Madison, Moore and Marx

By the end of the day I feel as slow as my computer, as old as a mountain.

I feel tasteless, bland and uninspired.

The hopeless, lower-middle-class, blue-collar fog follows me home every day from work. All day I am a young piece of ass with a cheerful voice meant to soothe and comfort broken middle-aged men who work seventy hours a week for a dirty company that tries to steal back what little wages they pay them. Men who do not need comfort and soothing but new jobs. Men with dying children, cheating wives, multiple mortgages and bad backs. Men who need new lives.

I am the bread and the circus for this particular branch of the American wage-slave-machine.

You will forgive me if I had higher expectations for myself, if, for that matter, I had higher expectations for the world I live in.

Without any reason or experiential evidence that would make such an assumption rational, I think I believed once that this was a good place-- that tired, lonely, helpless, dying people were the exception and not the rule. Adulthood has done nothing but shit all over my expectations.

It occurs to me often these days that man has been completely cheated out of his birthrights to liberty and willfullness, and he has been cheated by himself. We give everything away so freely-- all for the promise of meat and a locked door.

Consider the following:

You are a fetus in warm sea of nourishing goo. The world rocks strangely at times, and the living quarters are cramped, but there is a warm thumping noise that soothes you, and you are safe in the knowledge that nothing can harm you in your tiny, dark world. Then one day, your world turns toxic and the room you've come to love is expanding and contracting rapidly. You are forced out into the unspeakably bright world, air stings your lungs: you are born. The world is a confusing and somewhat dangerous place to be suddenly ejected into, but you are free now to become the person of your choosing, move about from place to place and perhaps even forge some kind of destiny for yourself. It is a fair enough trade...or at least it would be.

But unfortunately for you, before you can even squish up your eyes and let out your first wail, you already belong to someone. Your will has been checked, your actions limited, your future mortgaged. In payment for being involuntarily spat out onto the planet in a particular location, you now owe allegiance to an ideology that you are unfamiliar with and a group of people you may never meet. These people will decide what you may and may not do for the rest of your days, and if they deem your actions or your lifestyle unfit in any way they will punish you in a manner that they deem appropriate. If you disagree with the rules that they set before you, then you may ask to relocate. Should they acquiesce to your request, then you may ask another group of men in suits for permission to go and spend your life between their particular set of arbitrary lines drawn in the sand. But even if all parties agree to your occupying this new space, even then you will still not be free. Your new masters will have rules for you as well, new determiners for your behavior. Perhaps you will agree with some of them, but whether you agree or not, you will be held accountable for the extent to which you comply.

We go through our entire lives in this condition, our wills bent to whims of others, and most of us here in the Western world do so in a thoroughly complacent fashion. We may whine a bit about parking tickets and vice laws now and again, but in our hearts we have bought the lie. We know that we have more freedom here than in some places (for now, anyways), and aren't taxed wages and standardized modes of behavior a small price to pay for safety? Laws are there for a reason, after all. We wouldn't want other people to be able to malign, maim or murder us with impunity. We like the comfort of being able to dial three digits on any phone to get someone else to deal with any crises that might arise. We enjoy not having to trouble ourselves with the business of organizing, policing and managing our own affairs.

Humans are social creatures, after all, designed to live in societies. And societies must be run by someone. People in over-large groups do not self-regulate. Governance takes care of all of the day-to-day issues that might arise if their were no moderators.

I will deny none of this. There are benefits to being ruled. But the fundamental injustice that has infected the world for quite some time is that it is not optional. There is nowhere in the world that you can go to run from it-- none that I am aware of, at any rate. Long before any of us were born, important men in funny hats cut up the inhabitable world into tidy parcels and divided it amongst themselves.

Listen now, because I know that I am being long-winded, but this is the crux of the issue:

They have stolen the entire world from us, and we have let them.

Money is not the root of all evil; it is merely one of many convenient avenues to that particular thoroughfare. The deprivation of will is the root of all evil. No man, strong or weak, has the right to deprive another of his free action for any reason other than the preservation of his own. My whole life, I have not believed in much, but this I do believe. With every atom of my metabolic structure.

That being said, any given society may decide amongst themselves what constitutes lawful and proper behavior within that society, but the only just punishment they may proscribe is exile. If you do not wish to comply with the rules set down by the community that you are a part of, then that is your affair, but you cannot remain a member of that group. You may not reap the benefits of living in a society if you are not a compliant, productive member of it.

This is a natural law. On a small scale, it is constantly and organically enforced. In any circle of friends there are a set of ever-changing social by-laws that are (usually unconsciously) agreed upon by its members, and when one of the body consistently violates these rules, they are shunned by the community. Eventually the offending party either amends his errant ways or removes himself completely from the group. In smaller offices and places of business, managers set down rules that those in their employ are bound to obey-- dress-codes are put forth, schedules are set, modes of interaction regulated. If an employee violates these rules with any regularity, his employer will either fire him or (as in many cases I have witnessed) he will simply make the wrong-doer so uncomfortable and inconvenienced that he quits of his own accord.

The idea of applying such a system on the macrocosmic scale may seem ludicrous. Surely when the offending parties are guilty of, not just rudeness or poor hygiene, but murder or rape, more has to be done than merely kicking them out of the community. Such people deserve punishment, don't they?

If you are the sort of person for whom that constitutes a compelling argument-- the sort that completely believes, with a kind of righteous fury, that you or any other human on this planet is properly equipped to mete out judgment and decide what another person deserves-- then I apologize for taking up so much of your time as I am not, I'm afraid, directing this to you at all. Our worldviews differ on too fundamental a level for much to be accomplished by discourse.

And if you do not believe that a body of mere mortals has the ability to omnisciently pass perfect judgment on its citizenry in compliance with an Infallible Moral Code, what penal options remain? It seems to be the case that an organism, any organism, has the somewhat natural right to attempt to go on living-- and at any rate, right or wrong, self-preservation is an rather unquashable instinct possessed by almost everything. So it would seem that the only sort of justice that it is actually just to mete out is the kind that is done solely in the name of self-protection.

(Here there is a sort of scale because in order not to infringe upon the will of the offending party--and in so doing visit upon him an injustice in its own right-- a person may only use as much... “force,” for lack of a better word, as is necessary to protect himself. If for example, a man is being attacked and is in imminent danger, it is not unjust for him to kill the attacker if that is the only means at his disposal to save himself. If, however, a person is found dead by another's hand, it would be inappropriate to kill him after the damage is done. But in such a case, the community that this apparent killer lived in could hardly be expected to content themselves with such a person's continued presence among them. For their own safety, it would be perfectly acceptable to force this person to leave the area. If he would not stay away and knew the consequences of remaining, it might become necessary at a later date to kill him. There will always be those who cannot be reasoned with, after all, but every attempt to avoid taking human life should be made as it is more or less the ultimate act of will-deprevation. The police, the military and other organizations with the unhappy task of dealing with violent persons on a regular basis have a similar system in place, commonly referred to as the Continuum of Force. The idea behind it is that the level of suppressive reaction should match the level of threat-- it is a sensible enough idea.)

So what has happened? If it is so seemingly obvious that all men are entitled to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and smaller groups seem to naturally respect this, or at least allow for it, then how is it that there is no liberty to be found anywhere? Why, if I disagree with the values and ideals of my community can I not leave it at will and go off to govern myself or form a new society?

James Madison once notably lamented that the problems of government would not exist if only “men were ruled by angels.” He goes on to say that since they are not, the men of governance must somehow be prevailed upon to rule not only the citizenry but themselves. Because what begins as a small group of individuals looking out for the interests of themselves and the others in their community, rapidly develops into an independent organism, a creature that requires sustenance and desires growth and self-replication, just like any other. Put briefly, governments become more concerned with protecting themselves than us.

And so they spread like wildfire. They feed on the resources generated by their citizens, and so as they grow they require more citizens. And as they gain more citizens they grow-- they will not allow us to leave because we are their sustenance. The cycle continues indefinitely, and the only check on their growth is geography. Now, in the post-imperial world, the various governing bodies of the world have swolen up so large that they occupy every square inch of the globe and war with each other over boundries and resources. And nine times out of ten, governments do not die in these wars, men do.

So what, then, is to be done? The eternal question-- Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? --remains, but we have always known the answer.

It is the responsibility of no one but ourselves to take back what has always belonged to us. The overlords may have grown more clever, their promises more sweet, but their natures have not changed. Across the globe a full scale invasion occurred long ago. Hostile, complex, sentient life-forms attacked us in exactly the places where we were weakest-- they promised us protection, safety and abundance, and perhaps to varying degrees over the years they have even delivered. But we are fools if we fail to recognize that we are a conquered people. And the great tragedy is that this was accomplished by no alien race, no great legion of machines, but by creatures native and inborn to the human spirit. And it was with human hands that they forged our chains, human voices sing their praises, human minds preserve their power.

They have stolen the world from us, and we have let them. We continue to let them.

You will forgive me, if I had higher expectations than this.

I find myself thinking morbidly, almost wistfully, about various apocalyptic scenarios lately-- and, judging by the current pop-cultural undercurrents, I am not alone. But I think that perhaps this is only because we are lazy: it would be so much easier to change everything if only we could start from scratch.

But if God, nature or random chance will not deliver us from the world we built, then, one day, we are going to have to do it ourselves.