Perversions of Democracy

a child’s game

Tyrion: "No. She is no longer yours to torment."

Prince Joffrey: "Eνeryone is mine to torment. You'd do well to remember that, you little monster."

—Game of Thrones, Season Three: Episode Ten: “Mhysa”

One of the best episodes of Rod Serling’s television anthology series, The Twilight Zone, is “It’s a Good Life”, adapted from an excellent short story by Jeromy Bixby. The story is a masterpiece. Praised by critics, studied by authors, and beloved by audiences, this narrative has been widely recognized as one of the most iconic episodes broadcast during 1960s American entertainment. 

http://ciscohouston.com/docs/docs/greats/its_a_good_life.html

It's a Good Life written by Jerome Bixby, narrated by Edward E. French (youtube.com)

The premise is simple, memorable, and disturbing. 

It’s a profound horror story.

A small Ohio town has been separated from the rest of America, Earth, and (perhaps) the universe by a child with godlike powers. Anthony Fremont is a six-year-old boy with mysterious psychic capabilities who terrorizes everyone in his community; adults, neighborhood children, and even his own parents live in constant fear of accidentally upsetting the child tyrant. Nobody knows what actions, conversations, or accidental thoughts might enrage Anthony Fremont into a killing frenzy. He can read minds. He can create grotesque monsters with his imagination. He can teleport victims to their deaths, or transform their bodies into mutilated, crippled, unrecognizable parodies of human anatomy. 

Twisted sculptures of flesh and bone. 

Everyone fears Anthony. 

He has become the de facto prison warden of what used to be an ordinary, unremarkable small town. 

To survive, the adults have adapted to the bizarre whims and ever-changing rules of their environment. 

Adults cloud their thoughts, and do their best to think of nothing… mumbling incoherent phrases to themselves, desperately hiding their anxiety, horror, resentment, and hatred of Anthony Fremont. Whenever Anthony destroys crops, or murders a friend, they pronounce the phrase “that’s good, it’s good”. 

What they fear the most is that Anthony will try to help them — adults are afraid to complain about a hot sunny day, because they are worried Anthony might respond by destroying the sun itself. 

He has the mind of a child… the reckless immaturity of a child… the unreasonable tantrums of a young boy… paired with the power of a god.

No prospect of consequences, or proportion.  

His solutions threaten catastrophic unintended consequences. No matter how much he destroys, the most anyone can expect is a kind of benign neglect — the right to be ignored. And Anthony does not take kindly to criticism. Mild, polite condemnations of his destructive interventions risk the possibility of instant destruction.

His idea of entertainment is to broadcast disturbing images of dinosaurs and reptilian monsters ripping each other to pieces. 

One adult gets drunk to celebrate his birthday, wallows in nostalgia and self-pity, and rages that he cannot enjoy the old, sentimental music which used to make him happy — simply because Anthony Fremont despises music. The drunken, frightened, furious adult breaks down mentally, and attempts a failed coup — begging for someone to help him murder Anthony. The rest of the community watches on in horror as the small boy destroys the drunken man.

At the end of the story, Anthony Freemont calls down a heavy snow which obliterates the local crops. Grimly the adults realize that some of them will starve during the coming months. For a moment, Anthony’s father criticizes his son’s careless destruction of their food supply. Everyone around him adopts a mask of smiling, paralyzed terror, signaling that it’s too dangerous to criticize the child tyrant, or attempt to negotiate with him. In panic, Anthony’s father corrects himself, and celebrates the snow destroying their crops. 

It’s a fun, unsettling narrative.

And in many respects, this bizarre nightmare maps onto the Clownworld of the Global American Empire.

“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are:

I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.”

—Ronald Reagan

The democratic government of contemporary America indeed behaves like an insane child who destroys everything he attempts to improve, forces implausible Utopian visions onto victim neighborhoods, terrorizes citizens, ruins industries, wrecks economic incentives, and remains oblivious to the suffering he creates. He is unaccountable, cruel, and doesn’t take kindly to polite, mild criticism. He is stubborn, unreasonable, and punishes any attempt to negotiate or persuade him to behave in a more productive manner. 

Where does power lie?

What is the source of legal authority?

Who is piloting the global Imperial machine?

It’s educational to compare the written laws and political theory of American government, as written in textbooks and various philosophical manifestos authored by America’s Founding Fathers, against the actual history of how the world empire has conducted itself during the past century. Large contradictions emerge. Power doesn’t proceed along official, legally-proclaimed pathways. Money flows in opaque, tangled networks which violate federal protocol. In many respects, the law conducts itself illegally… criminally… maliciously. 

American citizens no longer behave as proud frontier warriors who demand personal sovereignty; demand justice and competent administration from their local officials. 

Today, American citizens cringe in the shadows, hoping to escape the intrusive Eye of Sauron, submitting to omnipresent data collection by the NSA, desiring at most a sort of benign neglect from the consequences and externalities of a multiethnic global Empire, robbed of their birthright, hiding from Utopian delusions. 

Citizens do their best to think happy thoughts.

No subversion here, comrades…

Foreign residents of vassal satrapies do the same.

Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan Experience: Podcast Number 2138:

“People don’t say this because they’re worried about getting punished. They’re worried about someone planting underage porn on their computer. Members of Congress are terrified of the intel agencies. I’m not guessing at that. They’ve told me that. Including people on the Intel Committees, people who run the Intel Committee. The people whose job it is to oversee, and to keep in line, these enormous secretive agencies whose budgets we can’t even know, they’re black budgets. 

Congressmen are the parents; the intel agencies are the children.

Congressmen are afraid of these agencies. 

That’s not compatible with democracy. 

Democracy is a really simple system, even representative democracy like ours: The people rule, they do so through elections, people express their popular opinions through voting, people send elected representatives to the Capital to run the government on their behalf. 

Whenever you have unelected people, who are not accountable to anyone, making the biggest decisions, you don’t have a democracy.

You have something else.

Another system.

I would call it a tyranny, or whatever you want to call it. 

So that’s like super obvious, it’s playing out in front of everyone, no one cares, and no one does anything about it. And I think the reason is, because they’re threatened. If you look at the Intel Committee Chairmen, who allow this shit to happen, year after year, they’re all — people say “Oh they’re compromised or being blackmailed or whatever, I don’t have any evidence of that” — but I know them. And they all have things to hide. I know that for a fact. 

So it’s not a stretch of imagination to suppose that some Committee Chairman who is allowing warantless spying to continue against Americans, or whatever abuse they’re allowing… why are they doing that? It’s not impossible to imagine that they have a gambling problem, a drinking problem, a drug problem, or some weird sex life — which is common, very common in Congress — that’s why they’re allowing bureaucratic mission creep to continue unchecked.

I don’t have proof of that. But that’s not a crazy thing to assume, that this could be happening.”

—Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan Experience: Podcast Number 2138:

Bronze Age Pervert, Bronze Age Mindset:

“Everything that is said now about Russia is pure projection. In fact it’s America and the western world that is run by spooks and intel agencies. They’ve placed their assets and compromised patsies in the corporate world no less than in other government agencies and among elected politicians.

Many, like Obama for example, are entirely creations of this or that faction inside the security system.

These in turn are allied to oligarchs and often to foreign interests and powers, so that it’s hard to think many western nations have anything but a parody of freedom and national sovereignty. “Representative democracy” plus a bureaucratic state is often criticized by conservatives as destructive of personal freedom and initiative, which it is; but given that most people who go into public life are poor and weak-minded, it also just means indirect rule by spooks, oligarchs, and whatever foreign nation or interest can funnel more money or influence or threat here or there.

Many of these people in the west screaming about Russia are puppets of China or the Gulf States — even when they’re not directly on the take or compromised, they expect sinecures and great wealth that will come in the future. Most of the media is similarly compromised, although the average schmuck journalist is probably deluded by the platitudes of “free press” and the humanitarian doxies that have been banged in their heads. Inside head they have central vacuole full of fluid, no brain. I have no doubt that things like “pizzagate” are real simply because, if I was a spook, or a rich man with spooks available, I’d find it very easy to compromise the officious, status-hungry low people who have been attracted to government in our time. These people arrive in the capital cities with a hungry look in the eye and, being full of the feeling that “they’re in on things” and that they’ve made it, have a very tough time controlling their appetites or behavior.

Many are chosen and groomed precisely because they begin with demented appetites to begin with.”

—Bronze Age Pervert, Bronze Age Mindset

The corruption of Congress has become a standard joke.

Nancy Pelosi and other elected representatives have attracted notoriety for outperforming the stock market, and investing with more success than some of Wall Street’s most profitable hedge funds. 

But it’s worth considering the hypothetical game theory of how a Congressman would behave with honor and integrity, guided purely by conscience. And what a man of conscience might achieve in these difficult circumstances; one isolated man attempting to restrain the ravenous ambitions of multinational conglomerates, captured industries, defense contractors, and the GloboHomo priesthood. 

Someone like Ron Paul would be rhetorically persuasive, symbolically inspirational… and politically irrelevant. 

The ruthless calculations of American politics, operating the global machinery of an Imperial Leviathan, encourages corruption of democratic representatives, while tolerating small amounts of useless symbolic posturing. But effective, impactful opposition to the status quo is harshly, swiftly punished. 

Congressmen and Senators earn an annual salary of $174,000. Roughly twice the amount of a comfortable white-collar job. 

Individual lawmakers are not prepared to resist the blackmail, coercion, and surveillance capability of domestic security operations. 

Theoretically, Congress exercises the power of the purse, authorizes the annual federal budget, and can control the Imperial bureaucracy by strangling its revenues. But in the real world, Congress lacks the practical capability to flex its own muscles against subordinate departments and bureaus. 

A global empire, equipped with its professional militaries, spies, bureaucrats, and secret police, will not passively allow its authority to be challenged. 

Every system breaks at the weakest point. 

Democracy is perhaps most vulnerable when regional leaders lack the resources, security, integrity, or vision to advocate for their constituent interests against the power of a hungry federal Leviathan. 

There are really two choices to fix America’s problems: either to contest the global Empire’s operations at the centralized bottlenecks where policy decisions are made, or to assert an alternative voice, culture, and constituency in a decentralized fashion. 

Dissent and reform are safely funneled towards centralized outlets, where discontent will be neutralized, contained, and redirected into harmless symbolic gestures. 

Congressmen and Senators are terrified of America’s secret police — for good reason. 

Congressman Madison Cawthorn spoke out about the drug-fueled orgies of Congress — and a short time later, sexually incriminating videos were leaked against him, and he lost his reelection. Other members of Congress learned from his disgrace to remain silent, and comply. 

The quiet terror, and passive corruption of Congress, is quite similar to The Twilight Zone. 

Perhaps we ask too much from federal politicians — saints and martyrs might be willing to suffer persecution based on idealistic principles, but government officials prefer expedience and self-preservation. 

Decentralized solutions offer a more effective response to an intractable culture of entrenched, institutional corruption and federal ideological capture.

N. S. Lyons, ‘Democracy’ Means Never Having to Hear ‘You’re Fired!’:

“Although in theory it’s the elected legislative branch that passes laws ordering American citizens around, in actuality the Congress has for decades simply deferred to the executive agencies to interpret its vaguely-worded laws and make regulatory and policy decisions, freeing up legislators to spend their time fundraising and prattling on cable news shows instead. In other words, it is the bureaucrats of the administrative state who actually govern America at the federal level. And none of these people are elected.

But since the president is allegedly elected by the American people to lead the executive branch, in theory there should still be at least a thread of democratic accountability tying the federal agencies to the will of the demos: the president, through the agency heads he appoints, should be able to control the policies implemented by executive agencies, right? Wrong! As Trump found out while in office, these agencies are staffed to the gills with permanent bureaucrats who collectively hold distinct views about the policies they think should be implemented, and how, and believe that they have a right – nay, a duty! – to “resist” any order to the contrary from their boss. And ultimately personnel is policy, so if they don’t want to do something, it doesn’t happen.

…

But as Trump’s White House also found out, these bureaucrats essentially cannot ever be fired. Powerful public-sector unions and “civil service protections” imposed by Congress have made it nearly impossible to legally fire them, except through an (extremely drawn out) bureaucratic process (conducted internally by their own bureaucracy) to prove that they were “under-performing” at their job (of bureaucratizing the will of the bureaucracy).

Citizens may of course wonder who they can vote for who can fire these people. If they don’t answer to the president, their official boss, then who do they answer to? (Answer: no one). But then you see, for the one portion of the executive branch that’s still democratically elected to go around firing the people sabotaging the policies they were elected to carry out would actually amount to “political interference” in “our democracy”

…

“Who you vote for should never affect your rightful access to government benefits and services.” So there you have it, pretty much in black and white: who you vote for should never affect the operation of the government (says the guy in Congress in charge of government “accountability”).

In particular your political choices must never be allowed to disrupt the “benefits and services” the managerial state redistributes from you to dole out to its various long-suffering client groups (like poor migrants, viral gain-of-function researchers, “democracy” NGOs, or Lockheed Martin), which are their sacred right under the Constitution. That would be “partisan manipulation” of our system, which must be “protected from the volatility of electoral politics.”

—N. S. Lyons, ‘Democracy’ Means Never Having to Hear ‘You’re Fired!’

‘Democracy’ Means Never Having to Hear ‘You’re Fired!’ (substack.com)

Some brief historical observations.

When was the last time that an American President successfully challenged the federal status quo, and measurably diminished the size and power of the centralized government?

The answer would be 1832-1836, when President Andrew Jackson prevented renewal of the Second Bank of the United States.

And the brief, forgotten presidencies of Calvin Coolidge and Warren Harding, who for all intents and purposes have been airbrushed out of American history — as an inconvenient reminder that an alternative exists to permanent bureaucratic expansion.

With the brief exception of that long-distant dispute, the past couple centuries have witnessed near-constant expansion and consolidation of the American Government; a hungry, insatiable Leviathan seeking power, thirsting for territory, hunting and devouring all obstacles in its path. 

Corruption stubbornly clings on. 

Individual heroes are small, and insignificant, compared to the ruthless scale of an industrial economy; a managerial bureaucracy; a global empire.

Widespread apathy, and disengagement from traditional political participation, suggests different tactics.

The Canadian trucker protests point towards the inevitable future — rather than passive submission to a hostile federal apparatus, rather than demoralized resignation to corruption and malice, rather than quietly hoping for a government characterized by benign neglect… the future will involve decentralized logistical disruptions, malicious compliance, and apathetic, nonviolent refusal to cooperate in an efficient, legible manner towards centralized tyranny. 

The Truckers Won. Everything.

If the law will not protect citizens, then citizens will protect themselves.

If citizens no longer trust the government, they will be forced instead to trust themselves.

Who watches the watchmen?

Empires breed dependent clients, and subservient parasites, to seize and consolidate power. But the triumph of an extractive federal tyranny forces ordinary citizens to learn self-reliance, or to be destroyed in gradual increments through bureaucratic mission creep and innumerable, petty legal harassments.

As communal disappointments play out again and again, as the democratic process fails to deliver timely solutions, then citizens will eventually adapt by organizing into parallel, autonomous networks which exist to solve the problems of anarchotyranny, which their government refuses to acknowledge.

Spies can easily blackmail a Congressman, or a Senator.

Spies are worthless against the sort of decentralized protests embodied by the Canadian truckers, where tens of thousands of citizens drive out to obstruct or delay traffic along roads, bridges, airports.

In the future, the corrupt federal government will be widely discredited, sometimes obeyed, and often ignored.