By BC Dad
Can pressure on the current government regime lead to meaningful change? Or is it time for the MRM to get seriously involved in the political debate at a deeper level? Consider this argument:
Individuals, people, are the only possible source of and justification for government.
Government by definition is a transfer of power from individuals and natural social units.
The transfer of power from people to government concentrates it (a little from each of the many yields much to the few) and enables government to reserve for itself a monopoly on the use of force against people.
The exercise of government thus becomes a matter of using force against people for the benefit of people.
So the question is then: which people? Who decides when government force is justified? Who are the recipients of government coercion and violence?
I’ve never had a problem with drugs. I’ve had problems with the police. ~ Keith Richards
The rationale behind the answer can be based on simple principles, on the idea that basic rights are inherent to the condition of being born human. Government’s only purpose is to preserve and protect those rights for the benefit of the citizens who created that government.
Ideology, on the other hand, provides a rationale based on a desire to change the fundamentally flawed nature of humanity, to improve the human condition according to its own identification of the problem. By its very nature, ideology seeks to control, change, and eliminate the perceived source of the problem.
Examples: the monarchy is the problem, the wealthy classes are the problem, the patriarchy is the problem, inequality is the problem, capitalism is the problem, socialism is the problem.
People (including governments composed of people) are vulnerable to the (often admirable and desirable) suasions of ideologues.
Example: All women should be free from violence.
An ideology which gains the support of a sufficient mass of people also gains the ability to influence and adjust the policies, functions, laws, institutions and practices of society and government, including the use of force to eliminate the perceived problem.
Contemplate legislation such as VAWA. For more, read Dr. Stephen Baskerville
The people, desirous of utopia, largely support the influence of ideology on government, and participate in the pursuit of that ideology’s rationale and outcomes.
The fact that totalitarian government, its open criminality notwithstanding, rests on mass support is very disquieting. Mass support for totalitarianism comes neither from ignorance nor from brainwashing. ~ Hannah Arendt
Ideology is thus the underpinning for the transformation of social government into the anti-social state.
See Alfred Jay Nock Our Enemy the State
Partial truths, propaganda and outright falsehood are part of the means used to generate public consent, means which are justified by the utopian ends.
Examples: 1 in 4 women are raped, women have always been oppressed by men, domestic violence is a male problem.
The process of scapegoating is a useful mechanism enabling ideological capture of the government’s monopoly on and subsequent use of force.
Example: America’s White Male Problem
The public supports and helps to justify the use of legal force to obligate conformity among society’s villains and scapegoats, and to clear the path to utopia.
Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
Eradication of scapegoats and other opposition becomes a prime goal and purpose of government in ostensible pursuit of utopia.
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. ~ US Supreme Court Justice Brandeis
People who see a need for controlling others in order to gain utopia, and those who see an opportunity for power and wealth, and those with a penchant for control and violence for it’s own sake, are motivated to gain positions of authority and are publicly honored, having the approval and backing of their government, their society, and their ideological leaders. The bullies come out of the woodwork and become state employees. It takes an awful lot of bureaucrats to kill 6 million Jews, 20 million Russians, 25 million Chinese, 800,000 Rwandans, and so on.
See The Soviet Story
The state thus becomes the enemy of the people; it becomes anti-social in the true sense of the word. Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away, and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any farther obedience.
~ John Locke
The courts, final protectors of justice and human rights, become the perpetrators of injustice and abuse, the opposite of their proclaimed function.
The larger society has already begun to believe the courts mad, and a society that does not believe in its system of justice is a doomed society. ~ Margaret Hagen
The greatest weakness of ideological government, i.e. the state, is that the use of violence against its citizens to forcibly hasten the onset of utopia does not in fact work very well, including in a democracy. Seriously investigate the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, the War on Crime, the War on Domestic Violence, or any of the other ‘Wars’ our ideological states are invested in, and three things immediately stand out.
1) the bureaucracies and legislation to deal with these problems never stop expanding, and
2) the problem is never solved and often gets worse, and
3) the (human and financial) costs of ‘solving’ the problem are often far higher than the costs of the problem itself.
You can’t regulate evil. ~ Michael Moore
Government, once morphed into the state by ideology, is thus the ultimate weapon against, and the greatest destroyer of, life and liberty. The precise ideology being invoked matters not one whit.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. ~ H.L. Mencken
Mass persecution, abuse and killing follows as surely as night follows day.
Insanity in individuals is something rare, but in groups, parties, nations and epochs it is the rule.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
When the MRM calls on the state to solve its problems with yet more bureaucracy and more legislation, it invites further abusive state micro-control, further loss of social power, further constraints on human rights; all based on the obviously flawed notion that ideologically-based legislation and bureaucracy can solve every problem. The low-hanging fruit, the easy solutions which government could meaningfully implement, were long ago accomplished under ‘government by principle.’
The ideological state absolutely cannot solve the problems of men; by joining feminism on that path, we increase the danger of tumbling down the rabbit hole.
Believe less, think more. ~ John Trudell
