image: a Cuckoo chick in the process of killing its host parents' chicks, a part of brood parasitism
The Economist, author, and philosopher Doug Casey has said that America is an idea, not a border drawn on a map, and I agree with that.
This is a fairly short description of how and why American became totalitarian, and what we can do about it:
Before each section, I'll note the specialized disciplines (that were once taught as generalized subjects in high school) that best help to understand each section. (Generalized portions of HISTORY, ECONOMICS, LAW, PHILOSOPHY once comprised CIVICS ...a class about when the use of force was morally appropriate in society, and how ethical decisions ought to be made in legitimate governments such as democracies and republics, and what made them ethically legitimate). As you read, you might want to estimate, to yourself, how many people you know who are even vaguely familiar with most of the named disciplines: this is a measure of Americans to define the problem. As most people understand, problems that can't be clearly defined are often impossible to solve.
By specializing the knowledge taught in government-controlled schools, and eliminating the teaching of a general knowledge base, the status quo (incumbent) political power eliminates the knowledge necessary to resist/challenge/displace the status quo political power. Over time, this consolidates power into fewer and fewer specialized hands, by concentrating control over every specialization into the generally-coercion-specialized hands of those whose inclination was to specialize in seeking power. What people are those? Mostly sociopaths who become lawyers, and among them, most sociopaths seek to become tax-paid lawyers(prosecutors, bureaucrats, politicians, judges).
As Will Groves points out: to be willing to enforce existing unjust laws, you either have to be too stupid to understand the content of the laws, or you have to be a malevolent sociopath.
HISTORY, LAW: To become totalitarian, politicians, prosecutors, cops, and judges had to defeat the "common law" requirement for a valid corpus to be present in all criminal prosecutions. This is called the right of "habeas corpus" ("show me the body") or the right to be shown "the body of your crime." The term "corpus delicti"("body of the crime" is shortened to just "corpus" in "habeas corpus." But what constitutes a valid "corpus"? Well, the "common law" that evolved in England in the 1600s required there to be "injury to a specific person" and "intent to injure the same, specific person." Unless BOTH of these elements are present, there is no "corpus delicti" ...and there is technically no crime. Congress is technically only allowed to make laws against actions that possess a valid, 2-part corpus.
So how come there are tons and tons of things that punish people without corpus? How can they do that?
PSYCHOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY, LAW: Well, politicians(mostly group-conforming sociopaths) are a little smarter than the average person(mostly group-conforming empaths). They noticed that if they simply denied that the common law was universally applicable, and then created "new standards for treating other types of law like criminal law," then they could simply criminalize any action, and most people would be too uninformed to figure it out. Why would they be too uninformed to figure it out?
HISTORY: In the late 1880s, the existing US States each caved in, at different times, to allowing government to take control of education. In 1900, Vermont was the last state to cave-in, and adopt "free and compulsory" model of education(John Taylor Gatto). It turns out that government schools are incapable of teaching people enough about History, Economics, Law and Philosophy to protect their individual rights. Why is this? In short: Teachers are unwilling to teach students well enough to put themselves out of a job. Because those who are paid with compulsory property taxation have tax money even from those who despise them and believe them to be doing a horrible job, the majority of them support property taxes, even though they are morally wrong. So, if History, Economics, Law, and Philosophy teachers (where they all still exist) conspired to teach the long-ago discontinued subject of proper Civics, they would create a nation of people capable of resisting property taxes in court, and would no longer have any income that wasn't purely voluntary.
PHILOSOPHY: But they don't want to be held to the high standards inherent in jobs where payment is contingent upon results.
PHILOSOPHY, LAW: ...So they all join unions that then do the dirty work of opposing voluntary social organization. If anyone challenges the "free and compulsory" model of education, they are targeted by several echelons of government-employed schoolteachers and their political and police cronies. The DEA, ATF, IRS, EPA, and many other unconstitutional government agencies accept anonymous tips (which teachers can use to target any critic for destruction by unaccountable federal agencies). As author Harvey Silverglate points out in his book "Three Felonies a Day" almost everyone is now unwittingly committing an action which, though technically not criminal(lacking a valid "corpus"), has been criminalized by the totalitarian legislators.
BIOLOGY: The problem is one of psychological "in-group" collusion and perverse interests driven by parasitism. Parasitism is cheaper than acting as an independent organism and converting raw resources into energy. This is why author Daniel Suarez speculated in his fiction novels Daemon and Freedom(TM) that there were 3 parasites in nature for every 1 independent organism. The estimate at Wikipedia's "parasite" page says "over half of all of life's diversity" are parasites. Stanley Milgram's famous study "Obedience to Authority: an Experimental View" (about which the book by the same name was written), was designed to test "average people" for willingness to obey immoral orders, (in order to find out if totalitarianism could rise to power in the USA). The answer is that over 60% of people will obey immoral orders, simply because they fail to question the legitimacy of the authority giving the command.
This indicates that, although human society depends on human minds comprehending what constitutes legitimate authority(CYBERNETICS, HISTORY, LAW, CIVICS, PSYCHOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY), most human minds lack this comprehension. Worse still, they are willing to override their own inherent moral response (their "consciences") because the general knowledge they possess is insufficient to understand what is happening. Immediately after a rebellion against unlawful, illegitimate, totalitarian, tyrannical, false authority, parents teach their young to resist illegitimate authority, above all else! ...But as the memory of the pre-rebellion times fades, the memory of the necessity and means of rebellion fades as well.
MILITARY ARTS, POLITICS: In order to surmount a successful defense against tyranny, we must overcome our very nature to choose inaction in uncertain and risky conditions.
BIOLOGY, PSYCHOLOGY, CYBERNETICS: Every government now on Earth, as an entity, is a parasite comprised of a hierarchy of parasites(primarily: individual sociopaths, groups of sociopaths, and their computer networks, and stupid subservient empaths who are bent to their will). Government-affiliated sociopathic individuals and groups are commensal organisms with respect to one another, and parasites on non-government private citizens (who are the independent organisms in this broad context). Government reaps the benefit from our labor, simply because it tries to do so, and we fail to adequately fight it. When a cuckoo chick forces the eggs of its host parent out of the nest, it is fighting for its life, whereas the host parent is only fighting for its desire to reproduce(a lesser desire, and one in which it must follow a programmed instinct to feed any open mouth).
Parasites drive evolution, because they are the single greatest threat to any independent organism. The cost of parasites to independent organisms is immense: just beyond the bare survival of the organism, and often contrary and destructive to the goals of the organism. If an organism is very successfully parasitized, it often loses "market share" within an ecosystem, to competing organisms. Parasitism weakens and decimates entire populations. It also decreases the quality of life of any human-intelligence-or-greater organism.
HISTORY, BIOLOGY: 1900s totalitarian governments(Nazi Germany, Hutu-Power Rwanda) were like microscopic parasites that quickly kill the host organism. When parasites kill the host organism too quickly, they themselves die out, because there is an obvious sickness in the organism, that causes other potential host organisms to avoid that organism. By driving away other host organisms and killing the ones they're currently feeding on, the parasites suddenly have no more host organisms for to feed on. This is why the ebola Zaire virus is less deadly than HIV virus: ebola Zaire kills too quickly and too obviously, and therefore, people avoid the infected human disease vectors, rather than interact with them. Because HIV is spread by sexual contact, and takes a long time to kill, and a long time to incubate before it displays disease symptoms, the disease has time to spread before it is detected. Humans have figured out that people who are bleeding from their eyes and pores should be quarantined, because they'll either recover or die in a short period of time, and they pose a huge risk to the people around them. ...Because HIV cannot easily spread without sex, and cannot be detected at a glance, it is not treated as if it is as great a threat as ebola Zaire. ...So, it kills vastly more people than ebola does.
HISTORY, POLITICAL SCIENCE: Nazi Germany was like the ebola virus: obviously evil from an outside perspective. Soviet Russia and communist China were more like HIV: as late as the 1950s, huge numbers of university professors were stating that the USSR's intent was benign, that it was "trying to do the right thing," that it was a more moral system than the USA. The numbers of people murdered by this ignorant view were immense: over 55,000,000 innocent people(Soviet civilians) murdered by their own government, during peacetime, not including battle deaths. Because China became Marxist-communist as well, and murdered over 60,000,000 of its innocent civilians (and continues to, to this day), communist government has been the most destructive parasite of the human race, in history. Over 173,000,000 innocent people were murdered by their own governments, during peacetime, in the 1900s. Professor R. J. Rummel at the University of Hawaii calls this phenomenon "democide." He notes that all of the governments that have murdered their people to this extent were totalitarian, and did not have open elections at the time of the mass-murdering. Rummel (himself a libertarian minarchist) also pointed out that democratic means of limiting government power (elections, proper jury trials) was the ultimate salvation of mankind from mass murder by government.
HISTORY: Democracy is the idea that man should have a means of preventing the ultimate destruction by the most deadly parasites. See: http://www.democracydefined...
America is the idea that man should be free of all parasites.
America once used democratic processes to limit government power, creating the most prosperous nation in the history of mankind.
CYBERNETICS, COMPLEX SYSTEMS, LAW: Computation now allows for the elimination of democratic processes that could usher in a new dark ages, where sociopaths have absolute power, and none dare question their might. Computation also allows for the reinstantiation of those powerful democratic processes, and complete elimination of totalitarian tyranny. If we extrapolate from the precursor conditions of the Founding Fathers to our modern times, we can harness computation to create a paradise on Earth.
Of course, that paradise will be flawed, but it will be far better than anything we've seen before.
As you can see, the all-caps labels at the beginning of the prior paragraphs consist of a broad range of specialized disciplines that most people are unfamiliar with. These disciplines are unlikely to ever be properly taught in government schools, because such teaching would counteract the true goals of the government schools(at the highest and lowest system-levels). Sadly, the American public is not going to become familiar with these disciplines on their own.
So how do we restore the democratic limits on government(proper jury trials, open elections, free speech, widespread gun ownership) that we have lost?
- We must promote the means by which restoring jury randomness can help set innocent prisoners free, and try to increase the number of jury nullifications.
- We must shame those whose weakness and intellectual cowardice places them in the camp of the enemy, using advanced political strategy that targets the information that government schools refuse to teach.
- We must elect libertarians to goal-valuable local posts(Sheriff, State Legislature) that are not contested by the enemy and backed by millions of establishment dollars, such that, even if the enemy finances our opposition with $5/vote, we can pay enough to overcome that financing, face-to-face. (Because the enemy is too lazy to do that, and even if he were not, his philosophy then becomes his weakness, because, face-to-face, tyranny cannot respond to questions adequately.)
And those who know best need to ask themselves a serious question:
How much is "freedom for everyone" really worth?
CYBERNETICS: The wealthy and intelligent must ask themselves the prior question, because the establishment has starved the freedom movement's democratic activists by infiltrating the Libertarian Party. I know how they do this, in great detail, because I was one of those activists for 15 years. I was pushed into poverty, and my quality of life was ruined. But even as this happened, I got to see, up close, and personally, how the freedom movement is commandeered and our defenses rendered harmless to the enemy. I watched as the same methods that had been used against libertarian party donors and activists were used against me.
This was demoralizing in the extreme, to find out that the liberty movement I had believed existed was false.
But it also showed me how valuable electoral victories are to the enemy. It showed me how they understand that, to achieve control of empaths, one must co-opt the electoral systems that empaths use to gauge "the appearance of legitimacy."
Stanley Milgram wasn't wrong about the same things that the Mises Institute and Ayn Rand Institute crowds are wrong about. Their time-frame for improving society has made them servile. Vast improvements can happen very quickly, but not without the right philosophy. In fact, Milgram recognizes that his study on obedience occupies the cybernetic domain, rather than a pure "natural selection" domain. (It occupies both, but cybernetics is the super-domain, because authoritarian systems and liberating systems are engaged in an informational "escalation of informational defenses" against one another, that shapes the control of outcomes.)
Modern computer equipment allows for better outcomes from the same cybernetic "feedback-and-correction" strategies the founding fathers used.
We should get serious about using that equipment, and those strategies, because there isn't much time left before our enemy will have beaten us to the punch, and locked down society into a totalitarian control system.