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Title: The Handbook of Human Ownership Author: Stefan Molyneux Date: June 13, 2011 Language: en Topics: government, taxes, human rights, oppression, theft, anarcho-capitalism, anarchism, capitalism Source: http://cdn.media.freedomainradio.com/feed/books/HHO/The_Handbook_of_Human_Ownership_by_Stefan_Molyneux_PDF.pdf
The Handbook of Human Ownership
A Manual for New Tax Farmers
Audiobook:
link
Video (with captions):
Hey — seriously — congratulations on your new political post!
If you are reading this, it means that you have ascended to the highest
levels of government, so it’s really, really important that you don’t do
or say anything stupid, and screw things up for the rest of us.
The first thing to remember is that you are a figurehead, about as
relevant to the direction of the state as a hood ornament is to the
direction of a car — but you are a very important distraction, the
“smiling face” of the fist of power. So hold your nose, kiss the babies,
and just think how good you would look on a stamp. A stamp, for mail...
No, not email, mail. Never mind, we’ll explain later.
Now, before we go into your media responsibilities, you must understand
the true history of political power, so you don’t accidentally act on
the naïve idealism you are required to project to the general public.
Human Livestock — A History of Tax Farming
The reality of political power is very simple: bad farmers own crops and
livestock — good farmers own human beings.
This is not nearly as simple as it sounds, hence the need for this
manual.
The very first thing to remember is that you are a mammal, an animal,
and like all animals, you want to maximize consumption while minimizing
effort. By far the most effective way to do this is to take from other
people, just as a farmer takes milk and meat from cows.
In the dawn of history, this predation occurred in the most base manner,
through brute cannibalism. While this may have proven effective in the
short run, it fell prey to the problem of consuming your seed crop, in
that it provided only a few meals, whilst re-growing more human
livestock took over a decade.
And, it was pretty gross. Sometimes, even after you washed your food, it
was too smelly to eat. (Interesting fact: deodorant was first invented
asmarinade.)
The husbandry of human ownership took a giant leap forward with the
invention of slavery, which was a step up from cannibalism because
instead of using people as food, it used people to grow food, which was
a much more sustainable model, to say the least. And far less smelly.
Slavery was an improvement to be sure, but it limited the growth of the
ruling class because it could not solve the problem of motivation. Turns
out, if you treat people like a machine, they end up with the motivation
of a machine, which is to break two days after the warranty ends, haha.
Anyhoo, the basic reality of human ownership is this:
1. First, you must first subdue the masses through force
2. Then, you maintain that subjugation through the psychological power
of ethics.
People think that ethics were invented to make people good, but that’s
like saying that chastity belts were invented to spread STDs. No, no —
ethics were invented to bind the minds of the slaves, and to create the
only true shackles we rulers need: guilt, self-attack and a fear of the
tyranny of ethics. Whoever teaches ethics rules the herd, because
everyone is afraid of bad opinions, mostly from themselves. If you do it
right, no judgment will be as evil or endless as the one coming from the
mirror.
This is all fairly straightforward — however, the ethics required to
control slaves requires the creation of a paradise after death that they
can look forward to, if only they continue to obey their masters. This
harvests the muscles of the slaves, but not their minds, which remain
depressed and alienated and otherworldly and, well, economically fairly
useless. Basically, you’re saying “Hey, let’s double down, shall we?
I’ll trade you pretty much everything in this life for everything in the
afterlife, mmmkay?” It really only takes a moment’s thought to realize
that anyone making that deal has no belief in the afterlife — I mean,
look at the gold palaces of the Pope, for heaven’s sake! — but frankly,
a moment’s thought appears to be a moment too long for most people.
Tragically, slavery had its limits. Slaves have to be treated as apes
that can be verbally commanded, which provides the ruling classes
sophisticated control over their muscles, but permanently breaks the
most valuable resource of the human crop — their minds.
The Roman Empire perfected the slave-owning model, but inevitably ended
up creating too many dependent slaves, which triggered the slow economic
collapse of the entire system. (For more on this, see the section on
current conditions below.)
After the Dark Ages, when the ruling classes had to suffer the indignity
of retreating into the dank attics of the Church, the feudal model
emerged.
The feudal approach improved on the direct slave-owning model by
granting the human livestock (“serfs”) nominal ownership over land,
while taking a portion of their productivity through taxes, military
conscription, user fees for grinding grain and so on. So instead of
owning folks directly, we just let them sweat themselves into puddles on
their little ancestral plots, then took whatever we wanted from the
proceeds — all the while telling them, of course, that God Himself
appointed us as masters over them, and that their highest virtue was
meek subservience to their anointed masters, blah blah. Again, you might
be thinking that, historically, God seems to have had a very soft spot
for the most violent, entitled and warlike of His flock — and if meek
submission was a virtue, why was it not practiced by the rulers, and so
on, but don’t worry; you need to just put these entirely natural
thoughts right out of your head, because once the people become
enslaved, basic reasoning just short-circuits in their tiny minds, so
that they do not see the cramped horrors of their little lives.
Anyway, the evolution of medieval serfdom split society into four basic
groups:
1. The ruling class (aristocracy);
2. The church (propaganda);
3. The army (enforcement) — and;
4. The serfs (livestock).
The aristocracy — of which you are now a proud member — reaped the
rewards; the Church controlled the slaves through ethics; the Army
attacked those not subjugated through ethics, and the Serfs paid for the
whole show. (The modern equivalents are: the political masters, the
media, the police and the taxpayers.)
Since they had partial custodianship of the land, medieval serfs had at
least some incentive to optimize their agricultural productivity, and so
starting from about the 12^(th) century, significant increases in farm
production created the excess food required for the development of
cities, the natural home of the ruling classes.
The economic development of cities remained dependent upon the
rediscovered Roman law, which was not a free market/private property
legal system, and so economic productivity remained relatively stagnant,
at least compared to the 18^(th) century to the present.
Medieval guilds were ridiculously inefficient, forcing father-to-son
transmission of livelihoods, requiring ridiculously lengthy
apprenticeships designed to raise barriers to entry, denying advertising
and marketing opportunities, and so on.
Furthermore, the Catholic Church had banned usury, or the lending of
money for interest, which prevented investment in economic improvements.
(This was largely due to the fact that the Church, and the Aristocracy
it served, did not want to pay interest on its debts.)
(All of these early economic inefficiencies hindered the development of
democracy, which requires enormous reserves of capital, used as
collateral to bribe voters in the present with the money of the future.)
The splintering of Christendom into warring factions during the
Reformation created new opportunities for capital accumulation and
loans, and the economic warfare that resulted was really a conflict
between medieval capital inefficiencies and the new investment
efficiencies available under Protestantism — and Judaism to some degree.
Naturally, the religion that was able to borrow the most won, and
lending money for interest became an established practice throughout
society, thus paving the way for the Industrial Revolution.
Also, after hundreds of years of bloody religious warfare where priests
were effectively trying to gain control of the military might of the
state, in order to impose their doctrines on everyone else, the
separation of church and state became a matter of base survival. Prying
religious doctrines away from government policies meant that some
vaguely rational approaches to property rights and trade could be
achieved, which gave rise to arguments for free trade, notably by
Ricardo and Adam Smith.
When you stop trading in God, you can start trading in goods.
Starting in the 17^(th) century, the agricultural productivity that the
cities depended on began to falter. Serf landholdings were willed to
sons, which created increasing fragmentation of properties, and
inevitable inefficiencies in sowing and plowing. The ruling classes,
eager to remain in the cities rather than go back to the damp and dirty
countryside, forced the enclosure movement on the peasants,
consolidating landholdings and driving hundreds of thousands of serfs
off their ancestral lands. This almost immediately increased
agricultural productivity, saving the cities — while creating a massive
army of cheap labor which, having no land to farm anymore, inevitably
ended up looking for work in towns.
The conditions were thus ripe for the Industrial Revolution — capital
freedom, a mass of cheap labor, some free trade, excess food, and the
growing religious skepticism which resulted from the wonderful advances
of the scientific method, followed since the 16^(th) century.
It was at some point during this period that the greatest leap forward
in human ownership came to pass, which was the simple genius of allowing
the livestock to choose their own occupations.
At one fell swoop, the problem of livestock motivation was largely
solved — at least until the present. Rather than eat the human
livestock, or own them directly, or force them into specific
occupations, a free market was created for the source of wealth, while
the enslavement aspect was shifted to the effects of wealth, i.e. wages
and capital.
Labor was free, wages were taxed — this was the greatest leap forward in
human farming history! All prior ruling classes were revealed as
incompetent parasites, compared to the brilliant manipulations of the
modern human harvester!
The economic predations of the ruling classes still remained, but became
largely invisible. Tariffs and duties were buried in the prices paid by
consumers, who had no comparison prices to see their effects. The
softening of the visible whip to a kind of leeching fog gave the
livestock theperception of freedom — and they all stampeded to work, to
wealth, and to fatten our tables in a way we had never dreamed possible!
The trapped entrepreneurial energies of the human herd were thus
unleashed for the first time in history, producing a staggering
superabundance of wealth and products and services, portions of which
were hoovered up to the ruling classes to a degree never before
experienced!
The benefits were clear, the productivity increases astounding — but the
complications of managing this semi-free horde of human livestock rose
exponentially as well.
The first and greatest danger was the shift from aristocracy to
meritocracy, or the reality that greater wealth could be accumulated
through trade and creativity rather than tax pillaging and the control
of state violence. (This was same danger faced by the Church in the
shift from superstition to science.)
The rising entrepreneurial class created an uncomfortable split within
society, in which the benefits of the aristocracy began to be openly
questioned. Societies like America were founded without any aristocracy
at all — and aristocracies across Europe faced mounting rebellions, and
sometimes outright extinction.
The aristocracy did not want to crush the entrepreneurial class — since
it was so wonderfully productive — but it could not allow itself to be
eclipsed by these entrepreneurs, and so another unnamed genius came up
with a delightfully playful solution called incorporation.
The entrepreneurial classes wanted to maximize their profits, of course,
and sometimes this came at the expense of the workers. In the early
19^(th) century, citizens had access to a common law legal system that
allowed them to bring suit against their employers for death,
mutilation, pollution and so on. The capitalists wanted to avoid these
legal attacks of course, but no one wanted to explicitly strip the
workers of these rights, otherwise they would become aware of their
enslavement, and would lose their motivation, and we would be right back
to the Middle Ages again, which no one wanted at all!
Across the Western world, government after government introduced the
concept of incorporation, a brilliant stroke in the annals of human
ownership! Incorporation created a legal fiction called a corporation
which shielded entrepreneurs, capitalists, managers and owners from most
legal repercussions for their misdeeds — and even losses within their
businesses!
Entrepreneurs could now take money out of this “corporation” and keep it
for themselves, while if any legal action succeeded against them, or
their businesses lost money or went into debt, it was now the
“corporation” and “shareholders” and employees that paid the price, and
no one could ever come after their personal assets. It was like a casino
where you kept your winnings, and strangers paid your losses.
In return for extending this legal shield to the capitalists, our
political class took a cut in the form of corporate taxes — most of
which came from dividends and wages of course. This effectively trapped
the entrepreneurs in the service of the state, ensuring that they would
never seek to eclipse or make redundant the political class, since they
were now dependent upon State power for the maintenance of their legal
shield and one-way economic privileges.
The 19^(th) Century
The 19^(th) Century was a wildly creative time in the history of human
livestock ownership. The amazing productivity unleashed by the
privatization of labor, and the partial socialization of wages, created
such prosperity that the necessity of the ruling classes itself was
called into question.
Furthermore, the increased education and economic initiatives of the
working classes threatened the economic value of the managerial classes.
The workers achieved almost complete literacy, and possessed excellent
work ethics, legal knowledge and social networks, including the
so-called Friendly Societies, which shielded the poor from destitution
through any of life’s many accidents.
The supply of those able to manage thus increased, which drove down the
price of management — which was not exactly welcomed by the existing
capitalists.
The traditional solution to increased competition from the poor was to
ban books and education, inflict religious guilt about materialism, or
start a war — none of which were politically or economically
advantageous at the time. Openly banning education for the children of
the poor would have reintroduced the “OMG I’m a total slave!”
demotivation problem; religious belief was waning, while war would have
destroyed all the new capital that the ruling and entrepreneurial
classes were enjoying.
In a brilliant stroke, the ruling classes and the Church conspired to
create a false educational “emergency.” In conjunction with a large
number of resentful and underperforming teachers, public school
education was introduced with the stated goal of improving the skills,
abilities and intelligence of the poor.
Naturally, the true goal was the exact opposite. Rather than focusing on
practical, economic and entrepreneurial knowledge, government schools
quickly shifted the educational focus towards patriotic history, rote
memorization and recitation, Latin and Greek, and an endless plethora of
other useless and boring trivia. This was the sports equivalent of
forcing your competition to take naps instead of training, resulting in
a truly delightful absence of competition for medals. Government schools
created dull, resentful drones only fit for taking orders, so the threat
to the managerial class was averted. (All this started in Prussia, which
was medieval, mystical and militaristic, which should have been
something of a clue for everyone, but again, thought hurts, apparently.)
One of the four pillars of the human farm, the Church, faced mounting
challenges in the 19^(th) century, as the increased secularism of the
Industrial Revolution and the growth in the empirical value of the
scientific method undermined the superstitious terrors of the Middle
Ages.
Sensing that the power of their God was on the decline, the clergy began
casting about for a new home. Their expertise was in sophistic ethics,
remember, rather than political power, and so they came up with a
wonderful idea that allowed them to bring their brilliant historical
lies into politics, but without having to enter into the sordid knuckle
fights of base democratic electioneering.
In a word: socialism.
Socialism, or communism as it is sometimes called, is merely a secular
religion, where the State becomes a god. It has its good and evil, its
creation myths, its eventual heaven where the State withers away, its
ruling class of ethical liars, and so on. Priest as Plato, you get the
picture...
Suddenly, instead of heaven existing in the afterlife, it was promised
in this life, as soon as government programs succeeded. (The afterlife
is far more likely!) The new Socialist clergy promised an end to
poverty, injustice, illiteracy, shortness, baldness — any word they
could get their grubby hands on — and of course anyone who disagreed
with these fantasies was immediately portrayed as pro poverty,
injustice, illiteracy etc. Of course, just as the moral guilt of
religion can never create virtue, government programs can never create
paradise, and so a perpetual motion machine of social control was
started, where the supposed “solutions” just created more of the same
problems.
Religion and Kiddies
Religion has always been used to support and extend the power of the
State, through a number of powerful psychological mechanisms, always
inflicted on children.
First of all, in religion, success is guilt, and failure is legitimate
need. Creating guilt among economically successful people plants a seed
that flowers into a guilty parting with their property for the sake of
“helping the poor.” (Notably, priests never seem to get round to
attacking their own successful head priests, or the successful political
systems they support and enrich.)
Secondly, religion excels at creating nonexistent entities, and then
promoting a class of specialized liars who claim to speak for those
entities. Thus you have a “god,” and a priest who speaks “for that god.”
In socialism, you have the poor, and you have those who speak “for the
poor.” (Notably, it doesn’t really matter that socialists almost never
come from “the poor,” such as Marx and Engels, two unemployed rich kids
who claimed to have earthshaking insights into the poverty-stricken
working classes, who were actually getting richer.)
Thirdly priests, like politicians, promote arbitrary but universal
ethics, while excluding themselves from the moral rules they impose,
which is the most fundamental attribute of any ruling class, as we will
see below.
Fourthly religion — again, like the State — promotes wonderful traps in
the form of false dichotomies. For example, if you don’t want to the
State to steal your income in order to “help the poor,” then according
to religion you must hate the poor. This is like saying that if you
object to getting raped, you must hate lovemaking.
We could go on with this, but since religion has been so thoroughly
absorbed into the State in the form of socialism, there’s little point
in examining its medieval corpse.
The Modern World
In the past, society was so poor that the aristocracy had to be
hereditary in order to maintain its economic wealth — this is no longer
the case, due to the massive productivity increases of the relatively
free market. Now, a successful politician can easily gather enough
wealth to last several generations — or forever if handled wisely — in
just a few terms. This has allowed for the development of the illusion
that the tax livestock control something we call “democracy.”
Because we can steal so much wealth in such a short amount of time, the
ruling classes have agreed to rotate in and out of power, in order to
maintain the illusion that there is no ruling class. This rotation is
essential to maintaining the optimism of the livestock by giving them
the belief — almost always false — that they too can join the ruling
class. This means that the ruling class is no longer directly exclusive,
but rather somewhat permeable, at least at the fringes.
(The modern democratic system has the advantage of transferring
literally trillions of dollars from the workers to the rulers — a
plunder unprecedented in human history — but the logic of our system is
inherently self-destructive, which is why it is important for you, as a
new political leader, to make sure that you extract as much money as
possible before the whole house of cards comes crashing down. We will
tell you how to do this later.)
The democratic system only really came into its own with the abandonment
of the gold standard, and the introduction of merely paper currency.
Governments in the 19^(th) century — and before — were limited in the
amount they could bribe supporters and dependents by the amount of gold
they had in their vaults. Gold cannot be created by printing presses,
and so abandoning the gold standard (the capacity for citizens to redeem
paper money for gold) allowed the printing presses of government bribery
to work overtime, creating a good deal of the so-called “wealth” of the
post Second World War period.
Democratic governments — like all governments — are all about the forced
transfer of wealth from the productive to the unproductive. When the
creation of money was limited by actual gold, it was more or less a
zero-sum game. When you stole from one group to give to another — always
taking your cut — it was a direct reduction and increase of wealth in
the present, which was not only highly evident, but also gave the group
being stolen from a good deal of incentive to fight the theft.
With the introduction of fiat currency, this all changed. The
unimaginative ascribed this to the advent of Keynesianism, but the truth
is that fiat currencies predated Keynesianism, and Keynesianism was
merely the intellectual cover for the greatest intergenerational theft
in history.
When governments can print their own money, politicians can sell future
generations off to bribe supporters in the present — and shaft the poor
at the same time! If the government adds 5% to the currency in
circulation, those closest to the government get to spend that money
first — at the prior valuation, before inflation hits — and then, as the
additional money spreads through the economy, the price of everything
rises, since you have more money relative to goods than you had before,
and those at the bottom and the outskirts of the economy — generally the
poor, and those on fixed incomes — get hit the hardest.
Thus printing money serves two major purposes — first, it gives free
cash to politicians to bribe their supporters; second, it creates and
exacerbates poverty on the outskirts of the economy, thus giving an
excuse for politicians to raise taxes, create more government programs
(and thus more supporters and dependents) and print more money, thus
closing the circle.
Fiat currency also allows for luxurious indulgences in social
engineering — you can create “wars” on everything (since war is the
health of the State, just as the State is the health of war) — drugs,
poverty, prostitution, gambling, illiteracy, sickness — whatever. This
creates more and more people dependent on State payouts, and scares
everyone through terrifying attacks on ordinary human vices. It also
changes the kinds of people who want to become enforcers — sorry, “cops”
— but again, more on that later.
Unfortunately, the relationship between increases in the money supply
and inflation has been too well established and understood to be of much
use anymore. Capital markets are always on the lookout for the
overprinting of money, and punish governments by increasing the price of
their bonds, or downgrading their credit ratings. This is just another
reason why we are approaching the end of the current cycle of human
ownership.
The second trick that governments can use to bribe those around them is
to refrain from pumping money directly into the economy, but rather to
create imaginary money, and use it to buy their own government bonds.
All this does is push the liability of the repayment of bonds — both
interest and principal — into the future. It is a mere accounting trick,
like just about everything else the government does, but fools more than
enough people to keep the game going just a little bit longer.
Democracy and Bribery — But I Repeat Myself...
Every politician must promise, say, three dollars in benefits for every
dollar taken in taxes. This is utterly impossible, of course, since the
government has no money of its own, and is ridiculously inefficient at
everything it tries — so it is only through borrowing or printing money
that politicians are able to bribe voters into imagining that the
government produces wealth. The introduction of fiat currency, and the
modern banking system, protected by government-controlled cartels — as
well as the legal shield called the “corporation” — has been a godsend
to modern politicians, since it allows the costs of present day bribery
to be pushed off decades or even generations into the future. This has
been a complete no-brainer for everyone involved — free bribe money,
paid for by strangers who haven’t even been born yet, is a temptation
too lucrative and consequence-free to even imagine resisting.
Technically, democracy is a money-drug addiction that wages war on drugs
far less addictive and destructive.
This is the End...
Unfortunately — and you will see this as an inevitable pattern of the
ruling classes’ use of violence — this unsustainable system is nearing
the end of its current cycle.
The problem is that the consequences of these inevitable national debts
are producing medieval conditions once again. First of all, the economic
engine of the productive classes — access to capital — is failing,
because governments are stealing all the capital in order to bribe
voters. It’s true that voters then often buy stuff, but that’s not quite
the same as driving new entrepreneurial development, since voters don’t
invest in new businesses, but rather buy products from existing
businesses — which is yet another reason why existing businesses are big
fans of the government!
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the issue of livestock
de-motivation is raising its ugly head once more. Young people now
instinctively grasp the economic catastrophes ahead, and this blunts
their ambition and creativity to the point where fewer and fewer new
entrepreneurs are creating wealth for the ruling classes.
Birthrates
To rulers, the most fundamental capital is not money, but people (or,
more accurately, children, but we will get to that below.)
Reasonably intelligent human beings do not breed well in captivity,
which is why the birthrates of modern Western nations have crashed so
catastrophically. Those of us in the ruling class obviously want human
livestock intelligent enough to create wealth for us — but unfortunately
that kind of intelligence is also easily high enough to do a rational
calculation on the benefits and costs of modern parenthood.
In the current system, most parents have to work outside the home in
order to sustain even a middle-class existence, because of enormously
high taxation, regulation, inflation, debt and economic controls. So
parents don’t get to spend days with their children, but instead get
them for the evenings, night times and mornings, which are in general
the least enjoyable times for parenting, particularly when you have to
rush kids out of the house to daycare or school. Parents work a full
day, get stuck on the terrible roads we built for them, stressed out
because they don’t want to be late picking up their kids, then bring
their kids home, and cook and feed and bathe them, and then try and get
them to bed — with precious little playtime. Mom and dad then fall into
an exhausted, sexless bed, praying that their children don’t wake up at
night — and then have to rouse them at an artificial time, get them fed
and clothed and out the door on a strict schedule — all of which is
anathema to children — and then pay a significant amount of their
after-tax income for strangers to take care of the children they so
rarely see!
It doesn’t take a genius to realize that this is a pretty raw deal for
parents, and this is the most fundamental reason why birthrates among
our tax cattle are so low — except among the poor, who we pay to breed,
so that we can use them to guilt the better-off into surrendering their
money to us.
Thus we have de-motivated young people, who spend forever draining
wealth — their own and others’ — in school and university; fewer babies
and children, and a massive bulge of baby boomers heading into
retirement, where a completely empty cupboard awaits them.
Citizens can easily understand how impossible this all is, but they shy
away from confronting it, or demanding that we change it — or even
admitting it — because they’re all so guilty at having accepted bribes
their whole life, and because parents so rarely want to admit to their
kids that they have royally screwed them out of a future, and sold them
off to strangers for cut-rate park admissions. These aging citizens need
the next generation to pay for their own retirement, but are leaving
them with a cratered economy, growing state power and massive national
debts, and so to admit guilt would mean — at any reasonable moral level
— withdrawing their demands for retirement funding. If a man steals a
woman’s car, any real apology requires that he give it back — but this
is never going to happen with the national debt, or the trillions in
unfunded liabilities, and so no one with any real influence is ever
going to demand that we deal with this impossible situation.
Democracy is all about the guilty and shameful pillaging of the helpless
and unborn; it corrupts moral responsibility to the point where almost
everyone is far too guilty and entitled to take a moral stand for
accountability.
Get a man to take stolen goods, and he will never complain about theft.
This is the essence of democracy.
So — no worries there.
The Dependent Classes
A key foundation of livestock management is bribery, which has an
obvious benefit — and a subtle one. The obvious benefit is that, say,
artists and intellectuals who receive government money will never be
fundamentally critical of government taxes and redistribution, for
reasons too obvious to mention here. The more subtle benefit is that
when you create an entire class of people dependent on government
handouts, you divide the livestock into warring factions. Those whose
money is being stolen have a strong incentive to reduce State theft,
while those who receive stolen money have a strong incentive to increase
State theft.
It is absolutely, absolutely essential that you create and maintain
conditions which foster slave on slave aggression. If rulers smack down
the slaves directly, the livestock immediately become aware of their
enslavement, which reintroduces the motivation problem. Efficient human
masters thus ensure that the slaves attack each other — the benefits of
this are almost too numerous to count, but a few will be mentioned
below.
Human beings, as interdependent tribal mammals, have evolved to be
terrified of horizontal social attack, ostracism and rejection. This is
a core emotional vulnerability which can never be eliminated, and will
always serve you well.
Prehistoric man could not live without the support of the tribe, and so
the need for social acceptance was programmed into the very base of his
brain, as a core survival mechanism. The philosophers who serve power —
mostly priests and academics — have layered onto this basic mechanism
the additional power of ethics.
Ethics is a claim to a universal principle of preferred behavior, which
has the enormous benefit of being easily internalized by the slave
classes. If you can get slaves to attack themselves for daring to
question the existing social structure, you will not have to lift a
finger to keep them in their chains — they will in fact attack anyone
holding a key!
As a backup, you must always have a group of slaves willing to attack
anyone who mentally frees himself from your false ethics. This
enforcement will always come from two main areas: the family and the
media.
The Slave Family
Deep down, slaves always know that they’re slaves, and their only real
enslavement is resisting this knowledge. Prior ruling classes did not
trust this basic mechanism, and so were hesitant to substitute
horizontal social control for vertical political violence.
Now, we know better.
All commonly accepted cultural myths are created by the ruling class,
are essential lubricants for the wheels of power.
The most common cultural myth is that your family is everything, the
most important relationship, the most essential intimacy, the most
fundamental social unit.
This helps the ruling class in countless ways — not least of which is
that it establishes and extends the principle that an accident of birth
creates a fundamental and eternal moral obligation; “family” thus equals
“country.” (Also: “sports team,” which is one reason why we fund them.)
Once you have enslaved one generation, most parents will almost
inevitably resist the freedom of the next generation, out of guilt and
shame about their own surrender.
We tell people to stay close to their families, because their families
will so often attack them for even thinking about leaving the cages of
collective history.
Let’s look at the sequence.
A man surrenders his liberty for petty cash and the illusion of
security. He then becomes a father. His son questions his father’s moral
courage and integrity, and the father then attacks the son, chaining
them in a cage they both rot in.
For this cycle to be maintained, we must forever tell the son that his
family is the most important thing in the world — more important than
reason, evidence, truth, integrity, morality — you name it! If he
believes us, and if his family is not committed to his freedom, we (and
they) will own him forever.
This is the basic deal we offer to parents, just like priests: give us
your kids, and we’ll teach them to honor and obey you no matter what, so
you don’t actually have to be a good person and earn their respect.
(True, not all parents take this unholy deal, but we just get the media
to mock the homeschooled kids and all is well.)
Furthermore, given the billions of people ensnared in the dependent
classes the world over, it is a near-certainty that at least one or more
close family members will be dependent upon the existing system, and
will then violently attack anyone who questions the morality and
practicality of predatory democracy. Want to privatize education? Say hi
to your teacher Aunt Mamie, and let the fun begin!
The Media
A few people, however, will retain the strength to emerge from the slave
class, and — particularly given the communications opportunities of the
Internet — may start broadcasting their message to a wider audience — in
which case, it’s important to pull the emergency backup attack switch
called the “mainstream media.”
How do you create slave on slave violence through the mainstream media?
Again, subtlety and trust in the inevitability of human psychology is
the key.
First of all, you must never directly censor and control the media, or
its inhabitants may rebel against your authority, and reveal your naked
aggression. Once the knowledge of slavery becomes inescapable, society
inevitably and immediately changes — and hiding this knowledge is the
entire art and science of human ownership.
Thus you need to create a slow and increasing economic dependence in the
media, rather than arresting and imprisoning its members.
You do this by making reporters more and more dependent upon information
from the government. It is much, much cheaper to simply rewrite a
governmental press release than it is to spend weeks or months going
undercover, interviewing subjects, verifying sources, and exposing
yourself to legal complications in order to break a story outside the
normal channels of communication.
Furthermore, as State power grows, more and more people become more and
more interested in what the government says and does, since they are
investors or business people whose fortunes rise and fall on the whims
of the ruling class.
This process can be a little risky at first, but you only need a decade
or two in order for it to become almost universal and irreversible.
Remember — it takes a pretty empty person to rewrite government press
releases for a living, and fairly delusionary managers to pretend that
they are not the mere amplifiers of the whispers of power. Once these
managers assume their positions, they will inevitably reject any
energetic truth seekers, and instinctively seek out and employ other
empty rewriters of State edicts. The collective delusion that they’re
still producing “news” becomes progressively stronger, to the point
where they will rail against and attack anyone who actually tries to
publish something that is true, particularly if it threatens the
government contacts who supply their disinformation.
Access to government thus becomes the foundation of any media
organization — therefore no fundamental criticisms of government can be
produced. You can criticize a tax, but not taxation itself. You can
criticize a party, but not the State. You can criticize a vote, but not
voting.
As usual, it is both depressing and exciting to see the tiny price that
people are willing to sell themselves for — their name in print, a
meager expense account, a few parties, and they are yours.
The physical abuse required to keep the sheep in line is doled out by
the police — the verbal abuse is doled out by the media.
The media has been trained to attack anyone who questions the
foundations of violent power. The equation is really very simple — so
simple that it is always overlooked. If a man says that coercive wealth
transfers — theft, in the vernacular — are wrong, then the media
instantly attacks him for not caring about whoever is receiving the
stolen money.
For instance, if a man questions the morality and practicality of the
welfare state, he will be immediately attacked for not caring about the
poor. If he argues against government schools, then he clearly hates the
fact that children get educated. If he defends free-trade, he is an
immoral advocate for bloodsucking corporations; if he criticizes
military budgets, he is a cowardly appeaser who wishes to surrender Fort
Knox to Al Qaeda; if he holds people morally accountable for their
actions, he is punishing them for their past mistakes and “playing the
blame game”; if he refuses to forgive unrepentant wrongdoers, he is
nursing a grudge and so on.
If he argues that adult relationships are voluntary, then he is
viciously anti-community; if he says that abuse should not be tolerated
in relationships, then he is an intolerant absolutist bent on destroying
all relationships...
This list can go on and on and on — and Lord knows it does, every day —
but you get the point.
The wonderful thing is that you won’t ever have to tell the media to do
this — it just happens of its own accord, because people who are expert
verbal abusers always rise to the top of the media pyramid, because they
are so useful to those of us in power, so we always give them access and
exclusivity.
You only need a few verbal abusers in charge, and everyone else will
fall in line, because anyone who tries to stand up against them will be
immediately smacked down, and will face the horrifying spectacle of
watching all of their colleagues either take cowardly steps back, or
joining in the verbal assaults.
(I should probably have mentioned that priests — the best verbal abusers
in history — left the church for socialism and the media, which is why
the media tends to be so left-wing.)
The reason the media performs this service for us is very simple — we
own their livelihoods through licensing, legal regulation and access to
information. If we decide to cut anyone off, his career is over. If
anyone displeases us, we can threaten to pull the license of the entire
organization, because the rules are so Byzantine that we can nail
someone for something at any time — much like tax code, it is a form of
soft totalitarianism that we have perfected over the generations.
The purpose of regulation is to control through rational anxiety rather
than dictatorial terror. Prior dictatorships would shoot people, arrest
and imprison them arbitrarily — this controlled people’s bodies very
effectively, but destroyed their entrepreneurial energies and
motivations.
It is far more effective to regulate and license and tax — and this is
true for all industries — because potential dissidents then face their
own foggy walls of vague anxiety — in which they will not face arrest
and imprisonment, but rather lengthy legal complications, which they may
eventually win, but which drain much of the joy out of living while they
go on, month after month, year after year.
This is true for public-sector unions as well — we don’t make it illegal
for a manager to fire a unionized employee, because that would expose
the system for the economic joke that it is — we just make it really,
really lengthy and complicated and emotionally draining and
confrontational and exhausting — that is the true perfection of soft
totalitarianism. People will surrender to anxiety and still vaguely feel
free — if you terrorize them directly, they tend to just collapse
intellectually and emotionally.
If the media were directly owned by the government, the propaganda would
be clear; the indirect “ownership” of licensing and access to
information is far more effective and powerful, because it maintains the
veneer of independence and critical thinking.
This form of indirect ownership is the essence of modern democratic tax
farming.
It is a central truism of human nature that people always attack what
they avoid — if a reporter imagines that he is some sort of freethinking
iconoclast, he is in complete denial about the reality of his
enslavement. This denial always manifests itself in hysterical attacks
against anyone who dares to point it out, or who is actually a
freethinker.
To sum up — if we attack the slaves, we lose — if the slaves attack each
other, which is so easy to orchestrate — we win, at least for a time.
Children: The Greatest Resource
When we say that human beings are the greatest resource, it’s important
to be precise about what we mean.
Human beings are naturally born with two characteristics — the first is
a resistance to arbitrary authority, and the second is a natural
susceptibility to obeying universal ethics.
Anyone who doubts the first characteristic has never tried to parent a
two-year-old, and anyone who doubts the second has never triggered or
experienced moral guilt.
Domesticating the human animal does not mean that everyone needs to turn
out the same — in fact, it would be quite a disaster for us if they did.
To most efficiently control the human farm, you need a majority of
broken, self-attacking, insecure, shallow, vain and ambitious sheep,
forever consumed by inconsequentialities like weight, abs and
celebrities — and a minority of volatile, angry and dominant sheepdogs,
which you can dress up in either a green or a blue costume, and use to
threaten and manage the herd.
Ruling classes have always had to separate children from their parents,
otherwise it is almost impossible to substitute weird abstractions like
“the state” or “a god” for the parent-child bond. Human children, like
ducklings, will bond with whatever person or institution raises them,
which is why we always need to get children — hopefully as young as
possible — to bond with the State through government daycare and...
“education” I guess is the closest word.
In the distant past, rulers made the error of forcibly removing children
from their parents, which exposed their enslavement, and so destroyed
their motivation. In the late Middle Ages, children were farmed out to
wet-nurses, destroying the parent-child bond. In more recent times, the
boarding school system separated children from their parents, destroying
empathy and creating wonderfully brutal administrators and enforcers for
a variety of European empires. (See: George Orwell.)
In our constant quest to perfect human ownership, we have found a far
better way to break these family bonds, and substitute allegiance to
ourselves, in the form of patriotism and/or religiosity.
It’s one of those beautiful win-win situations that come along so rarely
— first, we raised taxes to the point where it became very difficult to
maintain a reasonable lifestyle if one parent stayed home with the
children. We also funded feminist groups to the tune of billions of
dollars — one of the greatest investments we ever made — to encourage
women to abandon their children and enter the workforce.
Not only did this help break the parent-child bond, but it also moved
women’s labor from nontaxable to taxable — a delightful coincidence of
self-interest and practicality for us!
With both parents working, all we had to do was create a few scares
about the quality of child care, allowing us to move in to control and
regulate that industry, remaking it to serve us best.
In some countries, like the United States, children are effectively
removed from parental care by the state within a few weeks or months
after birth — in other countries, parents receive direct subsidies to
stay at home, which is quite funny when you think about it (and there is
precious little room for humor in much of this). We take money by force
from the parents, keep a large portion for ourselves, use another
portion to run up debts that their children will somehow have to pay off
— and then dribble a few pennies down to the mother, who then feels that
we are somehow doing her a great favor by allowing her to stay at home!
It is a delicious irony that everyone remains so totally blind to
reality that they run to us to protect their children from all kinds of
harm, while we are the ones selling off their children’s future through
national debts! It really is like hiring a thief to guard your property,
and the amazing thing is that this is all so completely obvious, and
never, ever spoken about!
Sometimes, it would be tempting to feel bad about ruling people, but
really, they are so very stupid that it seems almost helpful.
Parenting has generally improved over the centuries, which also poses a
grave threat to us, because if children are raised without aggression,
they will both immediately see, and never accept, the reality of human
ownership.
As parenting has improved, it has become more important for us to
intervene earlier and earlier. In the 19^(th) century, it was okay to
wait until the tax kittens were five or six before we started
propagandizing them in government schools. However, as parenting has
improved — particularly in the post-Second World War period, we have had
to start intervening earlier and earlier, which is why we try and get at
kids so soon after birth now.
When kids were raised fairly well in the post-war period, it produced
the disasters of the rebellious 1960s, which almost finished us, and so
we began funding radical feminism, controlling teachers more and
snatching the kids earlier and earlier to fix all that.
So — we need some parents to create the sheep, and other parents to
create the wolves, or the sociopaths who can be relied upon to attack
whoever we point to. These sociopaths can be divided into those who
guard the ruling class (the police and soldiers and prison guards and so
on) — and the criminals that we always wave around to frighten people
into running back to our “protection.”
Again, the amount of doublethink required to maintain the delusion that
the ruling class is not invested in crime — when even by our rules, we
are all criminals — is really quite astounding! Governments control
almost the entire environment of the poor, from public housing to food
stamps to welfare checks to public schools — and it is this environment
that produces the majority of criminals! For instance, governments
require that children spend about 15,000 hours being educated in state
schools, and yet when they emerge from this massive investment as
illiterate and violent criminals, no one ever takes us to task!
Never, ever underestimate the degree to which people will scatter
themselves into a deep fog in order to avoid seeing the basic realities
of their own cages.
The strongest lock on the prison is always avoidance, not force.
Never-Never Land
Imagine a world in which almost all children were raised peacefully —
there would be no criminals, no police, no soldiers, no politicians (or
others with a bottomless lust for power) — no bullying in the workplace,
no white-collar predations on the general wealth, no assault, no rape,
no murder, no theft, no drug abuse, no smoking, no alcoholism, no eating
disorders, no pedophilia, far fewer mental and physical health issues,
very little divorce, promiscuity or infidelity — since all of these
dysfunctions can be directly traced back to early childhood traumas.
What need would such a world have for rulers?
That is the world we can never allow to come into existence.
Anything we can do to traumatize children serves the hierarchical
violence of our power.
Getting kids into daycare is a great start, since daycare makes children
continually ill, exposes them to the wild aggressions of dozens of other
children, destroys the one-on-one time that children need for bonding
and emotional maturity. Daycare kids remain insecure, unbonded with a
consistent caregiver (since teacher turnover is so high), and end up
inevitably placing more emphasis on peer relationships than they do on
adult caregiver relationships — including their parents.
These peer relationships among kids inevitably devolve to the lowest
common denominator, with bullies and manipulators and the physically
attractive rising to the top, and the sensitive and intelligent and
empathetic hiding under tables. Children quickly perceive that adult
attention is almost always negative — in other words that they
themselves are negative — serving only to increase the stress of their
caregivers. Due to the shortage of time and resources, conflicts between
children are rarely resolved in a just manner, but merely with
separation and mutual punishment, which breaks the child’s natural
desire for integrity and virtue, and places all the power in the fists
of those empty and dangerous children who do not fear retribution.
When the stressed-out parent comes to pick up the child from daycare,
the child feels further devalued, knowing that he is just another source
of aggravation for his parent (“Just get in the car!”). The practical
necessities of child raising are then compressed into a very short and
taxing time, which no one really enjoys. Parents are short-tempered and
impatient, children are stressed and unhappy, and then the whole thing
starts all over again when the alarm bells go off the next morning.
Children have to feel herded and controlled by impatient adult
caregivers long before we get a hold of them in schools, otherwise our
whole system will fall apart.
Children have to feel that they are inconvenient impositions on
all-powerful authorities long before they become adults — or even
schoolchildren — otherwise we will have no control over them.
Children have to feel grateful for whatever crumbs of attention and
consideration fall their way, and learn to live on very little,
otherwise they will never grow up with the desperate hunger that can
only be filled by conformity, patriotism, sports addictions, religions
and other superstitions.
We plant children; we grow power.
Rule by Adjective
The violence of the government can create nothing, so all we can do is
manipulate language. This is called the “rule by adjective,” or RBA.
RBA essentially consists of the creation of noble sounding phrases that
completely disintegrate under the slightest rational or empirical
examination. The goal is to use wording that sounds like the tagline of
a B-grade action movie, but with flags.
A few examples we are particularly proud of:
· “Building a bridge to the 21^(st) century.”
· “[Insert country here] has a date with destiny.”
· “No dream is beyond our reach.”
· “We’re one people bound together by a common set of ideas.”
· “Let’s celebrate our diversity.”
In crafting political language, it’s essential to play upon personal
relationships, and pretend that the farmers and the sheep are all one
big happy family, and that anyone who expresses skepticism or
disagreements is not a “team player,” and does not want to achieve
anything noble or great or good or unselfish. For example:
· “There may be naysayers among us who say that we cannot achieve these
great things together, but I say that history will prove them wrong,
that the spirit of creativity and unity still lives within our people,
and that the final chapter of our civilization has yet to be written!”
etc etc.
Notice that no substantial criticism is ever addressed — rather, sly
slander is continually layered over the objection until whoever objects
is just kind of disliked. (This trick is continually reinforced in
movies, where all the bad guys are unlikable, and all the good guys
likable, which as anyone who has ever read Socrates knows, is almost
always the complete opposite of the truth.)
Now that you have achieved the summit of political power, it is also
essential that you project calm, confidence, serenity, and all the other
characteristics that are completely inappropriate to the imminent
disasters awaiting the tax cattle.
The way that you do this is very easy — know that you will now be taken
care of for the rest of your life, and your children will never have to
work, and their children will never have to work, and you will never
face any significant legal problems or disciplinary action or face
arrest for anything you have done, even if it means starting unjust
wars, murdering people by the hundreds of thousands, imprisoning
non-criminals by the millions, running up trillions in debt, authorizing
torture, you name it, it’s OK.
Consequences are for sheep, not farmers. A citizen cannot be caught
speeding without consequences — but you are above all that now, no
matter what hells you unleash on the world.
People want political power because they want something for nothing, and
they want to escape the consequences of their evil actions — we want to
assure you that you have now fully achieved these goals. You will never
have to worry about losing your house, your job, your money, your
freedom — and with this kind of immunity from political, legal and
economic reality, you can project all the serene confidence of a sea
captain being helicoptered to safety while his ship slowly sinks.
We can also guarantee you that you will never face any tough questions
from the media. Anyone who gets to interview you will be so thrilled at
the opportunity, and so excited to be advancing his career, that he will
only lob you softball setups. It’s true that a single question might be
asked, such as, “do you think that X was a mistake?” but we can assure
you with perfect equanimity that whatever you answer will be accepted,
and no follow-up questions will be asked. You will always have the final
say, and if anyone does dare to ask you a follow-up question, all you
have to do is act mildly irritated, and insist that you have already
answered that question.
If anyone persists, not to worry, his career will be over, because about
10,000 empty-headed pundits will take to the airwaves claiming to be
shocked and appalled at the way that you were browbeaten and harangued,
and demanding to know what your problem is, and who you think you are,
and so on.
We know, we know — it sounds impossible, but it’s a guaranteed fix,
every single time. It’s as predictable as hungry dogs chasing a dead
rabbit on a string.
Ethics
There are two kinds of ethics that you need to be aware of — it is very
likely that you are already aware of them, since you are where you are,
but it’s worth going over them one more time.
When slaves evaluate masters, relativism and deference and working
together and respecting differences of opinion are key.
When masters evaluate other masters, bipartisanship and putting aside
differences and working together and respecting differences of opinion
are also key.
This falls into the old category of “turn the other cheek.”
When masters evaluate slaves, however, it’s total “eye for an eye” time!
For instance, if you propose health care legislation that will force
people to do stuff, it’s very important that you respect the other
parties’ right to disagree with your proposal. However, once it becomes
law, no mere citizen is ever allowed to act on his or her disagreement
with you!
Debates are for the masters, enforcement is for the slaves.
You are allowed to debate whether or not to go to war, citizens are not
allowed to choose whether or not they fund the war, or are drafted to
get killed in it. You are allowed to debate whether to subsidize some
group, citizens are never allowed to choose whether they subsidize that
group.
Free will is for the masters — slaves get the determinism of their
masters’ whims.
In case you have any concern that someone will point out the
ridiculousness of all this, do not fear! The moment that anyone argues
that we don’t need violent masters — that such masters are in fact
hellishly destructive — all the slaves in the world will gang up on such
an exposed truth-teller, saying, in effect, “We are not slaves if you
don’t point out our masters!”
This reaction is all based on propaganda that is carefully layered in
throughout government education — and all education is government
education, because we regulate and control private schools and
universities as well.
The propaganda is, like all propaganda, completely insane, but through
calm repetition and attacking dissenters, it quickly gets accepted as an
obvious truth.
The propaganda is this:
1. The government provides service X.
2. If the government does not provide service X, service X will never be
provided.
3. Therefore, anyone arguing against the government providing service X
is arguing against the necessity or value of service X.
It seems almost embarrassing to point out the foolishness of these
arguments, but in the highly unlikely event you ever get a question on
this, it’s good to have an “answer.”
According to the democratic model, governments only do what the majority
of citizens want them to do. “The will of the majority,” is one of our
central gods, which cannot speak for itself, of course, and therefore
kindly allows us to, um, speak for it.
Democratic governments only help the poor, then, because the majority of
citizens want them to. If governments reflect the will of the people,
then whatever governments do is entirely unnecessary, because the
majority want to do it anyway.
The more that people get attacked for not caring about the poor, the
less the government needs to do anything about the poor, because the
attacks reflect a general preference to help the poor. The only
practical argument for the continuance of a government program would be
if everybody had a strong desire to get rid of it, because then, it
could be argued, they did not care about its recipients. If someone
said, “Let’s get rid of the welfare state,” and everyone cheered and
joined in, we might very well have some concern about the fate of the
poor — the fact that everyone defends the welfare state means that the
poor will be perfectly well taken care of in a free society.
Ah, the weariness of these ridiculous arguments! We do sometimes wish
that people would become just a little bit smarter, so we could all
eventually become free, but we are as trapped by the livestock’s
illusions as they are.
Exploitation
There are two classes of parasites on the productive classes — the poor
and the political. In the old days, Marxists used to blather on about
the exploitation of the poor by capitalists, which was utter nonsense.
When the capitalists were “exploiting” the workers in the mid 19^(th)
century, their real wages doubled — we democratic masters have had our
real claws on them for the past 40 years, and real wages have not only
stagnated and fallen, but educational standards have collapsed,
incarceration rates have skyrocketed, living conditions have
deteriorated — and the remaining social services we provide (bribes) are
all going to collapse because we have sold everyone off piecemeal under
the guise of “national debt” (because the real term — serfdom — is just
too accurate to be accepted).
The old-style capitalists “exploited” the poor by paying them
ever-higher wages — we exploit them by selling both them and their kids
off to whoever will shove a thin dime in our direction — dropping a
penny in the hollow plates of the poor, keeping eight cents for
ourselves, and using the last penny as collateral to borrow ten more.
But the merchant class is very useful to us, in more ways than as tax
cattle, tax collectors, and productive livestock — they also shield us
from popular anger at the inevitable results of our predations. When we
pay ourselves with the monopoly money (literally) of their futures,
prices go up. Who does the public get angry at? Us? Ha ha, get real, we
don’t teach them a damn thing about real economics — no, they get angry
at the checkout girl at the local convenience store for high prices —
and of course we always promise to “investigate” the source of such
shocking inflation. It’s pretty easy to pretend to investigate a mirror.
The strange thing as well is that we educate their kids, and then they
expect these lost souls to be somehow objective about us! Imagine if a
kid went to a school run by a government Post Office — would you expect
him to learn any form of critical thinking about the Post Office? Of
course not — he would get endless lessons on how wonderful, benevolent
and friendly Post Office workers were, and how before the Post Office
became a government monopoly, private mail carriers stole checks from
starving widows, abused their workers and overcharged their helpless
customers. You wouldn’t expect even a sliver of truth to fall through
the cracks of propaganda, but all this — and more, since the Post Office
can’t start wars — is inflicted on the helpless kids held prisoner in
state “schools.” So people arrive at adulthood worshipping the State
that stole from their parents, crushed their minds under forced
indoctrination, sold them into serfdom for the rest of their lives, and
programmed them for endless obedience.
Imagine if we said that Goldman Sachs should run all the government
schools — just picture the howls of indignation that would arise, shrill
shrieks of the dangers of bias, indoctrination and programming! Ah, but
give the children to the State, and everyone smiles benignly, certain
that objectivity, reason and a well-tempered love of children and
learning will reign supreme.
Ahhh, it does turn the stomach so at times! Everyone knows that teachers
don’t give even half a rat’s ass about the kids — and the test is so
pitifully easy that everyone knows what it is. Just remind the teachers
that kids don’t benefit from having over two months off in the summer —
and it’s hell for parents as well of course — and cite the statistics
about how well kids do when they’re in school year round, and don’t
forget everything over the summer. How will the teachers react? Meh, to
ask the question is to answer it.
Childhood <> Personhood
The key to tyranny is to treat kids as somewhere between pets and hobos.
If a child never thinks of himself as a full person, he will never
aspire to be more than a “citizen” — i.e. to be owned, and sold, and
ordered around. (People take pride in being ‘citizens,’ which is
completely mad, since ‘citizenship’ means that they have been granted
the ‘right’ to work, travel and live, which are all supposed to be
‘inalienable’ anyway...)
For example — imagine, as Murray Rothbard once wrote, that the
government should take over magazines and books, and limit readership by
local geography, and hire, fire and control all writers, editors and
reporters, and force people to pay for them even if they never read them
— what an unholy outcry would arise! Cries of ‘censorship’ and ‘tyranny’
would echo in tinny indignation from bosom to heaving bosom! Ah, but
inflict farworse controls on children — force them into local schools,
control all the teachers and curriculum (even for ‘private’ schools) and
not only are the voices of protest silent, but are only raised against
anyone who dares to suggest that the free minds of helpless children are
far more important than the recreational reading tastes of adults...
You’ll get a kick out of this one too — ok — use government power to
force everyone to pay for the indoctrination of children, force the kids
to sit in dusty, still rows, barely allowed to blink — and then drug the
living crap out of them if they get bored and restless — and keep them
trapped there, year after year — and then tell them that their masters
won the war that set them free, against National Socialism and
communism! Can you imagine telling children in an entirely communist
environment — public schools — that communism is the enemy? Of course,
they’ll just write it down and regurgitate it whenever you want, because
they’re terrified of being drugged — and then you have to tell them, of
course, that communist dictatorships used the lie called “mental
illness” to drug anyone who didn’t fit in and obey the rulers!
Freedom is for the adults — communism is for the children.
Science
We have a complicated relationship with science — we need it, for
weapons and tax livestock management (imagine how hard it would be to
collect taxes without computers) — so we need science to flourish, but
we also need to control it. The way we do this is to continually program
the population to view science as a productive but dangerous force that
will destroy the world if not tightly controlled. This is utterly
absurd, of course, since it was our control of science through the
Manhattan Project that created weapons that actually could destroy the
world, but then we just tell the sheeple that, yanno, worse things would
have happened if we didn’t make nukes, and they all baa and agree and
eat the leftover grass we shovel into their troughs.
So we do this sort of “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” thing, where science is
great to begin with, but then grows and grows and gets out of control
and needs to be shut down in an extremity of CGI adventure. Naturally,
we’re really talking about ourselves, the government itself, but no one
wants to think about that, so they imagine that it’s all about robots
and computers and carbon footprints and machines that make hot dogs in
the sky...
People will always choose a thousand fairy tales over one basic fact.
Except us, perhaps. Our understanding of — and immunity to —
sentimentality is our greatest power. We are the lions who hunt with
sentimental pictures of little kittens.
From Here...
At this point, it does pain me to tell you that you will soon have the
rather unenviable task of informing the livestock that they are pretty
much screwed.
There is no way in god’s green earth that our system will last even
another few years, which means that you will have dust off and start
playing the good old ‘sacrifice violin.’
Now this traditional instrument may sound screechy and ridiculous to
your ears but trust us, just keep playing and everyone will dance in a
line for you.
Just tell them that biiiig hardships are coming, that we as a nation are
being ‘tested,’ and that we all need to ‘pull together’ and shoulder our
common burdens, and look out for the most vulnerable among us, and that
to achieve a new dawn, sacrifices need to be made, and hint strongly
that bad forces outside your control — or before your time — have robbed
the people, and will be held accountable, but that we all need to look
to the future, and remember that we as a people can do anything we set
our minds and wills to, and we defeated the prior tyrannies etc etc etc.
For some reason, people always take a dark masochistic delight in
struggling through trying times where they all have to “pull together”
and “make sacrifices” and strive to achieve the best in tragic times and
so on. Probably boredom and self-contempt for their own hypocrisy, but
who knows, and who cares? The important thing is that government schools
and all the endless lies about past wars and depressions — that the best
in people comes out in the worst of times and so on — have all
programmed citizens to react with dark and lascivious glee when we
demand that they spend a generation eating shit for our mistakes.
Of course, people love to punish themselves for their own hypocrisies
and various other sins, and Lord knows the average state-sucking slut
voter has more than enough to feel guilty about, trying to wheedle
something for nothing out of the government, the future, their own
children for heaven’s sake! So when sacrifice is called for, most people
feel secretly relieved, since all these trials, tribulations and common
burdens effectively squelch any substantial social, economic or
political criticisms.
“Pull together” unleashes the most savage social censorship imaginable.
During the coming time of crisis, if the young people justly point
fingers at the greed and hypocrisy of their elders, they will be sternly
told that we all have to pull together, and there’s no point playing the
“blame game” now. If the young point out that they were never allowed
such a mealy-mouthed avoidance strategy when they were growing up, they
will be told that they are quibbling and refusing to let go of the past
and so on. Ha ha, imagine a teenager trying those strategies about
failing to take out the garbage, and you will instantly see how much
these cowardly redirects stink!
So — self-flagellation for past crimes and avoidance of just accusations
from past victims — these motives will trigger such hellish attacks on
freethinkers that only the truly crazed will continue to raise these
issues... (If you want to know more about this phenomenon, just remember
how few Europeans criticized the ruling classes for two World Wars in
two generations, but rather took pride in ‘winning’ a bloodbath that
cost over 50 million lives — and contrast that with how they treat a
waiter who forgets their food order.)
So the plan is always the same — we pillage, plunder and bribe — then
demand sacrifices from our victims. To get the general idea, picture a
rapist demanding a drive home from his victim.
Anyone who does not play along with this insanity will just be branded a
malcontent, not a “team player” — and mocked and ostracized.
Fortunately, we have bred our livestock to be so dependent on social
approval that most everyone will find this unbearable, and slink back
into the single file line to the graveyard, pushing their bewildered and
resentful children ahead of them...
Conclusion
So remember — you’re going to be taken care of, that’s the first thing
to really understand. You can’t go broke, you can’t go hungry, you can’t
lose your house, you can’t really be fired, and people will pay hundreds
of thousands of dollars to hear you speak every day for the rest of your
life. You will get libraries named after you, receive multimillion
dollar book deals, and a guaranteed gold-plated pension with free health
care for the rest of your life.
You have absolutely nothing to worry about. You have the softest seat on
the biggest lifeboat.
This is, to a large degree, the source of your weird confidence, which
separates you from the herd, and which they imagine is why you are their
leader.
The reality is that they have endless worries that you don’t have, and
so you can just join us, floating above the petty fears of the masses,
serene and secure like the ancient gods we have always been.
So go out among the crowds and make pretty noises with your velvet
throat. Distract these fools with your eloquence while we finish
pillaging their pockets. Empty out the remainder of your soul driving
the sheeple off a cliff — it may haunt the remnants of your integrity,
but don’t worry: we do still have that stamp just waiting for your
smiling face.