Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Pretty Slavery: What It Is And How To Identify And Expose The Fraud

Several years ago I coined the term "pretty slavery" and have used it many times in my communications with others to convey the notion of the gilt cage.  In a past article, I set forth the notion that freedom is an all or nothing deal.  There are no "degrees" where freedom is concerned.  One is either free or is not.  There is nothing between the two.  Degrees only present themselves under conditions of oppression and slavery where the master or tyrant decides what shall be allowed and what shall not.  This is by necessity an arbitrary position regardless of how well intended the tyrant may be, for no matter how benevolent one's master, you are always subject to that over which you have no control.  There is nothing in principle that constrains the master's hand; nothing to prevent his presumably reasonable base of principles from wandering into whim and caprice.

All that aside, there is nothing in credibly derived principle that endows one man to act as the master of another.  The Canon Of Individual Sovereignty makes this quite solidly plain.  Therefore, no matter how one attempts to slice the pie, he will find it quite impossible to concoct a logically valid basis for one subset of a population dominating another.  Dominion over others cannot occur except as a felonious action where those dominated have not given their consent.

This may seem intuitively obvious when one looks to the histories of personalities such as Stalin and Mao, whose colorless brutality made obvious to the world that they were monsters needing little more than tail, horns, and a pitchfork to complete the image.  Somewhat less obvious are the examples epitomized by men such as Hitler whose personal charisma and charm drew in millions of Germans who thereby fell for his lies and helped usher forth the destruction of most of the European continent and tens of millions of lives.

It is therefore not the obvious monster of whom we must beware, but rather of the one with the smiling faces of our beloved aunts and uncles - whose words soothe us, set us at ease and comfort, and promise us great peace, happiness, wealth, health, and endless prosperity.  Their appeals and arguments often carry such brute emotional force that we are compelled to forsake our normally good habits of circumspection.  We forget to ask the more pointed questions or pursue answers with yet more querying.  This is a terrible error into which even otherwise intelligent, smart, diligent, and careful adults fall and it is rapidly proving to be humanity's undoing.

What, then, is "pretty slavery"?  Simply put, it is the gilt cage wherein one is allowed enough of what one wants such that he tolerates all the other violations of his rights.  The characteristic of pretty slavery that is the greatest danger is that it is tolerable and even acceptable to those who subscribe to it.  In a great many instances it is, in fact, demanded.

Why, you may ask yourself, would anyone demand to be a slave?  The answer comes in two parts. Firstly, the subscriber often is unaware of his status as a slave, usually and precisely because he can do enough of the things he wants such that he sees no reason to "rock the boat", or rationalizing the nonsense that one has to make sacrifices or cannot always have what he wants, and so forth down a considerable list.  Secondly, he accepts the shackles of his status because he is seeking to get something at no cost to him, which is to say, something for nothing.  He does not care enough not to trade away B, C, D, E, etc., if he can be provided with A.

There are many aspects to this and the layers are numerous and possessing many entanglements and convolutions with each other.

The gay man who wants to be able to marry his partner will be satisfied if allowed that privilege in exchange for his silence when the men in charge prohibit his neighbor from keeping and bearing arms because he has no personal interest in such rights or perhaps even disagrees with them.  In other words, if the concerns of his neighbors do not coincide with his own, their rights become meaningless at best to him, and so long as he has gotten what he wants he will remain otherwise compliant and tolerant of tyrannies that do not touch him too objectionably.

The fundamentalist religious man, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or what have you is often more than happy to see the rights of the gay man trampled into the dust so long as that nativity scene can be displayed in the town square or his children allowed to pray in school.  To those people the rights of their neighbors whose interests do not coincide, or in this case perhaps even conflicts with their own, mean nothing to them.  Less than nothing, in fact, because he often finds them inimical.

Pretty slavery means lifting not an eyebrow when one's fellows rights are stampeded into the dust by law and those who enforce it with physical brutality so long as you have enough of what you want.  Pretty slavery is the result of having been bought off by a mob of dangerous thugs whose tacit message to the slave is this: "now that we are agreed about what you are, the only question remaining is that of price."  That is the pitiable truth about the man who tolerates his pretty slavery, the only thing differentiating one from the other being the price at which he is willing to sell his soul and those of his fellows, the latter being the sin for which there may be no forgiving.

Do what thou wilt with thine own life, but presume not to dispose of mine without consult or consent.

Pretty slavery is indeed a fraud because it is slavery that is masqueraded either as "freedom" or as being "necessary".  We already know that it is the farthest possible thing from freedom, but what of the necessity angle that is so often employed with such nearly universal success against the average man who is either incapable of or unwilling to make use of his brain for something even slightly more than a hat rack?

We have heard nearly every president in our lifetime utter the assertion that "everyone must make sacrifices". Oh really?  Says who?  And what sacrifices are we to make?  Who decides what they shall be, who shall make them, and who will be exempt?  On what basis are these decisions made and how did the people making them acquire the authority to do so?  These are but the first in a long list of questions that need to be asked and the answers, such as they may be forthcoming, must be very carefully scrutinized for odor.

I was once in a meeting that had been called by our district manager at AT&T.  He attempted to foist this sacrifice nonsense upon us regarding a now-forgotten issue.  The room full with about 70 peoples sat silently as the manager went on with his dreary dictates.  At one point he said, "we can't eat steak every night, can we?", to which those present silently acquiesced, some even nodding in agreement.  My close friend and associate, Charles, by that time had had enough and very unceremoniously called the manager on his baloney by asserting, "I do".  The manager was so taken aback by the challenge to his phony nonsense that he really had nothing to say save to toss out his weakly offered counter that "most" people could not afford to eat steak every night.  Upon what he made that assertion is anyone's guess, but in typical fashion the people in the room got all uncomfortable, which was very visibly the case based on facial expressions and body language, and remained silent.  After the meeting adjourned, Charles and the manager continued the exchange and I admired his having taken a stand against the latter's ridiculous comments offered to make the decisions in question more palatable to his people.

When those around you, be they political pros, acquaintances, or even strangers break out their manure shovels and start piling on the bullshit about how your status as a slave is actually freedom or that it is necessary for whatever reason such as "fairness", it behooves one to expose the nonsense by asking the questions beginning with "why?" and "who says".  Keep chipping away until the shoveler runs out of his stock in trade.  Defy the lies by challenging at every opportunity those who perpetrate and perpetuate them.

Howard Zinn is credited with with the following quotation:

"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders…and millions have been killed because of this obedience…Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves… (and) the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem."


Do as you will, of course, but may I respectfully recommend you reject slavery in all its forms, regardless of how innocuous or "necessary" it may seem?

As always, please accept my best wishes.

More Commentary On The Fraud Known As "The State"



On another forum a poster made the following comment regarding the seemingly incongruous concept of the "state" claiming ownership of land as posed in a video titled, "You Can Always Leave", which may be viewed here.


"I had never heard the argument about how the state cannot legitimately claim ownership of all the land."

To this I responded as follows.

Actually, that part is a pretty glaring error in the conceptual structure of the video because there is no such thing as "the state" per se. Given this, the issue becomes even more pointed. If there is no such thing as the state then who, exactly, is claiming ownership of... well, anything to which the "state" label is applied? What does "state property" even mean?

Because there is no state per se, the term "the state" as commonly [mis]used must perforce mean something other than what most people appear to think. The question is, "what?" Who, exactly, claims ownership to all this property for which we are forced, ultimately at the point of the sword, to pay? Who, exactly, is it that claims authority to take from us that which we may not wish to give? If there is no "state", then what is there?

Individuals. 

Individual human beings who come together to act as a group with sufficiently common purpose to give the tacit and at times explicit appearance of a monobloc entity; a single and relatively massive and powerful organism that I like to call an effective "superorganism".

These appearances are no happenstance. Indeed, they are absolutely essential to the psychological design of so-called "government", for without them the state would be visible to even the dullest eyes as what it truly is: a group of individuals acting in concert to assume and exercise authority over others to which they have no rightful claim. This purported authority rests upon a foundation of physical force, and as our history demonstrates beyond any argument, that force is routinely used freely and murderously as "the state" deems fit. Those who claim to act as agents of this impossible-to-locate entity rely upon the hoodwinked nature of those over whom they reign to get away quite literally with murder, assault, and theft on a daily basis.

Government buildings, for example, are built as imposing edifices not by accident, but by definite design to fool the rest into accepting the litany of fog-shrouded innuendo upon which their perceptions and understandings of what "the state" is and thereby securing their consent to be reigned over, if only tacitly so.  They are designed to be imposing and thereby to intimidate, the medium in this case being very much the message.  Empire is the single greatest, most successful, and long surviving scam in human history and the notion of "the state" is its central pillar.

Testament to the power of this lie is the fact that even though there may be no conscious conspiracy afoot to expropriate the cooperation of individuals through the agency of the concept of "the state", the expropriation occurs nonetheless. The "state" survives more or less intact as a conceptual entity generation after generation not necessarily because there exist cabals of evil, faceless, hand-wringing monsters whose long-lived dynasties exist for naught but to rule the rest, though such may exist from time to time, but because the drive to so rule is part and parcel of human psychological makeup. Therefore, there will always be those who will crave the power to make the rest do as they bid. This is part of what we are as human animals and that is why those who wish to remain free shall always reside behind the 8-ball. Free men will always have to fight against the monsters who would subdue them and take that to which they are not entitled.

When Pandora's box was opened, one of the little creatures that escaped just happened to be the single most dangerous evil in all creation: the concept of Empire. Empire takes and perverts with unimaginable extremity the natural and otherwise good human fascination with power and awakens a monster in the individual that might otherwise sleep eternally. The enormous raw power of our cognitive minds is a two-edged sword in that when perverted, the dangers a single individual may come to foist upon others becomes mind numbing. So much more the case when he has recruited the aid of friends and the principles of organization.

The "state" is worse than a lie: it is a bullshit. Mere lies are most often discovered in the longer run, but well crafted bullshit takes the truth and bends it in such ways that the effective lie it constitutes can become impossible for the average man to identify and even when pinpointed he finds himself incapable of accepting it. This is part of the genius that began with religion: inculcate the young with the belief system you want and as adults they will find it nearly impossible to shed it. The people who perpetuate this are like the vampires in horror movies where once bitten, the victim no longer wishes to escape. That is the situation we have had at hand within the borders of human Empire for at least 8 thousand years.

Individuals and administrations have made terrible errors in the past and still do today. The outlandish tyrants of Rome, England, China - the Napoleons, Georges, Stalins, and Maos arise and appear to be eventually vanquished, yet Empire remains perennially and that has been its greatest victory. Just consider that with some care for a moment. The individual tyrants and even their minions by the thousands and perhaps even millions in some cases are wiped from the face of the earth. The vanquishers, those noble fighters for equity and what is right, march joyously out of the maw of hell, only to turn themselves immediately around to march back in. Why? Because their minds are so utterly and hopelessly poisoned at the most fundamental conceptual levels in terms of what they see as politically necessary that they cannot see beyond their most basic and tacit assumptions about what it means to live properly with one's fellows.  They cannot let go of those things they assume to be absolutely essential, lest some horror befall the world in their absence.

In the end, people become the inmates of their own, single-celled conceptual prisons, the foundations of which their fellows helped them build in childhood and which from then on they willfully add to the thickness and height of the walls and bars throughout a lifetime. A people will revolt under a tyrant, defeat him, and then almost immediately continue his tyranny, then wonder why nothing has changed. 

Romania is a very good modern example of this where a group of people apprehended the dementedly evil Ceaucescu and rightly murdered him. While some of his tyrannical excesses were brought to a halt, the fundamental basis of his tyrannies, none of which he invented but rather merely inherited from his forebears, survived essentially intact such that today the most fundamental elements of "his" tyranny remains perfectly intact as if nothing had ever disturbed it.  The only changes are apparent, superficial, and thereby essentially devoid of substantive effect.

We hear and read about these tacit assumptions daily in statements such as "what about the roads?" As if trails have not been blazed without the aid of rank tyranny by the "state".  Yet, people are so blind to their own presumptions, so utterly convinced of the rectitude of their assumptions that they are unable to escape the mental box, the "prison", into which they have caged themselves.

Mind is the great destroyer, for where it goes the butt follows.

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

A Few More Reasons Why Humanity's State Of Inherent Freedom Remains In Grave Peril



Elsewhere in cyberspace someone wrote,


"You can't legislate morality ass clown."


Said the blind man to his deaf daughter in reference to some rather childish, yet revealing comments made by former senator Rick Santorum about what the Republican party was, and was not. To that I responded as follows.


They (religious extremists) think they can and this renders them equally dangerous to those at the other end of the supposed spectrum. Do not fool yourselves into thinking that such people would not have your necks under their boots were they given the opportunity.


Extremists of any flavor, whether religious or otherwise pose essentially equal threats to freedom and if liberty is to survive (and at this point that is in some very grim doubt) the day will almost certainly come where they will have to be "handled", and that can mean anything from simply managing them with some political clarity to open warfare.


Here again we see the perils that beset human freedom at every turn. Some people seem driven to the will to dominate others, though not always in manners that are obvious to the casual observer. A huge proportion of us, most likely a vast majority in fact, are terrified of actual freedom. They want all the benefits with none of the associated costs. In other words, they want something for nothing and in a universe that as yet provides no discernible free lunches this poses a very serious problem for everyone. Some very few of us want actual freedom. The rest want pretty slavery where the Master magically pulls those free lunches out of thin air and beneficently dispenses them to one and all. No worries there at all, right? Nothing could possibly go wrong there, right?


The bottom line for living freely is stark and perhaps unpleasant: in order to become and remain free one must be willing most literally to butcher his fellows who would trespass upon that freedom. There is no way around this. Law in itself is nothing. Principle left fallow is nothing. Talking nicely to empty headed animals avails one nothing. Talking harshly to them gains them practically nothing. It is naught but the sword that keeps the barbarians polite. Make no mistake about the fact that at the end of the day your "nice" neighbors who crave their particular visions of pretty slavery are not your friends. They are potentially as bitter an enemy as any you might imagine, for they would offer your children up for immediate and unceremonious slaughter if they thought it would get them what they want, which is that vision of paradise at no cost to them. They don't give a damn who pays, so long as it is not them. They are thieves every bit as much as the man who dons a mask and sticks a gun in your ribs for the sake of taking your wallet, only far less honest than the mugger, for at least he does his own work.


Bear always in mind the enormous raw psychological power of well crafted visions of pretty slavery. They are so viscerally appealing - so right in their appearances even to otherwise intelligent and careful adults - that it becomes easy to fall for the bait. Just as with the old vampire movies like Salem's Lot where those somehow saved from the ultimate fate say once bitten they no longer wanted to get away, but to remain in the monster's clutches, so it is with the right visions of pretty slavery. People get swept away with the visions of golden "freedom" and strong happy children and social order, never asking "at what cost, this?" That is the mistake - of wanting something so much that habits of good reason fall by the wayside.


The song of the Siren is nearly irresistible.


No matter how appealing a story line may appear to you, always ask yourself what the costs will be. This is most especially true for the vision of actual freedom because how can you want something you do not fully understand? What is the manna? Whence does it come? Who provides it? How shall they be compensated? For whom shall it be provided? Who shall compensate? How much shall be the bill? And so forth. Do not forget that nothing is free, not even our freedom. A paradox for the ages, perhaps.


When one has well in his grasp the principles of proper human relations the answers become easy to find. When difficulties arise in one's mind it is ALWAYS due to the desire for pretty slavery - for getting something for nothing - for avoiding the costs one does not want to pay. There are no exceptions to this. Proper human relations, which is the manifestation of proper human freedom, gives rise to some unpleasant truths. Some people will not "make it". Some children will die. Others will be stricken with disease, or go hungry and without homes. Some will be forced to live without a large flat-panel television; oh the humanity!


These are some of the costs associated with actual, proper human freedom. While there is no "government" to save you from your unfortunate circumstances or poorly considered choices, there is also none to step upon your rights. The pretty slaver wants the former without the possibility of the latter. 


The pretty slaver wants that which can never be realized. The pretty slaver expects magical and saint-like perfection to govern his world by hands no more adept and free of sin and vice than his own. It is a wish so violently disconnected from even the the most remote threads of reality as to defy one's credulity. How can anyone accept such barking insanity in the least measure? Yet, the vast majority of people in these United States and indeed the world have been trained to subscribe to this rank dementia with clamoring that flies well past the feverish. A goodly proportion of those people would unhesitatingly see you sacrificed upon the altar of their golden vision in order to have that for which they shamelessly fiend. Your desires, your rights, your very life is as nothing to such people. They are no different from all the fools in Germany who stood tall and raised their arms in the NAZI salute for Hitler. They are no different from those who meekly stood by as Mao and Stalin ran roughshod over their fellows, thankful in their quaking cowardice to have been passed over... this time.


These people, your neighbors, those wantonly ignorant and mindlessly greedy poltroons who are willing to accept any political idiocy so long as it affects someone else, would turn on you in an instant if they sensed profit in it or if you threatened their status as free lunchers. So long as they are not inconvenienced they are content to tolerate no-knock raids upon the man next door, always rationalizing that it is none of their business. With few exceptions this has been the increasingly overarching human proclivity since ancient times, having grown exponentially over the past century. Back when, at least, there were apparently far more willing to come to the defense of the rights of their neighbors as written history appears to indicate. Today, however, that characteristic of the race of men is all but extinct, Joe Average now drawing the shades when a ruckus breaks out as he draws a sigh of relief that is it not his house to which armed men in black have arrived and caved in the door, shot the dog, wrecked the house and stomped wordlessly away after realizing they came to the wrong address. Relief that it is not him being dragged away in handcuffs, having been beaten senseless and bloody for having had the temerity to question their actions, the children on their way to "the system", and the wife left to live under a bridge with the house under an order of civil forfeiture.


This is the reality of our nation today, and that is just the tip of the iceberg. The whole truth is so ugly, so frightening, and so impossibly nauseating that most people simply cannot - WILL NOT - consider it. It is simpler to shut it out - drown it out with the next big game on TV, remote in one hand, beer or pecker in the other and the will to tell oneself that all is well.


It is this reality against which we enter the breech. Never let this truth escape your thoughts, no matter how oppressive it may seem, for it is an essential element of that bare thread by which we hope for salvation from abject material slavery at the hands of the good intentions of our fellows. Facing this truth requires courage. Real deal, no bullshit courage as if we were going to war. Without it, we are lost. Do not forget this.


As always, until next time please accept my best wishes.