Government.
A word familiar to just about every human being.
The word is so common, it rolls off the tongue as easily as saying the sun rises in the east, or McDonalds, or the moon, or love or family or any other common word in our daily lives.
Throughout recorded human history, innocent people have suffered under the weight of these manmade constructs we call government. And for my fellow Christians, please place emphasis on the word manmade. While God allows these things to be made, there is no scriptural evidence that He authors their design, like for instance our design of government with three-branches and a Constitution. So we sin to blame God for the evil things we create. He did not.
In fact, today’s modern nation-state ideas of government are really just artificial constructs initiated by a group of sociopaths in Westphalia in 1648. Since that time, borders and the governments that rule the people inside them have been the way in which we understand the world. Currently, the United Nations recognizes 195 of these artificial fabricated constructs.
Let me emphasize once again, these are manmade constructs. There is nothing transcendent, supernatural, or divine about them. Mostly, they’re just repressive, oppressive and evil entities that serve no purpose but to aggrandize the few at the expense and suffering of the many.
So as a way to better understand the danger of believing in these manmade constructs, consider who is at war with each other right now between Ukraine and Russia.
Are the people at war with each other?
Hardly. Mostly, they just want to love their families, earn incomes, go to church, run their businesses, etc. Ukraine’s do not want to bomb and murder Russians and neither do Russian’s want to blow up a Ukraine apartment building.
It is always those who find their way into government power who do these things - and the innocent people suffer.
Do you ever stop and wonder why that is? You might find that the answer is quite uncomfortable - because the answer is you. You actually allow evil to be done in your name, though you’re probably right now cursing me out!
How dare you say I am to blame for all of this suffering you might be saying!
But your protestations do not erase this fact. And the fact is, governments have no real power if the people don’t believe in the very idea of government.
So, in a very strange, twisted way, these maniacs who inevitably find their way into government can only reach their goals of enslaving a population by the people believing in the very government that controls them. I can prove this with a simple equation:
This chart illustrates the problem, doesn’t it? Literally, we allow a small group of people who then use another small group of people with guns to control a massive group of people. If we ever organized to abolish government as Thomas Jefferson insists should happen in the Declaration of Independence, the fight would be over in days. After all, we outnumber the sociopaths in power 89 to 1!
Think about it for a moment. Literally, 0.16% of the people rule all 329 million people by “laws” they dream up, write on a piece of paper, vote on them and then tell people hired by them with guns to go make you obey them.
Does that make any moral or intellectual sense to you? Really, stop to ponder this for a moment before you read on.
Sadly, almost every person who reads this Substack is a person who believes government holds some special legitimate use of force, and because they believe it to be legitimate, rather than oppose it, even violently, they submit to this thing called government.
Gut check time! Can YOU admit you just believe in government? Or can you intellectually and morally defend the absolute empirical need for government in order to live in civil society? (Hint, you won’t be able to).
For illustration purposes, consider this. Let us say Amazon tried to use force to exercise total control over your children. Forcefully vaccinate them, teach them sexual behaviors at a very young age, groom them, dumb them down and turn them into automatons for Amazon headquarters. You know what you would do don’t you? All of us would use massive counter force, as violent as necessary to protect our children.
Why? Why would you instinctively know to oppose them and defend and protect your children?
Because you do not believe Amazon has the legitimate right to use force against you to make you obey them. You would shoot them if you needed to in order to protect your children.
But you won’t when it comes to government because you believe government holds some magical, mystical legitimate right to use violent force against you to make you comply. And while you might think you would resist them, just look at your average day now and how much you already submit to them with taxes, speech, speed limits, pulling permits to improve your property, voting, asking a government court to stop government from doing something to you, vaccine mandates, mask compliance, social distancing, closing churches, and on and on. It is too easy to think you would defend your children, but the reality is, you already submit to compulsory education.
Can you be humble enough to admit this? Admit your belief in government conjoined with a belief that it has some legitimate right to use force against you to make you obey them?
Simply interject the idea of government into this equation, and well-meaning parents will hand their precious children over to people they do not know for 180 6-hour days for this exact kind of indoctrination. Well-meaning parents will submit to compulsory government mandated education because they believe government is legitimate and has the right and power to force them do it.
All because they believe government is legitimate and thus has the legitimate right to use any kind of force to compel obedience.
To make matters worse, in a democratic system like ours, we actually convey this legitimacy by voting.
So damaging!
Finally, a while back, I wrote another Substack titled Humility, the virtue needed to learn. Humility and the ability to admit you have been wrong is an essential ingredient for learning. People have no idea how infected their brains are with the notion of government having some belief-based legitimacy to use force against them. Unfortunately, when I point it out, most often, they cannot muster the humility to admit they are wrong.
And they suffer for the lack of this humility.
But hope springs eternal; for if a hard head, stubborn, prideful person like me can muster up humility to admit I was wrong, I hold out hope that millions of other can as well. Especially those of us who call ourselves followers of Jesus Christ who commanded His followers to “love God with our minds” which should naturally lead to humility when we are wrong.
I repented of my belief that government is legitimate and has some magical, mystical legitimate use of force against me to make me obey them.
Mark, its' funny, I was just debating with a MeWe friend of mine, mostly on the subject of an Art. V convention (as he is a proponent trying to garner support for a COS). He remarked that I was the most anti-"federal" government person he had ever conversed with and let me know that he hoped there wasn't too many more like me. I assured him that I wasn't alone.
Appreciate this so much. Truth is if people would stop their busyness and open their minds to an alternate thought process instead of what has been injected for years and years, we might have a chance.