says vaguely, "I hate government," is as much an idolater as the democrat or republican who says "I love my government," or "I love my country." The Idols of Human Understanding by Francis Bacon (condensed and edited): "The idols and false notions which are now in possession of the human understanding , and have taken deep root there in, not only so beset men's minds that truth can hardly find entrance, but even after entrance obtained, they will again in the very instauration of the sciences meet and trouble us, unless men being forewarned of the danger, fortify themselves as far as may be possible against their assaults. There are four classes of idols which beset men's minds. To these, for distinction's sake, I have assigned names: Idols of the tribe; Idols of the cave; Idols of the marketplace; Idols of the theater. The idols of the tribe have their foundation in human nature itself, and in the tribe, race, and culture of men. It is a false assertion that the measure of man is the measure of things. On the contrary, all perceptions as well as the sense of the mind are according to the measure of the individual and not according to the measure of the universe. And human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it. The idols of the cave are the idols of the individual man. Everyone has a cave or a den of his own, which refracts and discolors the light of nature; owing to his personal and peculiar nature; or to his education and conversation with others; or to the reading of books, and the authority of those whom he esteems and admires; or to the differences of impressions, accordingly as they take place in a mind preoccupied and predisposed, or in a mind indifferent and settled; or the like. So that the spirit of man (according as it is meted out to different individuals) is in fact a thing variable and full of perturbation, and governed as it were by chance. Whence it was well observed by Heraclitus that men look for sciences in their own lesser worlds, and not in the greater or common world. There are also idols formed by the intercourse and association of men with each other, which I call idols of the marketplace, on account of the commerce and consort of men there. For it is by discourse that men associate; and words are imposed according to the apprehension of the vulgar. And therefore the ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding. Lastly, there are idols which have immigrated into men's minds from the various dogmas of philosophies, and also from wrong laws of demonstration. These I call idols of the theater; because in my judgment all the received systems are but so many stage- plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion." Max Stirner: the Greatest Idol Smasher of All Time Here is a brief "taste" of Stirner (edited from The Ego and Its Own): "I no longer humble myself before any supposed "power," and I recognize that all powers are only my power, which I have to subject at once if they threaten to become a power against or above me; each of them must be only one of my means to carry my point, as a hound is my power against game, but is killed by me if it should attack me personally. All "powers" that attempt to dominate me I then reduce to serving me. The idols exist through me; I need only refrain from creating them anew, then they exist no longer; so-called "higher powers" exist only through my exalting them and abasing myself. Man, your head is haunted; you have idols in your head! You imagine great things, and depict to yourself a whole world of "gods" that has an existence for you, a "spirit-realm" to which you suppose yourself to be called, an "ideal" that beckons to you. You have fixed ideas! Do not think that I jest or speak figuratively when I regard those persons who cling to the "higher" as veritable fools, fools in a madhouse. The vast majority belongs to this category. What is it, then, that is called a "fixed idea"? An idea to which a man has subjected himself. When you recognize such a fixed idea as folly, you lock its slave up in an asylum. And is the "truth of the faith," say, which we are not to doubt; the "majesty of the people," which we are not to strike at; "virtue," against which the censor is not to let a word pass, so that "morality" may be kept pure - are these not fixed ideas? Is not all the stupid chatter of most of our newspapers the babble of fools who suffer from the fixed ideas of "morality," "legality," and so forth? Fools who only seem to go about free because the madhouse in which they walk takes in so broad a space? Touch the fixed idea of such a fool, and you will at once have to guard your back against the lunatic's stealthy malice. These lunatics assail by stealth him who touches their fixed idea. They first steal his weapon - free speech - and then they fall upon him with their nails. Every day now lays bare the cowardice and vindictiveness of these maniacs, and the stupid populace hurrahs for their crazy measures. One only has to read today's journals to get the horrible conviction that one is shut up in a house with fools. But I do not fear their curses, and I say, my brothers are arch-fools. Whether a poor (or rich) fool of this insane asylum is possessed by the fancy that he is "god the father," the "emperor of japan," the "holy spirit," the "president of the USA," or whatnot - or whether a poor fool in comfortable circumstances conceives his mission as being a "good christian," a "faithful protestant," a "loyal citizen," or a "virtuous man" - these are all fixed ideas. Just as the schoolmen philosophized only inside the belief of the church; as "pope" (so-called) Benedict XIV wrote fat books inside the papist superstition, without throwing a single doubt upon these beliefs; as authors fill whole folios on the supposed "state" without calling into question the fixed idea of "the state" itself; as our newspapers are crammed with politics because they are manacled to the fancy that man was created a political zombie - so also "subjects" wallow in "subjection," "virtuous" people in "virtue," and "liberals" in "humanity"; without ever putting to these fixed ideas of theirs the searching knife of criticism. Undislodgeable, like a madman's delusion, those thoughts stand on a firm footing, and he who doubts them - lays hands on the "sacred"! Yes, the fixed idea, that is the truly "sacred"!" The phenomenon of self-abasement warrants further discussion. When you call someone "King" or "President," and yourself "their subject," you exalt him and debase yourself. Similarly, when you regard someone's words as "the law." When you surrender your power to another - for example, by political voting or paying taxes - you exalt another and debase yourself. Similarly, when you subject yourself to an idol such as "government." These are all vile acts of self-abasement. "Government" is Kept in Place by Gullibility To think of Slick Willy as "President of the U.S.A.," is pure gullibility. The same applies to Washington, Jefferson, and all the others. They were all liars and impostors - idols. The entire "U.S." political system has been a fraud and a hoax since the outset. The same applies to all the other political systems I know of. Why are people so gullible as to believe politicians, bureaucrats, and lawyers? The first reason is that human consciousness is in its infancy. In evolutionary terms, consciousness is a very recent development - as Nietzsche indicated. Erving Goffman started his book Frame Analysis with: "There is a venerable tradition in philosophy that argues that what the reader assumes to be real is but a shadow, and that by attending to what the writer says about perception, thought, the brain, language, culture, a new methodology, or novel social forces, the veil can be lifted. That sort of line, of course, gives as much a role to the writer and his writings as is possible to imagine and for that reason is pathetic." Later in the same book - implying that it's impossible for people to become more conscious? - Goffman wrote: "I can only suggest that he who would combat false consciousness and awaken people to their true interests has much to do, because the sleep is very deep. And I do not intend here to provide a lullaby but merely to sneak in and watch the way people snore." The second reason is that many beliefs are culturally passed on from generation to generation. In general, people who question cultural beliefs tend to be ridiculed, punished, cast out, or killed. Furthermore, the politicians, bureaucrats, and lawyers have created concentration camps for brainwashing (euphemistically called "schools" by the gullible) where the youth are coercively inculcated with cultural beliefs designed to perpetuate and strengthen the political system. The third reason why many people are so gullible is that few have developed the thinking skills to question what they are taught and what they see, hear, and read in the media. "Government" is Kept in Place by a Lack of Thinking Skills To see through political hoaxes requires thinking skills. The most important one is probably the ability to question everything. Robert Anton Wilson wrote as follows in his book Right Where You Are Sitting Now: "On a night in September 1927 when he contemplated suicide at the age of 32, Buckminster Fuller decided to live the rest of his life as an experiment. He wouldn't believe anything anybody told him - "golden rule," "dog-eat-dog," or any of it - and would try to find out by experience only, what could be physically demonstrated to work. In the year following that decision, Bucky stopped talking entirely, like many mystics in the east. He insists that he had nothing "mystical" in mind. "I was simply trying to free myself of conditioned reflexes," he said. He had met pioneer semanticist Alfred Korzybski shortly before and was convinced that Korzybski was correct in his claim that language structures caused conditioned associations - mechanical reactions that keep us locked into certain perceptual grids. Fuller tried to break these grids, to find out what a person "of average intelligence" could accomplish if guided only by personal observation and experiment... The language we use influences the thoughts we think much more than the thoughts we think influence the language we use. We are encased in fossil metaphors; verbal chains guide us through our daily reality-labyrinth. Physicists, for example, spent nearly three centuries looking for a substance, heat, to correspond to the substantive noun, "heat"; it took a revolution in chemistry and thermodynamics before we realized that heat should not be thought of as a noun (a thing) but a verb (a process) - a relationship between the motions of molecules. Around the turn of this century - this is all old news, even though most literary "intellectuals" still haven't heard about it - several mathematicians and philosophers who were well versed in the physical sciences began to realize consciously that there is not necessarily a "thing" (a static and block-like entity) corresponding to every noun in our vocabulary." Fuller's many inventions and discoveries stem largely from his ability to question everything. It's through the application of this and other thinking skills that we discover that the most fundamental issue concerning "government" is the underlying thought patterns, consisting of statist fraud-concepts like "government," "state," "nation," "king," "president," "law," etc. According to Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: "But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government... is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself. And if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government..." [emphasis added] Frank Herbert illustrates the same principle in his book The White Plague: "There's a lust for power in the Irish as there is in every people, a lusting after the ascendancy where you can tell others how to behave. It has a peculiar shape with the Irish, though. It comes of having lost our ancient ways - the simpler laws, the rath and the family at the core of society. Romanized governments dismay us. They always resolve themselves into widely separated ascendants and subjects, the latter being more numerous than the former, of course. Sometimes it's done with great subtlety as it was in America, the slow accumulations of power, law upon law and all of it manipulated by an elite whose monopoly it is to understand the private language of injustice. Do not blame the ascendants. Such separation requires docile subjects as well. This may be the lot of any government, Marxist Russians included. There's a peculiar human susceptibility you see when you look at the Soviets, them building an almost exact copy of the Czarist regimes, the same paranoia, the same secret police, the same untouchable military, and the murder squads, the Siberian death camps, the lid of terror on creative imagination, deportation of the ones who cannot be killed off or bought off. It's like some terrible plastic memory sitting there in the dark of our minds, ready on the instant to reshape itself into primitive patterns the moment the heat touches it." [emphasis added] Let me suggest to you that the "terrible plastic memory" consists of concepts like "government," "state," "nation," "king," "president," "law," etc. The tragedy of organizing human affairs into structures called "government" will be resolved when the underlying structures of words, and the thoughts that stem from the words, are changed. In The Virtue of Selfishness Ayn Rand wrote: "If some men do not choose to think, but survive by imitating and repeating, like trained animals, the routine sounds and motions they learned from others, never making an effort to understand... they are the men who march into the abyss, trailing after any destroyer who promises them to assume the responsibility they evade: the responsibility of being conscious." -[cont]- Not copyrighted; public domain. Please copy, translate, publish, and distribute widely. Please include following reference: Originally published by TERRA LIBRA in October, 1994. DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
