THE MOST DANGEROUS SUPERSTITION (Phần III)

Part III
The Effects of the Superstition
Effects of the Myth

Throughout the ages, human beings have dung to all sorts of superstitions and false assumptions, many of them relatively harmless. For example, when most people believed the earth to be flat, that factually incorrect notion had little or no impact on how people lived their daily lives, or how they treated one another. Likewise, if children believe in the tooth fairy, or that storks deliver babies, they are not going to become purveyors of evil as a result of accepting such myths. On the other hand, over the years other false assumptions and myths have posed real dangers to humanity. It could be a simple misunderstanding among doctors, which led them to try “cures” that posed a bigger threat to their patients than the maladies they were trying to treat. As a more drastic example, some cultures offered up human sacrifices, in the hope that doing so would win the favor of their imaginary gods.
But nothing else comes close to the level of destruction – mental, emotional and physical – that has occurred throughout the world, and throughout recorded history, as a result of the belief in “authority.” By dramatically altering how people perceive the world, the myth of “authority” alters their thoughts and actions as well. In fact, the belief in the legitimacy of a ruling class (”government”) leads nearly everyone to either condone or commit acts of evil without even realizing it. Having been convinced that “authority” is real, and that by way of it, some human beings have acquired the moral right to initiate violence and commit acts of aggression against others (by way of so-called “laws”), every Democrat, every Republican, every voter, and everyone else who advocates “government” in any form is a proponent of violence and injustice. Of course, they do not see it that way, because their belief in “authority” has warped and perverted their perception of reality.

The trouble is that when something alters a person’s perception of reality, the person rarely notices it happening. For example, the world might look very different to someone wearing colored contact lenses, even though he cannot see the lenses themselves. The same is true of mental “lenses.” Each person thinks that the world is really the way he sees it. Everyone can point to others and claim that they are out of touch with reality, but almost no one thinks that his own perception is skewed, even when others tell him so. The result is billions of people pointing fingers at each other, telling each other how delusional and misguided they are, with almost none of them willing, or even able, to honestly examine the “lenses” that distort their own perceptions.

Everything a person has been exposed to, especially when young, has an impact on how he views the world. What his parents taught him, what he learned in school, how he has seen people behaving, the culture he grew up in, the religion he was raised in, all create a long-lasting set of mental “lenses” that affect how he sees the world. There are countless examples of how mere differences in perspective have led to horrendous consequences.

A suicide bomber who intentionally kills dozens of civilian strangers imagines that he is doing the right thing. Nearly everyone on both sides of every war imagines himself to be in the right. No one imagines himself to be the bad guy. Military conflicts are entirely the result of differences in perspective resulting from mental “lenses” that have been trained into the soldiers on both sides. It should be self-evident that if thousands of basically good people were all seeing the world as it is, they would not be desperately trying to kill each other. In most cases, the problem is not actual evil or malice, but simply an inability to see things as they are.

Consider, as an analogy, someone who has ingested a strong hallucinogen and who, as a result, becomes convinced that his best friend is really a malicious alien monster in disguise. From the perspective of the one having hallucinations, violently attacking his friend is perfectly reasonable and justified. The problem, in the case of one whose perception of reality has been so distorted, is not that he is immoral, or that he is stupid, or that he is malicious. The problem is that he is not seeing things as they actually are, and as a result, decisions and actions which seem perfectly appropriate to him are, in reality, horribly destructive. And when such a hallucination is shared by many, the results become far worse.

When everyone has the same misperception of reality – when everyone believes something untrue, even something patently absurd – it doesn’t feel untrue or absurd to them. When a false or illogical idea is constantly repeated and reinforced by nearly everyone, it rarely occurs to anyone to even begin to question it. In fact, most people become literally incapable of questioning it, because over time it becomes solidified in their minds as a given – an assumption that doesn’t need a rational basis and doesn’t need to be analyzed or reconsidered, because everyone knows it to be true. In reality, however, each person simply assumes it to be true, because he cannot imagine that everyone else – including all the respectable, well-known, educated people on the radio and TV – could all believe something false. What business does one average individual have doubting something which everyone else seems perfectly comfortable accepting as indisputable truth?

Such 1 deeply entrenched belief is invisible to those who believe it. When a mind has always thought of something in one way, that mind will imagine evidence and hallucinate experience supporting the idea. A thousand years ago, people would have confidently proclaimed that it was a proven fact that the earth was flat, and they would have said it with just as much certainty and honesty as we now proclaim it to be round. To them, the idea of the world being a giant spherical thing, floating around in space and attached to nothing, was patently ridiculous. And their utterly false assumption about the world being flat would have seemed to them to be a scientific, self-evident fact.

So it is with the belief in “authority” and “government.” To most people, “government” feels like an obvious reality, as rational and self-evident as gravity. Few people have ever objectively examined the concept, because they have never had a reason to. “Everyone knows” that “government” is real, and necessary, and legitimate, and unavoidable. Everyone assumes that it is, and talks as if it is, so why would anyone question it? Not only are people rarely given a reason to examine the concept of “government,” but they have a very compelling psychological incentive to not examine it. It is exceedingly uncomfortable and disturbing, even existentially terrifying, for someone to call into question one of the bedrock assumptions upon which his entire view of reality, and his entire moral code, has been based for all of his life. One whose perception and judgment have been distorted by the superstition of “authority” (and that describes nearly everyone) will not find it easy or pleasant to contemplate the possibility that his entire belief system is based upon a lie, and that much of what he has done throughout his life, as a result of believing that lie, has been harmful to himself his friends and family, and humanity in general.

In short, the belief in “authority” and “government” warps the perception of almost every person, skews his judgment, and leads him to say and do things which are often irrational, or pointless, or counter-productive, or hypocritical, or even horribly destructive and heinously evil. Of course, the believers in the myth do not see it that way, because they do not see it as a belief at all. They are firmly convinced that “authority” is real, and, based on that false assumption, conclude that their resulting perceptions, thoughts, opinions, and actions are perfectly reasonable, justifiable and proper, just as the Aztecs no doubt believed their human sacrifices to be reasonable, justifiable and proper. A superstition capable of making otherwise decent people view good as evil, and evil as good – which is exactly what the belief in “authority” does – is what poses the real threat to humanity.

The superstition of “authority” affects the perceptions and actions of different people in different ways, whether it be the “lawmakers” who imagine themselves to have the right to rule, the “law enforcers” who imagine themselves to have the right and obligation to enforce the commands of the “lawmakers,” the subjects who imagine themselves to have the moral duty to obey, or mere spectators looking on as neutral observers. The effect of the belief in “authority” on these various groups, when taken together, leads to a degree of oppression, injustice, theft and murder which simply could not and would not otherwise exist.

Part III(a)
The Effects of the Myth on the Masters
The Divine Right of Politician

In this country, at the top of the gang called “government” are the congressmen, presidents and “judges.” (In other countries the rulers are known by other names, such as “kings,” “emperors,” or “members of parliament.”) And, though they are at the top of the authoritarian organization, they are not perceived to be “authority” itself (the way kings used to be). They are still imagined to be acting on behalf of something other than themselves – some abstract entity called “government.” As a result of the belief in “authority,” they are imagined to have rights to do things in the name of “government” that none of them have the right to do as individuals. The legitimacy of their actions is measured not by what they do, but by how they do it. In most people’s eyes, the actions that politicians take in their “official capacity,” and the commands they issue by “.lay of the accepted political rituals, are judged by a very different standard than are their actions as private individuals.

If a congressman breaks into his neighbor’s home and takes $1,000, he is seen as a criminal. If, on the other hand, together with his fellow politicians, he imposes a “tax,” demanding the same $1,000 from the same neighbor, it is seen as legitimate.

What would have been armed robbery would then be viewed by almost everyone as legitimate “taxation.” Not only would the congressman not be viewed as a crook, but any “tax cheats” who resisted his extortionist demands would be considered the “criminals.”

But the belief in “authority” not only changes how “lawmakers” are viewed by the masses; it also changes how “lawmakers” view themselves. It should be obvious thai if a person becomes convinced that he has the moral right to rule over others, thai belief will have a significant effect upon his behavior. If he believes that he has the right to demand a portion of everyone’s income, under threat of punishment (provided he does it through accepted “legal” procedures), he will almost certainly do so. If he is convinced that he has the right to coercively control the decisions of his neighbors – that it is moral and legitimate for him to do so – he almost certainly will. And, at least at first, he may even do so with the best of intentions.

A simple mental exercise gives a glimpse into how and why politicians act the way they do. Think about what you would do if you were made king of the world. If you were in charge, how would you improve things? Consider the question carefully before reading on.

When asked what they would do if they were in charge, almost no one answers, “I would just leave people alone.” Instead, most people start imagining the ways in which they could use the ability to control people as a tool for good, for the betterment of mankind. If one starts with the assumption that such control can be legitimate and righteous, the possibilities are nearly endless. One could make a healthier country by forcing people to eat more nutritious foods and exercise regularly. One could help the poor by forcing the rich to give them money. One could make people safer by forcing them to pay for a strong system of defense. One could make things more equitable, and society more compassionate, by forcing people to behave the way they should.

However, while many positive benefits for society can be imagined, if only “government” power were used for good, the potential for tyranny and oppression – in fact the inevitability of tyranny and oppression – is just as easy to imagine. Once someone believes himself to have the right to control others, there is little likelihood that he will choose not to use that power. And, whatever noble intentions he may have had to begin with, what he will actually end up doing is using violence, and the threat of violence, to impose his will upon others. Even seemingly benevolent causes like “giving to the poor” first require “government” to forcibly take wealth from another. Once someone – however virtuous and well-intentioned he may be – has accepted the premise that “legal” aggression is legitimate, and once he has been given the reins of power, and with them the supposed right to rule, the chances of that person choosing not to forcibly control his neighbors is almost none. The level of coercion and violence he inflicts upon others may vary, but he will become a tyrant, to one degree or another, because once someone truly believes that he has the right to rule (even if only in a “limited” manner), he will not view others, or treat others, as equals. He will view them, and treat them, as subjects.

And that is if the person started with good intentions. Many of those who seek “high office” do it for purely selfish reasons from the start, because they desire wealth and power for themselves, and delight in dominating other people. Of course, acquiring a position of “authority” is, for such people, a means of achieving an enormous amount of power that they would not otherwise have. The examples, throughout the world and throughout history, of megalomaniacs using the facade of “authority” to commit heinous atrocities are so common and well-known that they hardly require mentioning at all. Putting evil people into positions of “authority” (e.g., Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Hitler, Mussolini, Pol Pot) has resulted in the robbery, assault, harassment, terrorization, torture and outright murder of a nearly incomprehensible number of human beings. It is so obvious that it is almost silly to even say it: giving power to bad people poses a danger to humanity.

But giving power to good people – people who, at least initially, intend to use their power for good – can be just as dangerous, because for one to believe that he has the right to rule necessarily requires him to believe that he is exempt from basic human morality. When someone imagines himself to be a legitimate “lawmaker,” he will try to use the force of “law” to control his neighbors, and will feel no guilt while doing so.

Ironically, though “lawmakers” are at the very top of the authoritarian hierarchy, even they do not accept personal responsibility for what “government” does. Even they speak as if “the law” is something other than the commands they issue. For example, it is very unlikely that any politician would feel justified hiring armed thugs to invade his neighbor’s home, and drag his neighbor away and put him in a cage, for the supposed sin of smoking marijuana. Yet many politicians have advocated exactly that, via anti-drug “legislation.” They seem to feel no shame or guilt regarding the fact that their “legislation” has resulted in millions of non-violent people being forcibly taken from their friends and families and made to live in cages for years on end – sometimes for the rest of their lives. When they speak of the acts of violence which they are directly responsible for – and “narcotics laws” are only one example – “legislators” use terms such as “the law of the land,” as if they themselves are mere spectators and “the land” or “the country” or “the people” were the ones who made such violence occur.

Indeed, the politicians’ level of psychological detachment from what they have personally and directly caused via their “laws” borders on insanity. They command armies of “tax collectors” to forcibly confiscate the wealth earned by hundreds of millions of people. They enact one intrusive “law” after another, using threats of violence to control every aspect of the lives of millions of people they have never met and know nothing about. And after they have been directly responsible for initiating violence, on a regular basis, against nearly everyone living within hundreds or thousands of miles of them, they are genuinely shocked and offended if one of their victims threatens to use violence against them. They consider it despicable for a mere peasant to even threaten to do what they, the politicians, do to millions of people every day. At the same time, they do not even seem to notice the millions of people who are imprisoned, whose property is stolen, whose financial lives are ruined, whose freedom and dignity are assaulted, who are harassed, attacked, and sometimes murdered by “government” thugs, as a direct result of the very “laws” those politicians created.

When young men and women are dying by the thousands, in the latest war game waged by politicians, the politicians speak of it as a “sacrifice for freedom,” when it is nothing of the sort. The politicians even use scenes of soldiers in caskets – a consequence directly attributable to what those politicians did – as photo-ops, to show the public how concerned and compassionate they are. The very people who sent the young folk off to kill or to die, then speak about what happened as if they themselves were mere observers, saying things like “they died for their country” and “there are casualties in every war,” as if the war just happened by itself.

And, of course, the thousands upon thousands of people on “the other side” – the subjects of some other “authority,” the citizens of some other “country” – who are killed in the wars waged by the politicians, are barely even mentioned. They are an occasional statistic reported on the evening news. And never do the politicians accept the smallest shred of responsibility for the widespread, large-scale, prolonged pain and suffering, mental and physical, which their war-mongering has inflicted upon thousands or millions of human beings. Again, the depth of their denial and complete evasion of personal responsibility can be seen in the fact that, f one of the victims of the politicians’ war games decides to attack the source, by directly targeting the ones who gave the orders to attack, all of the politicians, even hose claiming to be against the war, and all of the talking heads on television express shock and outrage that anyone would do something so despicable. This is because, in the eyes of “lawmakers” – due to the amazing power of the “authority” myth to completely warp and distort their perception of reality – when they do things which result in the deaths of thousands of innocents, that is “the unfortunate cost of war,” but when one of their victims tries to strike back at the source, it is terrorism.”

It is bad enough for those who are just obeying orders to deny personal responsibility for their actions (which is addressed below), but for those actually giving the orders, and making up the orders, to deny any responsibility for what their orders directly caused to happen is sheer lunacy. Yet that is what “lawmakers” always do, on every level. Whether it is the federal government, or some local township or borough council, every time a “legislature” imposes a “tax” on something, or imposes some new “legal” restriction, the politicians are using the threat of violence to control people. But, due to their undying faith in the myth of “authority,” they cannot see that that is what they are doing, and they never take personal responsibility for having threatened and extorted their neighbors.

Part III(b)
The Effects of the Myth on the Enforcers
Following Orders

The “lawmakers” give the commands, but it is their faithful enforcers who carry them out. Millions upon millions of otherwise decent, civilized people spend day after day harassing, threatening, extorting, controlling, bullying and otherwise oppressing others who have not harmed or threatened anyone. But because the actions of such “law enforcers” are deemed “legal,” and because they believe they an acting on behalf of “authority,” they imagine themselves to bear no responsibility for their actions. Worse yet, they do not even view their own actions as being their own actions. They speak and act as if their minds and bodies have somehow been taken over by some invisible entity called “the law” or “government.” They say things like “Hey, I don’t make the laws, I just enforce them; it’s not up to me.” They speak and act as if it is impossible for them to do anything other than helplessly carry out the will of a power called “authority,” and that they are therefore no more personally responsible for their actions than a puppet is responsible for what the puppeteer makes it do.

When acting in their “official” capacity, while seemingly helplessly possessed by the spirit of “authority,” “law enforcers” behave in ways which they never otherwise would, and do things that they themselves would recognize as uncivilized, violent and evil if they did such things of their own volition, without an “authority” telling them to. Examples of this occur all over the world, every hour of every day, in a wide variety of ways. A soldier might shoot a complete stranger, whose only sin was to be out walking in a militarily occupied zone after a declared curfew. A group of heavily armed men might kick down someone’s door and drag him away, or shoot a man in front of his wife and children, because the man grew a plant which politicians proclaimed to be forbidden (”illegal”). A bureaucrat might file paperwork instructing a financial institution to take thousands of dollars out of someone’s bank account in the name of “tax collection.” Another bureaucrat may send in armed thugs upon finding out that someone had the gall to build a deck on his own property, with the approval of his neighbors but without “government” approval (in the form of a “building permit”). A traffic cop may stop and extort someone (via a “ticket”) for not wearing a seatbelt. A TSA agent may rummage through someone’s personal belongings, without the slightest reason to suspect that the person has done, or is going to do, anything wrong. A “judge” may direct armed thugs to put someone in a cage, for weeks, months, or years, for anything from showing contempt for the judge to driving without the written permission of politicians (in the form of a driver’s “license”) to having engaged in any type of mutually voluntary but nonpolitician-sanctioned (”illegal”) commerce.

These examples, and literally millions of others which could be given, are acts of aggression committed by perpetrators who would not have committed them if they had not been directed to do so by a perceived “authority.” In short, most instances of theft, assault and murder happen only because “authority” told someone to steal, attack, or kill. Most of the time, the people who carry out such orders would not have committed such crimes on their own. Of the 100,000 people who work for the Internal Revenue Service, how many engaged in harassment, extortion and theft before becoming IRS agents? Few, if any. How many soldiers went around harassing, threatening, or killing people they did not know before joining the military? Few, if any. How many police officers regularly went around stopping, interrogating, and kidnapping non-violent people before becoming “law enforcers”? Very few. How many “judges” had people thrown into cages for nonviolent behavior before being appointed to a “court”? Probably none.

When such acts of aggression become “legal,” and are done in the name of “law enforcement,” those who commit them imagine such acts to be inherently legitimate and valid, even though they recognize that, had they committed the very same acts on their own, instead of on behalf of an imagined “authority,” the acts would have constituted crimes, and would have been immoral. While there are obviously mOTE significant and less significant cogs in the wheels of the “government” machine, from low-level paperpushers to armed mercenaries, they all have two things in common: 1) they inflict unpleasantness on others in a way they would not have done on their own, and 2) they accept no personal responsibility for their actions while in “law enforcer” mode. Nothing makes this more obvious than the fact that, when the properness or morality of their actions is called into question, their response is almost always some variation of “I’m just doing my job.” The obvious implication in all such statements is this: “I am not responsible for my actions, because ‘authority’ told me to do this.” The only way that makes a shred of sense is if the person is literally incapable of refusing to do something a perceived “authority” tells him to do. Unfortunately, the horrific truth is that most people, as a result of their authoritarian indoctrination, do seem to be psychologically incapable of disobeying the commands of an imagined “authority.” Most people, given the choice between doing what they know is right and doing what they know is wrong when ordered to do so by a perceived “authority,” will do the latter. Nothing demonstrates this more dearly than the results of the psychology experiments done by Dr. Stanley Milgram in the 1960s.

The Milgram Experiments

In brief, the Milgram studies were designed to determine to what degree ordinary people would inflict pain upon strangers simply because an “authority” figure told them to. For the complete description of the experiments and the results, see Dr. Milgram’s book, Obedience to Authority. The following is a short synopsis of his experiments and findings.

Subjects were asked to volunteer for what they were told was an experiment testing human memory.

Under the supervision of a scientist (the “authority” figure), one person was strapped into a chair and wired with electrodes, and the other – the actual subject of the study – sat in front of a shock-generating machine. The person n front of the “zapper” machine was told that the goal was to test whether shocking :he other person when he gave a wrong answer to a memorization question would affect his ability to remember things. The true goal, however, was to test to what degree the person in front of the zapper machine would inflict pain on an innocent stranger simply because someone in the role of “authority” told him to. The zapper machine had a series of switches, going up to 450 volts, and the “zapper” subject was supposed to increase the voltage and administer another shock each time the “zappee” got an answer wrong. In truth, the “zappee” in the tests was an actor, who was not being shocked at all, but at given voltage levels would give out shouts of pain, protests about heart troubles, demands to stop the experiment, screams for mercy, and eventually silence (feigning unconsciousness or death). In addition, the “zapper” machine was dearly marked with danger labels at the upper end of the series of switches.

The results of the experiment shocked even Dr. Milgram. In short, a significant majority of subjects, nearly two out of three, continued through the experiment right to the end, inflicting what they thought were excruciatingly painful – if not lethal – shocks to a complete stranger, despite the screams of agony, the cries for mercy, even the unconsciousness or death of the (pretending) victim.

Dr. Milgram himself succinctly sums up the conclusion to be reached:

“With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe .... A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority.”

Of note, in the experiments there was no threat that the “zapper” would be punished for failure to obey, nor was there any special reward promised for obedience. So the results were not merely showing that an ordinary person might hurt someone else to “save his own neck,” or might hurt someone else if it somehow profited himself. Instead, the results showed that most people will inflict excruciating pain, even death, upon an innocent stranger for no other reason than that he was told to do so by a perceived “authority.”

This point cannot be over-stressed: there is a particular belief that leads basically good people to do bad things, even heinously evil things. Even the atrocities of Hitler’s Third Reich were the result, not of millions of evil people, but of a very small handful of truly evil people who had acquired positions of “authority,” and millions of obedient people who merely did what the perceived “authority” told them to do. In her book about Hitler’s top bureaucrat, Adolf Eichmann (sometimes called “the Architect of the Holocaust”), author Hannah Arendt used the phrase “the banality of evil” to refer to the fact that most evil is not the result of personal malice or hatred. but merely the result of blind obedience – individuals giving up their own free wit and judgment in favor of unthinking subservience to an imagined “authority.”

Interestingly, both Arendt’s book and Dr. Milgram’s experiments offended a lot of people. The reason is simple: people who have been taught to respect “authority; and have been taught that obedience is a virtue and that cooperating with “authority” is what makes us civilized, do not like to hear the truth, which is that truly evil people, with all their malice and hatred, pose far less of a threat to mankind than the basically good people who believe in “authority.” Anyone who honestly examines the results of Dr. Milgram’s experiments cannot escape that fact of reality. But aside from the general lesson to be learned from the Milgram experiments – that most people will intentionally hurt other people if a perceived “authority” tells them to several other findings from Milgram’s work are worth noting:

1)    Many of the subjects of the experiments showed signs of stress, guilt, and anguish while inflicting pain on others, and yet continued doing so. This fact demonstrates that these were not simply nasty sadists waiting for an excuse to hurt others; they did not enjoy doing it. Furthermore, it shows that the people knew that they were doing something wrong, and did it anyway because “authority” told them to. Some subjects protested, begged to be allowed to stop, trembled uncontrollably; even cried, and yet most continued to the end of the experiment. The conclusion could hardly be more obvious: The belief in “authority” makes good people commit evil.

2)    The subject’s income level, education level, age, sex, and other demographic factors seemed to have little or no influence on the results. Statistically speaking, a rich, cultured, educated young woman will obey an authoritarian command to hurt someone else just as readily as an illiterate, poor, male manual laborer will. The one common factor shared by all of those who continued to the end of the experiment is that they believed in “authority” (obviously). Again, the message to be learned, however troubling it may be, is logically inescapable: Regardless of almost any other factors, the belief in authority turns good people into agents of evil.

3)    The average person, when the experiment is described to him, not including the results, guesses that the compassion and conscience of most people would prevent them from continuing through the entire experiment. Professional psychiatrists predicted that only about one in a thousand would obey to the end of the experiment, when in reality it was about 65%. And when the average person, who has not actually been tested, is asked if he personally would have gone to the end of the study if he had been tested, he usually insists that he would not have. Yet the majority do. Again, the message is troubling but indisputable: Almost everyone hugely underestimates the degree to which the belief in “authority,” even in himself, can be used to persuade good people to commit evil.

4)    Dr. Milgram also found that some test subjects, defying all reason, were determined to blame the results of their own blind obedience on the victim: the one being shocked. In other words, through whatever twisted mentality it took, some of those doing the shocking imagined that the one being shocked was somehow to blame for his own suffering. With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that when police officers are caught assaulting innocent civilians, or when soldiers are caught terrorizing or murdering civilians, or when prison guards are caught torturing prisoners, their defense is often to blame the victim, no matter how much the authoritarian aggressors have to mangle the truth and logic in order to do so.

Interestingly, even though at the Nuremberg trials, “just following orders” was not accepted as a valid excuse for what the Nazis did, it is still the standard response from countless soldiers, police, tax collectors, bureaucrats, and other representatives of “authority” whenever the morality of their behavior is questioned. Both in Milgram’s experiments and in countless real-life abuses of power, those who intentionally hurt others simply fall back on the standard excuse, claiming that they were not personally responsible because they were merely following orders. In the Milgram experiments, several subjects even directly asked the “authority” figure which of them was responsible for what was happening. When the “authority” figure said that he was the one responsible, most subjects went on without further debate, apparently comfortable with the notion that whatever happened from then on was not their fault and they would not be held liable. Again, the message is difficult to escape: The belief in “authority” allows basically good people to disassociate themselves from the evil acts they themselves commit, relieving them of any feeling of personal responsibility.

5)    When it was left up to the “zapper” what voltage to use, only very rarely would he go above 150 volts, the point at which the one pretending to be shocked said he did not want to go on. It is very important to note that up to that point – and almost all subjects made it to that point – the “zappee” let out grunts of pain but did no: ask for the experiment to stop. As a result, the one doing the zapping could quite reasonably say that the one being zapped had agreed to the arrangement, and up to that point was still a willing participant. Interestingly, of the few subjects who did not go all the way to the end, many of them stopped as soon as the “zappee” said he wanted out. This could be dubbed the “libertarian line,” since, once the “zappee” asks to be unstrapped, for the zapper to continue anyway constitutes initiating violence against another – the exact thing libertarians oppose.

Unfortunately, those who stop at the “libertarian line” are only a small minority of the population. As for the rest, the findings are disturbingly clear: of the people who would, at the behest of “authority,” shock someone who calmly said, “I don’t want to do this anymore,” most would continue inflicting pain even if the victim was screaming in agony. Is this because most people are evil? No. It is because they have been conditioned to do as they are told and have been indoctrinated into the most dangerous superstition of all: the belief in “authority.”

It should be noted that even Dr. Milgram could not escape his own indoctrination into the cult of “authority” worship. In passing, and with very little comment, even he opined that “we cannot have a society without some structure of authority.” He made a weak attempt to defend teaching obedience to “authority” by saying: “Obedience is often rational. It makes good sense to follow the doctor’s orders, to obey traffic signs, and to clear the building when the police inform us of a bomb threat.”

Yet none of those examples actually requires or justifies a belief in “authority.” Despite the way people often talk, doctors do not give “orders.” They are “authorities” in the sense that they are knowledgeable in the field of medicine, but not in the sense of having any right to rule. As for the other examples, the main reason to observe the rules of the road, or to leave a building with a bomb in it, is not because obedience to “authority” is a virtue, but because the alternative is injury or death. If some non-authority in a theater pulled a bomb from under his seat, held it up for all to see, and said, “A bomb! Let’s get out of here!” would everyone else stay where they were because the person was not perceived as an “authority”? Of course not. And if “government” repealed the “law” saying which side of the road everyone should drive on, would people start randomly swerving around? Of course not. They would keep driving on the right side, because they do not want to crash into each other. So, although even Dr. Milgram clung to the notion that the belief in “authority” is sometimes necessary and good, he gave no rational argument to support such an assertion. It is a testament to the strength of the myth of “authority” that even someone who had witnessed what Dr. Milgram had witnessed was still unable to completely give up the superstition.

After Dr. Milgram publicized his findings, many were shocked and dismayed by the extent to which normal people were willing to inflict pain or death upon innocent strangers when instructed to do so by a perceived “authority.” Similar tests performed since Dr. Milgram’s experiments have yielded similar results, which continue to shock some people. However, the results really should not be surprising to anyone who has taken a look at how most human beings are raised.

Teaching Blind Obedience

The purported purpose of schools is to teach reading, writing, mathematics, and other academic fields of thought. But the message that institutions of “education” actually teach, far more effectively than any useful knowledge or skills, is the idea that subservience and blind obedience to “authority” are virtues. Simply consider the environment in which the majority of people spend most of their formative years. Year after year, students live in a world in which:

•    They receive approval, praise and reward for being where “authority” tells them to be, when “authority” tells them to be there. They receive disapproval, reproach and punishment for being anywhere else. (This includes the fact that they are coerced into being in school to begin with.)

•    They receive approval, praise and reward for doing what “authority” tells them to do. They receive disapproval, reproach and punishment for doing anything else, or for failing to do what “authority” tells them to do.

•    They receive approval, praise and reward for speaking when and how “authority” tells them to speak., and receive disapproval, reproach and punishment for speaking at any other time, in any other way, or about any subject other than what “authority” tells them to speak about, or for failing to speak when “authority” tells them to speak.

•    They receive approval, praise and reward for repeating back whatever ideas the “authority” declares to be true and important, and receive disapproval, reproach and punishment for disagreeing, verbally or on a written test, with the opinions of those claiming to be “authority,” or for thinking or writing about subjects other than what “authority” tells them to think or write about.

•    They receive approval, praise and reward for immediately telling “authority” about any problems or personal conflicts they encounter, and receive disapproval, reproach and punishment for trying to solve any problems or settle any disagreements on their own.

•    They receive approval, praise and reward for complying with whatever rilles, however arbitrary, “authority” decides to impose upon them. They receive disapproval, reproach and punishment for disobeying any such rules. These rules can be about almost anything, including what clothes to wear, what hairstyles to have, what facial expression to have, how to sit in a chair, what to have on a desk, what direction to face, and what words to use.

•    They receive approval, praise and reward for telling the “authority” when another student has disobeyed “the rules,” and receive disapproval, reproach and punishment for failing to do so.

The students clearly and immediately see that, in their world, there are two distinct classes of people, masters (”teachers”) and subjects (”students”), and that the rules of proper behavior are drastically different for the two groups. The masters constantly do things that they tell the subjects not to do: boss people around, control others via threats, take property from others, etc. This constant and obvious double standard teaches the subjects that there is a very different standard of morality for the masters than there is for the subjects. The subjects must do whatever the masters tell them to, and only what the masters tell them to, while the masters can do pretty mud anything they want.

Not long ago, the masters would even routinely commit physical assault (i.e. “corporal punishment”) against subjects who did not quickly and unquestioningly do as they were told, while telling the subjects that it was completely unacceptable for them to ever use physical violence, even in self-defense, especially in self-defense against the masters. Thankfully, the use of regular, overt physical violence by “teachers” has become uncommon. However, though the force has become less obvious, the basic methods of authoritarian control and punishment remain.

In the classroom setting, the “authority” can change the rules at will, can punish the entire group for what one student does, and can question or search any student – or all students – at any time. The “authority” is never seen as having any obligation to justify or explain to the students the rules it makes, or anything else it does. And it is of no concern to “authority” whether a student has a good reason to think that us time would be better spent being somewhere else, doing something else, or thinking about something else. The “grades” the student receives, the way he is treated, the signals he is sent – written, verbal, and otherwise – all depend upon one factor: his ability and willingness to unquestioningly subvert his own desires, judgment and decisions to those of “authority.” If he does that, he is deemed “good.” If he does not, he is deemed “bad.”

This method of indoctrination was not accidentaL Schooling in the United States, and in fact in much of the world, was deliberately modeled after the Prussian system of “education,” which was designed with the express purpose of training people to be obedient tools of the ruling class, easy to manage and quick to unthinkingly obey, especially for military purposes. As it was explained by Johann Fichte, one of the designers of the Prussian system, the goal of this method was to “fashion” the student in such a way that he “simply cannot will otherwise” than what those in “authority” want him to will. At the time, the system was openly admitted to be a means of psychologically enslaving the general populace to the will of the ruling class. And it continues to accomplish exactly that, all over the world, including in the United States.

The reason most people do whatever “authority” tells them to, regardless of whether the command is moral or rational, is because that is exactly what they were trained to do. Everything about authoritarian “schooling” (and authoritarian parenting), even the modern version that pretends to be caring and open-minded, continually hammers into the heads of the youngsters the notion that their success, their goodness, their very worth as human beings, is measured by how well they obey “authority.”

Is it any wonder, then, that father than applying logic to evidence to reach their own conclusions, most adults look for an “authority” to tell them what to think? Is it an] wonder that when a man with a badge starts barking orders, most adults timidly obey without question, even if they have done nothing wrong? Is it any wonder that most adults sheepishly submit to whatever interrogations and searches “law enforcers” want to inflict upon them? Is it any wonder that many adults will run to the nearest “authority” to solve any problem or settle any dispute? Is it any wonder that most adults will comply with any order, however irrational, unfair, or immoral it may be, if they imagine the one giving the order to be “authority”? Should any of this be surprising in light of the fact that nearly everyone went through many years of being deliberately trained to behave that way?

Dr. Milgram’s experiments made it quite clear that the kind of people produced even by our modern, supposedly enlightened society, even in the good old U.S.A. – that supposed bastion of liberty and justice – are, for the most part, callous, irresponsible, unthinking tools for whichever megalomaniac claims the right to rule. When the people are intentionally trained to humbly submit to the beast called “authority” – when they are taught that it is more important to obey than it is to judge – why should we be at all surprised at the extortion, oppression, terrorism and mass murder that are committed just because a self-proclaimed “authority” commanded it? All of human history makes the deadly formula as plain as it could possibly be:  A few evil rulers + many obedient subjects = widespread injustice and oppression.

Making Monsters

There should also be at least some mention here about the psychological study done at Stanford University in 1971, in which a sort of mock prison was set up, with dozens of students appointed as mock prisoners and others as mock prison guards. The experiment had to be terminated early, after only six days, because those who had been given “authority” (the guards) had become shockingly callous, abusive and sadistic toward their prisoners.

It must be noted that the abuse committed by the “guards” even went beyond what they were told to do by those running the experiment, which was designed to humiliate and degrade the prisoners. This shows that the personal malicious or sadistic tendencies in an individual is a significant contributing factor to such abuse, but that most people openly act out such tendencies only when given a position of “authority” that they believe gives them permission to do so. The same phenomenon can be seen in all sorts of abuses of power, whether by a bureaucrat on a power trip, a soldier or police officer who likes to bully or assault civilians, or any other official who enjoys lording his power over others.

These demonstrate that not only does the belief in “authority” allow basically good people to become tools of oppression and injustice, but it also brings out and dramatically amplifies whatever potential for malice, hatred, sadism and love of dominion those people may possess. The superstition of “authority” begins by making average people mere agents of evil (which Arendt described as the “banality of evil”), but then goes on to make such people personally evil, by convincing them that they have the right, or even the duty, to abuse and oppress other people. This can be seen in the behavior of soldiers, police, prosecutors, judges, even petty bureaucrats. Anyone whose job consists of harassing, extorting, threatening, coercing and controlling decent people will, sooner or later, become at least callous, if not downright sadistic. One cannot continually act like a monster without eventually becoming one.

Another important thing to note, as shown in countless examples of abuses of power, is that, while a belief in “authority” can lead people to inflict harm on others, that same belief often cannot limit the extent to which the agents of “authority” hurt other people. For example, many individuals who would never oppress an innocent person on their own become “police officers,” thereby acquiring the “legal” power to commit a certain degree of oppression. Yet, on many occasions, they end up going well beyond the “legal” oppression they are “authorized” to commit, and become sadistic, power-happy monsters. The same is true, perhaps even more so, of soldiers. Perhaps the reason so many combat veterans end up being deeply emotionally traumatized is not so much a result of thinking about what they have witnessed as it is a result of thinking about what they themselves have done. The high rate of suicide among combat veterans supports this thesis. It makes little sense for Someone to wish for his own death simply because he has seen something horrible. It makes a lot more sense for someone to wish for his own death because he himself has done something horrible, and has in fact become something horrible.

The reason that the belief in “authority” can drive people to commit evil, but in the end cannot limit the evil they commit, is simple. Aside from whatever “technical” limitations there are supposed to be on an agent of “authority,” the primary concept that the enforcer is taught, and the primary concept that he must accept in order to do his job, is that, as a representative of “authority,” he is above the common folk and has the moral right to forcibly control them. In short, he is taught that his badge and his position make him the rightful master of all the “average” people. Once he is convinced of that lie, it should be expected that he will despise the average citizen and treat him with contempt, in the same way – and for the same reason – that a slave owner will treat his slaves not as human beings, but as property, whose feelings and opinions matter no more than the feelings and opinions of the master’s cattle or his furniture.

It is very telling that many modern “law enforcers” quickly become angry, even violent, when an average citizen simply speaks to the “officer” as an equal, instead of assuming the tone and demeanor of a subjugated underling. Again, this reaction is precisely the same – and has the same cause – as the reaction a slave master would have to an “uppity” slave speaking to him as an equal. There are plenty of examples. depicted in numerous police abuse videos on the internet, of supposed representatives of “authority” going into a rage and resorting to open violence, simply because someone they approached spoke to them as one adult would speak to another instead of speaking as a subject would speak to a master. The state mercenaries refer to this lack of groveling as someone having an “attitude.” In their eyes, someone treating them as mere mortals, as if they are on the same level as everyone else, amounts to showing disrespect for their alleged “authority.”

Similarly, anyone who does not consent to be detained, questioned, or searched by “officers of the law” is automatically perceived, by the mercenaries of the state, as some sort of troublemaker who has something to hide. Again, the real reason such lack of “cooperation” annoys authoritarian enforcers is because it amounts to people treating them as mere humans instead of treating them as superior beings, which is what they imagine themselves to be. To wit, if someone was confronted by a stranger (without a badge) who started interrogating the person in an obviously accusatory way and then asked to be allowed to search the person’s pockets, his car, and his home, not only would the person being accosted almost certainly refuse, out he also would probably be outraged at the request. “Of course you can’t rummage through my stuff! Who do you think you are?” But when strangers with badges make such requests, they are the ones offended when the targets of their intrusive, unjustified harassments, accusations and searches object, and refuse to “cooperate.” Even when the “officers” know full well that the Fourth and Fifth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution specifically dictate that a person has no “Legal” duty to answer questions or consent to searches, such “lack of cooperation” – i.e., the failure to unquestioningly bow to the enforcer’s every whim and request – is still seen by the “police” as a sign that the person must be some sort of criminal and enemy of the state. From the perspective of “law enforcers,” only a despicable lowlife would ever treat representatives of “authority” in the same manner as he treats everyone else.

Again, this is not how most of these people view the world before becoming “officers of the law.” In their authoritarian enforcement training, they are specifically taught to treat people as inferiors, to always try to gain control of everyone and everything the moment they arrive on a scene, telling everyone where to go, what to do, when they can speak, and so on. They are not merely told that they have the right to boss everyone around, which would be dangerous enough; they are trained that they must, in every situation, use whatever it takes – commands, intimidation, or outright violence – to get everyone present to bow to their “authority,” and are taught that it is a crime for anyone to fail to unquestioningly bow to their will, which they characterize as “disobeying a lawful order.”
It is also very significant that it is customary for the police, as soon as they arrive at any scene, to make sure that no one else is armed with any sort of weapon, and to disarm anyone who is, before knowing anything else about who the people are or what is going on, and even regardless of whether the people are “legally” armed. The obvious purpose of this practice is to immediately create a huge imbalance of power, where only the “law enforcers” have the ability to forcibly impose their will on others. Imagine the arrogance required for an average citizen to arrive on some scene, unfamiliar with the situation and the people involved, and have his very first thought be, “Nobody is allowed to have a weapon, except me.”

In short, “law enforcers” are trained to be oppressive megalomaniacs and to treat everyone else as cattle. And, human nature being what it is, anyone who routinely treats others that way – the way “law enforcers” are required to treat everyone else – will learn to despise others and treat them with contempt, disrespect and hostility. However good or bad at heart an individual is to begin with, the way to bring out the worst in him is to give him “authority” over others.
(Author’s personal note: Several former police officers have personally told me that they quit the force after they noticed that the job, and their supposed “authority,” was slowly turning them into monsters – one of them using that exact word.)

In fairness, many “law enforcers” make an effort to be “nice guys” and at least attempt to treat others with respect. But ultimately they cannot treat others as equals, and still be “law enforcers.” They can be friendly, and even apologetic about it (e.g. “Sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to...”), but their job still requires them to coercively control and extort others, and not just those who have actually harmed, someone. A cop cannot treat others as equals without losing his job. Imagine an officer who would do traffic stops, or search places, or detain and interrogate people, or use physical force against someone only in situations in which you would feel justified in doing such things yourself, without any badge or “law” telling you you could.

The same holds true of “government” investigators, prosecutors and judges. And “government” employee who refused to investigate, prosecute, or sentence someone for a victimless “crime” would quickly lose his job. It is not up to the agents of “authority” to decide which “laws” to enforce. If there are morally illegitimate “laws” (as there always are), all branches of authoritarian “law enforcement” are required to enforce them, thereby assisting in the extortion and oppression of innocent people. Even if much of what he does is aimed at actual criminals – those who have committed acts of aggression against others – every “law enforcer,” as part of his job, is required to commit acts of aggression himself. There are some who do almost nothing other than initiating violence, such as “tax” collectors, narcotics agents, and immigration agents. This makes it literally impossible, in almost all cases, to work for “government” without committing immoral acts of aggression. Being a “law enforcer” and being a moral person are almost always mutually exclusive.

However politely they may do the job, and despite the fact that they also go after actual criminals (the kind who have victims), “law enforcers” are always professional aggressors, subjugating the people to the will of the politicians by way of violence and the threat of violence. And anyone who does that, if he did not already have a certain degree of contempt and hatred for his fellow man, will almost certainly develop it. To put it another way, even the nicest, most friendly slave owner, if he continues to believe in the legitimacy of slavery and continues to practice it, will be committing evil and will inflict harm upon the people he imagines to be his rightful property. And he will naturally develop a degree of contempt toward the victims of his aggression, and will behave contemptuously toward them.

The ability of the “authority” belief to create harm, and the simultaneous inability of it to limit the harm, once the master imagines himself to have the right to rule over his “inferiors,” can be seen not only on an individual basis but on a large scale as well. Most of the debates and writings that led up to the ratification of the U.S. Constitution focused on limiting the powers that the federal government would have, and on discussing all of the things that it was not allowed to do. The Bill of Rights, for example, is a list of things the U.S. government is constitutionally prohibited from doing. In fact, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments make it an open-ended list, so that the federal “government,” in theory, was not supposed to do anything except what the Constitution specifically “authorized” it to do. Nonetheless, with the possible exception of the Third Amendment, the “Bill of Rights” also happens to be a list of rights that federal agents violate every single day, in every state in the union. In reality, whether on an individual or national level, telling someone “You have the right to rule others, but only within these limits” will, sooner or later, result in that person dominating others without recognizing any limits to his power.

In the long run, there is no such thing, and can be no such thing, as “limited government,” because once someone is accepted by others as a rightful master, and believes himself to have the moral right to rule, there will be nothing and no one “above” him, with the power to restrain him. Inside a “government,” a higher “authority” might choose to limit a lower “authority,” but logic and experience show that an authoritarian hierarchy, taken as a whole, will never limit itself for long.

Why would it? Why would a master ever put his own interests below the interests of his slaves? The Constitution is a perfect example of this: a piece of parchment which purported to grant very limited “authority” to certain people but which utterly failed to stop those people from going beyond those limits, creating something that eventually grew into the most powerful authoritarian empire in history. And the problem cannot be solved by appointing another set of masters (e.g., a “court system”) inside the same authoritarian structure, with the supposed purpose of enforcing limits upon the first set of masters. “Separation of powers” and “checks and balances” and “due process” are meaningless if the masters and those assigned to limit them are both part of the same authoritarian organization.

Demonizing the Victim

It is important to stress the fact that in the Milgram experiments, the subjects thought they were shocking innocent strangers. There was no accusation that the one being shocked was a bad person, or had done anything immoral. It should be obvious that if the average person will, at the behest of “authority,” inflict pain upon an innocent person, he will also inflict such pain – with less hesitation and less guilt – upon someone he imagines to be deserving of such pain.

The U.S. military (and presumably many other militaries) has done a lot of research to determine what can be done to overcome a soldier’s natural aversion to killing, so that he will kill on command. And one of the most effective ways of achieving this is to demonize and dehumanize the one he is being told to shoot. In modern wars, the “governments” of both sides feed their soldiers constant propaganda designed to paint “the enemy” as a bunch of heartless, vicious, sadistic, inhuman monsters. Ironically, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because such propaganda makes both sides into gangs of heartless monsters, zealously trying to exterminate enemies that they do not view as being fully human.

Similar tactics are used in “law enforcement.” The hired mercenaries of “government” are far more likely to inflict injustice and oppression upon someone if that person has first been dehumanized and demonized. Just the terminology used – by the masters, the enforcers, and everyone else – constitutes a very effective form of mind control, which alters how both enforcers and their targets perceive reality, thereby affecting how both groups behave. Such terms reinforce the premise that obedience to “authority” is a virtue, and that disobedience is a sin.

What literally happens is that one group of people issues a command, and the:r enforcers impose it upon the masses, by punishing disobedience. This is what the Mafia does, what street gangs do, what schoolyard bullies do, and what all “governments” do. The difference is that when “government” does it, it uses not only threats but also indoctrination, of both the enforcers and the general public

Where the message of most thugs is usually direct and honest (”Do what I say or I hurt you”), the “government” message involves a great deal of psychology and mind control, which is essential to making the state mercenaries feel righteous about inflicting oppression on others. The controllers in “government” portray themselves as “lawmakers” who have the right to “govern” society, portray their commands as “laws,” and portray any who disobey as “criminals.” And, unlike Mafia “heavies,” those who administer retribution against any who disobey the politicians are portrayed, not merely as hired thugs, but as noble “law enforcers,” who are righteously protecting society from all the uncivilized, contemptuous “law-breakers.”

Such propaganda goes a long way, not only toward making the authoritarian enforcers carry out violence against innocent people but also toward making them feel proud of it. They are convinced, via their authoritarian indoctrination, that they are bringing “criminals” to “justice,” thereby maintaining “law and order” for the benefit of society. But what they are actually doing, more often than not, is using violence to coerce everyone into obeying whatever commands the politicians issue, however immoral, arbitrary, socially or economically destructive, or downright idiotic those commands may be.

There is a big difference in the connotations of the two terms “law enforcer” and “politician’s thug.” There is no difference, however, in what they literally mean. But by persuading the enforcers that the violence they use constitutes inherently righteous and noble “law enforcement,” their perceptions can be altered in such a way that they will gladly and proudly impose the ruling class’s will upon their fellow man. There are as many examples of this as there are “laws,” but they all fall into one of two categories: prohibitions (whereby politicians proclaim that their subjects are not allowed to do a certain thing) and demands (whereby politicians proclaim that their subjects must do a certain thing).
One example of each will suffice to demonstrate the point.

Prohibition: The controllers issue a decree that their subjects may not possess marijuana. That prohibition is proclaimed to be “the law,” and any who disobey it are deemed to be “criminals.” The controllers then spend huge amounts of money (taken from their subjects by way of a different “law”) to pay for mercenaries, guns, armored vehicles, prisons, and so on, for the sole purpose of taking captive any who are caught disobeying their “law.”

Now consider the perspective of the “police officer” assigned the duty of enforcing that “law” who discovers that someone has been selling marijuana to willing customers. If the “officer” could objectively consider the situation, without the myth of “authority” distorting his perception, he would immediately see that his “job” is not only immoral but utterly idiotic and hypocritical – his “job” being to physically capture someone for the purpose of putting that person in a cage for a long time, for doing something that was neither fraudulent nor violent. In fact, until the cop showed up, all the people involved – grower, dealer, seller, buyer, user – interacted peacefully and voluntarily.

Furthermore, if the officer has ever consumed alcohol, he would be guilty of something morally identical to what the “criminal” has done. Nonetheless, he will see himself as the brave, righteous, noble “law enforcer” as he participates in a paramilitary, armed invasion of the person’s home and forcibly captures and drags the “scofflaw” away from his friends and family. Then the office I will go home and have a beer, and of course would not react kindly to anyone who tried to forcibly stop him from doing so. The only difference – which is no real difference at all – is that politicians made up a command about one mind-altering substance (marijuana) and not the other (alcohol). As a result, the “officer” will truly believe that using one mind – altering substance is a good, wholesome, all – American behavior, while using another is shady, immoral and “criminal,” and even justifies violent assault and kidnapping of the “perpetrators.”

Demand: The controllers enact a “law” saying that any of their subjects who own property must give to the controllers, every year, a payment in the amount of two percent of the value of the subject’s property. That demand is called a “property tax” and is proclaimed to be “the law,” and any who disobey it are “criminals” and “tax cheats.” The controllers then set up an organization of “tax collectors” to find any who disobey, to either forcibly extract money from them or to forcibly evict them from their properties and seize such properties and give them to the controllers.

Of course if anyone did that without all of the authoritarian propaganda, it would be called extortion: “You have to pay me a bunch of money, every year, or I won’t let you live in your own house.” And very few people, including those who now work as “tax collectors,” would want to be part of such a racketeering scheme. Yet when the exact same thing is done “legally;” not only will average people accept a job being part of such an extortion racket but they will show disdain for any who resist it.
Those who then try not to be robbed are viewed as greedy “tax cheats” who don’t want to pay their “fair share.” And those whose job it is to forcibly take money or property from such “tax cheats” usually do so with a feeling of righteousness, because they truly believe that the “authority” of “law” can take what is usually an immoral act – theft, extortion and racketeering – and transform it into something righteous and legitimate. So they commit mass robbery, feel good about it, and feel contempt for their victims. That is the power of the most dangerous superstition.

Statists often argue that taxation is not theft because “governments” use tax revenue for things that are for the “common good,” so it’s just a matter of people paying for goods and services they receive. Such an argument ignores the fundamental nature of the situation. A simple example makes the double standard obvious. Suppose a stranger came up to you and said he had mowed your lawn, or left an item for you at your house, and now demanded that you give him $1,000, though you had never agreed to any such arrangement. Obviously that would constitute extortion, and you would have no duty to pay, even if he really had mowed your lawn or left you something. No one has the right, without your consent, to provide you some item or service – when you didn’t ask for it and didn’t want to buy it – and then forcibly take from you whatever he declares the item or service to be worth. And yet that is exactly what every “government,” at every level, always does.

When targets of authoritarian aggression are successfully demonized and dehumanized, there are essentially no limits to the degree of violence and injustice which those who believe in “authority” will commit. For any who might still have hope that the consciences of American soldiers and “law enforcers” might limit the level of injustice they are willing to inflict upon complete strangers, there are plenty of real-world examples that prove otherwise. One of the most well-known would have to be the massacre at My Lai during the Vietnam war, where U.S. troops not only murdered hundreds of unarmed civilians, mostly women and children, but also sexually assaulted and tortured some, and some soldiers openly delighted in the suffering and deaths of their victims, by the soldiers’ own testimonies. This is what American soldiers did, as a result of their loyalty to the myth of “authority,” combined with the demonization and dehumanization of their victims. The soldiers themselves put it perfectly bluntly, one saying they were “just following orders,” another saying that most of the U.S. soldiers there “didn’t consider the Vietnamese human” (It should be noted that there were some
American soldiers who tried, with little success, to stop or limit the massacre.) While this might have been one of the most famous examples of war-time atrocities committed by American troops, it is certainly not the only one. In fact, new examples of the sadism of America soldiers keep coming to light. Whereas in the Milgram experiments, some test subjects would demonstrate – verbally or by their behavior – that they felt bad about inflicting harm upon an innocent stranger, “law enforcers” and soldiers who are first taught to despise an “enemy,” obey authoritarian commands even more eagerly, often in a way that shows that they delight in inflicting pain and death on their victims.

This was plainly displayed in the images that came out of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq showing that American troops, male and female, not only carried out mental and physical torture but exhibited delight and amusement at the suffering of their victims, even happily posing for the camera while humiliating, assaulting, torturing and raping their prisoners. (Both the Bush and Obama administrations prevented much of the photographic evidence of this torture from being made public, for fear of the effect that those images would have on the opinion of the military and the “country,” among Americans and foreigners alike.) Again, though the evidence shows that such torture was carried out at the behest of the highest levels of “government,” it is important to note that the ones who carried out these commands of “authority” clearly exhibited a sadistic enjoyment of the pain and suffering they were inflicting on other human beings. They had been told, by someone they perceived as “authority,” that it was noble and righteous to hate and hurt “the enemy.” So they did, and they enjoyed it.

The same attitude and mentality can be seen in various “law enforcement” actions, such as the assault on Ruby Ridge in 1992 and the raid, standoff, and eventual massacre near Waco, Texas, in 1993. In neither case was “authority” going after someone who had actually harmed or threatened anyone else. Instead, both events involved paramilitary assaults based upon the alleged possession of “illegal” firearms. In the Waco incident, eighty people, including men, women and children, eventually died, after being mentally and physically tortured for weeks with sleep deprivation and CS gas, among other things. The victims were demonized, to both the public and those in “law enforcement,” and the “government” aggressors exhibited both contempt for their victims and enthusiasm at the thought of killing them. The same general attitude can be seen in dozens of “police abuse” videos depicting police enthusiastically bullying and even physically assaulting people who are not a threat to anyone, and who are not even fighting back or resisting. This is the direct result of convincing “law enforcers” that everyone else is beneath them and that, as agents of “authority;” they have the right to have everyone else treat them like superiors, groveling before them and unquestioningly obeying their commands. The same pattern can also be seen among “tax collectors” and other bureaucrats.
To what extent the belief in “authority” actually creates sadistic tendencies, and to what extent it simply unleashes tendencies which were already there, hardly matters. The point is that, by pretending to relieve the individual of responsibility for his own actions, and by ordering him to inflict harm on others and telling him that it not just permissible but virtuous to harm a particular target, the myth of “authority” converts millions of average, otherwise decent people into monsters and sadistic agents of evil. Whatever factors normally compel people to behave civilly and nonviolently – whether it be the individual’s internal virtues, his devotion to oral principles or religious beliefs, or simply his concern about what others might think of him or might do to him – are easily defeated and overridden by the belief in “authority.” In short, the most effective way to shut down the humanity and decency of any individual is to teach him to respect and obey “authority.”

What the Badge Means

Those who do the bidding of a supposed “authority” usually go out of their way to make it clear that they are doing so. When a soldier dons his military attire, marches in formation, or gets into a military vehicle; when a cop puts on his uniform and gets into the car marked “POLICE”; when a plainclothes “government” agent – whether from the FBI, IRS, U.S. Marshals, or any other agency – shows his “badge” or announces his “official” title, he is making a very specific statement, which can be summed up as follows:

“I am not acting as a thinking, responsible, independent human being, and should not be treated as such. I am not personally responsible jar my actions, because I am not acting from my own free will or my own judgment or right and wrong. I am, instead, acting as the tool of something superhuman, something with the right to rule you and control you. As such, I lim do things that you can’t. I have rights that you don’t. You must do as I say, submit to my commands, and treat me as your superior, because I am not a mere human being. I have risen above that. Through my unquestioning obedience and loyalty to my masters, I have become a piece of the superhuman entity called ‘authority.’ As a result, the rules of human morality do not apply to me, and my actions should not be judged by the usual standards of human behavior.”

This bizarre, mystical, cult-like belief is held by every “law enforcer” in the world. It is horribly dangerous for anyone to imagine himself to have an exemption from the basic rules of right and wrong, yet that is exactly what every agent of “government” imagines. Despite the fact that soldiers and “law enforcers” usually display their “official” uniforms with great pride, what they are actually doing is publicly displaying the fact that they are delusional, have a completely warped and demented view of reality, and have betrayed the very thing that made them human: their free will and the personal responsibility that goes along with it. Every person who cairns to act on behalf of “authority” is demonstrating that he has accepted an utterly ridiculous lie: that his position, his badge, his office dramatically changes what behaviors are moral and what behaviors are immoral. The idea is patently insane, but is rarely recognized as such because even the victims of the enforcers share in this delusion.

Noble Motives, Evil Actions

It is important to again stress the fact that, of those who become “law enforcers” and soldiers, most do so out of a desire to fight for justice. Nonetheless, because of their belief in “authority,” their noble intentions often end up being used to harm the innocent and protect the guilty. Because a police officer is supposed to “enforce the law,” and a soldier is supposed to follow orders, their own values and intentions get trumped by the agendas of those giving the orders. Notwithstanding the military recruiting propaganda encouraging young men and women to join up to fight for truth and justice, the true job of a soldier is to kill whomever the masters tell him to kill. It is as simple as that. How many Americans would, on their own, choose to go to foreign lands and kill complete strangers? Very few.
How many Americans, on their own, if they were in a foreign land, would feel justified in going door to door, interrogating strangers at gunpoint, invading and searching their homes, because they thought some truly bad people might be in the area? Very few. These are actions which almost every individual’s sense of morality would tell him are wrong. But when someone voluntarily joins an authoritarian military, he intentionally shuts off his own judgment and conscience in favor of simply doing as he is told.

Though soldiers sometimes use legitimate force, such as combatting aggressors and invaders, they also routinely act as aggressors and invaders themselves. It would be impossible for a “government” military to function any other way. Imagine an army going door to door, politely asking each homeowner for permission to cross his land. :;imply calling the situation “war” causes the believers in “government” to imagine :hat the usual standards of human behavior do not apply. Under the excuse of necessity; soldiers trespass, steal, intimidate, threaten, assault, interrogate, torture, and murder. And they do this even against people they consider to be their allies. The military invasion and occupation of Iraq by the mercenaries of the U.S. “government,” which was purportedly done to defend the people of Iraq, was an example of large-scale aggression and coercion – and thus was immoral – even if it displaced a regime guilty of an even worse level of intimidation and murder (the regime of Saddam Hussein). Yet the supposed evil of the enemy is often cited as the justification for authoritarian coercion. In truth, today and throughout history, large-scale violence against innocents has always been done in the name of “fighting for freedom” or “fighting against injustice.” Even when the Nazis invaded Poland, they first staged a series of false-flag events and propaganda stunts, collectively known is “Operation Himmler,” so they could pretend that the invasion was a justifiable act of self-defense. The truth is that, even when the evil of an enemy regime is easy to see, making the overall fight seem righteous to one side, the violence committed by authoritarian militaries is never directed only at the actual aggressors on the other side. The structure and methodology of hierarchical armies make it so that innocents are always victimized in one way or another, and not just by accident, but by design. The pack mentality that is such a big part of patriotism makes this unavoidable.

In World War II, the American troops saw “the Krauts” and “the Japs” as the enemy, rather than seeing the enemy as those individuals who actually committed acts of aggression against innocent people – a concept which would require each soldier to constantly use his own individual perception and moral judgment to assess each situation as he confronted it, which is incompatible with an authoritarian chain of command. Of course, of the people who fit the definition of “the Krauts” (the Germans) or “the Japs” (the Japanese), many played no part in the conflict (aside from funding it through paying “taxes,” as discussed below). But on both sides in every war, “government” militaries, and the propaganda they use, always target and demonize a general category of people rather than just the individuals who have actually initiated violence. The result is that huge demographic groups end up being ordered to subjugate or exterminate each other, making it so that neither side is ever the “good guy” in any war between “nations,” as both militaries always use violence against innocent people, as well as against other soldiers.

Perhaps one of the most heinous examples of this was the dropping of nuclear bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, which constituted by far the two worst individual acts of terrorism and mass murder in history. Together, they resulted in the deaths of around two hundred thousand civilians – about seventy times worse than the number of deaths from the 9/11/2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. The admitted goal was to inflict fear, pain and death on the population of an entire country, in order to coerce the ruling class of that country to bend to the will of another ruling class. Ironically, this fits perfectly the United States “government’s” own definition of “terrorism,” except that that definition conveniently exempts acts that are “legal” and/or committed by “governments.” If those in “government” advocate and carry out violent activities that are intended to “intimidate or coerce a civilian population” or to “influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion,” then it is considered legitimate and just. If anyone else does the exact same thing, it is “terrorism.” (See Section 2331 of Title 18 of the United States Code.)

As an aside, the existence of nuclear weapons is entirely the result of the belief in “authority.” Unlike many weapons, it is impossible to use them for purely defensive purposes. The only reason the nuclear bomb was invented and manufactured in the first place was because of the authoritarian, nationalistic, pack-mentality idea that it is possible, and righteous, to be at war with an entire country, and that therefore indiscriminately exterminating thousands of people at once can be justifiable.
Being a member of a “government” military requires one to contribute to anti-human acts, even if only indirectly, regardless of whatever noble motives the individual may have had for joining the armed forces. The reason is simple: acting based on one’s own perception and judgment, and abiding by one’s own conscience and one’s own sense of right and wrong, is utterly incompatible with being a member of any “government” military. Sadly, the result is that both sides of every war are wrong, in that they both initiate violence against innocents. At the same time, both sides of every war are also right, in that they each condemn the other side for initiating violence against innocents. In short, as long as there are soldiers willing to subjugate themselves to a claimed “authority,” and even to commit murder when it tells them to, lasting peace will be impossible. Those who fight for any “government,” even if they believe they are “fighting for their country,” can never achieve freedom and justice, because a ruling class, by its very nature, never wants freedom and justice, even for its own subjects, or it would cease to exist. However noble their motives, and however courageous their actions, ultimately the only thing “government” soldiers can ever achieve is subjugation and domination.

Ironically, probably in an attempt to hide the inherently evil nature of every “government” military, and to distinguish its own mercenaries from the mercenaries of other tyrannical regimes, the U.S. military pretends that American soldiers have the right and duty to disobey any order that they deem to be “illegal” or immoral. However, not only is any soldier who does so likely to be court-martialed, but such a principle – which by itself would be quite proper – goes directly against the entire concept of “authority,” and against the specific methods use to train soldiers to be unthinking, obedient tools of the regime they serve. In a combat setting, nearly everything that every “government” military does constitutes aggressive terrorism, and almost every order a soldier receives is an immoral order, whether it is to trespass on someone else’s property, blow up a bridge, block a road, disarm civilians, detain and interrogate people without justification, or kill complete strangers, just on the “say-so” of a supposed “authority.”

In fact, even when the rules of engagement are only to fire if fired upon, that is still often unjustified. When one is the aggressor, whether individually or acting on behalf of “authority,” the target of that aggression has the right to use whatever force is necessary to stop the aggressor. In other words, in a lot of situations, shooting at soldiers – including American soldiers – is inherently justified. Killing someone for defending himself against aggressors is murder, even when the aggressors are U.S. soldiers. And almost every soldier routinely commits immoral acts of aggression, believing that commands from “authority” make it okay for him to do so. If any soldier actually took seriously the idea that he had the duty to disobey an immoral order, the first thing he would do would be to quit the military.

Those who act as mercenaries for “government,” even if they do so with the best intentions, will always be part of a machine that commits aggression as often as, or more often than, it defends the innocent. That being the case, nearly every combat soldier does things which would justify the use of defensive violence against him. However, as conquering invaders always have, the American military commanders label anyone who resists their acts of aggression as an “enemy combatant,” an “insurgent,” or a “terrorist.” When aggression is committed in the name of “authority,” many then view any act of self-defense against such aggression as a sin. As much as American authoritarians might be outraged at the suggestion, the truth is that many thousands of people the world over have had good cause to shoot at American soldiers.

When a person who has not harmed or threatened anyone is in his own home, minding his own business, and heavily armed thugs break down his door, point machine guns at him and his family, threatening and ordering them around, the homeowner has the absolute right to protect himself and his family by any means necessary, including killing the armed intruders. The average American, if he were the victim of such an assault by foreign mercenaries, would feel perfectly justified in using whatever violence was necessary to repel the attackers, but if his fellow Americans were the ones committing such assaults in a foreign land, that same American, having been steeped in “authority”worship and pack mentality, will “support the troops,” and will cheer when American soldiers murder a homeowner who attempts to forcibly resist such aggression and thuggery.

Authoritarian military actions are never purely defensive. When “governments” declare war, it is never to defend the innocent or to preserve freedom, though that is always the stated purpose. When “governments” engage in war, it is always to protect or add to the territory or other resources controlled by that “government.” The ruling class, by its very nature, does not even want its own subjects to be free, much less the subjects of some foreign ruler. As a result, though one who dies in combat is often said to have given his life for his country, in reality those who die in war are simply resources spent by tyrants, in various turf wars with other, competing gangs of tyrants. The people are fed propaganda about heroism, sacrifice rod patriotism, to hide the fact that “governments” never enter wars to serve justice or freedom. They do it to serve their own power. An objective examination of history makes this obvious.

Even one of the most apparently justifiable military endeavors in history – the Allies in World War II fighting against the Axis powers – while it resulted in the defeat of the third worst mass murderer in history (Adolph Hitler), it also resulted in the worst mass murderer in history (Josef Stalin) essentially being given half of Europe by the rulers of the Allied nations. The motive of most of the American soldiers who fought in the war was undoubtedly to protect the good from the evil; but the motives of those who commanded them, and therefore the actual results of the brave soldiers’ efforts, was nothing more than authoritarian conquest and power.

In World War II, one could have at least suggested (with some imagination) the possibility of an invasion of the United States, and thereby claim that it was an act of selfdefense because “national security” was at stake. But most U.S. military operations have involved no direct threat at all to the u.s. Thirty-some thousand Americans died in the Korean war. No one imagined that North Korea was going to invade the U.S. Fifty-some thousand Americans died in the Vietnam war. No one imagined that North Vietnam was going to invade the U.S. No one imagined that the armies of Iraq or Afghanistan were going to invade the U.S. The excuse for such conflicts has always been a vague cause such as “fighting communism,” or the even more ethereal excuse of having a “war on terror” (which is made more ironic by the fact that terrorist tactics were and continue to be routinely used by U.S. forces).

The sad irony is that the American ruling class, because of the legitimacy its victims imagine it to have, is the only gang actually capable of conquering and subjugating the American people. The gigantic military machine, and all of the war games it has engaged in, rather than providing a shred of real protection for the American public, is what created most existing foreign threats, and what is still used as the excuse to justify the oppression of Americans by their own “government,” via the Orwellian-named “Patriot Act,” among other things. The popular bumper sticker that says “If you love your freedom, thank a veteran” is a continuing symptom of the pack mentality, stateworshiping propaganda that ruling classes feed to their subjects so that the masters will continue to have pawns to play in their sadistic, destructive power games. Even when a slave master fights to prevent some other slave master from stealing his slaves, he is still no friend of the slaves themselves.

It is quite understandable that someone who has risked his life, gone through hell, harmed or killed other human beings, possibly including innocents, and suffered physical or emotional trauma as a result, would be reluctant to accept that all his courage, his suffering, and the damage he inflicted on others ultimately served only be schemes of megalomaniacs. However, even some of the most famous military personalities in history have eventually come to acknowledge that “governments” engage in war, not for any noble purpose but for profits and power. Major General Smedley Butler, who at the time of his death in 1940 was the most decorated U.S. Marine in history, wrote a book titled “War Is a Racket” that criticized the military-industrial complex, saying that war “is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many,” even going so far as to describe his own military “service” as the actions of “a high class muscle man,” a “racketeer” and a “gangster.”
Likewise General Douglas MacArthur opined that military expansion is driven by an “artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria” and “an incessant propaganda of fear.” General MacArthur also said the following: “The powers in charge keep us in a perpetual state of fear – keep us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disaster seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.”

Of course, to criticize war as a racket which benefits only the ruling class is not to say that the ruling class on the other side is not also evil, or should not be resisted. The atrocities committed by the enforcers of the regimes of Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Lenin Pol Pot, and many others were extremely serious, and the use of defensive violence against the acts of aggression committed by the agents of such regimes was certainly justified. But authoritarian warfare pits pawn against pawn in large-scale bloody combat which covers huge geographical areas, always victimizing civilian populations in the process, while the ruling classes on both sides watch from a safe distance. Further evidence that war is never about ideals or principles is the fact that the U.S “government” has often waged war against tyrants it put into place, such as Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein. An even more blatant example of how war is not about principles is the fact that at the beginning of World War II, Josef Stalin and his Soviet Union were sworn enemies of the United States. By the end of the war, the psychotic mass murder was referred to as “Uncle Joe” by the U.S. “government” propagandists, and was treated as a noble ally. Stalin’s crimes against humanity resulting in tens of million of deaths, went largely unmentioned in the U.S. at the time. In light of that fact, it is absurd to claim that the U.S. “government” decided to enter World War II based on any moral principle, or to defeat evil.
It is important to note what does and what does not occur in traditional international warfare.

Competing ruling classes, including the American rulers, are content to watch their respective pawns slaughtering each other by the thousands, but it hat long been the official policy of many “governments,” including the U.S. “government,” not to attempt to kill foreign “rulers” – i.e., the ones most responsible for making the war happen. In truth, the most moral, the most rational, and the most cost-effective means of defense against any invading “authority” is the assassination of those who command it. Targeting “governments,” instead of their loyal enforcers, would serve humanity wonderfully, not only ending most violent conflicts a lot more quickly but creating a huge deterrent to any megalomaniac tempted to start conflicts in the first place. Yet there is an open, mutual, standing agreement between most high-level tyrants that, while it is okay to play games with the lives of their subjects, they will rarely target each other.

And so, over and over again, huge numbers of soldiers march out onto battlefields to kill each other while the real enemies of humanity – the rulers on both sides remain out of harm’s way. Thus the lives of the well-intentioned soldiers, the brave “government” enforcers who loyally follow orders to the bitter end, are utterly wasted in endeavors which, by design, ultimately achieve real freedom and justice for no one. And if a soldier manages to recognize and target the ones most responsible for injustice and oppression – those who wear the label of “government” on both sides of every war – he is condemned as a traitor and a terrorist.

Proudly Committing Evil

Whether it is a soldier or some low-level bureaucrat, the job of all “law enforcers” is to forcibly inflict the will of the ruling class upon the general public. Nonetheless, most imagine that as they do so they are “serving the people.” Of course, the idea of “serving” someone by initiating violence against him is ridiculous. (Consider the oxymoron of the absurdly named “Internal Revenue Service,” which does nothing Cut rob hundreds of millions of people of trillions of dollars every year.) Rather than ever considering the possibility that what they do on a regular basis – participating in a system of aggression and coercion – is immoral and uncivilized, most state mercenaries, from the paper-pusher to the hired killer, simply say that they are “just doing their jobs,” and imagine that that absolves them of all personal responsibility for their actions and the results of those actions.

This, above all else, has been the downfall of human society. Most of the evil and injustice committed by human beings is not the result of greed, or malice, or hatred. It is the result of people doing what they were told, people following orders, people “doing their jobs.” In short, most of man’s inhumanity to man is a direct result of the belief in “authority.” The damage done by the merely obedient is just as real, and just as destructive, as if they had each done it from personal malice. Whether an old lady is robbed by an armed street thug or by a well-dressed, well-educated “tax collector” makes no difference, morally or in practical terms. Whether a family iii Iraq is killed by soldiers of Saddam Hussein or by soldiers of the United States “government” makes no difference, morally or in practical terms. Whether some one’s personal choices are coercively controlled by a neighborhood thug or by the “police” makes no difference, morally or in practical terms.

The only difference is that the authoritarian thug, as a result of his delusional belief in the mythical entity called “government,” refuses to accept personal responsibility for his own actions. His belief in the most dangerous superstition renders him unable to recognize evil as evil. In fact, he will feel proud of his loyal obedience to his masters as he spends day after day inflicting hardship and suffering upon innocent people, because he has been taught, for all of his life, that when evil becomes “law,” it ceases to be evil and becomes good.

In truth, if anything is a sin, it is blind obedience to “authority.” Acting as an enforcer for “government” amounts to spiritual suicide – actually worse than physical suicide, because every authoritarian “enforcer” not only shuts off the free will and ability to judge which make him human (thus “killing” his own humanity) but also leaves his body intact, to be used by tyrants as a tool for oppression. To be a “law enforcer” is to willingly change one’s self from a person into a robot – a robot which is then given to some of the most evil people in the world, to be used to dominate and subjugate the human race. Wearing the uniform of a soldier or the badge of a “law enforcer” is not a reason for pride; it should be cause for great shame at having forsaken one’s own humanity in favor of becoming a pawn of oppressors.

Part III(c)
The Effects of the Myth on the Targets
Proud to Be Robbed

One of the more bizarre results of the belief in “authority” is that it causes the victims of “government” aggression to feel obligated to be victimized, and causes them to feel bad if they avoid being victimized. A prime example is the citizen who proclaims that he is proud to pay his “taxes.” Even if one believes that some of what he surrenders is used to fund useful things (roads, helping the poor, etc.), to be proud of having been threatened and coerced into funding such things is still strange. Pride In being a “law-abiding taxpayer” is not the result of having helped people, which the person could have done far more effectively on a voluntary basis; the pride comes from having faithfully obeyed the commands of a perceived “authority.” By analogy, a man may feel good about having freely given to someone in need, but he would not take pride in getting robbed by a poor man. Probably the only situation in which anyone brags about having been forced to do something occurs in the context of one who believes he is obligated to obey a perceived “authority.”

Having been trained to view obedience as a virtue, people want to feel good about surrendering what they earn to “government.” And so, with the help of political propaganda, they hallucinate that their “contributions” are actually helping society as a whole. They speak as if paying “taxes” means “giving back to society” or “investing in the country.” Such rhetoric, as common as it is, is logically nonsensical, since it implies that every one of the individuals who make up “society” and “the country” somehow each owes a debt to the group as a whole, but is owed nothing. What people are actually doing when they pay “taxes” is giving money not to “society” or “the country” but to the politicians who make up the ruling class, to spend however they please. The implication, as odd as it is, is that “the people” can benefit a, a whole, by everyone of “the people” being robbed individually.
The idea that the “common good” is better served by politicians spending everyone’s money than it would be served by each person spending his own money is strange, to say the least, Recently, the lie of “taxes” serving the common good has become more and more transparent as “governments” have spent astronomical amounts of money on things which obviously serve the elite at the expense of society and humanity. This would include perpetual war-mongering, direct multibillion-dollar redistribution schemes benefiting the richest people in the world (”bailouts”), and “government” takeovers of various segments of the economy (e.g., the health-care industry), among other things.
In fact, there is almost nothing average people could financially support that would be less helpful to society and humanity in general than paying “taxes.” Whatever things a person views as worthwhile – schools, roads, defense, helping the pear, etc. – he could just as easily support without going through politicians and “government.” Yet many people specifically express pride for having surrendered the fruits of their labors to their masters, having “paid their taxes.” Consider how someone would be viewed who proudly proclaimed, “I lied on my tax return, avoided giving $3,000 to the government, and gave the $3,000 to a really good charity instead.” Many people would still condemn such a person for his “criminal” disloyalty to:he masters, even if the person’s actions better served humanity than “paying his taxes” would have. This is because the pride expressed by many people does not cone from helping humanity, but from obeying “authority.”

There is little or no chance that anyone would voluntarily contribute his own wealth to everyone of the programs and schemes now funded via “government.” And if he hands over money only because some “law” or other “authority” compelled him to, and then expresses pride in having done so, he is in essence boasting about having been forcibly dominated, precisely the way a thoroughly indoctrinated slave might take pride in serving his master well. There is a big difference between feeling good about having voluntarily supported some worthy cause, and taking pride in being subjugated. Instead of being offended at the insult and injustice of being coercively controlled and exploited – in fact, instead of even recognizing that as injustice many victims of “government” oppression feel profound loyalty to their controllers.

Proud to Be Controlled

If a slave can be convinced that he should be a slave, that his enslavement is both proper and legitimate, that he is the rightful property of his master and that he has an obligation to produce as much as possible for his master, then he does not need to be physically oppressed.1n other words, enslaving the mind makes enslaving the body unnecessary. And that is exactly what the belief in “authority” does: it teaches people that it is morally virtuous that they surrender their time, effort and property, as well as their freedom and control over their own lives, to a ruling class.

Many people express pride at being “law-abiding taxpayers,” which means only that they do what the politicians tell them to do, and give the politicians money. When confronted with the idea that it is wrong for them to be forcibly deprived of the fruits of their labors, even if it is done “legally,” such people often vehemently defend those who continue to rob them, insisting that such robbery is essential to human civilization. (Of course, they do not use the term “robbery” to describe the situation, though they are well aware of what would be done (0 them if they refused to pay.) Likewise, when one person objects to the level of taxation or other forcible control being inflicted upon him by those in “government,” others who are also being oppressed will often condemn the one who is objecting, telling him thai if he does not like how he is being treated, he should leave the country. Maligning a fellow victim. of coercion for complaining about it is a sure sign that a person actually takes pride in his own enslavement.

Frederick Douglass, a former slave, witnessed and described that exact phenomenon among his fellow slaves, many of whom were proud of how hard they worked for their masters and how faithfully they did as they were told. From their perspective, a runaway slave was a shameful thief, having “stolen” himself from the master.

Douglass described how thoroughly indoctrinated many slaves were, to the point where they truly believed that their own enslavement was just and righteous:

“I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man.”

Though slavery is no longer practiced openly, the mentality of loyal subservience remains. Most people today detect no inconsistencies in allowing a ruling class to forcibly extort and control everyone else, and in fact feel that such extortion and oppression is right, to the point where many feel actual shame if they are caught keeping what they earn and running their own lives. It is one thing to feel shame at having been caught stealing, or defrauding, or committing aggression. But it is quite another for someone to feel shame about having done something which, if not for politician decrees (Taws”), he would have seen as perfectly permissible. Such shame does not come from the immorality of the act itself; it comes only from the imagined immorality of disobeying “authority,” i.e., “breaking the law.”

When, for example, the average citizen is caught “cheating” on his “taxes,” or not having a registration sticker on his car, or smoking marijuana, or doing anyone of a thousand other things which do not constitute aggression against anyone else, but which have nonetheless been declared “illegal” by the ruling class, there is usually Some feeling of guilt in the person’s own mind. Without a feeling of being obligated to obey, being caught and punished by agents of “government” would be regarded in the same way that being bitten by a dog would be regarded: as an unpleasant consequence to be avoided, but having no moral element to it at all. Instead, most people feel, at least to some extent, that being caught committing a victimless “crime” indicates some sort of moral failing in themselves, because they did not do as they were told. The desire to have the approval of “authority” is extremely powerful in almost everyone, to a degree they themselves do not even realize. The ubiquitous message of authoritarianism has a psychological impact far deeper than most people imagine, as the Milgram experiments demonstrated. Nearly everyone experiences dramatic emotional stress and discomfort anytime he comes into conflict with “authority,” and will go to great lengths, no matter what acts of evil he must commit, in order to earn the approval of his masters.

Even the terminology people use illustrates how effectively they have been trained to feel morally obligated to obey “authority.” This can be seen in such simple phrases as “You’re not allowed to do that” or even “You can’t do that” when referring to some behavior that has been declared “illegal” by the ruling class. Such phrases do not simply express a potential adverse consequence but also imply that, because some act has been forbidden by the masters, committing that act is bad, not allowable, or even impossible (”You can’t do that!”).

Looking at the statistical facts demonstrates the power of the belief in “authority.” In the United States, about 100,000 IRS employees extort about 200,000,000 victims. Those being robbed outnumber the robbers by about two thousand to one. This could never be accomplished by brute force alone; it continues only because most of those being robbed feel a duty to be robbed, and imagine such robberies to be legitimate and valid. The same is true of many other “laws,” which are generally obeyed even trough the enforcers are always hugely outnumbered by those they seek to control. The high levels of “compliance” do not come so much from a fear of punishment as from the feeling among those being controlled that they have a moral obligation to cooperate with their own subjugation.

The Good Funding the Evil

Even if an individual is never personally victimized by “law enforcement,” never has a run-in with the police, and sees little if any direct impact by “government” upon his dayto-day life, the myth of “authority” still has a dramatic impact, not only on his own life but also on how his existence affects the world around him. For example, the millions of compliant subjects who feel an obligation to surrender a portion of what they earn to the state, to pay their “fair share” of “taxes,” continually fund all manner of endeavors and activities which those people would not otherwise fund – which almost no one would otherwise fund, and which therefore would not otherwise exist. By way of “taxes,” those claiming to be “government” confiscate an almost incomprehensible amount of time and effort from millions of victims and convert it into fuel for the agenda of the ruling class. To wit, millions of people who oppose war are compelled to fund it via “taxation.” The product of their time and effort is used to make possible something they morally oppose.

The same is true of state-controlled wealth-redistribution programs (e.g., “welfare”), Ponzi schemes (e.g., “Social Security”), the so-called “war on drugs,” and so on. Most of the programs of “government” would not exist if not for the belief among the general population in a moral obligation to pay one’s “taxes.” Even “government” programs purported to have noble goals – such as protecting the public and helping the poor – become bloated, inefficient and corrupt monstrosities, which almost no one would willingly support if there was no “law” requiring them to do so.
In addition to the waste, corruption, and destructive things which “government” does with the wealth it confiscates, there is also the less obvious issue of what the people would have done with their money otherwise. As “government” takes the wealth of the producers to serve its own purposes, it also deprives the producers of the ability to further their own goals. Someone who surrenders $1,000 in “taxes” to the ruling class may not only be funding a war he morally opposes, but he is also being deprived of the ability to put $1,000 into savings, or donate $1,000 to some charity he considers worthwhile, or pay someone $1,000 to do some landscaping work. So the damage done by the myth of “authority” is twofold: it forces people to fund things that they do not believe are good for themselves or society, while simultaneously preventing them from funding things that they do view as worthwhile. In other words, subservience to “authority” causes people to act in a manner which is to one extent or another, directly opposed to their own priorities and values.

Even the people who imagine that their “tax” dollars are doing good by building roads, helping the poor, paying for police, and so on, would almost certainly not fund the “government” version of those services, at least not to the same degree, if they did not feel compelled – by moral obligation and the threat of punishment – to do so. Any private charity that had the inefficiency, corruption, and record of abuse that AFDC, HUD, Medicare, and other “government” programs have, would quickly lose all of its donors. Any private company as expensive, corrupt, and inefficient as “government” infrastructure programs would lose all of its customers. Any private protection service which was so often caught abusing, assaulting, and even killing unarmed, innocent people would have no customers. Any private company that claimed to be providing defense, but told its customers it needed a billion dollars every week to wage a prolonged war on the other side of the world, would have few, if any, contributors, including among those who now verbally support such military operations.

The feeling of obligation to pay “taxes” seems to be little hampered by the fact that “government” is notoriously wasteful and inefficient. While millions of “taxpayers” struggle to make ends meet while paying their “fair share” of “taxes,” politicians waste millions on laughably silly projects – everything from studying cow farts, to building bridges to nowhere, to paying farmers to not grow certain crops, and so on, ad infinitum – and billions more are simply “lost,” with no accounting of where hey went. But much of what people make possible through payment of “taxes” is lot just wasted but is quite destructive to society. The “war on drugs” is an obvious example. How many people would voluntarily donate to a private organization which had the stated goal of dragging millions of non-violent individuals away from their friends and families, to be put into cages? Even the many Americans who now recognize the “war on drugs” as a complete failure continue, via “taxes,” to provide the funding which allows it to continue to destroy literally millions of lives.

Even the most vocal critics of the various abuses being perpetrated by the ever-growing police state are often among those making that abuse possible, by providing the funding for it. Whether the issue is blatant oppression, or corruption, or mere bungling bureaucratic inefficiency, everyone can point to at least a few things about “government” that do not meet with his approval. And yet, having been trained to obey “authority,” he will continue to feel obligated to provide the funding which enables the same bungling, corrupt, oppressive “government” activities that he criticizes and opposes. Rarely does anyone notice the obvious inherent contradiction in feeling obligated to fund things that he thinks are bad.

Of course, people who work for non-authoritarian organizations can also be inefficient or corrupt, but when it comes to light what they are doing, their customers can simply stop funding them. That is the natural correction mechanism in human Interaction, but it is completely defeated by the belief in “authority.” How many people are there who are not currently being forced to fund some “government” program or activity that they morally oppose? Very few, if any. So why do those people keep funding things which they feel are destructive to society? Because “authority” tells them to, and because they believe that it is good to obey “authority.” As a result, they continue to surrender the fruits of their labors to fuel the machine of oppression – a machine which otherwise would not and could not exist.

“Governments” produce no wealth; what they spend they first must take from someone else. Every “government,” including the most oppressive regimes in history, has been funded by the payment of “taxes” by loyal, productive subjects. Thanks to the belief in “authority,” the wealth created by billions of people will continue to be used, not to serve the values and priorities of the people who worked to produce it, but to serve the agendas of those who, above all else, desire dominion over their fellow man. The Third Reich was made possible by millions of German “taxpayers” who felt an obligation to pay up. The Soviet empire was made possible by millions of people who felt an obligation to give to the state whatever it demanded. Every invading army, every conquering empire, has been constructed out of wealth that was taken from productive people. The destroyers have always been funded by the creators; the thieves have always been funded by the producers; through the belief in “authority,” the agendas of the evil have always been funded by the efforts of the good. And this will continue, unless and until the most dangerous superstition is dismantled. When the producers no longer feel a moral obligation to fund the parasites and usurpers, the destroyers and controllers, tyranny will wither away, having been starved out of existence. Until then, good people will keep supplying the resources which the bad people need in order to carry out their destructive schemes.

Digging Their Own Graves

Sadly, the belief in “authority” even makes people feel obligated to assist in their own enslavement, oppression and sometimes death. In fact, only a small percentage of the coercion of “government” is implemented by the enforcers of “authority”; most of it is implemented by its victims. The ruling class merely tells people that they are required to do certain things, and most people comply without any actual enforcement taking place. As one impressive example, tens of millions of Americans, every year, fill out lengthy, confusing forms known as “tax returns,” essentially extorting themselves. If the victims of the IRS agreed to pay, but only if the “government” figured out their alleged tax liabilities, the system would collapse. Every tax return is basically a signed confession, with the victim of the extortion racket not only revealing everything about his finances – essentially interrogating himself – but also even figuring out the amount he will be robbed, so the thieves do not have to.

But all the unproductive and unpleasant inconveniences and bureaucratic hassles that people subject themselves to, simply because they were told that “the law” requires it, are nothing compared to the more serious symptoms of the belief in “authority.” Based upon the mythology about “duty to country” and the “laws” imposing military conscription (”the draft”), millions of people throughout history lave become murderers for the state. Only a small fraction (so-called “draft-dodgers”) Ever resisted, and they have usually been despised by their fellow countrymen, for being cowards or for lacking “patriotism.”

In the case of many “laws,” it can be difficult to distinguish between people who obey because of a simple fear of punishment, and those who obey out of a feeling cf moral obligation to bow to the commands of politicians (”the law”). With military conscription, however, it is easy to tell the difference, because “compliance” is usually far more dangerous than any punishment “government” threatens against those who refuse to comply. If the choices are to “comply” and possibly die a gruesome death on some battlefield on the other side of the world, or to disobey and possibly go to prison, it is unlikely that the threat alone is why so many people “register” and show up for” duty” when called. In short, the level of compliance with “the draft,” at least in the past, shows quite clearly that most people would rather commit murder or die than disobey “authority.” There could hardly be a better indication of just how powerful the superstition of “authority” is: that thousands upon thousands of otherwise civilized, peaceful human beings will leave home, sometimes traveling halfway around the world, to kill or die simply because their respective ruling classes told them to.
Every soldier is both an enforcer and a victim of the superstition of “authority,” whether he volunteered or was drafted. Fighting to defend innocents against aggressors is a noble cause, and is often the intention of those who join the military. But in a hierarchical military regime, the soldier becomes a tool of the machine rather than a responsible individual. Rather than being guided by his own conscience, he is controlled entirely by the orders he receives through the chain of command.
And EVery time his obedience leads him to do something immoral (which is quite often), l.e not only harms his victims, he also harms himself. After the Vietnam war, as one example, many American soldiers came home with their bodies intact but with deep psychological problems. How much of the mental damage was a result of witnessing carnage and how much was the result of personally creating carnage is difficult to say. A prolonged fear of imminent death can, of course, cause serious psychological problems, as can inflicting death upon others.

Violent confrontations can be quite stressful, even when the individual feels entire.v justified, such as when defending his family from an attacker. But to engage in mortal combat where no one, including the combatants, seems to have any clear idea what the purpose or justification for the conflict is, as occurred in Vietnam, seems to add an additional degree of psychological trauma. As many combat soldiers have attested to, once in the hell of war, any vague but noble cause or justification for the fight is usually forgotten, and all that is left is the desire to stay alive and to help one’s friends stay alive – both of which are served much better by going home, or by not joining the military in the first place. And yet the number of people who simply walk away is quite small, for one simple reason: because it would constitute an act of disobedience to a perceived “authority.” And the average soldier, though he may have the courage and strength to throw himself into mortal combat, does not have the courage and strength to disobey a perceived “authority.”

As in many cases of authoritarian coercion, the victims of military conscription almost always far outnumber those trying to implement it. Even when people are “legally” commanded to sacrifice their minds and bodies for the sake of turf wars between tyrants, simple passive disobedience by any significant portion of “draftees” would make the war machine grind to a halt. What punishment is there to fear that is worse than the result of compliance? The usual results of fighting in war are prolonged terror, physical and mental pain and suffering, dismemberment or death. Nonetheless, even after witnessing the horrors of war first hand, very few people can bring themselves to disobey “authority,” take off the uniform and walk away.

A testament to the power of the belief in “authority” is the well-documented (If seldom discussed) fact that the atrocities committed against the German Jews by the Nazis were often carried out with the cooperation and assistance of Jewish police, such as occurred in the Warsaw Ghetto. In their culture, just as in almost every other culture, the people had been so thoroughly convinced that obedience is a virtue that, even though someone new was “in charge,” they still felt obligated to do as they were told, even if it meant violently oppressing their own kinsmen. But what may be even more disturbing (but indisputable) is the fact that many millions of people in history have assisted in their own extermination, because “authority” told them to. For example, during the Holocaust, many hundreds of thousands of Jews, on their own power, boarded the cattle cars of the very trains that would take them away to their deaths, without trying to hide, run away, or resist. Why? Because those pretending to be “authority” told them to. While it was no doubt true that they were not all aware of exactly what lay in store for them at the other end, they still handed themselves into the custody of a machine that obviously meant them harm.

There is a certain feeling of comfort and safety that one gets by conforming and obeying. Believing that things are in someone else’s hands, and having trust that someone else will make things right, is a way to avoid responsibility. Authoritarian indoctrination stresses the idea that, no matter what happens, if you simply do as you are told, and do what everyone else does, everything will be okay, and those in charge will reward and protect you. The body counts from one “government” atrocity after another show how misguided such a belief truly is. Had the victims of “legal” oppression and murder simply withheld their assistance, even if they did not lift a finger to forcibly resist, the world would be a very different place today. If the Nazis had had to physically carry each Jew, dead or alive, to the gas chambers or crematoriums, the level of murder would have been dramatically lower. If every slave sold into bondage had refused to work, there would soon have been no slave trade. If the IRS had to calculate the tax due and then directly take it from each “taxpayer,” there would be no more federal “taxation.” In short, if the victims of authoritarian extortion, harassment, surveillance, assault, kidnapping, and murder simply stopped assisting in their own oppression, tyranny would crumble. And if the people went a step further and forcibly resisted, tyranny would collapse even more quickly. But resistance, whether passive or violent, requires the people to disobey a perceived “authority,” and that is something that most people are psychologically incapable of doing. Ultimately, it is the belief in “authority” among the victims of oppression, even more than the beliefs of the ruling class and their enforcers, which allows tyranny, and man’s inhumanity to man, to continue on such a large scale.

The Effects on Actual Criminals

Ironically, in situations where obedience would actually improve human behavior, “authority” has no effect. Those individuals, for example, whose own consciences do not stop them from robbing or assaulting their neighbors, because they do not care about the usual standards of right and wrong, also do not care what “authority” tells them to do. It is only those who are trying to be good who ever feel compelled to obey “authority.” The belief in “authority” is a belief about morality – it is the idea that obedience is morally good. To those who do not care about what is deemed “good” – the very people whose consciences are not enough to make them behave in a civilized manner – the myth of “authority” has no effect. To put it another way, only those who do not need to be controlled – i.e., those already trying to live moral lives – feel any obligation to obey the controllers. Meanwhile, those who pose a real threat to peaceful society feel no moral obligation to obey any “authority” anyway. Generally speaking, all commands from “authority,” including inherently justifiable commands such as “do not steal” and “do not murder,” are always either unnecessary (when directed at good people) or ineffectual (when directed at bad people). It is difficult to imagine any situation in which an individual would otherwise have no qualms about committing theft, assault, or murder, but would feel guilty about violating “laws” which prohibit such actions.

A distinction should be made here between moral obligation and fear of retaliation. A thief who feels no moral obligation to refrain from stealing will also feel no moral obligation to obey “laws” against stealing. However, if he perceives a threat to his own safety, whether from the “police” or anyone else, he might be deterred from robbing someone. But that deterrent effect comes entirely from the threat of violence, not from the claimed “authority” underlying the threat. This means that supposed “authority” is never what stops actual crimes from happening, and that an effective deterrent system does not require “authority” at all. This is discussed in further detail below.

Part III(d)
The Effects of the Myth on the Spectators
The Sin of Non-Resistance

It is obvious that the belief in “authority” affects the perceptions and actions of “law enforcers,” and also affects the perceptions and actions of those against whom “laws” ire enforced. But even the perceptions and actions of the onlookers, those who are not directly involved, also playa huge role in determining the state of human society. More specifically, the inaction of spectators, who quietly allow “legal” coercion to be inflicted upon others, has an enormous impact. History is full of examples proving hat Edmund Burke was right when he said that all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.

The mass murder committed by the regimes of Stalin, Mao, Hitler, and many others was made possible not just by the willingness of the “enforcers” to carry out their orders but also by their victims’ imagined obligation to obey “authority,” and by the belief held by almost all onlookers that they should not interfere with “the law” being carried out. The perpetrators of mass injustice, including mass murder, are always hugely outnumbered by their victims, and if you add in the number of spectators – all those people who could have intervened – it becomes obvious how significant the actions (or inaction) of mere “spectators” can be.

Of course, some people will fail to intervene in a situation simply as a result of basic fear. A witness to a mugging who does not dare to intervene is not condoning mugging by his inaction. He simply values the benefit to his own safety that comes from inaction more than he values whatever benefit he thinks he could be to the victim by stepping in. But there are many cases in which the belief in “authority” makes people hesitate to get involved in a conflict, not just out of fear but out of a deep psychological aversion to going against “authority.” There are two ways this can cause spectators to stand idly by while “legal” injustice is inflicted upon someone else: 1) the spectator can believe that the injustice is actually a good thing, because it is “the law,” or 2) the spectator can disapprove, but his willingness to actually act out against “law enforcers,” or even to speak out against “authority,” is stifled by his trained-in subservience. Either way, the outcome is the same: the spectator does nothing to stop the injustice. But the two phenomena will be addressed separately.

Imagining “Legal” Evil to Be Good

There are literally minions of examples that could be used to demonstrate how the perception of the general public is dramatically affected by the belief in “authority.” Just consider how the average person views and judges an act when it is committed by one claiming to be “authority,” as opposed to how he views and judges the exact same act when it is committed by anyone else. Here are a few examples:

1)    Scenario A: An American soldier in a foreign country is going house to house, kicking in doors, carrying a machine gun and pointing it at complete strangers, ordering them around and interrogating them, while searching for “insurgents.” Scenario B: An average citizen, in his own country, is going house to house, kicking in doors, carrying a machine gun and pointing it at complete strangers, ordering them around and interrogating them, while searching for people he doesn’t like.
The first is viewed by most people to be a brave and noble soldier “serving his country,” while the latter is viewed as a horribly dangerous, probably mentally disturbed individual who should be disarmed and subdued at all costs.

2)    Scenario A: An “officer of the law” is manning a “sobriety checkpoint” or a border checkpoint, stopping everyone to ask if they are in the country “legally” or if they have been drinking, or to otherwise see if any indication or evidence of “criminal” activity can be found. Scenario B: A man without a badge is stopping every car that drives down his street, asking every driver if he is an American, asking whether he has been drinking, and looking into his car for anything that appears suspicious.

The cop who engages in such intrusive, obnoxious harassment, detainment, interrogation and searching is viewed by many as a brave “law enforcer” doing his job, while anyone else behaving that way would be viewed as psychotic and dangerous.

3)    Scenario A: A “Child Protective Services” worker receives a case file and, based upon an anonymous tip, shows up at a house to question the homeowners, with the stated purpose of deciding whether they are fit parents or whether the state should forcibly take their children away from them. Scenario B: An average person, based upon a rumor he heard from a stranger, shows up at the home of other strangers, asking them questions and threatening to take their children away if the questioner is not satisfied with the answers.

Again, the “government” worker is imagined to just be “doing his job,” while the average individual who does the same thing is seen as a dangerous, probably mentally unstable person. This is not to say that there could never be a situation in which a child should be taken away from his parents for the child’s own protection, but such matters would be taken extremely seriously by any individual who had to take personal responsibility for his actions. A bureaucrat who is merely acting as a cog in the machine of “government,” on the other hand, will do such things with far less hesitation and less justification, because he will imagine that something called “the law” is solely responsible for whatever he does.

4)    Scenario A: A pilot in the United States Air Force, having been given orders to do so, flies to the proper coordinates and delivers his payload to the intended target. The result is that some mercenaries of a different “authority” are killed, along with a number of civilians who happened to be in the area. Scenario B: An American citizen, acting on his own, loads up a plane with homemade explosives, flies over a building in the city where a vicious street gang is known to reside, and drops the ordnance. The result is that several gang members are killed, as are a dozen innocent bystanders who happened to be passing by on the street.

The average American views the civilian casualties from the first scenario as unfortunate, but chalks them up to the hazards of war. The military pilot is viewed as a hero for having served his country, and is given a medal. In the latter scenario, however, the average American views the pilot as a lunatic, a terrorist and a murderer, and demands that he be put in prison for the rest of his life.
Whether an act has been formally declared “legal” by politicians, and whether it is being done at the behest of “authority,” has a huge impact on the perceived morality and legitimacy of the act. In a very real sense, those who do the bidding of “authority” are not even regarded as people, in that their behaviors and actions are judged by such a drastically different standard from those of average human beings. As another example, a lot of people would be alarmed at a report of “a man with a gun” in their neighborhood, unless they heard that the man also had a badge.

People judge behavior based largely upon whether such behavior has been authorized or forbidden by “authority” rather than whether the behavior was inherently legitimate. When citizens are called into an authoritarian court to serve as jurors in a “criminal” trial, for example, it is routine for the “judge” to tell the jury that they are not to concern themselves with whether the accused did anything wrong; they are to decide only whether or not his actions were in accordance with whatever the “judge” declares “the law” to be. Of note, those in positions of power have, over the years, deliberately and methodically worn away at an old tradition known as “jury nullification,” whereby a jury could, in essence, overturn what they viewed as a bad “law” by returning a verdict of “not guilty” even if they believed the accused had actually broken “the law.” Every jury still has that power, but authoritarian judges do everything they can to keep jurors from realizing it.

Even when not on a jury, most people still judge others through authoritarian colored glasses, judging the goodness of another based heavily upon whether he obeys the commands of politicians – i.e., whether he is a “law-abiding taxpayer.” Compare how the average citizen would view the two individuals described below.

Individual A has no driver’s license, works “under the table” to avoid paying “taxes,” never registered for the “Selective Services,” owns an unregistered, unlicensed firearm, occasionally smokes pot, sometimes gambles (”illegally”), and lives in a cabin which he owns but for which he has no “occupancy permit,” and which has a deck on the back that he built without first getting a building permit.

Individual B has a driver’s license, pays taxes on what he earns, registered for the draft, owns a registered firearm, occasionally drinks beer, sometimes plays the state lottery, and lives in a “government”-inspected and approved house with a “government”-inspected and approved deck out back.

The two live otherwise similar lives, with both being productive, and with neither robbing or assaulting anyone else. Their behaviors, choices and lifestyles are very similar in almost every way, except that there are “laws” against the actions of Individual A, but not against those of Individual B. That alone, without any other substantive difference in what they do or how they treat other people, would cause a lot of people to view Individual A with a degree of contempt, while viewing Individual B with respect and approval. In fact, if Individual A was accosted, detained, and even physically assaulted (e.g., tasered, beaten and handcuffed) by “law enforcers,” even if he had never threatened or harmed anyone, many believers in “government” would opine that he “had it coming,” that he deserved to be attacked and caged for having disobeyed the commands of politicians.

This tendency of onlookers to blame the victims of authoritarian violence is incredibly strong. One who accepts the superstition of “authority” – the idea that some individuals have the right to forcibly dominate others, and that those others have a duty to comply – will assume that if “authority” is using violence against a person, it must be justified, and therefore the victim of such violence must have done something wrong. This pattern shows up in different situations. When, for example, U.S. troops kill civilians in some foreign country, many Americans are desperate to believe, and therefore automatically assume, without a shred of evidence, that the dead victims must have been “insurgents,” or collaborators, or at least sympathizers with “the enemy.” As another example, when the Branch Davidians near Waco, Texas, were subjected to a military assault, follow by prolonged physical and mental torture, followed by mass extermination, many Americans were quick to assume that anyone that “government” would do that to must have deserved it. The American tyrants fostered this attitude by fabricating various rumors and accusations, in order to demonize the victims of that violent, fascistic assault on nonviolent people. Actually, the incident was the result of a publicity stunt by the ATF, based upon rumors that some people in the group possessed “illegal” gun parts.

Many people assume that if someone was assaulted, prosecuted, or imprisoned by agents of “authority,” then that person must have done something “wrong, and must have deserved what was done to him. This assumption may come from a refusal of people to consider the possibility that the “government” they rely on for protection is actually an aggressor, or it may come from not wanting to consider the possibility that anyone, including himself, could be the next helpless victim of authoritarian violence, even if he has done nothing wrong. Regardless of the cause, the end result is that, when evil is committed in the name of “law,” many spectators immediately hate the victims, and rejoice at the pain and suffering that is inflicted upon them.

Obligation to Do Wrong

While everyone is aware that there are “laws” against robbery and murder (except when they are committed in the name of “authority”), the average person is completely unaware of the tens of thousands of pages of other “government”-issued statutes, rules and regulations – federal, state and local. But even when they have very little idea exactly what “the law” does and does not allow, most people still hold a general belief that “obeying the law” is a good thing, and that “breaking the law” is a bad thing. In fact, even when a person is strongly opposed to a particular “law,” believing it to be unjust, he may still hold a general, conflicting belief that “laws” ought to be obeyed and that it is justified to punish those who disobey. This psychological paradox is quite common, in fact, with many people vehemently lobbying to change what they view to be bad “laws,” while supporting the idea that as long as it is the law, people should obey it.

Such mental contradictions are common in the context of the belief in “authority,” rut are rare outside of it. For example, no one would argue that it is morally wrong to try to steal an old lady’s purse but also morally wrong for the old lady to hang on to her purse. But the concept of a “bad law,” in the mind of one who believes in “authority,” boils down to a similar paradox: a bad command which also is bad to disobey. The spectator who believes in “authority” may view a particular command, enacted by the masters and implemented by the enforcers, as being unimportant, unnecessary, counter-productive, or even stupid or unjust, while at the same time believing that people still have a moral obligation to obey that command, Simply because it is “the law.” Examples of the effects of such a viewpoint abound, ranging from the mundane to the horrific. Here are a few.

1)    At 2:00 a.m., on a wide-open, straight, empty road running through unpopulated farmland, a driver slows down, but does not stop, at the stop sign at a cross street. A motorcycle cop, hiding a hundred yards away behind some bushes, turns on his lights. Almost everyone, given those facts, would agree that the driver did not harm Or endanger anyone, or anyone’s property, and yet most people would agree that the cop would have the right to demand payment from the driver, via a traffic “ticket.” In other words, even though they would concede that the only thing “bad” about what the driver did was that it was technically “illegal,” they believe that that alone justifies the forcible robbery of the driver. Taking it one step further, if the driver attempted to leave the scene, rather than accept the “ticket,” most spectators would agree that the cop would be right to chase down, capture and imprison the driver.

2)    A “government” inspector, from a state “Board of Health,” conducts an inspection of a restaurant. The restaurant is perfectly clean and organized, and the inspector finds no indication that anything there poses any risk to anyone’s health. However, he nonetheless finds several technical violations of the local “code” for restaurants. As a result of those violations – not because they create a danger to anyone, but because they are “against the rules” – the restaurant owner is fined hundreds of dollars. Again, even though the restaurant owner did not harm or endanger anyone Or anyone’s property, most people would view it as legitimate for the owner to be robbed by those acting on behalf of “government.” And if the owner attempted to resist such robbery – whether by trying to conceal the technical “violations” or bribe the “inspector,” or by refusing to pay the fine – he would be seen as immoral by most people, and the enforcers would be seen as having the right to use whatever means necessary to achieve compliance with “the law.”

3)    A man drives his friend home from a party. Knowing he would have to drive, he did not have any alcohol to drink, though his friend did. He drops his friend off and heads home. He notices the police doing a sobriety checkpoint traffic stop ahead, and remembers that his friend left his half-full beer bottle in the car. Knowing that it is “illegal” to have an open container of alcohol in his car, he covers it up. He has not harmed or endangered anyone, and in fact has acted quite responsibly, acting as designated driver to make sure his friend would arrive home safely. However, he still “broke the law” (albeit accidentally) by driving a car with an open bottle of beer in it, and then tried to hide evidence of that fact. If he was caught doing so and arrested, few people would view the cop as the bad guy in the situation.

4)    A man sells a shotgun with a barrel a quarter of an inch shorter than “the law” allows. The weapon is no more lethal than a shotgun a quarter of an inch longer, end no one who was involved threatened or used violence against anyone. But the man, having been caught with the “illegal” item, is subjected to a para-military invasion of his property, followed by an armed standoff, in which several people are killed. Unfortunately, this example is not hypothetical. It happened to Randy Weaver at the incident at Ruby Ridge in 1992. And he was not merely “caught” selling an “illegal” shotgun; he was enticed into doing so by undercover “law enforcers.” The result of the armed invasion of the Weavers’ property, and the subsequent shootout and prolonged siege, was that Mr.
Weaver’s wife and son were killed, and he and a friend were wounded. Though it would be absurd for anyone to claim that there is a moral difference between possessing a shotgun with an 18-inch barrel and possessing a shotgun with a 17¾-inch barrel, and even though that allegation was the entire “legal” justification for the armed assault and confrontation, many spectators would still fault Randy Weaver, viewing him as the bad guy for having allowed himself to be coaxed into breaking an arbitrary, completely irrational (not to mention unconstitutional) “law.” That is the power of the belief in “authority”: it can lead many people to view a gang of sadistic, murderous thugs as the good guys, and to view their victims as the bad guys.

To most people, “breaking the law,” without specifying which “law,” has an automatic negative connotation. They view disobedience to “authority” not merely as dangerous but as immoral. But to the “government” believer, something even worse than committing a minor, victimless “crime” is openly disobeying an agent of “authority.” The average spectator, when observing the interaction between an “authority” figure and anyone else, will often view with disdain anyone who does not immediately and unquestioningly answer any questions and comply with any requests from a man with a badge. Even if the person complies, but exhibits an “attitude” toward the “authority” figure – any attitude other than meek subservience – many spectators will be quick to condemn the one who fails to grovel. And one who runs away from the police, even if he had done nothing wrong in the first place, is viewed with scorn by most. And when someone who runs, or hides, or refuses to cooperate is beaten up, tortured, or even murdered by “law enforcers,” many spectators opine that the victim should have done what the police told him to do. And when someone actively resists an “authority” figure, few have the gumption to take that person’s side under any circumstances, even with mere words. Just as a well-trained dog will not bite its master, even when sadistically maltreated, so those who have been trained to bow to “authority” are usually psychologically incapable of bringing themselves to lift a finger to defend themselves, much less someone else, from any aggression committed in the name of “law” and “government” and “authority.” Indeed, due to their authoritarian indoctrination, most people would more eagerly condemn their fellow victims than join together with their fellow victims to actually resist tyranny.

There is, of course, a difference between saying that it is not smart for someone to do something, and saying that it is immoral to do something. It is one thing to say that It is stupid for someone to “mouth off” to a cop, and another to say that doing so is actually immoral and that one who does so therefore deserves whatever abuse or punishment he receives. The believers in “authority” often express the latter opinion about anyone who “defies the police,” regardless of the reason.

The idea of average people imposing justice upon wayward “law enforcers” existentially terrifies statists, even when a “law enforcer” has done something as serious as committing murder. In the eyes of the well indoctrinated, the only “civilized” course of action in such a situation is to beg some other “authority” to make things right, but never to “take the law into one’s own hands.” People may complain about and condemn “legal” injustice, but few are even able to consider the possibility of engaging in premeditated, “illegal” resistance, even when agents of “government” are inflicting vicious brutality upon unarmed, non-violent targets. And if, through prolonged brainwashing, a people can be rendered psychologically unable to resist the oppressions done in the name of “authority,” then it makes no difference whether those people have the physical means to resist.
Modem tyrants and their enforcers are always outnumbered (and often outgunned) by their victims by a factor of hundreds or thousands. Yet tyrants still maintain power, not because people lack the physical ability to resist, but because, as a result of their deeply inculcated belief in “authority,” they lack the mental ability to resist. As Stephen Biko put it, “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”

Double Standard on Violence

The double standard in the minds of those who have been indoctrinated into authoritarianism, when it comes to the use of physical force, is enormous. When, for example, a “law enforcer” is caught on film brutally assaulting an unarmed, innocent person, the talk is usually about whether the officer should be reprimanded, Dr maybe even lose his job. If, on the other hand, some citizen assaults a “police officer,” nearly everyone will enthusiastically demand – often without even wondering or asking why the person did it – that the person be caged for many years. And if a person resorts to the use of deadly force against a supposed agent of “authority,” hardly anyone even bothers to ask why he did it. In their minds, no matter what the agent of “authority” did, it is never okay to kill a representative of the god called “government.” To the believers in “authority,” nothing is worse than a “cop-killer” regardless of why he did it.

In reality, using deadly force against one who pretends to be acting on behalf of “authority” is morally identical to using deadly force against anyone else. An act of aggression does not become any more legitimate or righteous simply because it is “legalized” and committed by those claiming to act on behalf of “authority.” And using whatever force is necessary to stop or prevent an act of aggression, whether the aggression is “legal” or not, and whether the aggressor is a “law enforcer” or not, is justified. (Of course, the risks involved with resisting “legal” aggression are often much higher, but that does not make it any less moral or justified.) Many of the reasons now used by “law enforcers” to forcibly take people captive – such is engaging in peaceful public demonstrations without a “permit,” or photographing “law enforcers” or “government” buildings, or not submitting to random stops and questioning by “law enforcers” – have no shred of justification when viewed without the “authority” myth. As such, resisting such fascist thuggery, even if it requires deadly force to do so, is morally justified, albeit extremely dangerous. But most people are literally incapable of even considering such an idea. Even when they recognize unjust oppression, they imagine that the “civilized” response is to let the injustice happen, and then later beg some other “authority” to make amends.

When faced with “legal” aggression and oppression, there are only two possibilities: either the people are obliged to allow “law enforcers” to inflict all manner of injustice and oppression upon them (and then complain later), or the people have the right to use whatever level of force is necessary to stop such injustice and oppression from occurring. To say, for example, that someone has a “right” to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures by “government” agents (as the Fourth Amendment states) would mean nothing if a victim of such tyranny was obliged to allow it to happen at the time and then complain about it later. To have a “right” to be free from such oppression logically implies the right to use whatever force is required to stop such oppression from happening in the first place, even if that requires the killing cf police officers. But the very thought terrifies those who have been trained to always bow to “authority.” Most of those who speak of “unalienable” rights still balk at the thought of forcibly defending those rights against authoritarian assaults.

To say that someone has a “right” to do something, while also saying that he would rot be justified in forcibly defending such a right against “government” incursions, is a contradiction. In truth, what most people call “rights” they actually perceive as “government”-granted privileges, which they hope their masters will allow, but which they have no intention of forcibly protecting if such “rights” are “outlawed” by “government.” For example, to have an unalienable right to speak one’s mind (the right to freedom of speech) means that the person also has the right to use whatever level of violence it takes, up to and including deadly force, to defend against “government” agents who try to silence him. Though the point makes loyal relievers in “authority” very uncomfortable, the very concept of a person having an unalienable right to do something also implies the right to kill any “law enforcers” who attempt to stop him from doing it. But in truth, there is almost nothing that “government” can do, whether it be censorship, assault, kidnapping, torture, or even murder, which would make the average statist advocate violent, “illegal” resistance. (The reader is invited to test the depths of his own loyalty to the myth of “authority” by considering the question of what would have to happen before he himself would feel justified in killing a “law enforcer.”)

“Law enforcers” constantly escalate disagreements to the level of violence, every time they try to arrest someone, or force their way into someone’s home, or forcibly take someone’s property. And authoritarian enforcers will then keep increasing the level of violence they use, until they get their way. The result is that the people, unless they are willing to engage in open revolution against the entire system, will Sooner or later bow to the will of the ruling class, or be killed. And though the mercenaries of the state are always using force, or the threat of force, to subdue and subjugate average people, the moment their intended victims respond to violence with violence, most spectators will instantly identify the victim of aggression – the one who used force only to defend against an attack – as the “bad guy.” This glaring double standard – the idea that it is okay for “authority” to commit violent acts of aggression on a regular basis, but horribly evil for the common folk to ever respond with defensive violence – shows how drastically the belief in “authority” can warp people’s perception of reality.

Ironically, in considering other places and other times, almost everyone accepts and even praises the use of “illegal” violence, including deadly violence, against agents of “government.” Few people would still insist that the Jews who lived in 1940 Germany should have continued to try to “work within the system” by voting and petitioning the Third Reich for justice. Instead, those who “illegally” hid, ran away, or even forcibly resisted (as occurred in the Warsaw Ghetto) are now seen by almost everyone as having been justified in doing so, even though they were technically “criminals,” “law-breakers,” and even “cop-killers.” But authoritarians, in their own time and in their own country, not only continue to condemn any who “illegally” try to avoid or resist oppression, but cheerfully gloat over the suffering of such people when they are punished by “government.” To delight in a “tax cheat” being punished, for example, as many Americans do, is akin to a slave taking pleasure in the whipping of a fellow slave who tried to escape.

There may be an aspect of simple envy in this: a feeling that, if one subject has been victimized, it is not “fair” that another escaped such suffering. This contributes to the fact that “taxpayers” – i.e., those who have been forcibly extorted by the ruling class – often express resentment of anyone who has avoided being similarly extorted. Oddly, the victims of “legal” robbery often imagine themselves to be virtuous for having been robbed, and look down on those who, for whatever reason, have not been robbed.

The Danger of Inaction

One who views “breaking the law” as inherently bad, regardless of what the “law” is, may be quick to report to the “authorities” any “illegal” activities he is aware of, even if the activities are victimless and constitute neither force nor fraud. Likewise, those who sit on juries in “government” courtrooms, if they imagine disobedience to “authority” (”breaking the law”) to be inherently immoral, are likely to give their blessing to someone being punished, sometimes quite harshly, for doing something which harmed no one and did not constitute either fraud or violence. In the case of the “snitch” and the juror, however, such actions take one out of the role of a mere spectator and move him into the role of a collaborator of oppression.

The damage done by the belief in “authority” among the spectators of oppression comes more often from their inaction, rather than from their action. Time after time, oppressions – large and small – have been committed right under the noses of basically good people who did nothing about it. To a certain degree, this is the result of simple selfpreservation: a person may avoid getting involved simply because he fears for his own safety. But the Milgram experiments showed quite clearly that even without any underlying threat to themselves, most people feel irresistibly compelled to obey “authority” even when they know that what they are being told to do is wrong and harmful to others. And if they find it difficult to disobey a perceived “authority,” they will find it even more difficult, if not impossible, to bring themselves to intervene when an “authority” is exerting its will on someone else. The result of the spectators having been trained to be passive, obedient, and non-confrontational can be seen in the many instances, throughout the world and throughout history, of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of spectators, standing around like zombies, watching as agents of “authority” assault or murder innocent people. Even in the United States, the supposed “land of the free and the home of the brave,” videos continue to surface depicting police brutality occurring right in front of crowds of onlookers, who simply stand and watch, not lifting a finger to protect their fellow man against the evils committed in the name of “authority.”

Part III(e)
The Effects of the Myth on the Advocates
“Legalized” Aggression

While most people probably imagine themselves to be “spectators” when it comes to authoritarian oppression and injustice, in truth nearly everyone is actually an advocate of “government” violence, in one form or another. Anyone who votes, regardless of the candidate, or even verbally supports some “policy” or “program” of the “government,” is condoning the initiation of violence against his neighbors, even if he does not recognize it as such. This is because “law” is not about friendly suggestions, or polite requests. Every so-called “law” enacted by politicians is a command, backed by the threat of violence against those who do not obey. (As George Washington put it, “Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force.”)

Most people, in their day-to-day lives, are very reluctant to use threats or physical force against their fellow man. Only a tiny fraction of the many personal disagreements that occur lead to violent conflicts. However, because of their belief in “government,” nearly everyone advocates widespread violence without even realizing it. And they feel no guilt about doing so, because they perceive threats and coercion to be inherently legitimate when they are called “law enforcement.”
Everyone knows what happens if someone gets caught “breaking the law.” It may only be a “fine” (a demand for payment under threat of force), or it may be an “arrest” (forcibly taking someone captive), or it may even result in “law enforcers” killing someone who continues to resist. But every “law” is a threat, backed by the ability and willingness to use deadly force against those who disobey, and anyone who honestly considers the idea will recognize that fact.

But the belief in “authority” leads to a strange contradiction in how people see the world. Almost everyone advocates that “law” be used to coerce others to do certain things, or to fund certain things. However, while advocating such violence, knowing full well the consequences to any who are caught disobeying, those same advocates fail to recognize that what they are advocating is violence. There are millions, for example, who consider themselves to be peaceful, civilized people – some even proudly wear the label of “pacifist” – while advocating armed robbery against everyone they know, as well as millions of strangers. They see no contradiction, because the robbery is given the euphemism “taxation” and is carried out by people who are imagined to have the right to commit robbery, in the name of “government.”

The level of denial which the belief in “authority” creates is profound. When advocating “political” violence, people accept no responsibility for the results. Those who apply for “government benefits,” for example, are asking to receive loot forcibly stolen from their neighbors via “taxation.” Likewise, applying for a “government” job amounts to asking that one’s neighbors be forced to pay one’s salary. Whether the person receives a direct payment or some service, program, or other benefit, he will usually accept the stolen property without the slightest hint of shame or guilt. He may otherwise be perfectly neighborly to the people whom he asked the state to rob. In no other situation does such a strange mental disconnect occur, not only for the one advocating the act of aggression but also for the victim of it. If, for example, one person had paid an armed thief to break into his neighbor’s house and steal some of his valuables, and the neighbor knew he had done so, such neighbors would probably not be on friendly terms (to say the least). Yet when the same thing is done using “authority,” via elections followed by “legislative” theft, neither the thief nor the victim usually perceives anything wrong with it.

(Author’s personal note: I’ve lost count of how many people have expressed sympathy for me and my wife because we were imprisoned for not bowing to the IRS. But it never seems to occur to our non-anarchist acquaintances that we were caged by the very people they voted for, for disobeying commands which they advocated. As far at I know, not one statist we know has even noticed the schizophrenia and hypocrisy of actively supporting mass extortion (”taxation”) and then giving heart-felt condolences to the victims of that same extortion.)

One can see the supernatural essence of “authority” in the fact that, among the people who will eagerly vote for their neighbors to be “legally” extorted and robbed, few would ask or pay mere mortals to do the same thing. Few people would feel justified in hiring a street gang to rob his neighbors in order to pay for his own child’s schooling, but many millions advocate the same thing when they condone “property taxes” to fund “public” schools. Why do the two feel so morally different to them? Because those who believe in “government” believe it consists of something more than the people in it. It is imagined to have rights that no mere mortal has. From the perspective of the statist, asking “government’ to do something has far more in common with praying for the gods to do something than it does with asking people to do something. A statist who demands certain “legislation” would be horrified and offended if some group of average people offered to provide similar services. Imagine if a street gang made the following offer to a local resident:

“We’ll do a shakedown of your neighbors and use what we get to pay for things you want your kid going to school, fixing the roads, stuff like that. We have to keep a cut ourselves, of course. And tell us how you wish your neighbors would behave, and we’ll make sure they behave that way. If they don’t do what we say, we take their stuff or stick them in a cage.”

If average people made such an offer, they would be condemned for their attempted thuggery, But when the same things are proposed in a campaign speech by someone running for a position in “government,” and when such things are done in the name of vague political abstractions such as “the common good” or “the will of the people,” they are seen not only as allowable but as noble and virtuous. When the politician says, “We need to provide adequate funding for our children’s education, and we need to invest in our infrastructure,” he is literally talking about forcibly taking money away from the people (via “taxes”) and spending it the way he thinks it should be spent. Such aggression is accepted as justified when done in the name of “authority,” but recognized as immoral if done by mere mortals. This shows that, in the mind of the statist, “government” is something more than a collection of human beings. Paradoxically, the statist will insist that everything that “government” is allowed to do, and everything it is, comes from “the people.” All belief in “government” requires the absurd, cult-like belief that, by way of pseudo-religious political documents and rituals (constitutions, elections, appointments, legislation, and so on) a bunch of mere mortals can conjure into existence an entity that possesses superhuman rights – rights not possessed by any of the people who created it. And once the people hallucinate the existence of such a thing, they will eagerly beg that thing to forcibly control and extort their neighbors. People recognize that mere mortals have no right to do such things, but truly believe that the deity called “government” has every right to do such things.

Excuses for Aggression

Though “democracy” is often praised as the height of civilization, cooperation, and “getting along,” it is the exact opposite. Voting is an act of aggression, and loving “democracy” amounts to loving widespread violence and constant conflict. Political elections are not about togetherness, unity or tolerance; they are about arguing over how everyone should be forced to behave and what everyone should be forced to financially support, via the control machine called “government.” The abundance of campaign signs littering lawns prior to every election are not the sign of an enlightened, free society; they are the sign of a mentally and physically enslaved society, bickering over which slave master they want holding the whip. Every single person who votes (Democrat, Republican, or third party) is attempting to put people into power who will carry out large-scale extortion (”taxation”) to fund various “government” programs. Any candidate who suggested doing away with all such robbery entirely – repealing all “taxes” – would be ridiculed as an extremist kook. All voters attempt to empower a gang that they know will commit mass robbery, yet none of those voters accept any responsibility for doing so. They know what their candidates will do if put into power, they know what the consequences will be to any who then disobey the commands of those politicians, but the belief in “authority” makes the voters psychologically incapable of recognizing that what they are doing is advocating widespread violence.

In fact, notwithstanding the traditional mythology and rhetoric, no one who believes in “government” actually wants it to be administered with the so-called “consent of the governed.” If it were actually done via genuine consent, it would mean that each person’s political preferences would be imposed only upon himself, unless others happened to advocate the exact same agenda. Obviously, the goal of the voter is not to compel himself to financially support things he likes, nor is it to control his own choices and behaviors; the goal of every voter is always to use the mechanism of “government” to coerce other people into making certain choices, funding certain things, and behaving in certain ways. Indeed, the individual statist sometimes has a fairly lax view of his own obligation to obey the myriad of political commands (”laws”), feeling that he is competent to rely on his own common sense and judgment regardless of “the law,” while at the same time feeling that everyone else needs to be controlled and micromanaged by “authority.” He believes that he himself is trustworthy and moral, and can make his own decisions, and that the purpose of “law” is to keep everyone else in line.
The degree to which different voters want “authority” controlling others varies significantly. The Constitutionalist wants the federal “government” to force others to fund only those things specifically designated as federal matters by the u.s. Constitution. The “progressive,” on the other hand, wants “government” to force others to fund all sorts of things, from art, to defense, to caring for the poor, to education, to retirement programs, and so on, ad infinitum. But while the two types of voters may differ in the degree and types of aggression they support, they do not differ in principle: they have both accepted the premise that “authority” has the right to forcibly extort money for “government” functions that are deemed necessary; they differ only on what counts as “necessary.”

The thinking of almost every statist is paradoxical. On the one hand, statists know that every “law” they condone is a command backed by a threat of violence. They are fully aware of the things that are done to any “law-breaker” who gets caught, but the average statist, when asked, will vehemently deny that he condones the initiation of violence against his neighbors. On a practical level, the statist knows that any “political” agenda he supports will, if enacted, be administered by whatever level 0: intimidation or brute force is necessary to obtain compliance from the people. Yet the average statist, while being fully aware of this, will also exhibit a huge logical disconnect, refusing to admit that he is openly and directly advocating the forcible extortion and coercive control of millions of innocent people. The reason for this is that the statist believes that the entity called “authority” has the right to rule, and as a result, when it commits violence, it does not count as violence.

As long as the violence is done by those claiming to be “authority,” who are imagined to have an exemption from the usual rules of morality (don’t steal, don’t assault, don’t murder, etc.) even those who are the most ardent proponents of various “taxes” and other “laws” can continue to imagine themselves to be peaceful, compassionate, non-violent people. Some even imagine themselves to be pacifists. (Because everything “government” does is done via force, or threat of force, there is no such thing, and can be no such thing, as a statist pacifist. While obviously not all anarchists are pacifists, all true pacifists are anarchists.) There are many ways – a few of which are addressed below – in which otherwise decent, virtuous people condone aggression and assault, intimidation and robbery, because they believe that it is perfectly allowable for the superhuman, mythical deity known as “government” to commit such acts, and therefore believe that it is perfectly moral and virtuous for them to ask “government” to commit such acts.

Charity Through Violence

The typical statist is profoundly schizophrenic, being both completely aware, and completely unaware, that he personally advocates the widespread use of violence against others. A dramatic example of this would be those who view themselves as loving and compassionate for supporting “government” programs to help the poor, What they are literally advocating, via their support of “welfare” programs, is a massive extortion racket, in which many millions of human beings are robbed of billions of dollars via the threat of being caged. Proponents of such “charity through violence” imagine themselves to be virtuous and caring because of what the needy may receive, while completely disassociating themselves from the threats, intimidation, harassment, forced seizures and imprisonments which they know occur and which they know are essential to any “welfare” program. Because of this bizarre selective denial, those who believe in “government” can be totally aware of the brute force by which such “laws” are implemented, while being seemingly unaware that they themselves are condoning such brute force, when they demand such “laws.”
The belief in “authority” is what allows for this strange psychological contradiction, as it convinces the advocates of wealth redistribution schemes that the victims of “legal” extortion have an obligation to cooperate, and that the use of violence against those who do not pay “their taxes” is therefore justified. As a result, the basic measure of morality and virtue is turned completely on its head, with “welfare” advocates viewing themselves as compassionate for advocating violent theft, while viewing as despicable criminals any who try to avoid or resist that violence.

Similarly, advocates of “Social Security,” a Ponzi-style wealth-redistribution scheme, imagine themselves to be caring and compassionate. Blinded by their belief in “government,” they fail to recognize that they are not only forcing people into what is (falsely) represented as a “government”-run retirement scheme, but are also adding insult to injury by insinuating that people cannot and should not be trusted to plan for their own futures. It takes a serious disconnect with reality for someone to vehemently support coercing people into participating in an “investment” program which invests in nothing and has no assets, and which has a return far worse than most real investments (and actually does not guarantee any return at all) and then to feel noble and charitable for having forced people into such a scheme. (Not only is there no Social Security “account” – individually or collectively – that is “paid into,” but the U.S. Supreme Court (in Flemming v. Nestor, 363 U.S. 603) has made it clear that no one has any contractual rights to any Social Security “benefits” at all, regardless of how much they may have “paid into” the system, and that Congress can cut off any or all “benefits” anytime it wants.)

Advocates of Brutality

Quite often throughout history, heinous oppression has been supported by the people, in part because the people were unable to recognize evil as evil when it was committed in the name of “law” and “authority.” If the people truly believe that “government” has the right to rule, as almost everyone now believes, all sorts of authoritarian “solutions” will be supported, or at least passively accepted, by most people. For example, many Germans in the 1940s, who themselves would never commit or condone private intimidation or assault, much less murder, nonetheless eagerly supported the idea of a “legislative,” “government”-approved and “government”-administered “solution” to the so-called “Jewish problem” (as Hitler called it). It was officially sanctioned, and done via “law,” so the people imagined themselves to be blameless for whatever happened, even if they vehemently advocated it.
Americans today; suffering from selective denial, are quick to righteously condemn what other violent, oppressive regimes have done but slow to recognize that, as a result of their own belief in “authority,” they too condone widespread draconian brutality, in the name of “law.” Even when oppression goes beyond mere threats and intimidation, and leads to constant, widespread, open violence and brutality, most people, as a result of their belief in “authority,” are still unable to recognize it as evil.

An obvious example is war. The nationalism that is so strong in authoritarians blinds them to the absolute evil which they condone and support in the name of “national defense.” In many cases, this blindness is intentional. Politicians and conservative voters alike complain when the blunt realities of war are shown to the American people. They want to wave their flag and cheer for their team, enthusiastically participating in the pack mentality, but they do not want to have to actually see the real-world results of what it is they support. They can be persuaded to proudly “support the troops,” and believe in a supposedly righteous war in the abstract, as long as they are sheltered from having to see the carnage – blood, guts and body parts – which their “patriotism” is causing.

Though love of one’s “country” is still portrayed as a great virtue, the truth is that the killers on both sides of every war, including those who fought for the most brutal, ruthless regimes in history, have been motivated by the feeling of righteousness that nationalistic pack mentality gives them, War could not happen at all without soldiers putting their devotion and loyalty to their own gang, tribe or “country” above doing what is right. “Patriotism” and the belief in “authority” are the two key ingredients to war. The easiest way to dupe basically good people into committing evil is by portraying acts of aggression and conquest as “fighting for one’s country.”

While rulers have long been practicing mind control over their subjects, in many cases the mind control of those who believe in “authority” is self-inflicted. They want to believe in “their country,” and in some righteous, abstract principle, some ideal, some noble cause (e.g., “spreading democracy”), without having to think of what is happening in simple, literal terms. It is easier to support mass murder when it is called “war,” and more so when it is called “national defense.” When it is cloaked in authoritarian, packmentality terminology, it allows its proponents – and those actually making it happen – to imagine themselves to be supporting something brave and righteous. While individual soldiers may truly believe they are fighting for a noble cause, it is impossible to be a “good guy” and be at war with an entire country, as discussed previously, The way “governments” wage war is never justified, and never moral, as it always involves widespread violence against innocents. But that is a fact that nationalists, left and right, refuse to see.

Another example of modern draconian brutality, “legally” committed in the “free world,” comes from the campaign of violence known as “the war on drugs.” In the name of trying to stamp out a habit – not violence, or theft, or fraud, but a mere habit – millions of nonviolent, peaceful, productive human beings have been assaulted, terrorized, and caged. Enforcement of “narcotics laws” occurs in a particularly brutal, vicious way, with paramilitary invasions of private homes being commonplace, and many-year imprisonments for victimless “crimes” being abundant. And the advocates of the “war on drugs” are well aware, not only of the overtly violent enforcement actions but also of the fact that the only measurable effects have been higher prices for certain mind-altering substances, more crime committed to pay for such substances, violent conflict between rival sellers of the substances, and more funds, weapons, power, and “legislative” permission for those who wear the label of “authority” to harass and assault innocents. Even if it actually worked, and eliminated or significantly reduced the use of certain drugs, such brutality would be absolutely unjustified and immoral. But even though it has utterly failed to get an inch closer to the stated goal, many “conservatives” enthusiastically cheer for more harassment, terrorism and violence. (To add hypocrisy to fascism, most of those “conservatives” drink alcohol: an act morally identical to the behaviors they want “authority” to violently stamp out.)

And while millions of lives continue to be destroyed by that brutal, draconian crusade, many statists eagerly blame the victims, by declaring that they “broke the law” and therefore deserve whatever is done to them. So, to the supposedly moral and responsible “conservative,” even if a person has harmed no one, and committed neither force nor fraud, if he has simply disobeyed the arbitrary decrees of his masters, he deserves to be assaulted, caged or killed. And, of course, such “conservatives” view it as unforgivable if one of the targets of such fascist thuggery decides to fight back. From the twisted, delusional viewpoint of the devout nationalist authoritarian, it is noble and virtuous for state mercenaries to violently assault, and attempt to kidnap and cage, a productive, peace-loving pot-smoker, but heinously evil for that pot-smoker to use violence to defend himself against such aggression. Such is the insanity caused by the superstition of “authority.”

Forced Benefits

Statists often defend “taxation” by arguing that the forced confiscation of wealth by “government” becomes retroactively justified when some of the confiscated money is spent in a way that benefits the one from whom the money was taken, or at least benefits society in general. For example, a statist may argue that if someone drives on a road that was funded in part by money taken from that person, or indirectly benefits from others being able to use the road, then that person should not complain about having been “taxed” to fund it. Ignoring the true nature of the situation, statists mischaracterize this as simply paying for services. No one would make a similar argument when “authority” is not involved. Suppose, for example, that a restaurant delivered a meal to someone who had not ordered it, and then sent over armed thugs to collect a hundred dollars from that person. If the person, after being extorted in that way, chose to eat the meal, no rational person would argue that that would make the restaurant’s actions morally acceptable. Yet that is exactly analogous to the usual view of statists: that if someone benefits from “government” services, he should not complain about “taxes.” The unstated premise is that “legal” robbery is perfectly legitimate, as long as “authority” afterward provides some benefit to the one who was robbed. And it seems to make little difference to statists whether such a “benefit” is only indirect, or is horrendously expensive, or is combined with all sorts of other things which do not benefit the person at all, or which the person morally opposes (e.g., funding war, or abortion, or some religious or anti-religious agenda). This is because statists believe that ultimately it is the prerogative of those in “authority,” not of those who earned the money, to decide how wealth should be spent, and that, as long as the ruling class claims to be robbing and controlling the people for their own good, the peasants have no right to resist whatever coercion and violence the masters deem necessary.

Violence for Protection

An offshoot of the notion that “government” providing “benefits” retroactively justifies all manner of theft and extortion is the patently ridiculous argument that it is necessary for the people to be forcibly controlled and robbed so that “government” can protect them from the bad people who might otherwise forcibly control and rob them. This absurd, contorted rationalization is quite common, whether the discussion relates to an authoritarian military or domestic “law enforcement.” And statists rely on fear-mongering to bolster such lunacy, making dire predictions about all the unpleasant things they theorize would occur if the people were not forcibly robbed via a massive authoritarian extortion racket.

Again, such silly arguments are never made in situations where “authority” is not involved. No one would accept a claim that it is okay fora restaurant to force someone to pay for food he did not order, on the grounds that otherwise the person might starve, No one would accept a claim that it is okay for a builder to force someone to pay for a building he did not order, on the grounds that otherwise the person might be homeless, But even more ridiculous would be to claim that it is okay for one street gang to run a “protection” racket so that they have the resources to keep all the other dangerous street gangs out of their city, Yet that is exactly the attempted justification for all “government”: that it must be allowed to commit aggression against everyone, so that it can protect them from others who might commit aggression against them, Supporters of a strong police force or a powerful military – both of which are funded via forced confiscation of wealth – have accepted the premise that it is not only okay but necessary for people to be oppressed, controlled and extorted by “government” as long as it is done for their own good. The fact that authoritarian “protectors” fail to prevent crime or war, and instead dramatically increase both via war-mongering and creating “illegal” markets, seems to go unnoticed by those who advocate defense via “government.” Again, it is only because “authority” is imagined to have the right to commit aggression that anyone would ever make the inane argument that it is proper to initiate violence against people in order to “protect” them.

When in Doubt, Advocate Violence

Much of the time, people will even advocate a forcibly imposed authoritarian plan simply because they are not sure what would happen if they did not, or are not sure how something would be accomplished if people were left in freedom. For example, if someone has a hard time picturing how a completely private road system would function, he will usually advocate a “government” plan, funded by coercion, If he is not sure how well free people could defend themselves without a standing army, he will likely advocate an authoritarian military solution, funded by coercive “taxation.” Those who believe in “government” advocate violence by default. All it takes is a little uncertainty and ignorance to cause the average person to advocate a coercive “government” plan for just about anything.

This is not how people behave in their day-to-day lives. The average person does not go around initiating violence against everyone he meets because he is not sure that everyone he meets will otherwise behave properly and make the right decisions. But that is precisely what most statists do via “government”: they advocate the widespread, forcible control of millions of human beings, simply because they are not entirely sure that people, if left in freedom, would spend their money the way they should, treat others the way they should, find peaceful, effective solutions to problems, etc.
By way of the superstition of “authority,” statists can comfortably advocate the violent subjugation of their neighbors, simply because they are not quite sure how their neighbors would otherwise behave.
And those who crave power exploit that fact to their advantage. All the politician needs to do, in order to get support for an authoritarian power-grab, is to tell the public that things might not work very well if he left people in freedom. He does not even need to wait until someone actually does something dishonest, or malicious, OJ negligent, or otherwise destructive. All he has to do is suggest the possibility that if the people are left in freedom, bad things might happen. Because advocates of “government” violence do not recognize “law” as violence, the threshold at which they will support an authoritarian, coerced “solution” is very low. Those who crave power can simply suggest that some “plan” might help someone somewhere, and many people will condone “legal” violence based upon that premise alone.

A lot of “government” violence is based upon guesses about what might happen as a result of what people might do. For example, much of the state coercion done in the name of “environmentalism” is based upon the idea that the state must forcibly control the choices of everyone because otherwise people might make choices that contribute to global warming, the end of the rain forests, the extinction of animals, aid so on. Few people, acting on their own, would commit aggression based upon a guess about possible indirect consequences of the non-malicious, non-violent actions of others. Yet that is commonplace in “government” policy.

As another example of advocating “government” violence by default, consider the practice of forcibly preventing foreigners from setting foot anywhere in an entire “country” without the written permission of the ruling class of that “country.” Such immigration “laws” create something akin to the war mentality, where an entire demographic category of people is criminalized and demonized, and subjected to acts of aggression, based upon concerns about what some of those people might do, People opine that many “illegals’’ are criminals, or come into the country just to receive ‘benefits.” Regardless of how often such allegations are accurate, the result is that all “illegals” – anyone who is in the country without the permission of the politicians – are forcibly controlled. This is the result of pack-mentality guilt by association. It should go without saying that using violence against one person because he is of the same race, or from the same country, or in some other way similar to someone else who has actually caused harm, is utterly unjustified. Of note, the attempts by “government” to quell “illegal immigration” also result in aggression being perpetrated against many “legal” residents (as well as “illegals”) at “border patrol” checkpoints, many of which are not even at the borders. To stop and question everyone driving down a road because someone might be there “illegally” is precisely the kind of unjustified aggression commonly committed by “government” agents and rarely committed by anyone else.

This violence-by-default can also be seen in the intrusive searches and interrogations of anyone who attempts to fly on a plane in the “land of the free.” For the owner of a plane to put conditions on anyone who wants to ride in his plane (and this would also apply to a train, a car, or anything else) is very different from a third party forcibly preventing anyone from riding on any plane anywhere in an entire country unless the would-be passengers first subject themselves to questioning, searches of their luggage, and even strip searches of themselves, by the agents of the third party. People would never tolerate any private individual behaving this way (with the attitude of “I’d better force my will on everyone else, just in case”), but for agents of “authority,” the tactic is commonplace. And people imagine it to be legitimate. In fact, they often demand that “authority” do such things.

In their day-to-day lives, non-violence is the “default” type of behavior for most people. While there are occasional physical conflicts, most people go to great lengths to avoid them, not only by trying not to start a fight but also by trying to defuse tense situations. Even when a fight does occur, both sides usually end up walking away. Each day, billions of people find ways to peacefully coexist, even when they have significantly different viewpoints, beliefs and attitudes. But that is in their personal lives. When it comes to “politics,” violence is the default. Every voter, to one extent or another, seeks to have his own views and ideas forcibly inflicted upon everyone else, through the mechanism of “government.” The default is not to let others “do their own thing,” or to try to get along peacefully; the default is to advocate aggression against absolutely everyone, by way of the authoritarian coercion called “law.” There is a mind-bogglingly huge disconnect between what the average person views as “civilized behavior” on an individual basis, and what he views as legitimate and civilized when it comes to the actions of “authority.” It is difficult to imagine anyone behaving in his personal life the way voters behave when it comes to “politics.” Such a person would constantly be robbing others friends and strangers alike – of huge sums of money to fund things he deems important, as well as using threats, physical force, and even kidnapping to coerce others into making whatever decisions he thinks would be best, for his victims or for society in general. In short, anyone who acted in his private life the way all statists act in the “political” arena would be immediately recognized as a thug, a thief and a lunatic. But doing exactly the same things via “government,” advocating mass extortion and thuggery, is accepted by most as something that normal, civilized people should do. In fact, they sometimes refer to voting as a duty, as if it is actually immoral to not advocate the coercive controlling of one’s neighbors. Amazingly, and ironically, the only people who do not advocate constant widespread violence and coercion via “government” – anarchists and voluntaryists – are usually viewed by the majority as being weird, uncivilized and dangerous.

How the Myth Defeats Virtue

Almost all parents routinely send their children two completely contradictory messages:

1) it is inherently wrong to steal, hit, bully, etc., and 2) it is good to obey “authority.” Almost everything that “authority” does constitutes bullying: using violence or the threat of violence to control the behavior of others and take their property. Every “authority” figure, from a school teacher to the dictator of a country, not only coercively controls his underlings on a regular basis but also speaks and acts as if he has the absolute, unquestionable right to do so. So the teacher is always forcibly imposing his will on the students ‘while at the same time telling them that it is wrong for them to forcibly impose their will on others. It is the ultimate example of the hypocritical message “Do as I say, not as I do.”

If children were raised with the idea that it is inherently wrong to steal, hit, bully, etc., why would there be any societal need for them to also be taught “respect for authority”? It only trains them to be easier to manage and control, which is of benefit to those who seek dominion over them (whether parents, teachers, or politicians), but does not train them to be any more civilized, compassionate, or humane. It does exactly the opposite, as the Milgram experiments demonstrated. In short, children are taught how to be civilized human beings, and then taught an insane superstition which overrides and renders obsolete everything they were taught about being civilized. This bizarre paradox can be seen all over the place in modern society.

The average person would feel shame and guilt if he stole a hundred dollars from his neighbor, but has no qualms about advocating, by way of voting, that “government” take many thousands of dollars from that same neighbor, The average person will hold a door open for a stranger but will, at the same time, advocate that that same stranger have much of his life forcibly controlled via “the law.” The superficial politeness and consideration most people exhibit is rendered meaningless and worthless by the massive levels of state coercion and aggression they advocate. Even the Nazis had proper table manners, said “please” and “thank you” (in German), showed proper etiquette and were generally courteous, when they were not committing mass murder.

There is a dramatic contrast between how nearly all statists treat others in their personal lives and how they advocate that “government” treat others via “the law.” Millions of people who would be very reluctant to physically hit another human being nonetheless proudly condone the violent subjugation or outright murder of thousands of people. They call it “supporting the troops.” Some statists even say that they oppose the war but support the troops, This is comparable to saying that one opposes rape but supports rapists. Because “government” troops always use coercion and violence against innocents, in addition to whatever defensive force they use, “supporting the troops” necessarily means supporting oppression. But because of pack mentality and an emotional attachment to one’s fellow countrymen, many people try to disassociate “the troops” from what it is that all “troops” do.

As another example of how the belief in “authority” distorts perception, many “welfare” recipients openly admit that, given the choice between accepting voluntarily donated gifts from people they know and receiving something that “government” forcibly took from a complete stranger, they prefer the latter, because it is, in their mind, the less shameful of the two options. The fact that anyone would ever prefer accepting stolen property over accepting compassion and generosity shows just how profoundly the belief in “authority” warps people’s sense of morality.

In short, every statist – everyone who believes in “government” – deceives himself into believing that he is a good person who supports good things and opposes injustice, hallucinating in himself a respect for his fellow man, while at the same time advocating that his fellow man be forcibly controlled, extorted, imprisoned, or even killed, The “authority” superstition is burrowed into the minds of the masses so deeply that they can advocate evil on a massive, nearly incomprehensible level, while still imagining themselves to be charitable and compassionate, They demand that “government” do things they would never dream of doing on their own. They imagine themselves to be non-violent, civilized, enlightened beings while routinely advocating that all of their neighbors be robbed and forcibly controlled, and put into cages or killed if they resist. In truth, mankind’s superficial charity, compassion and civility is nothing but a cruel joke when compared to what almost everyone will do, or what they will ask others to do, in the name of “authority.”

Many parents and teachers regularly repeat what is perhaps the most basic rule of humanity, sometimes called “The Golden Rule”: Treat others the way you want to be treated. However, none of the teachers, and almost none of the parents, who spout that rule actually live by that rule, because, by way of “authority,” they advocate that extortion and coercion be inflicted upon everyone they know. “The Golden Rule” is essentially a formula for anarchy: if someone does not like to be dominated and forcibly controlled by others, he should not advocate that others be dominated and forcibly controlled. If one wants to be left in peace, he should leave others in peace. If one desires the freedom to run his own life, he should allow others the freedom to do likewise. To put it bluntly, advocating aggression against others, including via any form of “government,” is utterly incompatible with being a charitable, considerate, compassionate, kind, decent, loving human being. And the only reason so many otherwise good people continue to advocate widespread constant aggression via “government” is because they have been duped into accepting the lie that there is a creature called “authority” that is not bound by the moral standards that apply to human beings.

“Liberal” Cowardice

To be blunt, people want “authority” to exist because they themselves are immature cowards. They want an all-powerful entity to impose their will on others. This takes different forms in different varieties of political advocacy, but the basic motivation is always the same. The “liberal,” for example, resents reality. He does not want a world in which suffering and injustice are possible. But instead of doing what he can as a human being, he wants a “government” to do it for him. He wants some magical entity to make sure that everyone, himself included, is fed, housed, and taken care of, no matter how lazy or irresponsible they are. Instead of trusting human beings to take care of each other, he wants a superhuman “authority” to guarantee housing, food, health care, and all sorts of other things, for everyone. He wants it so badly that he refuses to accept the obvious truth that no such guarantee is ever possible, and that if mere mortals do not take care of themselves and each other, nothing else will take care of them.

The liberal views the world as a continuation of the classroom, where there is always an “authority” in charge and in control who will make sure that the good kids are rewarded and protected from the bad kids. Each child is told what to do and taken care of. and all that is asked of him is that he does as he is told, He is expected to bear no responsibility at all for his own well-being, except through his obedience to the “authority.” He does not provide his own food, or his own shelter, or his own protection, or anything else. He Simply has faith that “authorities” (e.g., teachers and parents) will provide for him. He is raised in a setting which bears no resemblance to reality and is taught to look to “authority” for all of his needs.

And the liberal continues to do exactly that long after he leaves school. He speaks of each person having a “right” to housing, food, health care, and other things, as if some giant tooth fairy is obliged to make such things magically appear for everyone. The nature of reality, though it stares him in the face every day, is too disturbing jar him to acknowledge, because it is so different from the world he grew up in, where “authority” was responsible for everything. The “government” programs supported by “liberals” are a manifestation of their own delusional terror of reality and refusal to see the world as it is. They fear uncertainty so much that they try to hallucinate into existence a superhuman entity (”government”) that can somehow overcome all the uncertainties of reality and create an always safe, always predictable world. And when the mythological savior not only fails to fix the world but makes everything far worse (as happened with the collectivist regimes of the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, and many others), the “liberal” still refuses to let go of his blind faith in the omniscient, omnipotent god called “government.”

A simple analogy makes all “liberal” political theory collapse. If a hundred people were shipwrecked on an island, what would it even mean to say that everyone there has a “right” to food, or that everyone has a “right” to health care, or the “right” to a job, or the “right” to a “living wage”? If, for example, someone has a “right” to housing, and housing comes only from the knowledge, skills and efforts of other people, it means that one person has the right to force another person to build him a house, This is exactly what happens in a larger context, when “liberals” advocate that some people be forcibly robbed via “taxation” in order to provide “benefits” for others. The notion that people, by virtue of their mere existence, are entitled to all sorts of things – things which come into being only as the result of human knowledge and effort – is delusional. The logical result of this supposedly loving and compassionate viewpoint is violence and slavery, because if one’s “need” entitles him to something, that means that it must be forcibly taken from anyone else who has it or can produce it, if he will not supply it willingly.

The fact that such a short-sighted, animalistic attitude (”collectivism”) is portrayed as a “progressive,” compassionate philosophy does not change the fact that it is, in reality, indistinguishable from the “philosophy” of rats and cockroaches: regardless of who produced something, if someone else wants it (or claims to “need” it), he should forcibly take it. (The Communist Manifesto expresses this as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”) Of course, there is a fundamental difference between suggesting that people who have wealth to spare ought to voluntarily help the less fortunate, and advocating that violence should be used to make things “fair.” “Government” programs are never about asking people to help each other; they are always about using threats and aggression to force people to do certain things and behave in certain ways. But the myth of “authority” allows “liberals” to advocate widespread, constant violence and intimidation, while still imagining themselves to be caring and compassionate. In essence, what political “leftists” want is an all-knowing, all-powerful “mommy” to force people to share and play nice, and they ignore the fact that there is no such thing, and that imagining such a thing only adds violence, suffering and misery to society.

“Conservative” Cowardice

As much as political “liberals” want a giant mommy-state to protect and take care of everyone, political “conservatives” want a giant daddy-state doing the same tiling. The results are slightly different, but the underlying delusion is the same: the desire for an allpowerful “authority” to protect humanity from reality, The “right-wing” delusion focuses less on motherly pampering and hand-holding, and focuses more on fatherly protection and discipline. “Conservatives” want “authority” to be used to create a big, powerful protection machine, and to firmly impose morality upon the population, which they imagine to be necessary for the survival of mankind. Their denial of reality is just as strong as that of the leftists. Again, the island analogy demonstrates the point well. If a hundred people were shipwrecked on an island, who would imagine that forcing most of them to serve and obey a “protector” would be necessary or useful? And who would imagine that letting one or two of them forcibly impose their morals on the rest would make such a group more virtuous?
A conservative “daddy” form of “government” is the equivalent of a disciplinarian father, who acts as protector of the family from outside forces (the equivalent to a “government” military), and protector of each member of the family from others in the family (the equivalent of domestic “law enforcement”), and the one who keeps “undesirables” away from the family (the equivalent of immigration “laws”), as well as the enforcer of morality, who punishes family members who disobey the rules. This last item equates to “laws” against pornography, prostitution, gambling, drug use, and other habits and behaviors which, although they do not constitute force or fraud against anyone, are thought by many to be destructive – physically, morally, or spiritually – to those who engage in them.

But trying to forcibly impose morality is more damaging than the behaviors themselves. Aside from the fact that no one has the right to forcibly control the nonviolent choices of another, it is also horribly dangerous to set the precedent that it is okay to use violence to stamp out unseemly or distasteful behavior. Once such a premise is accepted in principle, human society will be a constant war of everyone against everyone. There will never be a time when everyone shares the same values and viewpoints. Peace and freedom cannot exist if every difference of opinion, and every difference in lifestyles or behaviors, leads to violent conflict via “government” coercion, Civilization, a state of peaceful coexistence, is not the result of everyone believing the same thing, but of people agreeing to refrain from initiating violence, even against people who do not believe the same things. “Conservative” statism, just as much as the “liberal” version, guarantees perpetual strife and conflict because it seeks to override free will and individual judgment with the so-called morality of a ruling class, whose first principle is forced conformity and sameness. Of course, violence cannot create virtue, even if it sometimes creates obedience, so all attempts by “authority” to coerce people into being moral and virtuous are doomed to fail, and ultimately do nothing but increase the levels of violence and conflict in society.

True Tolerance

The belief in “authority” is so strong that many people automatically associate disapproving of something with wanting to have “government” make it “illegal,” In their private lives, most people would never dream of resorting to violence against every person they encounter who has a habit or lifestyle they find unpleasant. Nearly everyone, on a regular basis, tolerates choices and behaviors from others that he does not approve of. Of course, to “tolerate” something merely means to allow it to exist (i.e., to refrain from trying to forcibly stamp it out); it does not mean to condone it or approve of it. True tolerance is what allows people with different viewpoints and belief systems to coexist peacefully.

Ironically, “tolerance” is often used by statists as an excuse to engage in intolerance. For example, if an employer chooses not to do business with someone based upon that person’s race, religion, sexual orientation, or some other general characteristic, some call that “intolerance” (which it is not), and then advocate that “authority” use the force of “law” to coerce the employer to hire whomever “authority” thinks he should. And that is intolerance, because it amounts to refusing to allow a person to make his own choices about who to associate with and who to trade with.

This is only one of many examples of how the belief in “authority” exacerbates differences, and introduces violence where it would not otherwise occur. There are several non-violent ways in which people can discourage behavior they disapprove of. Consider the example of a business owner who refuses to hire blacks (which, as repugnant as it may be, is not an act of aggression). Those who find such a policy offensive could boycott the person’s business, or speak out against his practices or beliefs. Instead, the common response to such a situation is for statists to petition those in “authority” to force supposedly fair and enlightened choices upon everyone.

The same holds true for many other societal problems, The fight over whether same-sex marriage should be “legally” recognized or “outlawed” is nothing but a competition in intolerance from both sides. It is not justified to forcibly prevent two men from saying they are married, nor is it justified to force anyone else to recognize such a relationship as “marriage,” The notion that everyone has to have the same idea of what constitutes marriage (or anything else) is a symptom of conformity-fascism. Likewise, “obscenity” laws seek to forcibly limit what people may read or view, “Narcotics laws,” as well as much of what the FDA does, constitute attempts to forcibly limit which substances people may ingest. “Minimum wage laws” try to forcibly control what two people are allowed to agree upon. “Anti-discrimination” laws attempt to force people into making deals and associations they do not want to make. “Laws” such as the “Americans with Disabilities Act,” are attempts to use force, in the name of “fairness,” to control what services people can offer, such as shutting down a business if the owner cannot afford to install a wheelchair ramp.

All such “laws,” all such acts of “authority” and “government,” are acts of aggression, the exact opposite of tolerance. It is absurd to try to force people to be nice, or fair, or compassionate, not only because aggression is inherently wrong but also because there will never be only one idea of what is nice, fair and compassionate. To have millions of people constantly fighting over the sword of “authority,” each hoping to forcibly impose his view of “goodness” upon everyone else, has been the direct cause of most of the violence and oppression in history. Though it may seem counterintuitive, this fact is historically indisputable: most of the evil committed throughout history has come from attempts to use “authority” to accomplish good things.

The constitution of the Soviet Union, for example, described an “authority” which was to treat everyone equally, regardless of race or religion, occupation or sex, and to preserve the individual rights of all citizens in their economic, political and social lives. The “rights” enumerated in the Soviet constitution included freedom of speech and freedom of religion, the right to work, the right to rest and leisure, the right to housing. the right to education, the right to health care, and the right of citizens to be cared for in their old age, among other things, The real-world result of that noble-sounding experiment, however, was constant, violent repression, harassment and intimidation, economic enslavement, forced suppression of thoughts and opinions, widespread poverty, and the murder of tens of millions of human beings, many via intentionally orchestrated starvation. The constitution of the People’s Republic of China is very similar to that of the Soviet Union, and the results were similar as well: widespread violent repression and tyranny, as well as mass murder. (The attempt by Chinese “authorities” to use the violence of the state to reduce population growth has had particularly horrendous and deplorable results.)

Tyrants have always professed to have the noblest intentions for what they do. But even good intentions, when added to the belief in “authority,” always result in immoral violence, sometimes to an almost incomprehensible degree. Even without all of the historical examples, it should be obvious that trying to achieve compassion ‘and fairness, love and virtue, cooperation and brotherhood, by way of authoritarian aggression and violence, is insane, and that “government,” by its very nature, as a tool of forcible control, can never and will never lead to justice, peace and harmony.
It is also worth noting that the political left and right are both enamored with the concept of “equality,” with the political right pushing for “equality under the law,” and the left pushing for equality of outcomes. But neither actually wants true equality. because they both exempt the ruling class from such “equality.” True equality rules out all “government,” because a ruler and a subject obviously can never be equals. What statists actually want is equality among the slaves, but enormous inequality between the slaves and the masters, This again shows that they view “government” as being superhuman, because it never occurs to them, as they push “equality for all,” that the equality should also include the politicians and the police.

Big or Small, Left or Right, the State Is Evil

Each and every person who advocates “government” in any form – whether liberal, conservative, moderate, independent, communist, fascist, constitutionalist, or any other flavor – believes that representatives of “authority” should, on a large scale, commit acts which, if done by anyone else, would be widely recognized as unjust and immoral. All statists believe that the people who make up “government” have an exemption from basic human morality, and not only may do things which others have no right to do, but should and must do such things, for the (supposed) good of society. The type and degree of aggression varies, but all statists advocate aggression.

In statist mythology, the political “left wing” and the political “right wing” are opposites. In reality, they are two sides of the same coin, The difference lies only in what the different voters hope those in power will do with that power. But in practice, “left” and “right” politicians all engage in wealth redistribution, war-mongering, centralized control of commerce, and numerous coercive restrictions upon the behavior of their subjects. As “right-wing” and “left-wing” stales approach complete power, they become utterly indistinguishable from each other. Hitler’s supposedly “far right” regime and Stalin’s supposedly “far left” regime were virtually identical. Whatever the original stated purpose of either, the end result was complete power and control for the politicians, and complete helplessness and enslavement of everyone else. Being allowed to choose between the political “left” and the political “right” provides the people with exactly as much power and freedom as allowing them to choose between death by hanging and death by firing squad. And adding an independent third party only adds the option of death by electrocution, As long as the people bicker only about which gang should enslave everyone (also known as “democracy”), the people will remain enslaved.

Ironically, statists of all political stripes lament the influence that “lobbyists” and “special interests” have over politicians, ignoring the fact that every voter is a special interest, and every campaign contributor is a lobbyist. Once people accept de premise that “government” has the right to forcibly micromanage society, perpetual competition between groups, each throwing money and favors at politicians to by to get their way, is inevitable. It is silly to advocate authoritarian control (”government”) only to then complain about the unavoidable effect of authoritarian control: people trying to buy influence. Politicians can be bought only because they haw the power to sell, and they have the power to sell only because people believe in “government.” State power will always be used to serve one person’s agenda at the expensive of another (how else could coercion be used?), making the idea of “government corruption” redundant. Every statist wants “government” to forcibly impose his will on others, but dubs it “corruption” if someone else’s agenda wins out, the hypocrisy is astounding.

Likewise, conservative pundits, on talk radio and elsewhere, sanctimoniously chastise liberals for advocating the forced redistribution of wealth, while the pundits do exactly the same thing for slightly different purposes. To criticize welfare while supporting corporate subsidies, or to criticize attempts to legislate “fairness” while supporting the “war on drugs,” or to criticize liberal plans to nationalize industry while supporting a giant, forcibly funded “government” military (which amounts to rationalizing the protection industry) shows a complete absence of philosophical principles. At the same time, it is equally hypocritical for liberals to righteously condemn “right-wing” warmongering while supporting a giant, intrusive, vicious extortion racket (”taxation”), or to complain about the “intolerance” of the “right” while advocating all manner of authoritarian behavioral controls. In truth, there is TO real difference between the philosophical principles of one statist and another, because they both accept the premise that a ruling class, with the right to control and rob the population, is necessary and legitimate, The only argument after that is riot one of principle, but simply a debate over how the loot should be distributed and what choices should be forced upon the peasants. There is no such thing as a tolerant liberal or a tolerant conservative because not one of them tolerates people spending their own money and controlling their own lives.

It is true that the degree of evil and the types of immoral aggression advocated vary based upon the different styles of statism, Constitutionalists, for example, advocate relatively low levels of robbery and extortion (”taxation”) and advocate that only certain, limited activities and behaviors should be controlled via threats and coercion (’regulation”). But every power which any constitution pretends to grant to any legislature is a power not possessed by mere mortal individuals. Who would bother writing into a constitution a line pretending to delegate to certain people a right already possessed by everyone else? All such “grants of power,” and any document purporting to create a “government” or empower any “legislature” to do anything, are attempts to issue a license to commit evil. However, as should be patently self-evident, no person or group of people – regardless of what documents they create or rituals they perform – can grant to someone else moral permission to commit evil. And putting supposed “limits” on such permission does not make it any more sane or legitimate. In short, to advocate “government” is always to advocate evil.

Liberals and conservatives both insist that someone needs to be “in charge,” because that is the reality they were raised in: the only thing required of them was that they remain obedient to authority, Prom that training, they have little or no idea what to do if left to their own devices, if no one is telling them what to do. So they refuse to grow up, and try to hallucinate into existence a superhuman “authority.” Paradoxically, even though there is no earthly species above human beings, they seek to fabricate this superhuman entity out of nothing but human beings, and then try to bestow upon it superhuman qualities, rights and virtues.

The entire concept is delusional, but it is shared by the vast majority of people the world over, who refuse to accept the fact that there is no shortcut to determining right and wrong, that there is no magic trick which will make truth and justice automatically prevail, that there is no “system” that can guarantee safety or fairness, and that everyday mortal human beings, with all of their deficiencies and shortcomings, are the best and only hope for civilization. There is no tooth fairy, or Santa Claus, or magical entity called “government,” which can make an immoral species behave morally, or make a group of imperfect people function perfectly. And the belief in such an entity, rather than being merely pointless and ineffective, drastically increases the overall stupidity, conflict, injustice, intolerance, violence, oppression and murder in human society. Nonetheless, most of those indoctrinated into the worship of “government” would rather cling to their familiar, horribly destructive, heinously evil, profoundly anti-human superstitions than grow up and accept the fact that there is no one above them, that there is no giant mommy or daddy to save the day that they are at the top, and that each of them is personally responsible for deciding what he should do and then doing it. Sadly, they would rather suffer the hell of perpetual war and total enslavement than face the uncertainty and responsibility that comes with freedom.

The belief in “authority” negates and overrides nearly all of the positive effects of religious and moral beliefs. What most people call their “religion” is empty windowdressing, and what most people tout as their moral virtue is irrelevant, as long as they believe in the myth of “authority.” Christians, for example, are taught things such as “If someone strikes you, turn the other cheek,” “Love your neighbor” (and even “Love your enemy”) and “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Yet every so-called Christian who believes in “government” constantly forsakes these principles, advocating constant aggression against everyone – friend and enemy, neighbor and stranger – via the cult of “government.” To put on a show of being pious, religious, compassionate, loving and virtuous, while “voting” for a gang that promises to use violence to control the actions of everyone you know, is the height of hypocrisy. To refrain from personally robbing one’s neighbor, while pushing for someone else to do it, is both cowardly and hypocritical. Yet almost every Christian (and every member of every other religion) does such things on a regular basis, by way of “political” advocacy.

As mentioned before, faith in “government” is a purely religious belief. As such, the vast majority of those who wear the label “atheist” are not actually atheists, because they believe in the god called “government.” They do not recognize it as a religious belief, of course, but their belief in that ethereal, superhuman savior of mankind (”authority”) is as deep and faith-based as any other religious belief. Ironically, atheists are often quick to point out the destruction that has been committed throughout history in the name of religion, but fail to notice the gruesome results of the god they bow to: “government.” The atheists are absolutely right to point out that when churches were the accepted “authority” – the organizations thought to have the right to forcibly control others – many of them committed large-scale, heinous acts of terrorism, torture and murder. But what most modern atheists fail to realize, despite the clear evidence staring them in the face, is that they are members of the most destructive church in history, the church of “government,” which has managed to wreak havoc, death and destruction on a level far beyond what even the most vicious churches of the past did. For example, over the span of two hundred years, around one or two million people were killed in the religious wars known as “the Crusades,” In comparison, in half that amount of time in the twentieth century, over a hundred times as many people were killed by the “progressive policies” of collectivist “governments.” Advances in technology no doubt played a large role in the increase in deaths, but the point is, whether the mask of “authority” is worn by a church or a state, the superstition is horribly dangerous, and the results horribly destructive. The fact that so many atheists eagerly condemn one form of the superstition, while vehemently advocating it in another form, shows an amazing degree of selective blindness, Often those most critical of oppression via “religion” are some of the most devout “true believers” in the god called “government.”

Again, in the eyes of those who believe in “government,” there is a world of difference between acceptable individual behavior and acceptable “government” behavior. When an individual steals $100, it is seen as an immoral crime; when those in “government” steal trillions of dollars every year, it is seen as acceptable. If the average individual prints his own $100 bill, and goes out and spends it, that is seen as fraud and counterfeiting – an immoral act akin to theft. When “government” gives “legal” permission for the Federal Reserve to do the same thing, but with trillions of fiat, out-of-thin-air “dollars,” that is seen as acceptable, even useful and necessary While various “governments” have declared that the average man is not “allowed’ to possess firearms, the mercenaries of “government” are allowed to have guns bombs, fighter jets, tanks, missiles, even nuclear warheads.
Ironically, such weapons – with the exception of nuclear weapons – are routinely put into the hands of the very same people who, before they became mercenaries for the state, were prohibited from possessing firearms. In other words, when those individuals use their own judgments, some politicians declare them to be toe: untrustworthy, and too much of a danger to society, to be trusted with a five-shot revolver, But when those same people are blindly following orders, obeying the chain of command, those same politicians declare that they can be trusted to have assault rifles, sniper rifles, grenades, mounted machine guns, tanks, fighter jets, bombers, heavy artillery, and countless other tools of large-scale destruction.

In addition to the huge chasm between what the masses perceive to be acceptable individual behavior and acceptable “government” behavior, the public sense of when “government” has gone “too far” seems almost random. The standards by which average individuals are judged are simple and constant: if they steal, defraud, assault, or murder, that is bad. But the measure of right and wrong for “government’ seems largely arbitrary. For example, it is now widely accepted that “outlawing’ alcohol would be unjustified, but “outlawing” marijuana – and using wide-spread, constant violence to enforce that prohibition – is legitimate. As an even more bizarre contradiction, most people would be rightfully offended if “government” attempted to coerce everyone into picking up litter in his own neighborhood, but most accept it as legitimate when “government,” via the military “draft,” coerces people into going to another country to either kill people or die. Bizarrely, this most heinous example of forced labor – forcing people to go to halfway around the world to murder complete strangers – was even committed by a “government” whose own rules (i.e., the Thirteenth Amendment) prohibit “involuntary servitude.”

It is clear that the limits of what “government” is allowed to do, as far as the general public is concerned, are not based on any principle whatsoever. One reason people, throughout the world and throughout history, have been so slow to resist tyranny is that, as long as the growth of tyranny is slow and steady, the tyrants are never seen as having “crossed the line.” This is because, without any underlying principles by which to gauge right and wrong, there can be no line to cross. The belief in “authority” is completely incompatible with any moral principles, precisely because the essence of the belief is the idea that those in “authority” are not bound by the same rules of conduct as their subjects. Logically, how could the subjects ever feel justified in dictating standards of behavior to their masters? And if “taxation” (forced confiscation of wealth) increases from 62% to 63%, how could any statist on principle declare that any line had been crossed, or that “government” had overstepped its bounds? There can be no principled objection to robbery unless it is an objection against any level of robbery, even if “legal.” If 1% forced confiscation of wealth by “government” is legitimate in principle, then so is 99%, Either the rulers own the people, and have the right to take as much as they please, or the people own themselves, and the rulers have no right to forcibly take anything from them. There can be no principle anywhere in between. How could there be? What possible rational basis could there be for holding the belief that 46% slavery is good, but that 47% slavery is bad? How could there be any principled line anywhere in between 0% and 100%?
When the violence of “government” becomes too widespread, too arbitrary, and too vicious, statists very slowly begin to question it. But there are no real principles guiding how they judge the righteousness of the actions of the ruling class, Once it is accepted that one group of people has the inherent right to commit acts of aggression against others, there is no objective standard for limiting such a right. If “government” can require people to have a “license” to drive to the comer store, why can it not require people to have a “license” to walk down the street? If it is legitimate for “lawmakers” to demand that private firearms be registered and regulated, why is it not also legitimate for them to demand that all forms of speech and expression be registered and regulated? If it is okay for politicians to create an enforced “government” monopoly on delivering letters (as the U.s. Postal Service has), why is it not okay for them to create an enforced “government” monopoly on telephone services?

The reason “government” is always a slippery slope, constantly pushing away from freedom and toward totalitarianism, is that once someone accepts the premise of a ruling class, there is no objective basis whatsoever for applying any limits to the powers of that ruling class. There can be no rational moral standard for saying that a certain person has the right to commit acts of aggression – theft, intimidation, assault and coercion – but that he may commit such acts only to a certain degree, or only if “necessary.” For slaves to concede that they are the rightful property of someone else, only to then claim that there are limits on what their owners may do to them, is a logical contradiction. For a subject to accept any master (including one called “government”), and to then imagine that he – the subject – will decide the extent of the master’s powers, defies logic and reality. Yet that is what all believers in “representative government” seek to do.

In short, those who believe in “authority” have accepted, on the most fundamental level, that they are owned by someone else: the people claiming to be “authority.” Having accepted that idea, they then proceed to beg their masters for favors, In doing so, however, the people are continually reinforcing the idea that ultimately it is up to the masters what will be done with the subjects. The one constant message that echoes throughout the entire “political process” is this: “Here are the things that we, the people, ask that you, the rulers, allow us to do.” The implicit message underlying all political action is that the only power the people have is the power to whine and beg, and that, ultimately, it is always up to the masters what will happen, To push for any change in “the law” is to accept that “the law” is legitimate.

In contrast, if an armed driver was accosted by a carjacker with a knife, the driver would feel no need to lobby the aggressor, to beg him to give his permission for the driver to keep his own car. If the driver had the means to forcibly repel the attacker, he would have every right to do so. To ask for something is to accept that the decision is the other person’s to make. To ask those in “government” for a bit more freedom is to admit that it is up to them whether the people may be free or not. In other words, to ask for freedom is to not be free, but to accept one’s subjugation to someone else. Consider what an oxymoron it is for a person to claim to have an “unalienable right” to do something, and then to ask the politicians for their legislative permission to do that thing. The belief in “authority” ultimately leads even those who imagine themselves to be ardent pro-freedom advocates to condone their own subjugation. No matter how loudly they “demand” that the politicians change some “law,” those who claim to love freedom while still suffering from the “authority” superstition merely reinforce the legitimacy of the ruling class’s control over them, by implicitly agreeing that the people need the ruling class’s “legislative” permission in order to have the right to do anything.

The Effect of the Myth on Freedom Advocates

“Government” itself does no harm, because it is a fictional entity. But the belief in “government” – the notion that some people actually have the moral right to rule over others – has caused immeasurable pain and suffering, injustice and oppression, enslavement and death. The fundamental problem does not reside in any set of buildings, or any group of politicians, or any gang of soldiers or enforcers, The fundamental problem is not an organization that can be voted out, or overthrown, or “reformed.” The fundamental problem is the belief itself – the delusion, superstition and myth of “authority” – which resides in the minds of several billion human beings, including those who have suffered the most because of that belief. Ironically, the belief in “authority” dramatically affects the perception and actions even of those who are actively fighting against a particular regime. The superstition drastically alters and limits the ways in which dissenters “fight” oppression, and renders nearly all of their efforts impotent:. Furthermore, on the rare occasion that a particular tyrant is toppled, one form of oppression is almost always replaced by another – often one that is even worse than the prior one.

Instead of fighting against a non-existent beast, what “freedom fighters” need to do is to recognize that it is not real, that it does not exist, that it cannot exist, and then act accordingly. Of course, if only a few people overcome the superstition, they will likely be ridiculed, condemned, attacked, imprisoned or murdered by those who are still firm believers in the myth, But when even a significant minority of people outgrow the superstition, and change their behavior accordingly, the world will drastically change. When the people actually want true freedom, they will achieve it without the need for any election or revolution.

The trouble is, almost no one actually wants humanity to be free, and almost no one opposes oppression in principle, To wit, the effects of the myth of “authority” remain intact even in the minds of most people who consider themselves to be rebels, nonconformists and free-thinkers. During their teenage years, many people go through a period of apparent rebelliousness, which consists mostly of doing whatever those in “authority” tell them not to do: engaging in smoking, sexual promiscuity, drug use, wearing different clothes or hairstyles, getting tattoos or body piercings, and so on, As such, their actions are still controlled, albeit in a backward way, by the myth of “authority.” Instead of obeying for the sake of obeying, they disobey for the sake of disobeying, but still show no signs of being able to think for themselves. They behave like angry children instead of complacent children, but still do not behave like adults. And in most cases, their natural desire to break the chains of “authority” does not last long, they “outgrow” their anti-authoritarian tendencies, and gradually transform back into “model citizens,” i.e. obedient subjects.

For example, the supposedly radical, anti-authoritarian hippies of the 1960s more or less became the new “government” in the United States with the presidency of Bill Clinton. Even the “peaceniks” whose mantra was “live and let live,” when given the opportunity to become the new “authority,” chose to forcibly meddle with the lives of others as much as or more than their predecessors did, including via military conquest. Likewise, those in “Generation X,” the “MTV” crowd, and so on, have always focused their efforts on putting people who agree with them into power, instead of working to actually achieve freedom. There is a fundamental difference between having complaints about a particular ruling class, and recognizing and opposing the insanity of “authority” in principle, In short, in all the various societal manifestations of so-called rebelliousness and nonconformity, almost none have actually escaped the myth of “authority.” Instead, they have merely attempted to make a new “authority,” a new ruling class, a new “government,” a new centralized machine of coercion through which they could forcibly subjugate and control their neighbors. In short, nearly all so-called “rebels” are phonies, who pretend to be resisting “the man,” but who really just want to be “the man.”

And this should be expected, If one starts with the assumption that there should and must be an “authority,” and that a “government” exerting control over a population is a legitimate situation, why would anyone not want to be the one in charge? Each person, by definition, wants the world to be the way he thinks it should be, and what better way could any person accomplish that than by becoming king? If someone accepts the notion that authoritarian power is valid, why would he not want it to be used to try to create the world as he wants it to be? This is why the only people who truly advocate freedom in principle are anarchists and voluntaryists – people who understand that forcibly dominating others is not legitimate, even when it is called “law,” and even when it is done in the name of “the people” or “the common good,” There is a big difference between striving for a new, wiser, nobler master, and striving for a world of equals, where there are no masters and no slaves. Likewise, there is a big difference between a slave who believes in the principle of freedom, and a slave whose ultimate goal is to become the new master. And this is true, even if that slave truly intends to be a kind and generous master. Even those who advocate a relatively limited, benign type of “government” are advocating against freedom. As long as the people believe in the myth of “authority,” every downfall of one tyrant will be followed by the creation and growth of a new tyrant.

History is replete with examples, such as Fidel Castro and Guevara, who portrayed themselves as “freedom fighters” just long enough to become the new oppressors. They were no doubt quite genuine in their vehement opposition to the oppressions which they and their friends suffered from, but they were not opposed to authoritarian oppression in principle, as clearly demonstrated by their behavior once they obtained power themselves. This pattern has been repeated over and over again throughout history, with the resentment of one tyrannical regime becoming the seed of the next tyrannical regime. Even Hitler’s rise to power was due in large part to anger at the perceived injustices and oppressions inflicted upon Germany via the Treaty of Versailles. Of course, as long as the rebels suffer from the superstition of “authority,” their first priority, once they have overthrown one “government,” will be to set up a new one. So even acts of great bravery and heroism, among those who still believe in “government,” have accomplished little more than replacing one tyrant with another. Many have been able to recognize and oppose specific acts of tyranny by specific regimes, but very few have recognized that the underlying problem is not who sits on the throne; the problem is that there is a throne to sit on.

The same failure to recognize the real problem occurs in more mundane, relatively peaceful “reform” as well. In the U.S., for example, a large portion of the population is perfectly able to see the injustices resulting from the “war on drugs,” global warmongering, and other violations of civil rights committed by Republican tyrants. However, not recognizing the belief in “authority” as the real problem, the solution proposed by those who recognize such injustice is to give the reins of “government” to Democrat tyrants instead. Meanwhile, another large portion of the population is perfectly able 10 see the injustices resulting from heavy “taxation,” “government” micromanaging of industry, wealth-redistribution schemes, citizen disarmament (”gun control”), etc. But, not recognizing the belief in “authority” as the real problem, the solution proposed by those who recognize such injustices is to give the reins of “government” back to Republican tyrants. And so, decade after decade, the machine of oppression changes hands, while individual freedom, in all aspects of life, continues to dwindle. And still, all that most Americans can even contemplate as a solution is yet another election, or another political party, or another lobbying effort, in the hope of begging the ruling class to be more wise or benevolent.

Some people, seeing the disaster caused by the two-party system, blame “extremism” for the negative effects of “government.” They surmise that if people would only support a form of coercive control somewhere in between the “far left” and the “far right,” things would improve. Such people claim to be independent, openminded and moderate, but in reality are merely general advocates of oppression instead of being advocates of a particular flavor of oppression. The “left” and “right” are merely two masks which the one ruling class wears, and making a new mask which is a compromise between the other two will have no effect whatsoever upon the nature of the beast or the destruction it causes, Taking a position halfway between “left-wing” tyranny and “right-wing” tyranny does not result in freedom; it results in bipartisan tyranny.

Among those who vote Democrat or Republican – or for any other party – no one recognizes the underlying problem, and as a result, no one ever gets any closer to a solution. They remain slaves, because their thoughts and discussions are limited to the pointless question of who should be their master. They never consider – and dare not allow themselves to consider – the possibility that they should have no master at all. As a result, they focus entirely on political action of one kind or another, But the foundation of all political action is the belief in “authority,” which is the problem itself So the efforts of statists are, and always will be, doomed to fail.

Unfortunately, this is also true of the less mainstream, supposedly more pro-freedom “political movements,” including Constitutionalists, the Libertarian party, and others. As long as they think and act within the confines of the “government” game, their efforts are not only completely incapable of solving the problem but actually aggravate the problem by inadvertently legitimizing the system of domination and subjugation which wears the label of “government.”

The Rules of the Game

Even most people who claim to love liberty and to believe in “unalienable” rights allow the superstition of “authority” to drastically limit their effectiveness. Most of what such people do, in one way or another, consists of asking tyrants to change their “laws.” Whether activists campaign for or against a particular candidate, or lobby for or against a particular piece of “legislation,” they are merely reinforcing the assumption that obedience to authority is a moral imperative.

When activists try to convince politicians to decrease “taxes,” or repeal some “law,” those activists are implicitly admitting that they need permission from their masters in order to be free, And the man who “runs for office,” promising to fight for the people, is also implying that it is up to those in “government” to decide what the peasants will be allowed to do. As Daniel Webster put it, “There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern; they promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.” Activists spend huge amounts of time, money and effort begging their masters to change their commands. Many even go out of their way to stress the fact that they are “working within the system,” and that they are not advocating anything “illegal.” This shows that, regardless of their displeasure with those in power, they still believe in the myth of “authority,” and will cooperate with “legal” injustice unless and until they can convince the masters to change the rules – to “legalize” justice. While the intended message of dissenters may be that they disapprove of what the masters are doing, the actual message that all political action sends to those in power is “We wish you would change your commands, but we will continue to obey whether you do or not.” The truth is, one who seeks to achieve freedom by petitioning those in power to give it to him has already failed, regardless of the response. To beg for the blessing of “authority” is to accept that the choice is the master’s alone to make, which means that the person is already, by definition, a slave.

One who begs for lower “taxes” is implicitly agreeing that it is up to the politicians how much a man may keep of what he has earned. One who begs the politicians not to disarm him (via “gun control”) is, by doing so, conceding that it is up to the master whether to let the man be armed or not. In fact, those who lobby for politicians to respect any of the people’s “unalienable rights” do not believe in unalienable rights at all. Rights which require “government” approval are not unalienable, and are not even rights. They are privileges, granted or withheld at the whim of the master. And those who hold positions of power know that they have nothing to fear from people who do nothing but pathetically beg for freedom and justice, However loudly the dissenters talk about “demanding” their rights, the message they actually send is this: “We agree, master, that it is up to you what we may and may not do.”

That underlying message can be seen in all sorts of activities mistakenly imagined to be forms of resistance. For example, people often engage in protests in front of “government” buildings, carrying signs, chanting slogans, sometimes even engaging in violence, to express their displeasure with what the masters are doing. However, even such “protests,” for the most part, do little more than reinforce authoritarianism. Marches, sit-ins, protests, and so on, are designed to send a message to the masters, the goal being to convince the masters to change their evil ways. But that message still implies that it is up to the masters what the people may do, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: when the people feel beholden to an “authority,” they are beholden to an “authority.” Those in “government” derive all of their power from the fact that their subjects imagine them to have power.

Legitimizing Oppression

The harder people try to work within any political system to achieve freedom, the more they will reinforce, in their own minds and the minds of anyone watching, that the “system” is legitimate. Petitioning politicians to change their “laws” implies that those “laws” matter, and should be obeyed. Nothing better shows the power of the belief in “authority” than the spectacle of a hundred million people begging a few hundred politicians for lower “taxes.” If the people truly understood that the fruits of a man’s labor are his own, they would never engage in such lunacy; they would simply stop surrendering their property to the political parasites. Their trained-in desire to have the approval of “authority” creates in them a mindset not unlike the mindset of a slave: they literally feel bad about keeping their own money and making their own choices without first getting the master’s permission to do so. Even when freedom is theirs for the taking, statists continue to grovel at the feet of megalomaniacs, begging for freedom, thus ensuring that they will never be free.

The truth is, one cannot believe in “authority” and be free, because accepting the myth of “government” is accepting one’s own obligation to obey a master, which means accepting one’s own enslavement. Sadly, many people believe that begging the master, via “political action,” is all they can do, So they forever engage in rituals which only legitimize the slave-master relationship, instead of simply disobeying the tyrants. The idea of disobeying “authority,” “breaking the law,” and being “criminals” is more disturbing to them than the idea of being a slave.

Those who want a significantly lower level of authoritarian control and coercion are sometimes accused of being “anti-government,” an allegation most vehemently deny, saying that they are not against “government” per se, but only want better “government.” But by their own words they are admitting that they do not believe in true freedom, but still believe in the Divine Right of Politicians and the idea that a ruling class can be a good and legitimate thing. Only someone who still feels an abiding obligation to obey the commands of politicians would want to avoid being labeled “anti-government.” Since “government” always consists of aggression and domination, one cannot be truly profreedom without being anti-”government.” The fact that so many activists reject that label (”anti-government”) shows how deeply ingrained the superstition of “authority” remains, even in the minds of those who imagine themselves to be ardent advocates of individual liberty.

(One particularly fascinating phenomenon is worth mentioning here. Outraged by authoritarian injustice, but still unwilling to give up the “authority” superstition in themselves, many in the growing freedom/militia/”patriot” movement continue to seek, or claim to have found, some “legal” remedy which will persuade tyrants to leave them in peace. Over the years, one theory after another has surfaced alleging the existence of some secret “government” form, or some “legal” trick, or some official procedure, which can free an individual from the control of “government.” Sadly, this demonstrates only that such people are still doing nothing more than looking for a way to get permission to be free. But the road to true freedom has never been, and will never be, a new political ritual, a new “legal” document or argument, or any other form of “political” action. The only road to true freedom is for the individual to let go of his own attachment to the superstition of “authority.”)

The Libertarian Contradiction

Perhaps the best illustration of how the belief in “authority” warps thinking and gets in the way of achieving freedom is the fact that there is a “Libertarian” political party. The heart and soul of libertarianism is the non-aggression principle: the idea that initiating force or fraud against another is always wrong, and that force is justified only if used in defense against aggression. The principle is perfectly sound, but trying to make it a reality via any political process is completely self-contradictory, because “government” and non-aggression are utterly incompatible. If the organization called “government” stopped using any threats or violence, except to defend against aggressors, it would cease to be “government.” It would have no right to rule, no right to “legislate,” no monopoly on protection, and no right to do anything which any other human being does not have the right to do.

One excuse for libertarian political activism is the claim that society can transform from its current authoritarian arrangement into a truly free society only if it does so slowly and gradually. However, that has never happened, and never will happen, for a very simple reason: either there is such a thing as “authority,” or there is not. Either there is a legitimate ruling class with the right to rule everyone, or each individual owns himself and is beholden only to his own conscience. The two are mutually exclusive paradigms. It is impossible for there to be an in-between, because whenever there is a conflict between what “authority” commands and what one’s individual judgment dictates, it is impossible to obey both. One must outrank the other. If “authority” outranks conscience, then the common folk are all the rightful property of the ruling class, in which case freedom cannot and should not exist. If, on the other hand, conscience outranks “authority,” then each person owns himself, and each must always follow his own judgment of right and wrong, no matter what any self-proclaimed “authority” or “law” may command. There cannot be a “gradual shift” between the two, nor can there be a compromise.

Trying to convert libertarianism into a political movement requires a mangled, perverted hybrid of the two options: the idea that a system of domination (:government”) can be used to achieve individual freedom. Whenever a “libertarian” lobbies for legislation or runs for office, he is, by his own actions, conceding that “authority’ and man-made “law” is legitimate. But if one actually believed in the non-aggression principle, he would understand that the commands of politicians (”laws”) cannot trump that principle, and any “law” that is contrary to the principle is illegitimate. This goes for the idea of “unalienable rights” as well, If an individual has an inherent right to do something, then, by definition, he does not need any permission from tyrants to do it. He does not need to lobby for a change in “legislation,” and does not need to try to elect some master who will choose to respect his rights.

Anyone who actually believes in the principle of non-aggression – the underlying premise of libertarianism – must be an anarchist, as it is logically impossible to oppose the initiation of violence while supporting any form of “government,” which is nothing but violence. And libertarians cannot be Constitutionalists, as the Constitution quite plainly (in Article I, Section 8) claims to bestow upon some people the right to initiate violence, via “taxation” and “regulation,” among other things. The principle of libertarianism logically rules out all “government,” even a constitutional republic. (Anyone who tries to describe a “government” which commits no acts of aggression will describe, at best, a private security company.) Nonetheless, so many people have been so thoroughly trained into the authoritarian mindset that even when they can see the obvious moral superiority of living by the non-aggression principle (the basis of libertarianism), they still refuse to give up the absurd notion that the right to rule (”authority”) can be used as a tool for freedom and justice.

There is a fundamental difference between arguing about what the master should do – which is what all “politics” consists of – and declaring that the master has no right to rule at all. To be a Libertarian candidate is to try to do both of these conflicting things. It obviously legitimizes the office the candidate seeks to hold, even while the candidate is claiming to believe in the principles of non-aggression and self-ownership, which completely rule out the possibility of any legitimate “public office.” In short, if the goal is individual freedom, “political action” is not only worthless, it is hugely counterproductive, because the main thing it accomplishes is to legitimize the ruling class’s power. The only way to achieve freedom is to first achieve mental freedom, by realizing that no one has any right to rule another, which means that “government” is never legitimate, it is never moral, it is never even real. Those who have not yet realized that, and continue to try to petition “the system” to make them free, are playing right into the hands of the tyrants. Even petitioning for lower levels of “taxation” or “government” spending, or asking for things to be “legalized” or “deregulated,” or begging for other reductions in “government” control over the people, still do nothing to address the real problem, and in fact add to the real problem, by unwittingly repeating and reinforcing the idea that if the people want freedom, they need to have freedom “legalized.” Political action, by its very nature, always empowers the ruling class and disempowers the people.

If enough people recognize and let go of the “authority” myth, there is no need for any election, any political action, or any revolution. If the people did not imagine themselves to have an obligation to obey the politicians, the politicians would literally be ignored into irrelevance. In fact, the belief in “democracy” dramatically reduces the ability of the people to resist tyranny, by limiting the ways in which they resist it. For example, if 49% of the population wanted lower levels of “taxation,” but maintained their belief in “authority,” they could accomplish exactly nothing via “democracy.” On the other hand, if even 10% of the population wanted no “taxation” at all and had escaped the myth of “authority” (including the “democratic” kind), they could achieve their goal easily by simple non-compliance, Using the U.S. as an example, if twenty million people – less than 10% of American “taxpayers” – openly refused to cooperate with attempts by the IRS to extort them, the ruling class would be powerless to do anything about it, and the infamous Internal Revenue Service, along with the massive extortion racket it administers, would grind to a halt. It would be utterly impossible for 100,000 IRS employees to continually rob millions of Americans who felt no obligation to pay. In fact, it would be impossible for any agency to enforce any “law” which even a fraction of the public could disobey with no feeling of shame or guilt. Brute force alone could not achieve compliance.
Any large population of people that did not perceive obedience, in and of itself, to be a virtue, and felt no inherent duty to obey the commands of those claiming the right to rule, would be utterly impossible to oppress. Wars occur only because people feel obliged to go into battle when “authority” tells them to. (As the saying goes, “What if they had a war, and nobody came?”) As long as the people car be duped into perpetually begging for freedom to be “legalized,” they will be easy to subjugate and control. As long as a person’s perceived duty to obey “authority” outranks his own personal beliefs and individual judgment, his beliefs and opinions are, as a practical matter, irrelevant. Unless and until a freedom advocate is willing to disobey the master – to “break the law” – his supposed love of freedom is a lie, and will accomplish nothing.

Same as the Old Boss

Many have argued that society without rulers is impossible, because the moment one “government” collapses or is overthrown, a new “government” will instantly spring up. In one sense, that is true. If the people continue to adhere to the myth of ‘authority,” after any upheaval of a particular regime they will simply create a new set of masters to replace the old set. But the reason for this is neither the necessity of “government,’ nor the basic nature of man. What nearly all “freedom fighters” fail to realize, as they rail against tyranny and oppression, is that the underlying problem is never the particular people in power. The underlying problem resides in the minds of the people being oppressed, including the minds of most “freedom fighters.” As long as the people accept the myth of “authority,” even open revolution will, in the long run, do nothing to reduce oppression. When one group of controllers and exploiters falls, the people will simply set up another. (Though few of those who wave their flags on “Independence Day” may realize it, the level of oppression under King George III, just before the American Revolution, was trivial compared to the current levels of “taxation,” “regulation,” and other authoritarian intrusion, coercion and harassment which routinely occur in the U.S. today.)

It is easy for people to see specific injustices committed in the name of a particular regime, but far more difficult for those same people to recognize that the root cause of such injustices is the belief system of the general public. History books are full of examples of long, bloody reigns of tyrants, followed at last by bloody revolution, followed by the anointing of a new tyrant. The type of tyrant may change – a monarch replaced by a communist regime, a “right wing” tyrant replaced by a “left wing” tyrant, an oppressive theocracy replaced by an oppressive “populist” regime, and so on – but as long as the belief in “authority” remains, so will oppression.

Even the most heinous examples of man’s inhumanity to man, committed in the name of “authority,” rarely persuade anyone to question the idea of “authority” per se. Instead, it leads them only to oppose a particular set of tyrants. As a discouraging example, much of the most fervent resistance to the Nazis came from the communists, who themselves advocated a form of oppression just as vicious and destructive as Hitler’s regime. Due to their authoritarian mindset, the Germans had no chance to achieve peace or justice, as their entire national debate was concerned only with which kind of all-powerful rulers should be in charge, without even a hint at the possibility that no one should have such power. The public discourse has been similar throughout most of the world, throughout most of time, focusing on who should rule, instead of questioning whether there should be rulers at all.
A Mix of Wisdom and Insanity

In the late eighteenth century something very unusual occurred, something that seemed as if it might break the perpetual cycle of serial tyrants. That event was the signing of the Declaration of Independence. What made that event unusual was not that the people were rebelling against a tyrant – which had happened countless times before – but that the rebels expressed some basic philosophical principles, rejecting not just a particular regime but rejecting oppression in principle. Almost.
The Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution which followed some years later, were a combination of profound insight and glaring contradictions. On the bright side, the discussion of the time was not just about who would be in charge, but focused heavily on the concept of individual rights and limiting the power of “government,” At the same time, the Declaration of Independence erroneously asserted that “government” can have a legitimate role in society: to protect the rights of individuals, However, this has never been true in practice, and cannot even be true in theory. As explained above, an organization which did nothing more than defend individual rights would not be “government” in any sense of the term.

The Declaration also spoke of unalienable rights, and asserted that “all men are created equal” (as far as their rights are concerned). But the authors failed to realize that such concepts completely rule out any possibility of a legitimate ruling class, even a very limited one. The very principles they expressed were then immediately contradicted by their efforts to create a protector “government.” One day they were declaring that “all men are created equal” (the Declaration of Independence), and the next they were declaring that some men, calling themselves “Congress,” had the right to rob (”tax”) everyone else (U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 1). The American Revolution was the result of a hodgepodge of conflicting ideas, some supporting individual sovereignty, some supporting a ruling class. The Declaration asserts that when any “government” becomes destructive of individual rights – as every “government” always does, the moment it comes into existence – the people have a duty to alter or abolish it. Yet the Constitution claims to give to Congress the power to “suppress insurrections” (US. Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 15). This implies that the people have a right to resist “government” oppression, but that “government” has a right to violently crush them when they do. In short, the works of the “Founding Fathers” consist of a combination of profound wisdom and utter lunacy. In some places, they described quite well the concept of self-ownership; in others, they sought to create a ruling class. They did not seem to notice that those two agendas are utterly incompatible with each other.

The result of their efforts was, in one sense, a gigantic failure. The regime they created grew far beyond what both the federalists and the anti-federalists said they wanted. The Declaration and the Constitution utterly failed to keep “government” power limited. The promise of a “government” that would be a servant of the people, protecting their rights but otherwise leaving them in peace, grew into the largest, most powerful authoritarian empire the world has ever known, including the largest and most intrusive extortion racket ever known, the largest and most powerful war machine in history, and the most intrusive and invasive bureaucracy in history.

In truth, the idea was doomed from the beginning. Perhaps the most valuable thing the “Great American Experiment” accomplished was to demonstrate that “limited government” is impossible, There cannot be a master who answers to his slaves. There cannot be a lord who serves his subjects. There cannot be a ruler who is both above the people and subordinate to them. Unfortunately, there are still many who refuse to learn this lesson, insisting instead that the Constitution did not fail, the people failed – by not doing it right, by not being vigilant enough, or by some other neglect or corruption, Oddly, this the same excuse given by communists for why their flawed philosophy, when put into practice in the real world, always turns into violent oppression. The truth is that any form of authoritarian control – any type of “government,” whether constitutional, democratic, socialist, fascist, or anything else – will result in a set of masters forcibly oppressing a group of slaves. That is what “authority” is – all it ever has been, and all it ever could be, no matter how many layers of euphemisms and pleasant rhetoric are used in an attempt to hide it.

The Contract Myth

The mythology surrounding the Constitution alleges that it served as a sort of contract between the people in general and their new “servants” in Congress. But there is not a shred of truth to that. One cannot, by signing a contract, bind someone else to an “agreement.” The idea that a few dozen white, male, wealthy landowners could enter an agreement on behalf of over two million other people is absurd, But the absurdity does not stop there. No contract can ever create a right held by none of the participants, which is what all “government” constitutions pretend to do. The form of the document makes it clear that it was not an actual contract, but an attempt to fabricate out of thin air the right to rule, however “limited” it was supposed to be.

An actual agreement by contract is a fundamentally different thing from any document purporting to create a “government.” For example, if a thousand American colonists had signed an agreement saying “We agree to give a tenth of whatever we produce, in exchange for the protection services of the George Washington Protection Company,” they could be morally bound by such an agreement. (Making an agreement and breaching it is a form of theft, akin to going to a store and taking something without paying for it.) But they could not bind anyone else to the agreement, nor could they use such an agreement to give the “George Washington Protection Company” the right to start robbing or otherwise controlling people who had nothing to do with the contract. Additionally, while the Constitution pretends to authorize “Congress” to do various things, it does not actually require Congress to do anything, Who in their right mind would sign a contract which did not bind the other party to do anything? (In DeShaney v.

Winnebago, 489 U.S. 189, even the U.S. Supreme Court officially declared that“government” has no actual duty to protect the public.) The result is that the Constitution, rather than being a brilliant, useful, valid contract, was an insane attempt by a handful of men to unilaterally subject millions of other people to the control of a machine of aggression, in exchange for no guarantee of anything. The fact that millions ofConstitutionalists are desperately trying to get back to that, in the hopes that it can save their “country” if the people try it again – after it completely failed on the first attempt – is a testament to the power, and the insanity, of the superstition of “authority.”