Hain’t
we got all the fools in town on our side? and ain’t
that a big enough majority in any town?

~ Mark
Twain

My wife and
I are very fortunate: we have two automobiles that have the kindest,
and most congenial and responsible dispositions. In the years
that we have owned them, they have neither gotten us drunk and
crashed us into a busload of schoolchildren, nor have they driven
us along a freeway at 120 mph, weaving in and out of traffic.
I might add that none of our previous cars engaged in any such
acts, leaving me thankful that they have chosen not to endanger
our safety, or that of our children and grandchildren. Perhaps
my wife and I know how to select “nice” vehicles; cars
with a pleasant state of mind; unlike those that manage to extend
their powers of causation to other drivers.

As I write
this article, I am informed that a van carrying Chinese kindergarten
children plunged into a pond, killing eleven youngsters. Are we
to conclude that Chinese vehicles are more inclined to destroy
human life than are those in the West? We do know that there are
various substances – such as alcohol, drugs, and tobacco – whose
use forces men and women into an irresistible submission to their
powers. We are also being told – by those who most of us accept
as being more knowledgeable than ourselves (e.g., politicians,
academicians, people in the mainstream media) – that guns also
have this capacity to exercise their wills over us; to make us
do their bidding.

Why are so
many of us inclined to accept the proposition that inanimate things
and forces in the universe have the capacity to act through intentionality;
to substitute their will for ours, and to make us do things
we might never choose to do on our own? The answer to this question
can be traced back to the patterned conditioning to which we were
subject in early childhood. Like our tribal ancestors, we modern
humans embarked on institutionally-defined and centered social
systems, and have been conditioned to think of ourselves as extensions
of the organizations that have succeeded in setting their purposes
above our own. In so doing, we have not only made ourselves
subservient to institutions, but have become what David
Riesman defined as “other-directed” persons. Truth,
moral principles, useful standards of conduct, our sense of being
and purpose in life, and all other considerations bearing upon
human motivation and behavior, are qualities prescribed and enforced
by authorities in the organizational hierarchy.

The underlying
premises of such thinking are constantly reinforced by our parents,
teachers, friends, the news and entertainment media, and other
institutions which have a vested interest in the universalization
of such a mindset. Most of us find it difficult to think of ourselves
as being independent of such attachments. The processes by which
we become indoctrinated in this externalized definition of ourselves
go back at least to Plato and his superintending “philosopher
kings.” The particular forms by which the few are allowed
to dominate and subdue the many are largely the products of an
intelligentsia that has – in furtherance of their own interests
– created systems that confine intelligence to the service of
institutions.

The system
that has proven to be the most destructive in pursuing this organizational
premise has been the state. The disastrous, anti-life consequences
of political behavior arise from the underlying definition of
the state: an agency that enjoys a monopoly on the use of violence
within a given territory. Because it enjoys a monopoly on the
use of force, those who believe that their interests can be better
pursued through coercion rather than consent, find
themselves attracted to the use of the state’s violent machinery.
As more and more people find themselves seduced by the trappings
of violence, society becomes increasingly politicized.

The exercise
of coercive power has always been the essence of political behavior.
In a free market system, the interests of different parties are
subject to contractual negotiation, never to the use of violence.
If a buyer thinks that a retailer’s asking price for a widget
is too high, he will make a counter-offer which the retailer is
free to accept or reject. The two parties either arrive at a mutually
agreeable price, or the buyer takes his business elsewhere. The
idea that the retailer could pull out a gun and threaten the would-be
buyer with death if he did not agree to the seller’s demand, would
be so unthinkable as to make the evening news programs. For the
state, however, the gun is always behind the demands of
government officials, and negotiation or withdrawal are rarely
an option available to the individual.

In recent
years, the violent nature of state action has greatly expanded.
Having been conditioned to accept the legitimacy of – and personal
identification with – a system that enjoys a monopoly on the use
of violence, most people find it difficult to conceive of limitations
on the use of such defining powers. As a consequence, arbitrariness
and absoluteness have come to characterize the modern state. Because
of the uncertain and unpredictable nature of complexity – coupled
with a growing awareness of the self-serving character of the
corporate-state – the resulting conflicts, contradictions, and
turbulence produces a failure of the popular expectations of political
systems to produce societal order.

With the
increasing inability of political systems to satisfy their expected
ends, they begin to experience dynamics similar to those about
which Thomas Kuhn has written regarding revolutions in scientific
thought. Kuhn observes, in the context of a scientific theory,
that “the failure of existing rules is a prelude to a search
for new ones.” He then emphasizes that a major paradigm shift
in thinking occurs not solely from such a failure, but
only when a better model is available to replace the old one.

The traditional
model of a vertically-structured society under the centralized
authority of the state has shown itself unable to satisfy even
the narrowest definition of societal order. Wars, depressions,
genocides, torture, police-state brutalities, assassinations,
economic dislocations, imprisonments without trials, and a twentieth
century death toll of some 200,000,000 victims of state power,
attest to the failure of political systems to provide their promised
protection of life, liberty, property, and the creative processes
that sustain a civilization. When popular expectations and real-world
conduct continue to diverge, the failure of the old model leads
intelligent minds to seek a new paradigm.

It must be
remembered that political systems depend on the widely-held belief
that transcendent moral principles are being served by the state
apparatus: divine will, natural law rights of people, utilitarianism,
egalitarianism, social contract, historical determinism, being
the more familiar. But, through a combination of political failures
and the emergence of technologies that allow for the decentralized
communication of information and ideas, millions of people throughout
the world have become aware of the fraudulent nature of all
political systems no matter the rationale upon which they have
been founded. They have also discovered that the “greatest
good for the greatest number” always comes down to
the “greatest good for the greatest guy;” that
the rulers have never represented the interests of the ruled,
but want nothing more – nor less – than the unrestrained power
to pursue their ends through coercively-enforced obedience.
The fluff and fool’s gold that has been used to sanctify the state
has largely eroded and been blown to the winds, leaving thoughtful
minds with the realization that the state is nothing more than
the systematic organization of unprincipled violence. Having a
vested interest in maintaining the ignorance of the many has not
assured the rulers of the passivity of its conscripts.

A consequence
of the increasing politicization of society has been that the
violence that defines the state has precipitated into the rest
of the culture. Movies, television programs, and computer games
have not been the causes of the proliferation of
violence, but reflect the pervasive mindset of death and destruction
loosed upon society by the very nature of politics. Presidents
assert – and act upon – a presumed personal authority to declare
wars against nations of their choosing, and to kill persons of
their choosing, and few voices are heard in protest. And yet,
when a few young men with troubled minds resort to mass killings
at schools, movie theaters, or shopping malls, otherwise intelligent
people fail to see – or pretend not to see – the causal connections.
Preferring to address the symptoms rather than the causes
of our politically-generated collective madness, people with
bankrupt minds look for explanations in the guns used by
these killers.

Politicians,
academicians, and media hacks were quick to exploit the murders
at Newtown, Connecticut, feigning genuine sympathy for the kindergarten
victims and their families in order to promote the long-held desire
of establishment owners to disarm those they rule. These five-
and six-year old murder victims should be mourned, but
as an act of genuine human emotion, not of political opportunism.
If there was any sincerity in those who use the deaths of these
twenty children – and five adults – to plump for more violent
government power over those who did not engage in the murders,
why were their voices utterly silent when, in 1993, the federal
government – acting through the FBI, the BATF, and other agencies
– murdered twenty-one children and fifty-five adults at the Branch
Davidian site in Waco? With the use of gas, tanks, armed helicopters,
machine guns, and fire, the deaths of so many innocent people
was met with a collective yawn by the politically-correct, who
rationalized the slaughter on the grounds that the Branch Davidians
had strange religious beliefs! If the murders of twenty children
in Connecticut merit depriving peaceful people of their weapons,
why doesn’t the earlier killing of twenty-one children by the
collective force of the federal and state governments warrant
the shutting down of political systems; the agencies of violence
upon which the establishment owners depend for maintaining their
authority over the rest of mankind?

In order
to institutionalize its powers of violence, the political order
is dependent upon neutralizing the intelligence of those to be
ruled, so as to discourage the questioning that fosters
understanding. Government schools and the mainstream media
serve these ends, programming minds that would never inquire whether
there are any limits to state power, and relying upon government
officials (e.g., the Supreme Court) to tell them if any such boundaries
exist.

As wars proliferate
against people who have caused Americans no harm; as government
monetary and taxation policies continue to transfer wealth from
those who have produced it to the privileged elites who
want it; as the state insists upon acquiring more and more
details of our private lives, while demanding the secrecy of its
own behavior; when people’s lives and liberty are put in jeopardy
by the whims of presidents; it becomes increasingly evident that
the alleged moral principles political systems are reputed to
serve represent nothing more than the rationalization of power.
When the image of government ceases being Edmund Burke’s “contrivance
of human wisdom to provide for human wants,” and becomes
what former Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, called “government
by crony,” the system loses any popular sanction, save for
those who fashion themselves as beneficiaries of the looting and
violence.

As
the state loses the respect and awe in which we have been conditioned;
as a new age of young minds – adept at employing the developing
technologies that exponentially expand the flow of information
and ideas – begin to question the existing order; and as the dinosaurs
of “America’s [so-called] greatest generation” take
their politically-serving bromides and basic premises with them
down history’s “memory hole,” a widespread loss of innocence
about the nature of politics is accelerating. In the face of growing
disaffection, along with the emergence of alternative, non-political
practices, the state is resorting to increased violence in a desperate
effort to shore up its collapsing foundations and sustain its
dominance.

To borrow
from Thomas Kuhn’s work, I believe that Western Civilization is
at a point where a fundamental paradigm shift in social thinking
is occurring. Relating his study to the topic at hand, Kuhn tells
us that “political revolutions are inaugurated by a growing
sense . . . that existing institutions have ceased adequately
to meet the problems posed by an environment that they have in
part created.” Kuhn adds that such revolutions “aim
to change political institutions in ways that those institutions
themselves prohibit.”

If Kuhn is
correct, we might ask ourselves to what source(s) young men and
women of an emerging paradigm will look as they begin to flesh
out new visions for a world grounded in peace, liberty, and the
inviolability of every individual?