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Earthgovernment
This essay is not copyright; it is public domain.
When gangsters extort protection money from small businessmen
or organize and regulate forms of commerce like gambling, prostitution or drug dealing
for the benefit of those in the trades, so called legitimate business people frown,
and make somber pronouncments that something should be done to repress organized
crime. These very same good citizens also pay protection money, er, ah, taxes, that's
it, taxes to the police and politicians, these very same good business people enjoy
trades and professions that are organized and regulated for the benefit of those
in the very same trades and professions by government. Protection rackets go on because
the gangsters also pay taxes to those very same police and politicians, though the
gangsters' taxes are paid in cash without written receipt.
Here's how you set up a protection racket, er, ah, government
on Earth. Imagine if you would, a prediluvian community of free people without government--a
village if you will, or a rural area after the holocost, like Lane County, Oregon,
where I lived when I wrote these words. Someone gets the idea that if they could
trick everyone in the village or district so each would give them a small amount
of money, they'd be rich and not have to work like everybody else.
To pull this deception off the very first step would be to
make Everybody afraid. That's not too hard to accomplish because 75 percent of everyone
on this planet is an Everybody--a timid person that doesn't confront well. "The
neighboring village, or Douglas County, is dangerous," the budding criminal
would suggest. "They want to take our land, women and cattle. We have to protect
ourselves against them." So this enterprising extortionist tries to organize
a small army to 'protect' Everybody. If he can't get enough support because people
are disinclined to become afraid of their neighbors in the next village or county,
he'll inspire a few local thugs to make a raid on the neighbors. This will sure stir
up some hostilities. So he gets his armed force, paid for by taxes. And what does
he do with his army? Natually, he makes a few forrays against the "enemy,"
stealing a few cattle, raping some women, burning a few homesteads along the border.
Now, on the other side of the border, there are some other
enterprisers who play the same game. They run the very same deceit, and likewise
organize an armed force to get even and protect their territory. Sporadic raids happen
on both sides. This makes life dangerous for the people, who then genuinely begin
to feel the need for increased protection. "Pay us more taxes," the enterprisers
say, "and we'll raise a proper military force, set up border garrisons and ensure
peace within our borders. If they attack us again we'll punish them properly, so
the enemy will think twice about messing with us."
However, the garrisons of soldiers have another use, more
important to the enterpriser--they become police, and are useful to enforce the collection
of taxes.
So now there is an established government with the power
to enforce, a force it uses to disarm and disorganize the citizens. Once the State
gains a monopoly on domestic force, the situation rapidly worsens. Taxes are gradually
raised to the point where the people are driven into apathy, while the governors
and their military establishment live high on the hog. To maintain government power,
it is essential that there always be a credible threat to protect their enslaved
population against, so rarely do governments engage in serious efforts to conquer
their neighbors. It almost seems they'll cooperate with their enemies to maintain
perpetual belligerency. In the 19th century, this was called realpolitik.
Unfortunately military establishments gain strength and legitimacy,
creating their own unique self-justifying cultures as they persist. Thus nations
occasionally fight major, conclusive wars. When an enemy is totally vanquished--enslaved,
exterminated or completely broken and incorporated into the victor's system--a new
enemy must be created or there remains no justification for the grinding taxes and
controls imposed by the govenment.
A very clear example of this occured about seventy years
ago. [Reader: please recall in what follows, this segment was written before the
fall of the Soviet Union.] After fifty years of continual and highly useful tension,
increasing government control, ever-steeper taxes and a growing military establishment,
the major nations of Europe concluded four years of total war in 1918. One side--Germans,
Turks and Austrians--was totally overwhelmed and at the mercy of the victors--French,
English, Italians and Americans. And did the victors relax when there was no more
threat to their total world domination? No, not at all. As a result of the war's
convulutions, a large, but weak nation to the east, Russia, had undergone a revolutionary
change in its social system, and was now operating on a formal ideology called Communism,
an ideology that officially sought to change the entire planet, much as the American
Revolutionary ideology sought planetary improvement after our own revolution. Not
that the Russians were in any position to advance Communism beyond their own borders--their
own country was in a state of catastrophic disorganization and starvation.
So what did the victors do after 1918? First they aided the
Russian Communists with food and loans to cover industrial start-up costs so that
Russia might appear to be a credible threat, while on the other hand, the victorious
nations threatened the Russians militarily, and proclaimed Russia to be the 'enemy
of civilization.' Any internal dissent within the victors' territory was then labeled
'Communist' and supressed. Today, the world is divided into "Communist"
and "free" nations, with a continuation of tension, military buildup, occasional
inclusive conflict, increasingly strong social control in all countries involved,
and don't forget the key issue--higher and higher taxes. [And now that that evil
Soviet empire has gone, who will be the next enemy? Militiamen? Moslems?]
Though the "free" nations ostensibly feel so threatened
by Communists that they'll stockpile atomic weapons of mass destruction to discourage
further "Communist aggression," the free nations also continue to feed
the Russians because a Communist economic system causes such gross inefficiency and
non-productivity that Russia cannot manage to produce enough food. After all, if
the free nations did not feed the communist nations there would be no credible threat
to protect their own people against.
Governments turn the same trick with street crime and criminal
justice. By failing to process and handle petty violent criminals in such a way as
they pose no further threat to daily social peace, the state can create a crisis
of "danger on the streets" that demands more and more police, repressive
laws and especially, disarming the public so the criminals won't be "able"
to obtain weapons. The sheeplike people on Earth are so intimidated by the magnitude
of the dangers their own governments have created that people no longer feel they
could survive without any help and control.
On the island of Jamaica, a protest religion has developed
called Rastafarianism. The Rastas correctly call the current state of affairs on
Earth The Babylon System. Rastafarians believe the whole third world as well as the
working and middle-classes in the industrial nations are currently enslaved, and
call for a revolutionary uplifting of mass consciousness, so that all might prosper
in peace and love. The only ones who would be hurt would be the top rankin' slave
masters who skim the cream from The Babylon System for their own. Unfortunately,
though praying for an uplift, the Rastas devote most of their energy destroying their
own awareness with huge overdoses of marijuana, whose continuous and heavy use they
consider a sacrament. Like most everything else in this universe, the Rastafarian
movement seems to work towards its opposite and creates its own failure.
Now, one of the rulers of the actual ancient Empire of Babylon
itself was the Persian king, Cyrus the Great, who invaded the tired old civilization
of Babylon with his conquering army. Being conquered is one experience common to
mature civilizations, for the grinding taxes and apathy generated by maximum governmental
control eventually makes such cultures unable to defend themselves, and historically,
most were overwhelmed by a succession of vigorous and less-civilized peoples, as
were the Persians when Cyrus conceived the notion of making himself emperor of the
known, civilized world. The valuable taxpayers themselves have little to fear personally
from such a conquest, for they are in and of themselves the main plunder--the language
and style of the government may change while the culture and degredation of the lower
classes continues virtually without alteration.
At any rate, this Cyrus came down from the mountains to effect
his goal of "lets go down and rip them off." Babylon's corruption-riddled
mercenary army collapsed, and Cyrus found himself more successful than he had ever
dreamed. Before he ran into any serious resistence he had taken everything from the
Indus River to the Aegean Sea, including those nations Earthpeople now call Turkey,
Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Iraq, Iran, Afganistan and Pakistan. Cyrus also had a remarkable
talent for political organization, and managed not only to conquer this extensive
territory, but more important, to weld it together into a single administrative system
that persisted for several hundred years.
A minor Greek king with expansionist ambitions himself, seeing
Cyrus march across most of Civilization, watching the Persians stop their expansion
(only momentarily, he feared) across the narrow Aegean Sea between what is now Turkey
and Greece, sought to make friends with Cyrus, and perhaps to ally himself with this
successful enterpriser. So he got together the most magnificent gifts he could manage
to assemble from a small rude city-state named Sparta, and sent them to Cyrus with
his emmisary.
After months of travel, the emmisary was received into Cyrus'
palace and was granted an interview. The gifts were presented and accepted and Cyrus
took the opportunity to learn something of the Greeks--whose territory he planned
to add to his empire as soon as it would be convenient. He and the emmisary got on
pleasantly, when the emmisary made a demand. "Sire," he said, "my
master, the king of Sparta, has only one request of you beyond your friendship. He
wonders if you would answer a single question for him."
"Of course I will if at all possible," said the
generous emperor.
"Sire, what my master wants to know is how do you manage
to weld so many distant and different peoples into one single nation. He too would
like to expand his power and conquer his own neighbors, if he only knew how to manage
them once conquered."
Cyrus thought a moment, and then surprisingly, "Come
with me. The answer to your question lies outside the city."
Cyrus led the emmisary to the stables, where they mounted
horses and, accompanied by only a small guard detachment, rode out into the country.
In a short time they came to a field of ripening grain. Cyrus dismounted, told the
guards to remain on the road, and said the the Spartan, "Come with me, your
answer lies in that field. Watch carefully what I do here and report it to your master.
It is his answer."
Cyrus then walked into the field. When he was in the middle,
he squatted down and looked over the field, his eyes at the level of the heads of
wheat. Then he got up and walked quickly over to a single stalk of grain that was
quite a bit taller than the others. He drew his curved sword and snicked off that
taller head of grain. Then he squatted down and again scanned the field until he
found another head that stood above the others, repeating his action of cutting it
off. He did this several more times. "Tell your master what I have done here,"
he said.
Education in American schools scythes down the able ones
exactly like Cyrus. Three-quarters of all students are of very average intelligence--their
heads do not stand higher than each other. Being average does not make them particularly
able, keep in mind. About five percent of the students possess abilitities that place
them a whole level above the average in awareness and creative potential. To keep
control of society, the Masters of the Babylon System must snick off the heads of
these able ones in some way.
First, the school divides the able ones into two groups;
those with and those without academic abilities. In my opinion the great majority
of the intelligent ones do not possess academic abilities--while the force of their
humaness is much stronger than the average Earthperson. The very bright non-academic
rarely moves smoothly through an institution that systematically represses spontaneity.
School destroys these gifted ones by invalidating their musical, spatial, social,
emotional, ESP, physical or other abilities and shunts them into the lower part of
the "average" group, defined as equal to those not expected to make a success
of life. This has been called "tracking." These extraordinarily intelligent
beings either go into agreement with this invalidation and consider themselves to
be cannon fodder and blue collar workers or become embittered, antagonistic and anti-social.
In either case, they are never going to get near the seat of power.
Now take the academically able students This group contains
some few gifted with extraordinary intelligence and many more than that who are merely
dilligent grinds. The brilliant are classified by the school system as equal to the
dilligent average, the brilliant academics are educated to consider themselves not
significantly better than all the others. Having no other standards, or means to
realize that the difference in their abilities is of an order of magnitude so great
that the able might as well be a different species compared to the average Earthperson,
this group of able beings does not ever realize themselves, effectively cutting off
their potential for changing the social system they are being trained to manage for
the Masters of Babylon.
The truely well-educated Founders of the American Republic
were adept political philosophers who were fully aware of the gloomy sociology of
government. They wisely concluded that government of any kind was a necessary evil,
which should be limited in scope as much as possible. In those days, understanding
society at such a sophisticated level was common among the well-educated, because
for one thing, well-educated people were not commonly found, while their education
was quite different from that which passes for schooling today. The eighteenth-century
person who got past primary school studied the classics--Greek, Latin, and the wisdom
of those ancients, a body of wisdom that included a mature political economy. This
was learned to gain an understanding of life, people and society, and how it really
works. The Founders and their peers also studied mathematics--to sharpen up conceptual
ability. Remember that well-learned geometry involves a great deal of visualization
of simple shapes and relationships between those shapes--making mental mockups. The
mental visualization of shapes has long been a core technique of mystery schools
and other esoteric practices for the development of mental acuity.
One group of politically aware Earthpeople called Libertarians,
attack government for more or less the same reasons as did the Founders of the American
Republic, and tend to label government as the source of our planets difficulties.
Libertarians spend much time admiring the writings of the Founders, and work hard
and hopelessly to limit the growing influence and power of the American State. However,
they are not correct in blaming enslavement on the enslaver. It must not be forgotten
that the "victim" agrees to be victimized. Were people willing and able
and eager to be fully responsible for themselves, their families and their communties,
they would not ask another to protect them, while abandoning their own ability to
protect themselves.
And how can Earthpeople ever become responsible when most
of them cannot even remember today what they decided yesterday?
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