Responsibilities of a resident of the police state, part IV

Part I

Part II

Part III

Changing perceptions at the end of empire
Or
It steamboats come steamboat time

The empire demands obedience. But the more harshly it demands, the more desperate it is. A government that sends thugs to kick down people’s doors at 6:00 a.m. or that shuts protestors within barbed wire enclosures is a government that is frightened. And weak. Not strong.

Our particular empire exists in the age of public relations. It realizes that We the Mob can be kept quieter longer via bribes than by oppression. But times change. The bribe money runs out. The PR curtain is ripped away, revealing the real beneficiaries of the welfare-warfare state — those with power and pull. The people become cynical. But the empire first doesn’t recognize the change, then doesn’t know how to respond. It’s the classic “when your only tool is a hammer …” dilemma. Empires aren’t fast on their feet. they stick with formula. As Einstein said, it becomes madness.

At the end of empire, the rich get richer, the poor suffer. But the rich — that is, those who get rich on pull and not by having to satisfy the customer — get stupider. They become as blatant in their folly as the members of any ancien regime, headed for a fall.

As things fall apart and the emperor’s nakedness becomes obvious to all, adherents of empire propose plans that are ever-more desperately idiotic.

The empire will strike back — as it just did against supposed members of the super-hacker group Anonymous. But empires, by their top-down, insulated-from-Clue nature, inherently don’t get it — even when the rebels are laughing right in their faces. “Anonymous” isn’t an organization. It’s … anonymous. I don’t know whether it has leaders; you probably don’t know, either. Nobody even knows whether “it” exists as an “it” in any traditional sense. But it’s hydra-headed. Bust one “leader” or a handful of “members,” and others arise.

Empires never really get this. Not even when they think they do. (Does one, single person here believe that the Pentagon, for instance, will win this particular war?)

Eventually — and perhaps in isolated places, at first — even the expected defenders of political corruption say no.

I don’t necessarily agree with the timeline of The Fourth Turning. When you set out to “prove” a historic point, it’s easy to pick any events that uphold your thesis and ignore others. But this much is true: change, when it comes, can come rapidly and in unexpected ways.

How can we doubt that? Most of us were alive to watch the Berlin Wall be torn down chunk-by-chunk by young revelers. Most of us were alive to watch Boris Yeltsin mount a tank and proclaim the end of the “invincible” Soviet empire. These were events that not one mainstream “expert” would have predicted even months earlier, and almost nobody on the outside saw coming. But one day … there they were.

That’s huge. One of the two biggest empires on earth, gone overnight — and with minimal violence. How can we forget that?

The Berlin Wall is a particularly vivid example of how change comes. For decades, people had been shot — killed — just for trying to get over that wall. But when “steamboat time” came, when the wall was ready to fall, all it took was a chain of bureaucratic screwups … and the world shifted.

Moving into the light

To those who say that only violent revolution will do … well, there are so many answers to that.

Is violent revolution sometimes necessary? Of course. But if you’re eager for it, please tell me how you expect freedom to emerge on the other side of the bloodbath? Tell me how you expect Enlightenment values to rule the day when most of the population has been so diligently conditioned by government schools, government-sucking media, and government itself? Most people wouldn’t know freedom if it bit them on the backside. The sixty percent whose daily lives hang on government checks aren’t going to thank you for depriving them — and they’re sure as heck not going to rush to help you restore values that they consider meaningless abstractions (if they consider them at all).

Doubt it? Just go ask any 10 people on the streets to tell you what’s in the Bill of Rights and why it matters.

Violent revolution may — may — be necessary. But unless hearts and minds are ready for freedom, the aftermath is going to look more like the French or Russian revolutions than like the Olde American one.

But there are other forms of revolution. And other forms of battle. Look around you; there are thousands of weapons that fire no projectiles, and rebels able to wield them.

When empire degrades to this, rebels rise to this.

Some fight within the system, but in their own flashy ways. Others … well, they make it interesting … and sometimes even triumph.

And what of humor and irreverence?. Amazingly powerful weapons, those. I’d go so far as to say there’s nothing a tyrant fears more than people who no longer take him seriously.

And the ordinary — yet extraordinary — power of networks? One of the factors that helped bring down the Soviet Union was a crude, primitive samizdat of fax machines, mimeograph machines, copiers, and radios. The kind with tubes. How much more power do we have, literally at our fingertips?

You might be able to cancel the program, if you have the power. But you can’t stop the signal. Not these days.

—–

Is anything going to happen fast? Who can say? It steamboats come steamboat time. Even if Nostradamus had been as prescient as the supermarket tabloids pretend he was, neither he nor anybody else could have said when any particular “steamboat time” would come or what form any particular “steamboat” would take.

I’ve been reading a couple of books lately that give a little historical perspective on the dilemmas we face. One is American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans by Eve LaPlante. The other is Judge Sewall’s Apology: The Salem Witch Trials and the Forming of an American Conscience by Richard Francis.

When the insufferably self-righteous Puritan leadership exiled the abrasive, outspoken Mrs. Hutchinson from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, they no doubt considered it a victory. Indeed things didn’t turn out so well for Hutchinson and her own. She first fled to the nascent Rhode Island colony, but the pesky Puritans continued to send agents to dog her. When it looked as if her enemies might take over Rhode Island, she and a number of her children sought refuge with the Dutch in what is now New York. But stubborn woman that she was, she stayed put when warned of an Indian attack — and she and all but one of those with her got scalped and burned.

No doubt her enemies crowed. But by their intolerance and cruelty to Hutchinson, they gave birth to the very thing they detested — religious freedom as an American political principle.

A few decades later, Samuel Sewall — a good man, though one whose values might be incomprehensible today — served as a judge in the Salem witch trials. Everybody agrees that those trials are a black mark on American history — superstition and credulity meeting teenage drama and social prejudice, resulting in mass hysteria and judicial murder.

Yet five years after the fact, when Judge Sewall examined his conscience and made a public apology (the lone judge out of nine to have the courage to do so), he helped change standards of justice and evidence — and even helped change the Yankee mindset. From the murderous “mistakes” of Medieval, symbolic, black-and-white thinking flowered a great intellectual revolution.

So you never know how change will come or when. But you can know that the darkest days and darkest events force light to dawn.

—–

Another thought, if it’s any comfort. This one’s on the timing of change and is for those who think we lack gumption because we’re not holding The Revolution right this very minute.

Did you know that, eighty-six years (almost to the day) before citizens of Concord and Lexington sent the Redcoats scurrying, the leaders of Boston arrested hated governor Edmund Andros, staging armed rebellion against his rule? Andros was the agent of a far-off king and they weren’t willing to put up with his high-handedness against them. They still considered themselves loyal Englishmen — as most American colonists would until the late 18th century. But when ass-kicking time came, they were ready to kick ass.

Still, it took their “steamboat time” another century to truly arrive. No point in despairing if our steamboat doesn’t dock tomorrow.

—–

Yes, still more to come …