Saturday, March 5, 2022

Why Tyranny Is Self-Perpetuating

 I an certain that many people wonder how it is possible that despite our long human history of tyranny upon tyrannies, how could it be possible that no significant population in the civilized world has broken with it, save perhaps for a few precious moments, even in the face of manifold revolutions throughout the past several thousands of years by people yearning to be free of the yoke.

Well, I'm here now to spell it out, and the answer is a very simple two-part explanation.

Firstly, and perhaps trivially seeming, is the fact that human beings are corruptible and, once corrupted, are wildly difficult to return to the fold of virtuous and honorable behavior.  This is especially so of larger populations.  I cannot precisely give a number, but it seems clear that when a group or population grow past a certain size,  mutual support pursuant to the maintenance of proper behavior becomes non-viable in practical terms.

Then there is the most unfortunate phenomenon of entropy, the tendency of things to simply fall apart.  In order to retain a structure's integrity, effort must be invested in its maintenance, of else it crumbles.  If one fails to conduct maintenance on a house, for example, it will eventually fall and it will do so much more quickly than if it is properly maintained, all else equal.  Thus we find it with the structure of a culture - a nation if you will.

Combine the entropic nature of things with the human predilection of not wanting to strain oneself, also known as laziness, and it takes no great feat of the intellect to see the possibilities.

Further combine those qualities with the other base human bent for free and easy living at little to no cost to oneself, and the DNA for misery and failure is thereby established on both sides of the tyrannical fence.  That is, both oppressor and the oppressed end up with sufficiently strong incentives for establishing and maintaining tyranny, including their respective roles in such schemes.

Each party, being constituted of human beings, wants something for nothing.  The tyrants are willing to say and do whatever is required to live off the necks of those over whom they presume to lord.  The oppressed are willing to be tyrannized, as they conveniently choose to see the tyrannies imposed upon them as something more benign, and in fact beneficial.  They may go so far as to choose to regard bald-faced tyranny as freedom itself!  This can be seen at any time one wishes, just by observing with unclouded eyes.  The tenets of Big Brother are alive and well in the world, and have been since long before Orwell was born.

In the golden age of establishment, there arises what I like to call a "balance of corruptions" where the lies that the new Tyrant tell pursuant to his ends mesh well enough with the corrupted desires of the people who are more than willing to believe those lies pursuant to their own objectives, usually for free stuff and illusions of security and false freedom, a condition I call "pretty slavery".

The general pattern is that of the political scoundrel promising whatever it is he thinks the masses want to hear, whether it be security, free stuff, or what have you.  Those who guess wrong tend to have short-lived careers as politicians, though this is by no means always the case.  But those who guess correctly usually score in a big way with the people ready to carry his water, chop his wood, and build him. a very nice palace.  So long as the Tyrant keeps himself in check such that he delivers enough of the illusory promises (which are never what the people think they are in reality), the people who corruptly want what they want, tend to remain quite happy to live the lies peddled them for as long as they might live.

It is the common error of the Tyrant, however, to allow his own corruptions to get past his better judgment, which invariably leads him to overstep some line, upsetting the balance of corruptions, which in turn upsets the apple cart of the rotten-at-best social harmony, and gets people in a humor to grumble.  If the Tyrant fails to come to his senses, the downward spiral of dissatisfaction grows ever more steep in time, eventually turning to talk of treason.  Eventually threats surface and finally actual violence erupts as the once well-disguised trespasses of the Tyrant become so blatantly that which they actually are, even the most rank and corrupted dullard can no longer accept them.  If the revolution "succeeds", victory is met with much drinking, carousing, the making loud and happy noises, and is likely punctuated with much celebratory sex.

This leads us directly into part two of the tyranny phenomenon: it is built into the very architecture of civilized life.  It cannot be argued that civilization has provided humanity with enormous benefits, even if many of them were a long time in being realized.  But along with those miraculous benefits there have come many dangerous and destructive liabilities of which the average man appears largely unaware.

It all seems to have begun innocently enough, long ago with the realization that there is strength in coherent, properly coordinated numbers, what I like to call "superorganization".  Humans likely posed sufficient threats to other humans to prompt someone whose name is lost to us, to twig to the possibility of not only strength in numbers, but the idea that building a walled dwelling might provide a measure of security that was theretofore non-existent.  And so arose humanity's first city, the identity of which remains debated.   It may have been a glorious place, but because of the nature of what it took to bring such a place to realization, superorganization was required.  Superorganisms require management, which perforce implies the existence of at least one chief, or "leader".  In such matters, hierarchy cannot be entirely avoided for reasons we shall not go into here, but you may take it on faith that at least some level of hierarchy is absolutely necessary in order for the organization to occur in the first place, much more so to maintain it and direct its actions to good effect.  That means bosses and bossees.  The Walden II notion of the bossless society is a childishly unrealistic fantasy, save in those tribal circumstances where populations are small and the ambitions of such small groups are meek in the extreme.  But the moment those ambitions reach beyond that which but a tiny handful of men can accomplish, superorganization begins to come quickly into play, and you now know the rest.

It would appear that at some point, some fellow in that mix realized a few things that were to alter human destiny in ways I bet they could never have imagined.  One was that it was good to be the king.  Yes, there were many responsibilities associated with the role, but the benefits were spectacular.  Live in special quarters, get to tell people what to do, especially a labor force in which you did not have to toil, not to mention your pick of the best women, and so on down a list I'm sure you are well able to conjure without help.  Another realization was that it was actually possible to get huge numbers of people to do your bidding if you bent the truth in the right ways, or even lied through your teeth on certain matters.  

Any of this sounding familiar?

Since the earliest moments of civilized life, people have been trained to think in certain ways about the civilizations of which they were part.  Those societies were home to those people, as they are today, and no doubt the open tyrannies people accept as facts of life today were not quite so blatant in the early times.  But people are prone to creep - the slow and perhaps imperceptible alterations of mind that occur as seemingly innocuous change is introduced, most often by authority figures, but also by the people who live as denizens of their cultures at any given time.  The earliest steps toward what we now call "tyranny" may have been very sensible changes imposed by leaders upon the people for the most solid and practical of reasons at those times.  Once acclimated to the new reality, further impositions were undoubtedly made upon people by chiefs, this practice continuing until the chief held so much power that he became a king, emperor, or perhaps pharaoh, no longer human as the rest, but a living and breathing god in the flesh; a most convenient evolution of circumstance... for the king, at least.

From such a point, the rest is easy to dope out.  Once the authority of the chief became unassailable, he became more than just a leader; he most often became unquestionable.  The minds of people were by then so trained to thinking along the lines of the absolute authority of "government", the fate of humanity was more or less set in concrete precisely because of the fundamental and usually utterly tacit set of assumptions under which nearly all humanity labors, and of which has yet to break itself.

It is precisely because we tend to think in the ways we do about such things as leaders, "government", authority, and so on, in league with the general bent toward corruptions of all manner, that we have failed to break the cycle of tyranny.  In. brief, we don't really want to, and in large part because the Tyrant absolves us from a vast litany of responsibilities in which we have no interest in assuming for ourselves.  We revolt, kill the Tyrants and sometimes even their entire families, and what do we do in the aftermath?  We seek more of the same, somehow thinking that things will be different this time.  It is the perceived need for leaders that gets us into trouble - the convenient belief that we are incapable of leading ourselves and that order must be imposed upon us from without, rather from within ourselves, that leads us inevitably to instate the new tyrant-du-jour every single time we manage to shake the old one from our necks.

Until we sufficiently break ourselves of this most self-destructive of habits and couple that with a will to dispense with our manifold corruptions petty and grand, humanity will continue its race to the bottom, with the dangers now more threatening than ever before due to the great technological advances of the past several decades.  Furthermore, looming advances in cybernetics promise technological manacles so unbreakable, freedom may fall beyond humanity's reach for good.

How do we accomplish so monumental a feat?  Once again there are two factors.  Firstly, there is education, a necessary yet insufficient requirement.  Education here entails the apprehension and complete understanding of the principles of proper human relations.  The principles are simple and easy to understand, yet are not easy to accept for the average man due to the fact that humans so willingly accept their roles as functional slaves to scoundrels and criminals they call "leaders", which leads us directly to the second factor: the human "heart".  Education, however proper, is of no value until the individual's attitude, his "heart", is right.  People reject real freedom in preference of pretty slavery precisely because real freedom is no picnic.  Our individual corruptions tend to lead us to want all the benefits and shiny bits associated with freedom, without having to pay the piper.  This, of course, is a dog that doesn't hunt, for one cannot enjoy the benefit in any temporally sustainable way without bearing the high burdens of becoming free and remaining that way.  Remaining free is the real trick, for it is a relatively small affair to fly into rage against a tyrant, and go on a made killing rampage to oust him.  The real question, the trick, lies in what comes afterward.  If history demonstrates nothing else on that point, it is that we as the human species have failed universally.  No matter who the felon at the top, every one we have toppled, have we replaced with another of the same rotten cloth.

Proper freedom demands everything of a man.  The Freeman must be intelligent, loving, smart, courageous, intolerant, honorable, eternally vigilant, must have vast integrity, must know right from wrong and be devoted to living righteously while shunning evil, and must be generous.  Here, generosity is not the forced giving from his wallet to the less fortunate as the communist would demand at gunpoint.   Rather, generosity in this sense is that of allowing your fellows to live freely as they please in exchange for their equal considerations to you.  The Freeman gives unto others that which he expects of them for himself, even when the choices of his fellows offend or even appall him.  The Catholic must allow the Jew, the black the white, the homosexual the heterosexual, and so on, as well as vice versa.  This is not to say we must tolerate criminal acts - for how could we be free under such conditions?  But for those whose life choices others find disagreeable, perhaps even disgusting, so long as there is no criminality involved, the Freeman is bound by the requirement of liberty to eschew hypocrisy, and by his honor to freedom itself, to be tolerant.  This is the only viable way forward that stands even the least chance of stamping the life from tyranny, as we adopt and embrace an attitude of eternal vigilance against, and utter intolerance for, trespass by one man upon another.

Freedom is at least as frightening as it is exhilarating, and so it should be, for who wishes life to be dulled with the poison of excessive ease?  In freedom there are no false guarantees as we find so prevalent these days in the world of pretty slavery that is hailed and praised with fictitiously concocted and fraudulent appellations and monikers like "socialism", "collective/social obligations", and so forth down a depressingly long list of notions that have wreaked endless havoc, chaos, misery, poverty, disease, and death upon our numbers.  We are given life, inherent freedom, and our valid claims to both.  All the rest is up to us as individuals to make of it what we might, the only rightful prohibition and constraint being that we commit no trespass against our fellows, and that when we do, we amend and restore those whom we unjustly damage.

It is a simple formula that is endlessly challenging to live by on a daily basis, which is largely why the mean man rejects it with such raw and utter violence, in preference for the lies and bends of good truth that underpin the pretty slavery that he chooses to embrace.  He makes his choice under the false belief that it absolves him of responsibility to his fellows, not to mention himself, for to be a Freeman is the single most difficult and challenging thing in the world.  But is it also by far the most exhilarating and rewarding.  To be in complete and utter possession of yourself as a matter of choice, and to understand most fully those choices and the will to devoting oneself to the greatest of all challenges, the mastery of Self, is the greatest of all human accomplishments.  There is no more worthy a life possible, the second greatest choice residing so far below that it cannot even be observed.

Fear you neither hardship, work, great challenges, or being without, for these are the summons to the superior man, the FREE man; the man whose foremost master is of himself.  He is clear, confident, in control of himself, and is utterly invincible, unconquerable, ungovernable.  The Tyrant has no purchase over such men and in their presence is reduced to choosing between backing way down or showing himself for what he truly is through escalation, ultimately to that of physical violence that includes murder.  The Tyrant can never win, regardless of how many he may put down even to the point of taking away life itself.  The Tyrant can but only debase himself as he allows his corruption to dictate his thoughts and actions, because he is an abject cur, unworthy of a Freeman's consideration, save that the latter dispatch the former in defense of all that is good between men.

Tyrants and their games can be eliminated, but doing so requires the absolute commitment of men willing to don the mantle of the Freeman.  Without this in critical mass, humanity stands doomed.  What will you choose for yourself, the bracing competition of free living amid your peers, or the timid and tepid snooze-fest life of Weakman?

May this missive find you in good health, happiness, prosperity, and on the warrior's path of the Freeman.

Until next time, please accept my best wishes.