The Wizards of Ozymandias

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

—Albert Einstein

A Republican candidate running for Congress in Texas set many minds and mouths atwitter with his suggestion that, should state tyranny ever become a problem in America that could not be resolved by political means, the use of violence, while “not the first option,” would be “on the table.”1 There is a deep-rooted frustration and anger among millions of Americans directed at the entirety of a political establishment that is forever employing lies, deceit, contradictory reasoning, violence, increased regulatory and taxation schemes, Federal Reserve monetary policies, wars, expanded police and surveillance powers, and other practices that advance corporate-state interests at the expense of ordinary people. Those upset with such behavior have tried resorting to the politically-acceptable means of bringing about change. They have gone to voting booths to support candidates who promise to “get the government off your backs,” or “no more taxes,” or to not engage in “nation-building.” With but a handful of exceptions, those elected turn around and violate such promises, leaving the disenchanted voters to seek out other political saviours at the next election.

The current “Tea-Party” movement began as yet another expression of popular disaffection with our politicized society. It was, however, quickly co-opted by the same right-wing franchise of the political establishment that participated—in bipartisan efforts with its left-wing branch—in the construction of the modern empire. Just as in the 1994 Republican Party’s congressional victories, persons of libertarian sentiments will discover that dressing a Tea-Party candidate in a three-cornered hat will not change his fundamental character as a pimp for the prevailing order.

When the futility of using institutionally-approved methods for making change becomes increasingly evident to people, it is not surprising that many might look to violence as the only effective solution. Students of social psychology often speak of the “frustration/aggression” hypothesis, wherein a repeated interference with goal-directed activity may result in a resort to violence. As Fred Berger expressed it, where

certain segments or groups within the population are systematically exposed to these weaknesses in the ability of the legal system to provide or protect security, those subjected to such treatment come to feel “left out” of the social process, come to regard themselves as the “victims” of the social and political scheme, rather than full participants in it. . . . Such conditions tend to foster counter-violence and retaliatory disorder. . . .2

In a world in which it has become evident to so many that the institutional order exists to promote the interests of the few at the expense of the more numerous, is it so remarkable that such an awareness would be responded to with anger and violence? To regard oneself as being endlessly at the mercy of increasingly malevolent forces that one is otherwise unable to control or resist, can produce a sense of hopelessness that may lead to violence directed against its perceived source.

How is one to respond to the systemic violence that is the lifeblood, the very essence, of the state? Society has always been a struggle between the “invisible hand” of a peaceful and productive order that arises, without direction, as the unintended consequence of people pursuing their own interests; and the “iron fist” of institutionally structured violence we have been conditioned to equate with “social order.” I have defined “government” as “an institution of theft, predation, rape, destruction, and mass murder, the absence of which, it is said, would lead to disorder.”

To understand political systems, and to learn how to protect oneself when dealing with them, one must cast aside all of the illusions and lies in which we have been trained to see them. Even their defenders understand the essence of government to consist of the lawful exercise of unrestrained power. There is nothing, nothing, that the state ever does that does not derive from a presumed authority to employ whatever amount of deadly force its officials deem necessary—or just convenient—to achieve its ends. Contrary to the mantle of “public servant” in which they like to cloak themselves, government employees—from the president on down to janitors—insist upon their power to compel obedience by force.

The mainstream media and high-ranking government officials feigned righteous indignation over city officials in Bell, California, who paid themselves gargantuan salaries—one as high as $800,000 per year, and with retirement pay nearing $1,000,000 annually.3 What is most upsetting to such critics, however, is not the enormity of their racket, but that these local officials failed to conform themselves to established methods for the looting of taxpayers. Like Captain Renault in the movie, Casablanca4, who informs Rick that he is “shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on” in his business—as he receives his gambling payoff from the croupier—the town government of Bell will receive a selective criticism of its behavior. Government defense contracts; hundreds of billions of dollars in “stimulus” gifts to favored business interests; the refusal of the Federal Reserve system—or of Congress—to reveal the beneficiaries of its monetary policies, these and other politically-correct forms of looting will pass without significant comment from right-thinking people. Nor, in contrast with the Bell racket, will much be made of the fact that a candidate for governor in California spent $141.5 million of her own money in an effort to get elected. Why? As one who understands that people act in order to be better off after acting than they would have been otherwise, what returns does this woman expect from her investment? Who is insisting upon an explanation from her?

I have long been of the view that parents have a moral obligation to keep their children from living under tyranny. As such, how do I go about the task of helping to make their world one in which they may enjoy the conditions of peace and liberty? My experience convinces me that participation in electoral politics is more than futile: it only adds energy to the system; it confirms the central premise of all political thinking, namely: important change can occur only within the halls of government. Besides the fact that the electoral process is unavoidably rigged in favor of the status quo, it also assures that, no matter who you vote for, the government always gets elected. Voting is designed to give people the false sense that they are in control of the machinery and the policies of the state. Emma Goldman got it right when she said that “if voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”5

My opposition to voting arises from the same sense as my opposition to other forms of violence. Implicit in efforts to persuade the state to act according to your preferences—whether through voting, lobbying, or threats of force—is the idea that, should you prevail, others will be compelled to abide by what you have chosen for them. Voting is anything but the peaceful alternative to violence: it is premised on the coercive machinery of the state being employed on your behalf should you prevail in amassing a greater number of people on your side than do others.

More direct forms of violence—as some suggest to be the ultimate solution to statism—are likewise inconsistent with a condition of liberty. Violence is an expression of reactive anger, born of unrequited frustration. Violence is the nature of the state: can one expect mankind to free itself of political destructiveness by adopting its very essence?

We will not become free when the state goes away. Rather, the state will go away once we are free. “Freedom” is a very personal quality, wherein the individual enjoys a centered, integrated life, unburdened by the conflicts and contradictions that make up our normally neurotic lives. We must learn to respect the inviolability of one another’s lives and other property interests if we are to enjoy this inner sense of being free. A need for liberty is what we have in common with one another; it is the condition in which free men and women live together in society. We will experience liberty only when each of us is free of the inner forces that keep us divided and in conflict.

The desire for liberty is not rational. It is not a logical extension of certain abstract philosophical premises, but a right-brained expression of our spiritual and emotional character. How we define and manifest liberty in society is a left-brained, rational process, its substance determined by whether we have developed a personal, inner sense of being free. How many people have been attracted to the novels of Ayn Rand, for instance, because of her facility in logically playing out the premise of rejecting the initiation of force? By contrast, how many were moved by her passion for liberty and the inviolability of the individual?

We have conditioned our minds to think of ourselves in conflict-laden ways, be they nationalistic, religious, racial, gender, or other forms of separation. Our political masters have trained us to think of one another in “we/they,” “us” against “them” categories, divisions that are—like the scapegoats upon whom we play out our conflicts—changeable to suit the political needs of the moment. The fear of unseen “communists” that helped fuel the Cold War, has morphed into the concealed “terrorists,” with each serving the same purpose: to expand the power and plundering of the state. Only by our individual ending of such divisive thinking and discovering the inner sense of non-contradictory wholeness that respects the inviolability of our neighbors’ lives and interests, can we become free.

“Liberty,” on the other hand, is the condition in which free men and women can live together in society. Trying to twist or manipulate unfree people into social systems—even those grounded in a verbal support of liberty—will never foster liberty. This is why the Constitution was doomed from the start: there was too much conflict and contradiction in the minds of most people to allow for the assemblage of free men and women. It is also why, once we have discovered the inner meaning of freedom, constitutions—and the governments they create—will be wholly unnecessary for a condition of liberty. This is part of the meaning of F.A. Harper’s observation that “the man who knows what freedom means will find a way to be free.”

How can a person whose mind and conduct is grounded in divisive thinking that considers violence as a means to wholeness, be regarded as “free”? Free of what? Is it not evident that resort to violence can never be a means to liberty; that such methods presume a fundamental separation of interests that would reduce society to the Hobbesian dystopia of “all against all”? If a group sought to dismantle the state by violent means, is it not clear that it could accomplish such ends only by amassing coercive powers superior to the state itself; that it would have to become a super-state? And if this group were to be successful, it would dare not dismantle its own machinery, lest another group should seek to recreate the previous apparatus; it would have to remain diligent in policing the thinking and actions of others who might be inclined to favor a more structured society.

One can no more advance liberty through violence than he can regain sobriety by embracing an alternative brand of alcohol. The state is nothing more than a system of legally organized force. It is no answer to this destructive menace to introduce a competitor who employs the same means and seeks the same ends, namely, to construct society on the principle of the power to compel obedience to authority.

Albert Einstein got to the essence of the problem when he declared that “force always attracts men of low morality.”6 I understand how being frustrated by others as we pursue interests we are entitled to pursue can generate intense feelings of anger. But it is not out of reactive rage or desperation that we discover our individual freedom and the resultant liberty we can share with our neighbors. It is such divisiveness that keeps us enslaved to the state. We need to discover what we share with one another, namely, a respect for our individuality that can arise only from the integration of our rational and emotional energies into a focused intelligence. If mankind is to avoid the fate of being the first species to intentionally make itself extinct, we must transform our own minds, and abandon our ageless and contradictory efforts to force others to be free!

7See The Dallas Morning News, October 22, 2010.

8Fred R. Berger, “’Law and Order’ and Civil Disobedience,” 13 Inquiry 254, at 262-63 (1970).

9Foxnews.com, September 21, 2010.

10Casablanca (Warner Brothers, 1942).

11www.counterpunch.org/2004/03/20/emma-goldman-for-president/

12Alice Calaprice, ed, The Expanded Quotable Einstein (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 284.

• 1T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men, 1925.
• 2Bretigne Shaffer, “Mere Anarchy Loosed Upon the World,” in Why Peace, Marc Guttman, ed. (Marc Guttman: East Lyme, Conn., 2012), pp. 118–26, at 124.
• 3See, e.g., James Gleick, Chaos: Making A New Science (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987); Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue With Nature (Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala, 1984); Erich Jantsch, The Self-Organizing Universe (New York: Pergamon Press, 1980); and John Briggs and F. David Peat, Turbulent Mirror (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).
• 4I use the word “individual” not to denote activity isolated from other persons, but to refer to persons acting as autonomous, self-owning beings who, more often than not, voluntarily associate and cooperate with others, but who are free not to do so.
• 5Henry Hodges, Technology in the Ancient World (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1970), pp. 209–10.
• 6Paul Bonnefon, Oeuvres Completes d’Etienne de la Boetie (Bourdeaux: C. Gounouilhou, and Paris: J. Rouam et Cie., 1892), p. xlvi.
• 7When I first decided to chronicle the collapse of Western Civilization, I assumed I would have a sufficient amount of time to observe and comment upon the transformations taking place. I shared T.S. Eliot’s sentiment that: “This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper.” Surely a vibrant culture that took centuries to develop would have to experience a prolonged demise. I could not imagine that its downfall would be as precipitous as it has proven to be. Because of the complexities involved, it is difficult to identify a specific date or period when the descent began. Suffice it to say that the process was well underway by the time Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize!
• 8If there is one period in Western history that I think reflects what we have become, it would be the French Revolution. What could be a more fitting symbol for that period of collective madness, destruction, and inhumanity than the guillotine, ever busy searching for new victims? Whatever visions of mankind in society have been offered by the numerous creators of Western Civilization are being lost as the culture, itself, disappears into history’s “black hole.” My oldest daughter, Bretigne, may have most succinctly encapsulated the changes occurring during her lifetime when she wrote: “I don’t know who the people around me are anymore.”
• 9The study of chaos informs us that complex systems are subject to far too many interconnected and inconstant variables to make it possible to control events in order to achieve predictable outcomes. The ability to predict outcomes in a complex system rests on a “sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” meaning an awareness of the presence and strength of every factor that could affect the result. In other words, our efforts to describe or to prescribe those patterns of regularity we define as “order” are limited by complexity itself. Events in our world are generally produced by countless networks of influences that make it difficult to identify causation. What may appear—if seen at all—as an inconsequential factor can produce damaging results (thus the nursery rhyme about “the want of a nail” leading to the loss of the war). We also discover that our faith in linear processes to produce anticipated results is often upset by the intervention of nonlinear influences (“the straw that broke the camel’s back”). The hubris that attends all political programs of central planning is fueled by an ignorance of the forces of chaos.
• 10It is difficult to think of the dynamics of Western Civilization without identifying its individual creative producers. When mention is made of this culture, do not the names and accomplishments of Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, Gutenberg, Beethoven, Galileo, Sophocles, Leonardo, Roger and Francis Bacon, Homer, Austen, Dante, Edison, Kepler, Carnegie, Michelangelo, Alcott, Locke, Curie, Rembrandt, Thomas Aquinas, Adam Smith, Emerson, Orville and Wilbur Wright, Milton, Bach, James Watt, van Gogh, Montessori, Pasteur, Darwin, Van Eyck, Einstein—to identify but a scant few individuals—immediately come to mind? Do we not think of such persons as the creators of our civilization?
• 11While the works of such people make up so much of the substance of our culture, their efforts, standing alone, would have been insufficient to produce a civilization. What other conditions were necessary to such ends? A factor I have long considered a major contributor to the emergence of highly productive societies can be found in what I call the “power of place.” Why, for instance, did technological inventiveness, standing alone, not produce industrialized societies in such places as ancient Greece, Baghdad, and Rome? In the 1st century AD, the Greek scientist, Hero, invented what we now know to be a steam-engine. He drew upon the works of earlier Greeks Vitruvius (80 BC-15 AD), and Ctesibius (285-222 BC) to create an instrument which, as far as is known, was used only to open and close temple doors. Another Greek invention, the Antikythera mechanism, was created in the second century BC, as a system of gears and cogs used, apparently, to calculate astronomical phenomena. While this device is often referred to as the earliest known computer, its appearance did not transform the pre-Christian world into a “Silicon Valley.” Was the two-thousand year-old copper cylinder found near Baghdad—believed by some to be an ancient electrical device—just another technological cul-de-sac that would await development centuries later? Did the glass industry of ancient Rome suffer from governmental restraints on technological innovation, thus impeding its development?
• 12In order to more deeply explore the dynamics involved in the development of this culture, I would like to focus on one of the major contributors to Western Civilization, one that had a profound impact on my own life. At some point in my youth, I became aware of the long-standing practice in such countries as Austria of many students graduating from college and then going on to law school. Following their legal studies, they would undertake careers that may or may not have involved the practice of law. During my college years, I became very interested in going on to law school, although at no time—whether before, during, or after law school—did I have any intention of practicing law. I wasn’t certain as to what kind of work I wanted to do, but law practice was not one to which I gave serious attention: law school, for me, was to provide the opportunity to synthesize disparate subject areas of learning—what used to be termed a “liberal arts” education—and to develop critical, analytical thinking. This approach was well-expressed by one nineteenth-century writer who observed that the study of law was “a sort of search for truth, carried on by teacher and student in common, and which they feverishly undertook, opening up an endless field for philosophic speculation.”