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?
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.
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.
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.
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