Mystic Revolution

“As a subjectivation apparatus, the smartphone works like a rosary- which, because of it’s ready availability, represents a handheld device too. Both the smartphone and the rosary serve the purpose of self-monitoring and control. Power operates more effectively when it delegates surveillance to discrete individuals. “Like” is the digital “Amen.” When we click like, we are bowing down to the order of domination. The smartphone is not just an effective surveillance apparatus; it is also a mobile confessional. Facebook is the Church- the global synagogue (literally, assembly) of the digital.”

-Byung-Chul Han, Psycho-politics

“Woe to the downpresser,

They’ll eat the bread of sorrow,

Woe to the downpresser,

They’ll eat the bread of sad tomorrow.”

-Bob Marley, Guiltiness

America was founded on something more than just faith in God or Biblical principles. We were founded on the premise of self-governance, meaning, at root, self control; and that the government is the best which governs the least. Yet in 300 years, we have become significantly more governed and significantly less free. As I’ll attempt to show in this article, the loss of self-governance leads directly to the loos of freedom.

We have seen the government consistently take advantage of our supreme lack of ability to self-govern. Read Bastiat’s “The Law.” Read Herbert Spencer’s “The Right to Ignore the State.” Both of these emphasize well how the loss of self-governance produces the loss of freedom; for what is freedom for if we don’t use it properly? The Law, Bastiat says, is not to promote Justice, but rather to prevent injustice. That puts a very fine point on it. But how many times do we find the government inserting itself where it doesn’t belong; aka, doing more than merely preventing injustice, or what we have hired it to do for our mutual benefit?

Why does the Fed exist? 

Why are Infrastructure bills including more money to Ukraine than to our own infrastructure? 

Why is the Patriot act still enforced?

Why are we trillions of dollars in debt to China while also, in a way, waging a proxy war with them through Iran and Israel? 

Why is DARPA, by their own admission, monitoring misinformation on social media? 

If they care so much about the health and well being of Americans, why isn’t social media banned rather than marijuana, when there are more adverse effects from the former as the latter? Not to mention the welfare state, which is legal plunder, aka socialism, by definition. All examples of the government taking a prime opportunity to seize power. 

What about fentanyl killing the children of America? If the past four years have shown us anything, it’s not only that the government doesn’t care about the American people, but that the American people don’t care enough to actually organize and do something about it ourselves, without government. This is because we’ve lost sight of what government is for, and forgotten how to self-govern.

The whole point of a government is for mutual benefit of a group of people, because we are more powerful and stronger when we’re together and organized. We are no longer a society of mutual benefit, however. To use a recent example: in the latest Vice Presidential debate, both candidates, Walz, and Vance, both agreed the government needs to appropriate funding for childcare. 

What does this mean?

The government is going to take my money, that I earned, and use it to care for another person’s child- not love them, certainly not, but merely to make sure they stay alive while the one who birthed the child is at work. Because in reality, they’re not parents. Take some time to research how childcare centers operate. They’re overrun, and the workers by and large don’t care about the kids. Childcare ought to be a last resort, when at the moment it is a given. 

Even if childcare was a good thing, it is still not within the government’s purview to take my money. If a robber came to me on the street, took my wallet at gunpoint, and then came back a week later and brought me gifts, does that make it right? 

Therefore it is not right for the government to take my money, without giving me a choice, and threatening jail time if I don’t comply. 

Same with the school system. It’s clear the public school system is shot: it’s an indoctrination camp at this point (for more on that, check out the video at the end of this article from Yuri Bezmenov). But that is to say, I don’t want my money to go to indoctrinating my peers, or the next generation. If we were self-governing, we would refuse indoctrination, and if our parents were self-governing, they would organize and form their own education system. But instead we pawn our thinking off to the state and the parents pawn their children off to the state and the state controls parent and child. 

So you say, vote. If you don’t like it, vote. I have two responses to that. The first is, I think it’s pretty clear that the last election was bought. Remember the jump of votes in Wisconsin back in 2020? Remember all the dead people voting? That’s certainly not the norm.

The second reason I could not communicate better than the great Lysander Spooner: 

“It cannot be said that, by voting, a man pledges himself to support the Constitution, unless the act of voting be a perfectly voluntary one on his part. Yet the act of voting cannot properly be called a voluntary one on the part of any very large number of those who do vote. It is rather a measure of necessity imposed upon them by others, than one of their own choice. On this point I repeat what was said in a former number,* viz:“In truth, in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent, even for the time being. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having even been asked a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights, under peril of weighty punishments. He sees, too, that other men practise this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further, that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self-defence, he attempts the former. His case is analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or be killed himself. Because, to save his own life in battle, a man attempts to take the lives of his opponents, it is not to be inferred that the battle is one of his own choosing. Neither in contests with the ballot—which is a mere substitute for a bullet—because, as his only chance of self-preservation, a man uses a ballot, is it to be inferred that the contest is one into which he voluntarily entered; that he voluntarily set up all his own natural rights, as a stake against those of others, to be lost or won by the mere power of numbers. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, in an exigency into which he had been forced by others, and in which no other means of self-defence offered, he, as a matter of necessity, used the only one that was left to him.Doubtless the most miserable of men, under the most oppressive government in the world, if allowed the ballot, would use it, if they could see any chance of thereby meliorating their condition. But it would not, therefore, be a legitimate inference that the government itself, that crushes them, was one which they had voluntarily set up, or ever consented to.”

And, particularly regarding taxation: 

“As taxation is made compulsory on all, whether they vote or not, a large proportion of those who vote, no doubt do so to prevent their own money being used against themselves; when, in fact, they would have gladly abstained from voting, if they could thereby have saved themselves from taxation alone, to say nothing of being saved from all the other usurpations and tyrannies of the government. To take a man’s property without his consent, and then to infer his consent because he attempts, by voting, to prevent that property from being used to his injury, is a very insufficient proof of his consent to support the Constitution. It is, in fact, no proof at all.”

Let me examine my situation, then: I pay my taxes, but disagree with how my money is used. I do not see it going to the mutual benefit of myself and my neighbor, but rather a man halfway across the world who’s war I am not a part of. My recourse? Choose between two or three candidates who both espouse beliefs I heartily disagree with, vote in an election that is clearly tampered with, or, even if my vote does carry weight, as Spooner says, practice tyranny over others by way of the ballot. 

And we call ourselves free. 

It’s about time we refuse what the government is offering. You want to solve the fentanyl crisis? Get out in your streets. Organize. Work with your neighbor on the common problems you face. You want to solve pollution and be a conservationist? Plant a garden; be self-sustaining. That’s how we give the middle finger to the establishment, and that, if anything, is how we turn America around. It’s not through legislation- it’s not through voting. It’s through community work, with a focus on sustainability. 

It’s alienating because no one wants to be self-governing- but it must be done, and it must start now. If you can’t do it because it’s right, do it for your own sanity. The world has become so insane, so lost in Nominalism and Nihilism, that to be sane is to be counter-cultural. That’s reason enough. 

I think that the church is particularly poised to further a rekindling of self-governance. We as the church have 2000 years of men and women who possessed unchained souls, souls that could not be held in the trammels of government, religious or state. We have a freedom that is of the soul. We have a wild, untrammelled God. Why do we allow our government to invade where it ought not to be? Why do we forget the government has no money of it’s own? What if we just said, “we don’t need your programs?” Whatever change needs to happen, it’s not going to happen through a government program. 

There are so many people in the world that talk like rebels, that dress like rebels, but in reality are just conformist. They’re addicted to the screen, they believe this world is all there is, they believe science is an end-all be-all. They’re no rebel. The real rebels are, ironically, the dedicated Christians, the ones who sing in peacetime and fight in wartime- and most importantly, who self-govern. And yet in the Church, we’ve adopted the same bored approach with which the secular person approaches life. 

We must cast it off. 

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light”, to quote Dylan Thomas. 

There is another half to the current problem of self governance. Not only does the government not want us to self-govern, but the technology and social-unconscious all but forbid us to do so. Consider this:

The biggest roadblock to self-governance at present is self-surveillance. To return to the opening quote from Han, the smartphone is a subjectivation-apparatus. We self-surveil. Orwell predicted the State as Big Brother; but the reality is we have become our own Orwellian big brother, with anyone who disagrees with our point of view becoming Immanuel Goldstein. In fact, Byung-Chul Han says as much: 

“Orwell’s surveillance state differs fundamentally from the world of the digital panopticon- which uses freedom to excess. Today’s society of information is not characterized by destroying words, but by multiplying them without end.” 

Han even echoes Proverbs: 

“When words are many, transgression is not lacking, but whoever restrains his lips is prudent.” (Proverbs 10:19)

How much of the internet is engaged in truth seeking, and how much of it is purely reactionary? How much of it is purely “what team are you on?” How much of conversation is not only prolific with unnecessary words, but simply binary, us versus them? There is another reason I will not vote- because I know that team politics, not thoughtful decision making, reigns. We watch political debates with the same attitude that we watch football- in fact, with perhaps less of a gravitas than we would have with the game. We see, also, that it’s not true that our vocabulary has broadened, but merely that we say the same things with more frequency, and everyone is involved. 

Even if, as Christians, we view America as a secular nation rather than a God fearing one, the reality is we’re quite a religious nation: but we follow the religion of the machine. We bow to the love-less, unforgiving God of progress. Of course, this is not to say that the government is not furthering this process, seeing as it is in their best interest. Progress is a sanctifying word. 

I’ve already made reference to the fact that DARPA is monitoring misinformation on social media. We believe in representation; but whose will is it to be monitored on Instagram? Just as the Catholic church refused to give the Bible to the illiterate in the 16th century, the government seems to believe the people to be too illiterate to discover truth for themselves. Arrogance and power-hunger, which go hand in hand, are the root of all ill-begotten legislation. If one is to be a good legislator, one must be humble: humble enough to recognize that it is not one’s job to legislate right and wrong as seen by the legislator. Legislation ought to prevent injustice, and the moment it goes beyond this simple task, it is tyranny. How can one say, then, that we live in a free nation, if we not only chain ourselves through self-surveillance but we are under tyranny from the state? How are we free when every time we pay our taxes, the revenue goes to initiatives that we did not authorize the self-absorbed legislator to pursue? 

This tech driven, self-surveilling society has led to an isolated populace. It is an axiom, a tautology, that there can be no community action if there is no community, or if the community is entirely online, in a disembodied universe. Carl Trueman, writing in Strange New World, illustrates this with the example of music: 

“Technology also reinforces the focus on the individual, and upon individual satisfactions. Take something like music, a basic part of human societies throughout history and across the globe. In the past, music was always a live, and often a communal activity. Someone had to be playing music for it to be heard; and somebody had to be present in order to appreciate it. Now we can listen to whatever music we choose, whenever we want, and, perhaps most significant of all, we can do so in privacy.”

To build off of Trueman, not only can we listen to music whenever, wherever, and in private, but the sheer amount of music that we have access to merely reinforces the oppressive freedom that we encounter in the self-optimization gospel, and that creates burnout and weariness. 

Thusly- the first key to self-governance is to abdicate from the oppressive religion of progress, likes, authenticity, and self-surveillance, and begin to live truly. The second is to organize in your community and face problems locally, without the help of the government, because you don’t need the help of the government. Engage with what is real, not with things of death; with wood rather than stone. Forsake the calamity-addicted populace and become a sort of “minstrel-warrior,” to use Frank Herbert’s words. Know when to sing, and when to fight, and you’ve won half the battle. 

One final point: 

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist.” 

-Verbal Kint, The Usual Suspects (1995)

Such is government: the greatest trick the government ever pulled was convincing the people, essentially, that they, like the devil, didn’t exist either. To say it another way: if people think they are free, they will be less likely to notice when freedom becomes a tacit slavery. Such it is with America and internationally. National security, human welfare, and american patriotism have also become sanctifiers of overreach in taxation, legislation, and foreign policy. Even in times far preceding ours, the government has been taking public money and surreptitiously (or not so much) placing it in private pockets (Spooner builds off of this as well in No Treason.) We must remember that the government has no money- only what we give. We hire them to do jobs for us- not the other way around. Are they performing their job to our satisfaction? 

How have politicians solved anything over the past 4 years?

Eight years?

Twelve?

Sixteen?

You get the idea. 

It’s time for a change- first, a change internally. We can make no change to our government if we do not first make a change to ourselves. The change begins, as most great endeavors do: simply. Do not gainsay the value of merely meeting in person with other people and being thoughtful. Fight to become re-enchanted with the world. At this point, doing that might just make you punk rock.

Related Revolutionary Resources:

Lysander Spooner, No Treason: https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/spooner-no-treason-no-vi-the-constitution-of-no-authority-1870

Herbert Spencer, The Right to Ignore the State: https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/spencer-the-right-to-ignore-the-state-1851

Yuri Bezmenov, aka Tomas Schuman, on ideological subversion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gnpCqsXE8g

Frederic Bastiat, The Law: https://fee.org/ebooks/the-law/?gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwx4O4BhAnEiwA42SbVE0fGsV_xCaU7J_Y-YY2Ofm5yFsVJ0p7MmndXyNzc2AhzhGQbxenbBoC8dQQAvD_BwE

Bob Marley, Guiltiness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5lAQJYLuWI

References:

Han, Byung-Chul. Psychopolitics : Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. , Translated by Erik Butler, Verso, 2017.

Trueman, Carl. Strange New World. Crossway, 2022.

Singer, Bryan. 1995. The Usual Suspects. United States: Gramercy Pictures (I)