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April 2, 2007
We’re All Terrorists
It is rather amazing how fast a cultural heritage of
multiple centuries can simply vanish in a few years. Western society, as most of
us should be aware, is a product of the continental and cultural awakening
called the Enlightenment. Essentially, this period meant people awoke from
centuries, if not millennia, of religious unconsciousness to embrace philosophy,
science, and reality.
The product of this philosophical paradigm shift is
evident in Western economies, through society-wide wealth production in the era
of industrialization, and in science, where seeing reality without mystic bias
made enormous headway possible. But the most important change was in philosophy,
where the logical and reasoning intellect was liberated from religious dogma.
The change in philosophy came first, and from it emerged a new way of seeing man--and not seeing god.
It is in this new way of thinking that an
intellectual elite started thinking about what man is and whether man has a duty
to society or if it is the other way around. These are the thoughts from which
the United States emerged: man as an end in himself rather than as a means to
achieve a luxurious living for monarchs and emperors. Man, this new way of
thinking declared, must be protected from government--it is the individual who
is vulnerable, not violent power.
This is the reason many Western democracies have
their governments split in multiple powers. The theory is that such powers, with
no real ties to each other, can balance the harm done to the citizenry by
government. Government, this intellectual elite declared, is evil--but a
necessary evil.
Thus, individual liberties and personal integrities
were defined and exemplified in constitutions in order to make people aware of
their right to not be oppressed. All basic rules for how the public authorities
must treat the individual, such as the legal “presumed innocent until proven
guilty” and habeas corpus, serve the same purpose: power must be leashed so that
it doesn’t transgress its so-called proper functions and limited powers. The
constitutions, the intellectual elite thought, would guarantee the rights to
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--against government intrusion.
It didn’t take long to completely destroy this dream.
The 20th Century was a severe backlash for
individual liberty and a victorious century for the State. The victories
were won through waging wars and using democracy as a means to enslave the
people. There is a reason the old-time Enlightenment intellectuals were hesitant
to let “everybody” become government tamers. It would be better, they argued, to
leave people be and guarantee their rights and liberties; people are easily
misled and tend to accept incremental infringements in their liberties for
promises of an undefined good.
In neo-political discourse, people talk of this as
“how
to cook a frog.” You cannot, the theory goes, put a live frog in boiling
water--it will jump out of the pot. But if you increase the temperature little
by little, the frog will not notice the real change: It will remain in the pot
and be cooked alive. This is exactly what has happened to the peoples of the
West during the 20th Century--the heritage from the Enlightenment has
been effectively wiped out. We are no longer sovereign individuals to whom the
government is a servant; instead, we are equally enslaved by the omniscient and
omnipotent State.
Some blame (and some cheer) 9/11 as the turning
point. This is but an illusion-- the gradual change towards total enslavement
started a long time ago. 9/11 is simply the latest “crisis” used by the State to
further its powers at the expense of individual liberty. The terrible attack on
the WTC made the people of America aware of the fact that there are people in this world who
are simply nuts--and that some of them really don’t like the government’s
imperialistic foreign policy.
But while focusing on and calling for anti-terrorism
measures, i.e., protection from harm, not many seem to have noticed that none of
the new policies have anything to do with protection. It has but to do with
increasing State powers, and that can only be done through restricting that very
state’s citizenry’s rights and liberties. To protect us from terrorism, the
State has publicly and potently declared us all terrorists: We’re all terrorists
and enjoy what’s left of our liberties only as far as we don’t speak up, speak
out, or start asking questions. The state, we will learn, sooner or later, is
protecting itself--as well as its privileged class and its vast powers--from its citizenry.
The
question is no longer whether the State in its public or military courts can
prove someone is guilty. No one is presumed innocent until proven
guilty--conviction is a question of whether you have a right to claim you are
innocent, whether the State will let you prove you are innocent, and whether
anyone at all cares. The heritage from the intelligent gentlemen of the
Enlightenment has been long lost; the powers of the State were unleashed a long
time ago, and government is feeding off whatever is left of life and liberty.
The pursuit of happiness, we must learn, necessarily includes pushing the State
back and keeping its powers as distant as possible.
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