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The Control Cult
Butler Shaffer
Lew
Rockwell.com
Saturday April 21, 2007
What an immense mass of evil must result
. . . from allowing men to assume the right
of anticipating what may happen.
~ Leo Tolstoy
In the aftermath of the murders of 32 people at Virginia Tech,
we are witnessing the collective reaffirmation of the article of
faith uniting all politically-minded persons: the belief that the
state is capable of identifying and controlling the factors that
produce undesirable behavior. Even before the killer was identified,
the chant arose – in unison – from political chambers,
academia, government offices, and the media: “there is something
that those in authority can do to alleviate such problems.”
The mantra often finds expression – without any break in established
meter – in this form: “we will find out what went wrong
and fix it, so that this doesn’t happen again.”
This mindset is so out of touch with the harsh facts of reality
that The Wall Street Journal carried a feature article asking: “Next
Debate: Should Colleges Ban Firearms?” That firearms had been
banned on the Virginia Tech campus before these atrocities took
place apparently did not inform the judgments of this newspaper’s
editors. Nor have I seen evidence of any rethinking on the part
of a Virginia Tech spokesman who, in 2006, following the Virginia
legislature’s enactment of a ban on guns on state university
campuses, declared: “I’m sure the university community
is appreciative of the General Assembly’s actions because
this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe
on our campus.” This man might send such words of comfort
to the families of these 32 victims!
Whatever explanations or remedies various “experts”
offer for the problems that beset mankind, the common thread connecting
them is that both human and physical nature are capable of being
causally understood and, therefore, subject to interventionist correction.
Universities are the temples of faith in this proposition, with
students enrolling for their stated purpose of “making the
world a better place.” It is not surprising, therefore, that
immediately following these atrocities, the Virginia Tech campus
became an attractor for the proponents of this Weltanschauung. “If
the university had intervened after this man turned in some disturbed
writing to his English professor;” “if we can just control
guns;” “if police had had access to his mental health
records beforehand”: these were the oft-repeated concerns
of those who are convinced that the world is predictable and, hence,
controllable. In the latter vein, NBC news anchor, Brian Williams,
reportedly vocalized the catechism in proposing a new federal program
to monitor the mental health of all college students, in order to
prevent occurrences such as this one.
The true believers of the dogmas of control have insinuated themselves
into all forms of institutions. Being ends in themselves, and with
people serving as little more than resources for organizational
purposes, institutions provide a fitting environment for such thinking.
Government schools – unable to grasp the reality that children
are, by nature, self-directed, spontaneous, and exploring people
eager to devote their energies to what interests them – become
upset when their conscripts refuse to suppress their inquisitiveness.
The children get labeled “hyperactive” or “suffering”
from “attention deficit disorder” (i.e., do not adhere
to the teacher’s prescribed agenda) and must, therefore, have
their energies controlled by drugs, counseling, and other “behavior
modification” techniques that squeeze the childhood sense
of personally-relevant curiosity from them.
Children grow into adulthood, and go to work for an institutionalized
employer who plays this same control game at their expense. The
employee finds himself or herself under the thumb of what has got
to be the most dehumanizing and vulgar job description anywhere:
a “human resources manager.” For an individual to be
labeled as nothing more than a “resource” – what
one dictionary defines as “an available means” –
is a glaring admission of the victory of institutions over the human
spirit!
Members of the control cult have always found themselves attracted
to the agency whose raison d’etre is to subdue all of humanity
to its coercive mechanisms of control: the state. What problem,
or catastrophe, or even fear thereof, is not met with the aforesaid
chant of bureaucrats: “we will find out what went wrong and
fix it, so it doesn’t happen again”? And what members
of the boobeoisie – their minds thoroughly indoctrinated in
this mindset – do not breathe a collective sigh of relief
that their managers are on the job, looking after their well-being?
Cho Seung-Hui bought one of his guns on Friday the 13th? Perhaps
– with psychics explaining the causal connection - gun sales
should be banned on such days! Cho Seung-Hui was bullied and teased
as a child? Maybe such behavior can be included under “hate
crime” laws and made subject to criminal punishment!
In the months following 9/11, the control freaks came forth with
their seemingly endless laundry list of additional mechanisms of
control with which they promised to fight the “terrorist”
bogeyman. More police powers to enter people’s homes –
even without their knowledge; more wiretaps; more surveillance cameras
in more places; more x-ray cameras; more background checks; more
systems for probing into the human mind for motives and dispositions
– an area of research now being perfected in England. Any
objections offered by the handful of people who see the dangers
inherent in police-states were casually dismissed by those who regard
all expressions of individual liberty as “loopholes”
to be closed by additional legislation.
Not to be left in the exhaust provided by their “war on terror”
brethren, the “global warming” denomination mounted
the pulpit to preach the sins of human behavior, and to promise
existential salvation if only they, too, be given extended control
over the human species. Mindless of the incalculable complexities
at work within our world – a topic I took up in my last article
– there is an arrogance of omniscience that unites members
of the control cult. Whatever the field into which they wish to
intrude, they remain convinced that they are capable of marshaling
sufficient information that will allow them to create mechanisms
to prevent harmful acts and to generate beneficial ones. If, in
religious thinking, God is regarded as both omniscient and omnipotent
then, in a secular age, such powers must repose elsewhere, namely,
in the gods and goddesses of institutional governance.
But recent inquiries into the nature of “chaos” and
complexity are revealing the baseless foundations of this faith
in control. Our world – including each human being –
is simply too complex, too subject to a myriad of too many influences
over which we can never have sufficient awareness to predict outcomes.
If physical and human nature are too complicated to be predictable,
the rationale for state control is swept away. To the controllists,
the expression of this fact is a heresy that must be exorcised from
our thinking.
Those who cling to a faith in their dying secular deity remain
convinced that all that is needed to make a complex world more predictable
is more information. This is the essence of much of the babbling
of tongues disguised as “expert analysis” in the days
following the killings at Virginia Tech. What we tend not to understand
is that the more information we possess about anything, the more
questions and uncertainties that arise. Albert Einstein understood
this quite well in saying that “as a circle of light increases,
so does the circumference of darkness around it.” Bertrand
Russell provided the social meaning to this when he declared: “The
trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent
are full of doubt.”
But one need not rely on abstract insights to confirm that a complex
and unpredictable world cannot be rendered certain by more information.
Over many decades, the American government has spent – and
continues to spend – tens of billions of dollars in so-called
“intelligence agencies,” whose functions are to gather
as much information as possible on the forces at work within foreign
countries – and, disturbingly, within America itself. Despite
the virtually unrestrained powers enjoyed by such agencies, and
the resources put at their disposal to gather information, they
have been able to predict almost nothing of major significance.
The tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet
Union, the events of 9/11, all occurred without any foreknowledge
of such agencies. And what of the predictions that American troops
would be welcomed by Iraqis as “liberators” in a “slam
dunk” war that would last only a few weeks? On a more comic
level, even knowing that January 1, 2000 was an event certain to
happen, the voices of what became known as “Y2K” uncertainty
were all over the lot in trying to predict what consequences, if
any, were likely to befall our computer-centered world.
Apostles of the control cult will focus their energies on any area
of human activity that provides them the opportunity to advance
what is central to their lives: the exercise of coercive power over
other people. Whether any given issue involves gun ownership; global
warming; discriminatory behavior; tobacco, drug, and alcohol usage;
eating habits; educating or raising children; or any other expressions
of human action that can be exploited for their purposes, the overall
objective remains fixed. There is nothing this crowd fears more
than the specter of ordinary people retaining decision-making authority
over their own lives.
Those who want control over us have taught us that they –
if given enough power – can protect us from the destructive
and murderous rampages of madmen. The Cho Seung-Huis and the Saddam
Husseins of our troubled world will continue to be offered up to
us as the destructive, murderous madmen from whom we need the protection
of state officials. But the war system ought to be a stark reminder
that it is political authorities who are the madmen; who destroy
property, ravage economies, and – in the 20th century alone
– butchered some 200,000,000 people in pursuit of their psychotic
ambitions to control the rest of humanity.
Most of your life is – and will continue to be – spent
in peaceful relationships with others. But there will be the occasional
thug with whom you may have to contend. Your ability to defend yourself
will always depend upon the actions you take, with the resources
you have available. You are more likely to prevail if you have disabused
yourself of the notion that the state – or any other established
system – will be there to prevent such threats to you. To
this end, if you draw nothing else from the terrible events of this
past week, let it be the awareness that there is nothing that anyone
in authority can do to protect you from the unpredictabilities and
uncertainties of life.
INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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