On Tyrants and Power Structures

All power structures and hierarchies lead to tyranny. All current political systems in existence are based on such failed and obsolete scaffolds. None, not even direct democracies, may claim innocence for they are all predicated on the same ideological assumption that without power structures, chains of command, or leaders, there can be no Life.

And of course, without Leaders to lead us from temptation, Chaos would reign supreme. Or so, the Gospel tells us.

But in fact, what does the Historical Record actually has to reveal about Leaders and their actions? Are they a sine qua non condition for an organized society to exist and function outside of chaos? Is that a precondition for civilization and progress?

Or, is that perhaps the biggest fallacy of them all?

Historical research shows that this fallacy has plagued us from the early days of written records, until Our Glorious Thermo-Nuclear Era.

My bet is that the only guideline underpinning the entirety of human history, in fact, the only common denominator of our species, is our subservience to this pernicious principle of obeying the Dictates of Authority. For they are exactly that: Dictates. They emanate from a Ruler, usually unelected, very often from a dynastical line, that carried a deeper meaning sometime in the Deep Past, but that no longer has any legitimacy to lord over the people.

Yet, we continue to obey, be culled, be prodded one against the other, we suffer, we toil, we pray, but we do Their Bidding, for in our downtrodden eyes, we feel this must be the way forward, the ONLY way forward.

I had an epiphany tonight, while ingesting a little something something, I felt as if things had become suddenly clearer. I was pondering the nuclear threats being exchanged between Nuclear Russia and the Atomic West. I figured that it is amazing how cavalier these sycophantic leaders of ours are with our blood and sweat, our children and hopes.

How easily they are ready to discard them all in the name of their freaking ideologies. Who cares, I say?! Who gives a flying buck?! Not I, not most of you, not any of you, if we only count the sane among us.

For to hope and pray for the continuation of the UKR war is to expect the War to become nuclear. It is the logic of alliances, after all. And that is actually what triggered my spiritual foray à la recherche du temps perdu, to quote Marcel Proust.

I was thinking how generations of people were called to go to war by their governments in WW1, and WW2, and before and after, and most of them weren’t even told they needed to protect their homes, and families, and country. Most were told that they needed to go to war for Poland, Danzig, other countries’ interests, an old alliance, a dynastic fight, a princely question of honor, a slight, a delit de less-majesté.

And in my mind, that doesn’t make sense. It is utterly insane. How stupid people can be to buy such a weak narrative or rationale for exposing their lives to danger, disease, famine, pestilence, malady, violence?! Apparently, very, very stupid. Extremely dense. For you have to be extremely dumb to buy into the fairy tales told by countless generations of grand priests, pharaohs, viziers, sultans, kings, emperors, senators, consuls, khans, war chieftains, generals, politicians, priests, cardinals, popes, judges, presidents and prime-ministers, as well as teachers, and peers.

You have to be extremely dense and I would even say a deep moron verging on cretinism, to entertain the notion that you must take up arms for any other reason than to defend your own skin, family, and immediate (i.e., within visual range) friends. Anything else is incitement to violence and murder.

And yet here we are, people are volunteering to go to UKR to fight an unjust war on behalf of a deeply amoral Power (take your pick), supporting a deeply corrupt regime, involved in a very serious war against a Power (insert your own preference) that will not hesitate to escalate the hostilities by resorting to nuclear weapons.

We are here because we know better yet we keep repeating the same old mistake. We know it deep in our hearts that each dollar, pound, or Euro we pay in taxes will somehow supply the weapons and wherewithal prolonging the UKR conflict. We are happy, we are content to pay no matter what cost as long as our side is expected to prevail, because we enjoy a good moral fight between the underdog and the bully. And we obviously think that our side is supporting the underdog. A delusion, yet our delusion. So that’s that.

And somehow, we think that it’s all worth it to pay through our noses, to toil half of our workdays for UKR and the elite, and the other half for our families. I wonder how many would still appreciate the sentiment if they knew a nuclear weapon was heading towards their cities, their children’ playgrounds, schools, homes, farms, villages?!

How many will have the time to freeze the fraction of a second before the nuclear core of an ICBM goes supernova, to rememorate one last time their life achievements?! How many indeed.

I say this not because I want to instill fear into your hearts. I say this because someone has got to reach out to you and shake you by the shoulders and tell you: “Wake the f…k up!” You are paying for this front seat to your demise. Stop. It. Don’t accept to be a part to this. You can opt out of this insanity. Don’t do it, for the love of what is holy!

They tell us that we all have to pay our fair share, that we must contribute to the social cohesion of society. That we must pay taxes, or else. Or we don’t get roads, hospitals, schools, benefits, old age pension, etc, etc, etc. Yet they never mention that a lot of our work or tax money, basically Income Tax, was not even a thing before the American Civil War.

Yes, it’s true. Before the early 1860s, there was no such thing as Income Tax. What you made for your work, you got to keep. Like all of it. Of course, there were indirect taxes on certain goods and services, and property taxes, I mean the State had to survive somehow. But no Income Tax.

All that stopped one fateful day of August 5, 1861 when the North was going through a financial Crunch, and unable to pay and feed the hundreds of thousands of soldiers needed for the war effort, imposed a 3% tax on incomes over $800 ($18,600 in 2020). It was a war measure act enacted by Lincoln. An act of desperation, that saved the Union, and doomed the Confederacy.

But in so doing, it doomed us all. Because while it helped the North win the war, and while Congress rescinded it after the War, the Rubicon had been crossed. In actuality, a politician had enacted a deeply unpopular measure touching the rich and poor, and got away with it. Well, perhaps not got away with it, because after all Lincoln was reelected in 1864 but was shot dead a few days after the end of the conflict.

No, the biggest problem was that he had opened the Gates of Hell, and 52 years later, a Democrat by the name of Woodrow Wilson, managed to one up Old Abe. Wilson introduced the Income Tax permanently in 1913, in peacetime.

And nobody thought twice about crying havoc or tried to point out the lack of justification for such an unjust tax measure. Remember the Income Tax was supposed to provide money to pay for a war, not to dig deep into our pockets during peace time, for roads, hospitals, schools, police, government services, etc. And all of these services existed just fine before 1913, based on indirect tax revenue collected from a population that understood and agreed with the principle of taxation with representation.

Nowadays, the income tax revenue generated by fleecing hundreds of millions of taxpayers is being used to pay for tens of billions of dollars worth of armaments going to UKR. We are morally responsible for the people killed there. We here in the West are now in a state of war with Russia as Ukraine’s cobelligerents.

We pay for the war. We arm and feed the UKR Army. We are responsible for their actions.

By continuing to support our leaders in this War Against Russia to the last Ukrainian, we are basically condoning the destruction of a country at the hands of a military power who will not eschew any weapon in its arsenal including nukes, if it knew its survival was on the line.

We are playing with Atomic Fire.

We need to reassess our allegiance to the hierarchical principle, which led us to this mortally dangerous junction in time. If we continue, it may lead to our demise as a 21st century civilized society. If we stop, we need to rethink our political system. We need to accept the historical record body of evidence.

Hierarchies and power structures are toxic. Leaders are tyrants in disguise. We the meek are food for the mighty to eat. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel like being chewed up, digested and excreted at the pleasure of any Majesty, President, Prime Minister, if I can avoid it.

What about you?! Do you like to be on the menu, cannon fodder, or a pawn on their Grand Chess Boards?! Or do you feel ready to say Ya Basta! Enough Already, and let’s turn the page.

Perhaps we need to abandon the old ways, and really do a makeover, start fresh with new ideas from scratch.

First item on the Agenda: No more Leaders, Enlightened or Not!

We all work together as neighbors do, when a dead tree is brought down by a storm or when the power goes out for weeks and we have to fend off ensemble, juntos, together, zusammen, impreuna!

Nobody needs to force Anybody then! We all do what we must because we know that it’s up to us to pull ourselves up from the bootstraps, and the buck stops here. Coercion, forcing someone against their will, violence, all these are brutal means employed by the power structures trying to convince us that people are unable to band together outside organized violence.

Nothing further from reality. People come together because of shared needs: security, safety, comfort, survival!

Obeying a Supreme Leader is only done under the Threat of Violence.

And that is the common thread uniting an American police officer, with an SS Guard, an Israeli Tzahal Soldier in Palestine, a Russian soldier, a Soviet officer, a French officer, a British soldier, a Roman general, a Chinese General, an Iranian mujahedin, a Palestinian fighter, etc etc etc.

Fear is the Great Inhibitor of Reason! When the Elite makes us fearful, that’s when they got us. It’s the oldest story told mankind. And it never ceases to amaze me how successful the elite are in convincing us we need them. But then again, we are gullible and that may prove our downfall.

I guess Public Enemy were right all along.

𝑌𝑜𝑢 𝑑𝑜𝑛’𝑡 𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔, 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑓𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑎𝑛𝑦𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔

All hierarchical systems are predicated on the false assumption that men need to be controlled, steered, kept in check by a larger force, authority, power.

In fact, this is exactly the nefarious principle behind so many millions and billions of mass graves, where so many sentient beings were led to be struck dead, burned, strangulated, garrotted, disemboweled, hung, quartered, sacrificed, tortured, shot, gassed and murdered.

Most proponents of power structures believe in the need for a higher power. Incidentally some of the staunchest atheists among us did away with God only to replace Him with the State.

Talk about a waste of an opportunity to become Free. But their aim was never this. Their goal was to replace something intangible (temporal) with something tangible (secular).

I don’t think we need a higher secular power to protect society and enforce the social contract. The historical evidence already shows the State to have an abysmal track record of protecting human life.

As it happens, the State has already killed a large proportion of our forefathers and foremothers.

How many people need to die, must continue to die under the State’s watch before we realize that the State is not protecting us but instead it is murdering us wholesale and en detail?!

And now, ask yourselves this question: how many people would have died if we had all been left alone to our own devices?!

Do you think that anarchy would have killed more people than what organized civilized society protected by State already did destroy?!

I don’t think so.