I picked up Albert Jay Nock’s Our Enemy, the State (again). What a great read. Every page is loaded with things to consider. Challenges to the political orthodoxy of any day. With moments of brilliance that define not just the State but our relationship to it.
Here, Nock lays out the spell government casts upon so many.
“Instead of recognizing the state as “the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men,” the run of mankind, with rare exceptions, regards it not only as a final and indispensable entity but also as, in the main, beneficent. The mass-man, ignorant of its history, regards its character and intentions as social rather than anti-social; and in that faith, he is willing to put at its disposal an indefinite credit of knavery, mendacity, and chicane, upon which its administrators may draw at will.”
Instead of looking upon the state’s progressive adoption of social power with the repugnance and resentment that he would naturally feel towards the activities of a professional criminal organization, he tends rather to encourage and glorify it, in the belief that he is somehow identified with the State, and that therefore, in consenting to its infinite aggrandizement, he consents to something in which he has a share – he is, pro tanto, aggrandizing himself.
It is, after all, the one thing “to which we all belong.”
That Leftist bumper-sticker marketing copy takes on a whole new meaning after reading that pull quote. It is a call to accept without question the will of people drawn to power with an unquenchable urge to separate you from your property to fund their ideological endeavors.
People prepared to go to war in every corner of society until they get their way — folks who are not just indifferent to the collateral damage but accept it.
The Left’s years-long tantrum over Miz Clinton’s failed candidacy is their criminal organization (labeled the Deep state) engaged in a political gang war because Mr. Trump is not their man.
Do not expect this hissy fit to end until he is removed or has left office – and even then, he should expect to spend the rest of his days chased by lawyers and institutionalized malcontents for daring to challenge their orthodoxy.
All Tyranny is Local
At lower altitudes, anyone who has every run contrary to the will of that same creature (at the state or local level) can tell you that the bumper-sticker marketing copy is a lie. Government is not a thing to which we all belong. It is a thing unto itself whose mission is your cultural and economic slavery.
Your contribution is that of the extorted subject forced to pay protection money that will protect them from you. You are a peasant outside the walls. The serf in a modern feudal landscape. In a system that exists to prevent change. That hates anyone and anything that diminishes their power. And still, we need to find a way to take it back from them and give it to a people, most of whom have no idea of what they have lost, the danger looming over them, and if we are honest, what to do with their social power should we rest it back from the brink.
But still, it needs to be done.
