The Nature of Government

Two Tribes

Consider two different isolated tribes somewhere in the jungles of South America. Call them Tribe 1 and Tribe 2. Each has its unique language with its own structure. The language of tribe 1 (language 1) tends to be very literal. A man who fishes, for example, is called "man-who-fishes." The same man, while sleeping, is called "manwho-sleeps"; while talking, "man-who-talks"; while running, -"manwho-runs"; while eating, man-who-eats"; while writing, "man-whowrites"; while making a chair, "man-who-makes-chair"; while giving orders, "man-who-gives-orders"; etc. In language 1, distinctions are made between different kinds of words: "Thing-words," "Do-words," "How-words," "Story-words," "Funny-words," "order-words," "Panicwords," "What-words," "Who-words," "Why-words," "When-words," "Where-words," etc. Abstractions are rare in language 1. To the people of tribe 1, any word that doesn't refer to something physically perceivable, is highly suspect. Their test for reality is physical.

The language of Tribe 2 (Language 2) is very different. A man who obtains his wherewithal mostly by fishing, is called "fisherman." (This system of nomenclature would seem absurd to the people of Tribe 1 - how can you call someone a "fisherman" when he is not fishing, but sleeping?) Language 2 contains many abstractions - like "happiness." People from Tribe 2 can talk for hours about "happiness." (To someone from Tribe 1, this would be incomprehensible - they only talk about "woman-who-is-happy" while she is happy, and "woman-who-is-sad" while she is sad. The notion that you could separate "happiness" from a real person being happy, and talk about "happiness" as if it existed by itself, would be completely unthinkable to someone from Tribe 1.)

To the people from Tribe 2, any word being used is automatically assumed to be part of existence, otherwise people wouldn't use it. (To someone from Tribe 1, the word "existence" would be a meaningless absurdity, because in their mentality only particular objects exist.) In Tribe 2, the test for reality is agreement. If other people agree with a word and the way it seems to be used, then that word is automatically accepted as valid and useful. They suffer from hypostatization.

One day a strange man arrives at the place where the people of Tribe 1 live. They ask him: "Who you?" He: "I King". They: "your name King?". He: "No; my name John." They: "Why call self King if name John?" He: "I special person, agent of God." They: "You look different but not special; who God?" He: "God creator of world." They: "Where God?; How create world?" He: "God everywhere; God all-powerful." They: "How we see God?" He: "Can't see God." They: "You speak crazy." He: "No; I special; I show you." Whereupon the stranger performs various tricks like apparently making objects appear and disappear. They: "You clever man-who tricks." He: "I special; I King." They: "You speak funny; you clever John-who-tricks." He: "I King; my word law." They: "What law? special word?" He: "Yes; my word law - you must obey." They: "Ah! You mean order-word!" He: "Yes; I King; I make law." They: "No; you speak order-word?" He: "Yes; I special". They: "What special? - Anybody speak order-word?" He: "You not understand." They: "No."

Eventually John-the-stranger gives up trying to convince the people of Tribe 1 that he has a "special status" and that his words are different from the words of anyone else - so he leaves, to search for more gullible and impressionable victims elsewhere...

For many days and nights he trudges through the jungle before discovering the people of Tribe 2. They: "Who you?" He: "I King." They: "Your name King?" He: "No, my name John." They: "Why call self King if name John?" He: "I special person, agent of God." They: "You look different; what God?" He: "God creator of world." They: Where God?; How create world?" He "God everywhere; God all-powerful." They: "Show special?" Whereupon the stranger performs various tricks like apparently making objects appear and disappear. They: "You King, agent of God." He: "Yes, my word law." They: "What law?" He: "Law special word of God through me; you must obey." Whereupon the people of Tribe 2 bow down and kiss the feet of John - they do not habitually test abstractions against reality, so they readily accept John-the-stranger as their "King" and his word as "law." Thereafter all he has to do to control and dominate them, is to open his mouth...

"Government" is a Form of Parasitism or Cannibalism

The reason why people call themselves "government" is because it provides them with advantages - if they can get away with it. In the case of tribe 1, John-the-stranger called himself "King," but the people didn't buy it, so he left. However, the gullible people from tribe 2 believed him, so they became his "subjects" - meaning he could live off their effort - like a parasite.

The "state" (so-called) has its origin in a gang of looters making an agreement with a tribe: "We'll protect you from other gangs if you give us part of the food you produce." ("Government" is a Mafia-like protection racket.)

It's much easier to live off the values produced by others than to create your own values. Being a parasite is easier than being a producer. Being a value destroyer is easier than being a value creator. Now if we take it a step further, and regard the fruit of our labor as part of ourselves, then we're talking about cannibalism. That's why the American Declaration of Independence talks about "eating out our substance." "Government" is a form of cannibalism.

"Government" is Kept in Place by Certain Fraud-Words

Politicians and bureaucrats use mostly words to impose their will upon others - even when physical violence is involved, they use words to attempt to justify their actions. Thomas Szasz wrote in The Second Sin, "Man is the animal that speaks. Understanding language is thus the key to understanding man; and the control of language, to the control of man." The language used to control and dominate others I collectively lump together as "Newspeak." The word Newspeak was invented by George Orwell and described in his book Nineteen-Eighty-Four. I use the word in essentially the same way that Orwell did, but within its domain I subsume words that I don't think Orwell would have: "state," "government," "law," "king," "constitution," "queen," "president," "prime minister," etc. Newspeak, as I use the term, has developed over many centuries. I contend that the use of Newspeak by freedom lovers as if valid (i. e., without questioning its validity, and without considering its consequences), may easily become counter-productive. I specifically use Newspeak in the sense of Orwell's "B vocabulary":

"The 'B vocabulary' consisted of words which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them... the 'B' words were a sort of verbal shorthand, often packing whole ranges of ideas into a few syllables... even in the early decades of the Twentieth Century, telescoped words and phrases had been one of the characteristic features of political language; and it had been noticed that the tendency to use abbreviations of this kind was most marked in totalitarian countries and totalitarian organizations... the intention being to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness... ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centers at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word 'Duckspeak' meaning 'to quack like a duck.'" [emphasis added]

I'm also introducing here the concept of "fraud-word." I'm saying that certain words are fraudulent in themselves. You don't even have to use them in a sentence; the word itself is a lie. For example, the word "King." We have a perfectly good word "man." When a man calls himself "King," he's lying as did John-thestranger above. The word itself is a fraud.

In his superb book Restoring the American Dream, Robert Ringer devoted an entire chapter to how "government" is kept in place by certain words - Chapter 8: "Keeping It All in Place." Here is my list of statist fraud-words: "government," "state," "country," "nation," "U. S.A.," "empire," "commonwealth," "republic," "society," "emperor," "king," "queen," "prince," "princess," "president," "prime minister," "law," "constitution," "public interest," "national interest," "fair share," "common good," "national security," "social contract," "public policy," "mandate from the people," etc.

Two of the Worst Fraud-Words: "Constitution," and "Law"

If you think about it, you will realize the role of language in practically all coercion: be it parents or teachers coercing the young; or those masquerading as (so-called) "state" or "government" coercing (so-called) "subjects." Politicians and bureaucrats have an armory of weapons they use to coerce their victims. I put it to you that fraud-words are the most formidable weapons in their armory - not guns and explosives. Do politicians and bureaucrats use guns or words? I further put it to you that next to "government," two of their most powerful fraud-words are "law" and "constitution."

Most people believe that some of the noises and scribbles emanating from the mouths and pens of the lawyers, politicians, and bureaucrats (masquerading as "government" so-called) are somehow special and constitute "the law." This is a grotesque superstition.

The criminals who masquerade as "government" use "the Constitution" as their shield - they claim that "the Constitution authorizes or empowers them" to perpetrate their destructive acts. They use the word "law" as their sword. Because you broke their so-called "law," therefore they are authorized or empowered to punish you as they see fit.

"It is illusions and words that have influenced the mind of the crowd, and especially words - words which are as powerful as they are chimeral, and whose astonishing sway we shall shortly demonstrate," wrote Gustave le Bon in his classic The Crowd, a hundred years ago. About two hundred years ago, Jeremy Bentham wrote, "Out of one foolish word may start a thousand daggers" - Bentham's Theory of Fictions by C.K. Ogden. And 160 years ago Jonathan Swift wrote in Gulliver's Travels:

"There was another point which a little perplexed him... I had said, that some of our crew left their country on account of being ruined by 'law'... but he was at a loss how it should come to pass, that the 'law' which was intended for 'every' man's preservation, should be any man's ruin. Therefore he desired to be further satisfied what I meant by 'law,' and the dispensers thereof... because he thought nature and reason were sufficient guides for a reasonable animal, as we pretended to be, in showing us what we ought to do, and what to avoid... I said there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, accordingly as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are slaves."

"Government" is Kept In Place by Superstition

The first superstition that keeps "government" in place is the belief that because practically all of us use certain words without any thought as to their validity and the consequences they produce Duckspeak - therefore these words are valid and represent reality.

The second superstition is the notion that certain words constitute "the law" (so-called). This is a most grotesque absurdity.

The third superstition is that because certain naive and gullible people put pieces of paper into "ballot" boxes, this action transforms, transmutes, transubstantiates, or transmogrifies, certain people into "presidents," "congressmen," etc. This is primitive magical "thought."

The fourth superstition is that because some people call themselves "government" - or organize themselves into structures called "government" - therefore they acquire magical powers to perform miracles.

"Government" is Kept in Place by Gullibility

To think of Slick Willy as "President of the U.S.A.," is pure gullibility. The same applies to Washington, Jefferson, and all the others. They were all liars and impostors - idols. The entire "U.S." political system has been a fraud and a hoax since the outset. The same applies to all the other political systems I know of. Why are people so gullible as to believe politicians, bureaucrats, and lawyers?

The first reason is that human consciousness is in its infancy. In evolutionary terms, consciousness is a very recent development - as Nietzsche indicated. Erving Goffman started his book Frame Analysis with:

"There is a venerable tradition in philosophy that argues that what the reader assumes to be real is but a shadow, and that by attending to what the writer says about perception, thought, the brain, language, culture, a new methodology, or novel social forces, the veil can be lifted. That sort of line, of course, gives as much a role to the writer and his writings as is possible to imagine and for that reason is pathetic."

Later in the same book - implying that it's impossible for people to become more conscious? - Goffman wrote:

"I can only suggest that he who would combat false consciousness and awaken people to their true interests has much to do, because the sleep is very deep. And I do not intend here to provide a lullaby but merely to sneak in and watch the way people snore." [emphasis added]

The second reason is that many beliefs are culturally passed on from generation to generation. In general, people who question cultural beliefs tend to be ridiculed, punished, cast out, or killed. Furthermore, the politicians, bureaucrats, and lawyers have created concentration camps for brainwashing (euphemistically called "schools" by the gullible) where the youth are coercively inculcated with cultural beliefs designed to perpetuate and strengthen the political system.

The third reason why many people are so gullible is that few have developed the thinking skills to question what they are taught and what they see, hear, and read in the media.

"Government" is Kept in Place by a Lack of Thinking Skills

To see through political hoaxes requires thinking skills. The most important one is probably the ability to question everything. Robert Anton Wilson wrote as follows in his book Right Where You Are Sitting Now:

"On a night in September 1927 when he contemplated suicide at the age of 32, Buckminster Fuller decided to live the rest of his life as an experiment. He wouldn't believe anything anybody told him "golden rule," "dog-eat-dog," or any of it - and would try to find out by experience only, what could be physically demonstrated to work.

In the year following that decision, Bucky stopped talking entirely, like many mystics in the east. He insists that he had nothing "mystical" in mind. "I was simply trying to free myself of conditioned reflexes," he said. He had met pioneer semanticist Alfred Korzybski shortly before and was convinced that Korzybski was correct in his claim that language structures caused conditioned associations mechanical reactions that keep us locked into certain perceptual grids. Fuller tried to break these grids, to find out what a person "of average intelligence" could accomplish if guided only by personal observation and experiment...

The language we use influences the thoughts we think much more than the thoughts we think influence the language we use. We are encased in fossil metaphors; verbal chains guide us through our daily reality-labyrinth.

Physicists, for example, spent nearly three centuries looking for a substance, heat, to correspond to the substantive noun, "heat"; it took a revolution in chemistry and thermodynamics before we realized that heat should not be thought of as a noun (a thing) but a verb (a process) - a relationship between the motions of molecules.

Around the turn of this century - this is all old news, even though most literary "intellectuals" still haven't heard about it - several mathematicians and philosophers who were well versed in the physical sciences began to realize consciously that there is not necessarily a "thing" (a static and block-like entity) corresponding to every noun in our vocabulary."

Fuller's many inventions and discoveries stem largely from his ability to question everything. It's through the application of this and other thinking skills that we discover that the most fundamental issue concerning "government" is the underlying thought patterns, consisting of statist fraud-concepts like "government," "state," "nation," "king," "president," "law," etc. According to Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

"But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government... is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself. And if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government..." [emphasis added]
[...]

"Government" is Kept in Place by Brainwashing

My book Wake Up America! The Dynamics of Human Power (available from Terra Libra) includes a chapter titled "Are our Schools Concentration Campuses for Mind Destruction?" in which I describe "education" in some detail.

Ayn Rand's The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, contains a chapter, "The Comprachicos." Comprachico is a Spanish word meaning "child-buyer." The comprachicos were a nomadic association, notorious in the seventeenth century. They bought and sold children - special children, children turned into deformed freaks, used in freak shows to amuse the public. At an early age they placed a young child in a porcelain pot with a grotesque form. As the child's body grew, it had to assume the shape of the pot. The result was a deformed freak for people to laugh at.

Rand uses the practice of the comprachicos as an analogy to describe American "education." She refers to our "educators" as "the comprachicos of the mind." Children's minds are forced to assume the shape of a grotesque "intellectual pot." Rand describes the result:

"The students' development is arrested, their minds are set to respond to slogans, as animals respond to a trainer's whistle, their brains are embalmed in the syrup of altruism as an automatic substitute for self-esteem... They would obey anyone, they need a master, they need to be told what to do. They are ready now to be used as cannon fodder - to attack, to bomb, to burn, to murder, to fight in the streets and die in the gutters. They are a trained pack of miserably impotent freaks, ready to be unleashed against anyone." [emphasis added]

In every part of the world, the monsters who masquerade as "government," do their utmost to achieve monopoly control of the so-called "education system" - they try to make it compulsory so all children will be subjected to government brainwashing. The result is that practically every victim is degraded into an unthinking follower... or unthinking rebel.

"Government" is Kept in Place by Mass Hallucination

My Webster's definition of hallucination includes the following:

Perception of objects with no reality;
A completely unfounded or mistaken impression or notion.

We could also describe hallucination as "seeing" or "perceiving" what's not there - or "seeing" or "perceiving" more than exists in reality.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) could be described as the science of representational systems. In our brains we have "neural patterns" or "models" that attempt to represent reality. For example, in my brain I have a "picture" of a table. If someone asks me to draw a picture of a table, I access the "picture" or "model" in my head, from which I then draw a table. These "pictures," "models," or "neural patterns" are called representational systems. They include intellectual, emotional, visual, auditory, and other sensory data.

Our representational systems are more or less "useful." To the extent that we use them to predict accurately and produce desirable results, we regard them as useful. NLP people have identified three major ways in which our representational systems differ from reality:

Generalization - e.g., the representational system called "furniture" - or the "intellectual" neural pattern: "all women are the same."

Distortion - e.g., "the color of my car is blue" - the physicist tells us this is a distortion; it's more accurate to say that my car's outer surface reflects light with the wavelength we call "blue," while absorbing light with other wavelengths.

Deletion - e.g., "Tom is a wonderful, generous, happy, healthy individual" - Tom has many other attributes, some of which have been ignored or "deleted" from my representational system.

I've identified a very important fourth way in which our representational systems differ from reality: Addition - e.g., "John-the-stranger is a King, therefore he has special powers; and the words that come out of his mouth are special and therefore are the law which must be obeyed." John is really an ordinary man. By representing him as a "King" in our representational systems, we have added something to what exists in reality. Similarly, John's words are ordinary like those of the rest of us, and when we represent some of his words as "the law" in our representational systems, we have added something to what occurs in reality.

The essence of hallucination is "seeing" or "perceiving" what doesn't really exist or occur. The phenomenon of addition, as described above, is simply hallucination. To have a neural patterns or mental models that say "the government runs the country," "government makes law," "Slick Willy is President of the U.S.A.," all constitute hallucination.

It's these forms of hallucination that keep "government" in place. Because practically all humans suffer from similar political hallucinations, they tend to all agree with each other about certain fundamental political concepts and notions - such as "government," "state," "country," "nation," "constitution," "king," "president," "law," etc. If anybody questions or challenges these concepts or nations, they tend to think he's crazy. The phenomenon is mass hallucination.

Here is one of my favorite sentences: "The notion of "law" (socalled) is an hallawcinotion" - it sounds even better in French: "La notion de la "loi" (soi-disant) est une halloicinotion." How's that for self-referencing?!

"Government" is Kept in Place by Terror and by Violence

Ultimately, political power comes from the barrel of the gun - as Mao said. The last resort of the monsters who masquerade as "government" is terror and violence. That's why they need the IRS, the ATF, the FBI, the CIA, etc. They have to threaten, terrorize, punish, and kill to retain their coercive power. Make examples out of those who question, threaten, or challenge their so-called "authority."

That's why it's appropriate to call them "territorial gangsters" or "territorial criminals" or "terrocrats" - monsters who use fraud, coercion, and violence to claim "jurisdiction" over a certain area, and the people who happen to be in that area. The monsters do so in order to control and dominate, and to live like parasites or cannibals off the values created by their victims. The foregoing is another very useful definition of "government!"

Source: Frederick Mann - The Nature of Government