Wednesday 18 July 2012

Screaming from the rooftop as if a clarion of truth



It would be a dream if we could cure the sickness of the state with an infusion of untainted fresh thinkers - oh we do need them so.  They could unwind all that is wrong.  Simplify and correct.  The sun will shine again, larks will rise, the sound of children's voices, as they play, could fill the air.

Who would support their candidacy however against the power of established interested parties.  Who would defend them against the onslaught that would inevitably come as they realised and attempted to undo all that has been done to assure the continuance of the status-quo from which these oligarchies and elites feed?

Is this the only chance, the last chance.  Surely everything else, every other idea, form and concept of the state, has be done and done to death. 

Now, just maybe, we can have our leaders decided by a process as random as jury selection to assure their best chance of offering purity.  What better means could there be?  More democratic than democracy!  Nothing better to assure perversion and self-seeking is not the immediate agenda of candidates.

But a moment.  What is the problem here?  Is it not that everything the state and its government does is, at best, seen to only be just good enough.  And too frequently is racked with corruption, illegitimacy, wastefulness, inefficiency plus, above all, that most insipid of all, the state alone holds the monopoly on the use of violent force.

Without the threat of force the state cannot function.  No subjects are truly voluntary.  Yes we are given the pat of democracy as if that worked.  We are given 'the rule of law' as if any normal man can find the means to resort to such an exclusive system.  The state is out of control, out of the control of the majority of people who make-up its population and who's property and work go to fund it all.

But we are locked into it through no more than its general acceptance, the people's unquestioning acquiescence to the fundamental of its necessity.  We are startled before the state and cannot imagine how it could be any different, how on earth could the earth function without this, most ancient of institutions, in place. 

Like the air, the sun, night and day, food, nature and death; the state is seen as irreplaceable.  Like men and women before took religious god to be the focus of humanity.  Took serfdom to be inevitable.  Took monarchies to be irreplaceable.  Took tribal leaders, took family elders, took father and mother.

From these common precepts of human life the fundamentalism of the state has been born.  As each transition of ruler has come about so the true legitimacy has fallen away and in its place a more illusionary paradigm of deception grown.

Like at the abolition of slavery people would holler: how will we work the land, who will take care of the slaves, its natural, its essential, its always been, its acceptable.  But at that time who could foresee how the world would become without slavery.  The arguments, no matter how persuasive, are illegitimate once it is accepted that the condition is unendurable.

Who can really foresee how the world will function in the absence of the state since we cannot understand the changes that will come about.  All we can guess is that the rate of change is to be ever exponential.

All that will be necessary to bring about the change will be a shift in human comprehension, in perception.  Two elements are evident and can be seen, with increasing clarity, as the denial recedes: 1. the state does not work indeed most problems emanate from the state and 2. the state, through its dependence on the use of violent force and lack of voluntarism, is illegitimate.

As the individual's process commences the counter questions one asks are initially sufficient to overwhelm and return one scurrying back into the comforting confines of statist thinking.  No shame in that. 

As one progresses the answers are realised. It is a slow process since our world comprises of so much to make the state appear essential.  We are immersed from the outset in such conformity.

The simple illustration, from the Chauncey Gardener school,  I find a help is to imagine human society to be as if a woodland (sounds a bit 'new-age' but stick with me please).  We can have a team of woodsmen and gardeners to try to keep every little detail just-so but we can all realise the world cannot run - be micromanaged - like that; a forest is never going to be a garden.  Things are going to keep growing, rotting and such - it cannot be helped.

The alternative, in our woodland illustration, is to live with nature, to allow natural growth and cycles to occur.  Instead of attempting to manage the woods top down, and fighting it all the way, let nature do what it does better than man ever can.  Let nature manage each and every cell, organism, insect and on to ultimately every great tree and it will always be balanced and sustaining.  The right decisions for the woodland's continuation will be assured.

Nature has long since worked through every lesson we need learn.  Everything mankind does is a part of the natural process, even if that is poisoning our planet with radioactivity or building self-replication cyborgs that destroy us all!

I am not saying we should go back to nature, not at all.  My point is simply that we should allow the world to run ground-up not top down.


There should be law and that law can be formed from the common judgement of the cases as they occur with courts acting little more than in arbitration. 

There should be the right to property and that right commences with the right to ones own body, life and the product of ones effort.  One has the right that ones property should not be harmed by the actions of another.

How we arrive at this point is dependant only on the people's complete rejection of the concept of the state.  If we do not find this for ourselves I believe it is inevitable that mankind will be subjected to a progressively authoritarian state the objective of which is simply its own self-perpetuation; to only see the trees and never the wood.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Don't just think it - write it!