What myself and many anarchists understand about the world now, whether it has been understood for a year or five or thirty, is that for all of recorded human history, small groups of humans have exerted tremendous, relentless efforts to manipulate and control as many humans as they can through the violation of free will. Through force, fraud, and coercion, sociopaths have spent exorbitant amounts of energy through centuries to figure out the most effective, efficient way to make free people submit to them.
Now, when referencing those people who try to rule other people, I could be referring to anyone who at any level attempts to violate the free will of another human through the threat of (or initiation of) violent force. What I wish to elaborate on is the different levels at which people try to rule others, since a clearer understanding of this will help us to better see the world around us as it truly is.
The Amateur
The amateur level of violent control is observed in a burglar. The burglar attempts to use immediate violent force against another human, without much premeditation or strategy, in order to directly control what the other human will do. The Amateur does this to gain the victim’s submission, submission that may mean the surrender of his material things, his space, his money, his body or whatever it is the The Amateur—the burglar—demands.
The Amateur violator gains more certainty for himself in this brief moment, than he might have had if he were attempting to work out a voluntary agreement, because he knows that if he forces a human to immediately choose between being seriously harmed or surrendering something, the odds are far higher the human being violated will respond to his demand.
The victim is far less likely to deny the burglar’s desires if a gun is at his head, if his life is at stake.
This temporary scenario provides The Amateur Violator with instant gratification; providing him whatever it is he believes he so desperately needs, provided his ill-thought and poorly-planned scheme succeeds.
However, all of this is still extremely risky for the burglar. He is still thinking only in terms of his own very short-term reality. He is not strategizing beyond the present event. He is seeking instant gratification to solve an immediate issue, without consideration for how the other human may choose to respond, or retaliate. The Amateur violator also fails to consider the sort of reputation he immediately acquires when that victim alerts anyone or everyone nearby. He does not consider the immediate consequences that likely can undo everything he hoped to accomplish in the short term. While he is certainly operating in sociopathy and is a dangerous person, he is also highly short-sighted and dimwitted because he lacks strategy, patience, and any long-term vision.
The Adept
The Adept violator is observed in the cartel lord—the human-trafficker or member of the mafia. This person chooses to think a bit more long-term. He knows how to implement a more strategic plan for defrauding, coercing and manipulating other individuals in his life. This person understands the balance between gaining some modicum of loyalty and trust, and then ensuring some level of continuing loyalty and trust through a careful mix of incentives and threats. The Adept violator understands the potential that lies just beyond the immediate, short-lived success experienced by The Amateur violator.
The Adept considers the fact that people tend to defend against direct force with force of their own, and so The Adept understands that he cannot obtain what he wants entirely by brute force. His strategies provide him with far more continuous and reliable results than The Amateur can expect. This sort of violator understands he must maintain a sort of equilibrium between creating and maintaining relationships, and using the threat of force to manipulate those relationships. This allows The Adept to enjoy a slightly steadier lifestyle of coercion than The Amateur could ever hope for.
Still, this Adept violator has missed something important. In his world—in the dark “business” practices of the cartel lord—every individual he is met with is consciously aware that a gun is behind every interaction. Inevitably, this serves to create a very expected and natural strain, a sort of resentment and ever-present tension. After all, the fight-or-flight survival process must always be turned on, like a background computer program always in process.
Ultimately this means trust only ever runs so deep. In a place where a gun is an unspoken (and often spoken) threat everyone is conscious of, there can be no deeply felt regard for human life. Since every individual involved understands this on some level, betrayals are rampant and exchanges are always dangerous. Trust and loyalty may exist to a degree, but are still somewhat fleeting, and mostly illusory.
The Professional
The Amateur and The Adept violators of human free will have been surveyed, but the type of person which exceeds them both rather significantly is shall be referred to as The Professional. The Professional violators are the sociopaths who build governments and have been running them in one form or another throughout most of human history.
The Professional violator wants to gain all the control, certainty and results of The Amateur and Adept, but to a far greater extent and in a more all-encompassing form. The Professional wants to achieve results for the entirety of their own lifetime. Many of these violators plan for beyond their deaths, to the degree that they even plan to leave a legacy that carries on what they worked for. This is evident in the Divine Right of Kings, or otherwise recognized in modern day in its new form: The Divine Right of Politicians.
The Professional violator is the sociopath who desires a life of comfort without having to deal directly with violent force in his/her immediate interactions with other individuals. The Professional has no interest in the precarious and tumultuous consequences of direct coercion. He wants to be above the messy, violent situations and avoid the dangerous potential outcomes all too common with direct coercion.
The Greatest Weapon of All : Part 1 - Understanding Free Will
It is often tempting to observe the enormous turbulence and violent atrocities committed by government throughout the ages and see only violent force. It would seem almost obvious in the catastrophic murder, thievery, caging, and torture that the greatest weapon at their disposal is their immense monopoly on deadly force. Some of those reading these words will already know where this is heading, and you know already that what would seem to be true simply is not.
Rulers at the highest ranks of sociopathic control acquire expansive power because they understand something about the human being. It is crucial to grasp for any group of people to successfully maintain power over large groups indefinitely. What then, precisely, is this particular ‘something’?
The Professional Violator understands free will.
Yes, The Professional understands human free will, but this is not asserting that The Professional believes free will should be honored. Obviously he doesn’t think such a thing or he wouldn’t be what he is. The Professional does, however, understand that free will exists, whether he would call it by that name or not, and understands what it means for how humans interact and how those humans react to coercion and violation. While the sociopath would love a servant robot—even a host of them—the intelligent, educated sociopath knows humans are far from that.
The Professional violators understand that human free will is an essential human trait, inseparable from the human. This means that it is a trait that is required in order to call a human “human” at all. Without that trait, humans are either simple robots or pure biological programming, limited to a strict instinct like that of a sea urchin. Free will cannot be bred out. It can certainly be manipulated, but it cannot be removed from us. The Professional violator came to understand this over many centuries, and so adjusted and refined his approach to rulership.
The refining of rulership by The Professional Violator comes with his discovering the most valuable truth learned by those who wished to rule: something that would appear to be subtle, but was most imperative to graduating from the tumultuousness of feudalism to the First World Empire of Prosperity.
An outright violation of free will, when understood as an outright violation by the victim himself, creates a dangerous, retaliatory victim who cannot be trusted to submit or to be “loyal” to any ruler in the long term. Smart sociopaths—what are now Professional violators—came to learn that they must allow victims to feel free will, to believe they are in possession of it and using it. The victim must experience, for the most part, most of the time, a sense of free will in every day living.
Feudalism was messy, was too directly violent for many of the rulers, and created such drastic gaps between classes of humans, that the burdened herds of human cattle were pushed to the brink of death often, making them far more resentful of their masters and far too likely to be violent towards them—quite unlike the average American resident’s likelihood to violently resist a cop. The extremes of constant starvation, disease and death, coupled with the brutal harassment by the higher classes, created a resentful group of humans prone to retaliation and revolution.
The Greatest Weapon Of All: Violation Becomes Protection
The first part of the greatest weapon has just been reviewed. That is, the understanding that human free will cannot be bred out, and that the human being needs to therefore have some sense and satisfaction that they are free to choose how to live their life. This gives the human a sense of contentedness, satisfaction, and happiness, enough that they are less likely to revolt against any power, since they don’t perceive a real serious violation of their will, and not often enough.
The second part comes in how humans protect their free will.
It starts with staying alive. Humans can’t express, and create, and interact, and innovate in the world if they are dead, so right away, upon exiting the womb, they want to remain alive. As they grow older, each one learns how to obtain greater degrees of protection over their body and property. This includes greater degrees of security in order to guarantee continued survival and the ability to keep using our free will. The desire for security, whether on the level of a tribesman, or on the level of a CEO, is natural, and is tied to our survival, which is tied to the desire to continue using our will.
The Professionals who have owned, built, and run governments of various forms, eventually figured out that it made a lot more sense to appeal to the natural human desire for security, rather than control humans by immediately, directly violating that security.
Given this reality, the key was for The Professional to find a way to create a life for the victim where they perceived they were safe and secure, and when violations did occur, they would even hallucinate those violations to be protections.
If I think the Violator is actually somehow my Protector, am I going to revolt against him? Defend myself? Of course not. Why would I?
The Spartan leaders understood that having good soldiers who would obey orders had to begin in the young boy’s mind, and so in Sparta, the young were molded through early compulsory schooling. They were trained to be obedient, trained to be servants to a greater cause, and taught that all of that was for… what?
The protection of their world, their lifestyle, their empire.
When any one observes the history of American Compulsory schooling, he learns that its designers derived it from The Prussian model of schooling. Would you believe the Prussians knew the same things the Spartans did? They did, indeed. They knew that logical men don’t surrender their own freedom and hallucinate a direct threat of force as a source of protection, and so they don’t make for obedient, servile soldiers to a war-driven group of sociopaths. It followed, in their minds, that logical men must be made into irrational men by beginning in the mind of the child long before he becomes a man.
American schooling was borrowed from the Prussians, and its aim was first and foremost to distort reality for the human mind, the primary aim being to create a hallucinated worldview where a violation of that human’s free will would be perceived as exactly the opposite.
This is done through the use of language, and the manipulation of it. Individuals are taught by other individuals when they are very young, through language, how to determine reality around us. Ideally, humans should be passing down the tools to determine real from unreal for ourselves, not told what ought to be assumed as real.
If everyone surrounding a young man communicates to that young man that a police officer or military person is something called a “Protector”, and that young human sees everyone around him accepts this as fact, then he is trained to see something that is not actually there. He is told that the police officers’ actions are good, and that instead of violations, they are protections. So then, the young man becomes grateful to, and support, his own oppressor.
Does The Professional Have A Weakness?
It was previously noted that The Amateur violator (the burglar) and The Adept (the member of the mob) were overlooking crucial elements to successfully securing their own power. The Amateur is living right in the moment with no regard for the consequence of the victim’s retaliation, and The Adept lives in a world of tension where trust is short-lived, because everyone is aware of deadly force behind every transaction and so every man is loyal to himself first above any principle.
Now that The Professionals have been reviewed—the sociopaths that build, run, and even own governments, sociopaths who have understood human psychology for some time, and have spent generations distorting and bending it in order to make humans into unwitting free range slaves—what is it that The Professional could be failing at? What is their weakness? Like the Adept and the Amateur, are The Professional violators also forgetting something? Are they missing something?
Today we have something called the Internet. For the first time in our history, information and mass-communication of information (as well as mass-sharing of information) is in the hands of the average person— the sort of person who before might have grown up an ignorant child in a limited compulsory schooling system, whose outlets to the world were managed by teachers, parents, newspapers, or a television with a handful of channels, with most of those newspapers and television channels being owned and manipulated (indirectly or otherwise) by a small minority.
What is The Professional’s weakness, then?
The weakness is in the arrogant assumption that he or she can get away with distorting reality for the human and violating their free will indefinitely, to whatever degree seen fit.
If free will cannot be bred out, or separated from us, because it is a necessary trait of a human, then it stands to reason that the will of a human could only be violated so repeatedly, for so long, before some part of the human mind would begin to take notice and to feel the oppression of that, regardless their level of indoctrination.
Yes, the human will is so strong, and so persistent, that even if our conscious mind is temporarily fooled into justifying our own oppression and violations of our freedom, our subconscious mind has a sense of those limits, and it will FIGHT BACK.
Where can evidence be seen of humans attempting to free themselves, whether they are consciously aware they are so oppressed?
It is seen in the open-source software technologies being created and developed upon.
It is seen in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
It is seen in entrepreneurs making a living off of Craigslist by exchanging skill for cash.
It is seen in companies such as Uber, Lyft and other carpooling and transportation companies launched by every day people as alternatives to government-monopolized transport.
It is seen in mobile apps that allow quick exchanges of favors and small gigs for cash or Bitcoin.
It is seen in the resurgence of people teaching and acquiring survival skills, homesteading skills, and in the increase of firearms purchases.
It can also be seen in major donation/fund-raising sites and companies that want to allow a freer way for individuals to fund what they want in this world voluntarily without a chunk being stolen along the way.
It can even be observed in the store front sites that allow the average person to instantly become a business person and sell their wares without any kind of licensure or other government approval.
Humans—most of whom are not consciously anarchists/Voluntaryists at all, and who may still verbally defend their own violators because they have been trained to do so—these humans everywhere are, quite literally, freeing themselves in spite of all attempts to limit them further.
Thanks to the internet and the technologies possessed by millions today, intended victims of mass control can go around instituted walls and clear away the distortions of reality, dissipating the fog in their minds. And because that can be done, The Professionals are being seen as they really are. The veil comes off, and people can see that their Great Protector had been their greatest Violator all along.
Have Humans Been On The Wrong Battleground?
For centuries, perhaps even millennia, individuals have discovered governments were full of evil people doing evil things. And for all those centuries, humans fought that violence with violence, revolted by overthrowing rulers, tried to change government via infiltration, tried time and again to rid themselves of a great evil they perceived only to replace it with another. Over and over again the monster of authoritarianism only grew and persisted.
Yet, this is only because for so long humans were fighting on the wrong battleground.
The monopoly on force, and their monopoly on it, has always been secondary, but it has been the battleground humans of the past were stuck on.
The truth is that force has always been the undergirding to the primary weapon, which is control of ideas, control of the mind.
The battleground is the mind and the weapon is the almighty idea. Ultimately, people will act based on what they believe in their mind about the world around them. Force is nearly meaningless without a bunch of people who support it, allow it, and participate in it as though it’s moral and legitimate. Without the hallucination that the great Violator of all time is a Great Protector, the Violators are outnumbered, out-gunned, and most of all— rendered useless and irrelevant by the humans who will live life as though the Violator is a mere inconvenience to be swept aside, a pathetic pebble in the shoe.
As this is written, individuals here on Earth are standing on the primary battleground of The Professional violators, fully aware of it. They are seen trying to infiltrate the mind, and are being shut down and shut out for good.
Now, those free minds are helping to free other minds from these violators as well. The powerful and resilient human will cannot be destroyed. It can at best be manipulated for awhile, and the Professional sociopaths have lost the expansive control they once had over information exchange, so their number one weapon has been discovered and taken back.
Those of us freed are now fighting on the battleground of the mind, the real battleground, with our ideas, the only real weapons, and so the truth already wins, it is just a matter of time.
Ideas are more powerful than any other war weapon; be it a gun, a tank, or an A-bomb, because they drive whatever it is humans do.
Ideas are all that have ever changed the world.