The views that this blog receives daily are greatly appreciated. For those that click on the Facebook link, consider sharing the posts, or do whatever you like. Other than posting links to Facebook, I do no actual blog promotion, something I should probably begin at some point. I mainly post news stories that are interesting to myself, with some posts consisting of me thinking out loud, along with posting quotes from books that influence my thinking on the ideas surrounding political liberty. I do post quite a bit of news and commentary involving the burgeoning ‘Surveillance State’, or Tech-Industrial Complex. As more and more of the largest tech corporations are roped into Pentagon surveillance/AI deals, it becomes more worrisome to me as to what the future holds. Perfect surveillance of the people by the most blood-thirsty institution that humankind has ever created, the State, is, for the first time in history, within the realm of possibility. This must be prevented, if we are to preserve, not only our liberty, but our species. It can be debated whether or not we need government, but there is no question that this creature of our own creation is at all times hungering to metamorphose into the great machine of mass murder that history has shown it to be. We must surveil it, not the other way around. We must disarm it, and we must always ensure it remains locked within its Pandorica-esque prison. But immediately, and insidiously, government begins surrounding itself with a religious aura, demanding worship and acts of fealty. It exploits the tribal instinct, and employs the most persuasive silver-tongued, flag-enshrouded lies to convince the people to let it out of its cage. And no lie more persuasive or more pleasing to the ego than that government itself is “the people”. The antidote, I believe, lies in the reading of Hayek, Miss, Nock, Isabel Patterson, Mencken, and many others. To not give in to the tribal worship of the State, either through mindless salutes and songs, or through the endless rationalizations for the next tax, regulation, or war. That we do not exist for the sake of the State is the first superstition to free oneself of. And it is ingrained at a very young age. Our children’s lives and income are not fodder for the next overseas slaughter. The government serves us, not the other way around. If it is the other way round, then it is illegitimate, and it’s claims on our income and future are also illegitimate. I say that if we must have a State, then bring back the monarchy. Let the State be a State out in the open, with no pretense that the people govern themselves. Brighten the line between civilian class and governing class.
And now to Hayek, from Chapter 3 of Law, Legislation, and Liberty, the only books I’ve been reading lately:
“The thesis of this book is that a condition of liberty in which all are allowed to use their knowledge for their purposes, restrained only by rules of just conduct of universal application, is likely to produce for them the best conditions for achieving their aims; and that such a system is likely to be achieved and maintained only if all authority, including that of the majority of the people, is limited in the exercise of coercive power by general principles to which the community has committed itself.
Individual freedom, wherever it has existed, has been largely the product of a prevailing respect for such principles which, however, have never been fully articulated in constitutional documents. Freedom has been preserved for prolonged periods because such principles, vaguely and dimly perceived, have governed public opinion. The institutions by which the countries of the Western world have attempted to protect individual freedom against progressive encroachment by government have always proved inadequate when transferred to countries where such traditions did not prevail. And they have not provided sufficient protection against the effects of new desires which even among the peoples of the West now often loom larger than the older conceptions—conceptions that made possible the periods of freedom when these peoples gained their present position.”
