Im going to share a chapter of the book im writing for shits and giggles
In Chapter Two I listed the government not representing us as the second root societal issue of rampant-market societies with hierarchical and centralized governments (H/C/Gs). I don’t think I have to elaborate on that point much; this is a truth that most people are painfully aware of.
Where I’m sure I do need to explain my reasoning is in my stance that this is a structural issue.
I know this is a bitter pill to swallow, but Preambles are just sales pitches; H/C/Gs simply cannot represent us. They have their own interests separate from ours, and since they have all the power, you can bet that those will always take precedence. Leviathan cannot do more, or even as much, for us as we do for it; it’s very anatomy will not allow it.
Now, this could be changed. How? Well, the same way someone could make you spin your head 360 degrees: with enough force. The experiment would kill you, though, and just as violent revolutions of the past have retained the same power dynamic between common people and their governments—changing only the level of subtlety in their bondage—nothing meaningful would be accomplished.
The Pretense of Government
Someone cries out: “But, the government fulfills vital functions for society! They provide infrastructure, public education, and monitor private businesses to protect consumers!”
That is correct. I call it: “The Pretense of Government”.
Everything that the state provides is done under this pretense: that fostering the general welfare of the people is their one and only goal in providing these services. Sorry to break it to you, but what the state gets out of it is the true purpose. What you happen to get out of it is only their justification for taking your money and giving you a mugging, a beating, a bullet, and/or free room and board, if you don’t comply. The truth of this is seen in the poor quality of these services. Including, but not limited to:
Crumbling infrastructure, especially roads.
A public education system that leaves you unprepared for life
Regulatory agencies that claim to protect you while businesses shake you down
How many times have you sat in infuriating traffic and asked yourself why the roadways aren’t more efficient? It wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to think of something better than two lane roads and forty million stoplights, after all. Ever felt like public school wasted years of your time and left you clueless about how to build a life for yourself? Have you ever had to fight tooth and nail with a government agency to get what you're legally entitled to, only to feel like you're being gaslit or stonewalled by the system, all while exploitative businesses get off scot-free?
I’m sure at least one of those three questions will bring up frustrating memories for you. This frustration is a result of taking these services at face value; supporting you is not their true purpose.
Roads exist in case military deployment is necessary—not for you to get home from work faster. In times of invasion or rebellion, guess who won’t be using them much? You. Unless you happen to be a soldier, that is.
Public education is designed to create workers, not thinkers. It ensures you can keep a job and provide steady tax revenues. Whether or not you find fulfilling work for sufficient pay? That’s your problem.
Regulatory agencies exist to prevent crime waves, not to save you from being exploited. The government’s goal isn’t to eliminate corporate abuses—just to keep them under a red line so the economy—and their tax money—isn’t ruined by a tidal wave of retaliation. (Remember that UnitedHealthcare CEO?)
Whatever use the people happen to get out of roads, the education system, or regulatory agencies, is an afterthought. These things are good enough for the state and so they are good enough for us pissants.
The only public services that are never lackluster are those directly tied to the power of the state; chiefly, the military. An H/C/G will spare no expense in having everything it needs to threaten foreign ones that get pig eyes for their food—and by “their food” I mean us, our lands, and everything we own that is taxable—and to threaten their food too if we ever get any ideas about taking ourselves off the menu.
I assure you, if there was some way to get consistent and considerable tax revenues from a population that was constantly under the threat of foreign invasion, or prone to violent uprisings, our militaries would be just as shitty as our roadways, schools, and regulatory agencies.
But shouldn’t H/C/Gs get some credit for accomplishments like civil rights or social security?
No.
Why? Because they’re the ones that caused the problems that created the need for those solutions in the first place.
If I smash a huge hole in your roof, and then fix it, should I get to use that as justification for ruling over you? No. That would be stupid and evil. Now, let’s make that even more stupid and evil by making this metaphor even more true to what H/C/Gs have “accomplished”:
What if I fixed the roof, but I used your money to do it? Hell, what if instead of me fixing the roof, you had to beg me to allow you to fix it with your own money and labor. Now imagine you had to beg for generations, suffering the leakage, the cold, and the heat that comes with having a gigantic hole in your roof. All the while I punch and kick you for daring to ask for the right to repair your roof that I damaged. Finally, after decades on decades, I relent and allow you to finance and install the repairs. Should you be grateful?
Under an H/C/G social neglect, hell, social abuse, is a feature, not a failure. The system isn’t broken; it is accomplishing its true goal—to perpetuate itself. This is why politicians can rarely deliver real change.
Politicians’ promises are usually just a means to get your vote. As soon as they get into office they may very well try to keep them, only to find out just how resistant to change the government is. Or, they may just make accusatory excuses, fling them at the other party, and immediately start fundraising for the next round of elections—as they never had any plans to make good on their promises anyway.
Why even vote then? What’s the point?
Vote to Gain Leverage!
To address whether or not voting has any purpose, I must bring things back around to the purpose of this book; my plan for heterarchical and decentralized communities (H/D/Cs).
The only time an H/C government aligns with the people’s interests is when private individuals with deep pockets push for it. Lobbying is the politically correct name for it (it is formally known as “oligarchy”. Or “bribery” for short) and what lobbying demonstrates to us is that the only force powerful enough to compel Leviathan is game theory.
Game theory is the study of how people or groups make decisions when their choices affect each other, and lobbying is an example of game theory in action. Corporations give money to politicians to influence policy, while politicians weigh financial support against voter expectations. It’s a game, and we—the common people—are pawns.
It is unfortunate that the livelihoods of so many millions of people have become tied up in this game, but crying about it won’t solve anything; the plan in this book very well may, though. If we solve the two fundamental issues of society by becoming functionally independent of the market and the government, we become players at the board in our own right.
So, why vote at all? Personally, I vote for politicians that would make the above easier to accomplish. I vote for politicians whose plans just so happen to facilitate my plan in Chapter Two.
Don’t vote to fix the system—because there is no fixing this system—vote to create leverage we can use to build something better.
And I assure you, creating leverage by which we can control our own fates is indeed our best move. Why? Because even when H/C governments try to improve society for the sake of their people, things get worse.
Why the Government Can’t Be the Answer
You know, whenever I begin to pitch my plan for self-sustainable, heterarchical and decentralized communities ( H/D/Cs) to someone who leans Modern North American Liberal, the first thing they ask me is something like:
“So, is this a rallying cry to petition the government? A grassroots campaign to make them muster and organize the means to make this happen”
It is hilarious to see their flabbergasted faces when I answer “of course not!
Then I explain to them that having politicians handle this would just mean taking our chain from the market and handing it to the government instead. What do you get when you mix socialism with hierarchical and centralized power structures?
Most of the time you get Communism—and that’s been tried before.
To say the least, that didn’t go well. And guess what? Wage labor was still mandatory, and the government still didn’t represent the common person’s interests. Both of the root issues of modern society were still present!
Socialism started out as a good idea being worked on by great, patient, and thorough minds like Peter Kropotkin. But then guys like Karl Marxx, his hype man Friedrich Engels, and the most successful opportunist in the world Vladimir Lenin, grabbed it, ran off with it, didn’t do all the math, turned it into Communism, and that led a lot of people to dark times.
Socialism + H/C/Gs ≤ communism
Remember that equation kids; socialism works best if it is done by people, for people, with no government middleman in between. It typically does NOT mix well with H/C/Gs; this will either equal out to communism, or to something less than communism but not quite socialism either. (Like a heavily compromised welfare state constantly under siege from private interests. Speaking of which…)
Highly socialized democracies, such as the Nordic and Nordic-modeled countries, are the best-case result to this formula. Their governments are still hierarchical and centralized (though less so than most, which is probably why they get good results) but they have robust social services and worker protections.
This relatively better societal model was only arrived at after centuries of struggle against the exploitative efforts of H/C power structures, and that struggle continues even to this day. Market entities often use their capital to push back against policies that prioritize the common good over profits, and when H/C/Gs fight each other—be it by direct or indirect (cold) warfare—these countries suffer greatly from their proximity. What these nations have achieved is constantly under threat on all fronts; wolves at the margins and serpents among them.
Democratic socialist countries are better places to be for working class people, but they are still very much subject to the whims of Leviathan. This is largely because H/C/P structures are inherently less stable than H/D/P structures are.
Why is this so? Because it doesn’t matter what kind of system you put into the hands of an H/C/P structure, especially one as powerful as a national government. Anything, sooner or later, from within or from without, will be warped into a method of resource extraction and control. That is literally what the purpose of these societies always was. The DNA of modern H/C governance was set long ago, and ancient Rome is an excellent case in point.
The DNA of Hierarchical and Centralized Power
The current world order’s legal systems are heavily based in Roman Law.
Everyone is always on about how noble and advanced those romans were for having such sophisticated law codes
Do you know how Rome started?
As a gang of thieves and rapists.
They made a lifestyle out of taking other people’s stuff—and other people, at that (slaves)—by force. When a bunch of thieving, raping, assholes decide to live together at the base of a hill, yeah, you’re going to need rules to figure out whose stuff it is never okay to take, whose stuff it is okay to take under certain conditions, and whose stuff is free game because they aren’t actually people in the eyes of the law. Without such rules, things would get messy real quick.
It just makes sense given the crowd you’re dealing with.
In the beginning, a warrior elite of aristocrats held the Roman Empire together. They spread through Europe and the Mediterranean conquering people as they went. Most settled into Roman rule because, ruthless though they were, their terms weren’t terrible: worship our emperor along with your god(s), pay your taxes, and you’ll get by and have our protection.
But, through the generations, the descendants of this warrior elite devolved into bloated aristocrats fit for nothing but orgies, drugs, and stuffing their faces. More and more of the burden of sustaining Rome fell onto the common people. The terms got worse and worse. Higher taxes, less freedoms (any of this sounding familiar?)—and to top it all off—Rome became spread so thin that it could hardly defend its conquered peoples any better than they could defend themselves.
To the group of people who had become most responsible for upholding it, Rome was no longer worth the hassle. So, it collapsed under its own weight with just a few nudges from hostile barbarians.
Then, the pieces of its dead body were carved up and divided by the catholic church and those barbarian tribes. These tribes, culturally fused with the remnants of Rome, sometimes strengthened and sometimes played against each other in The Vatican’s quest to latch onto worldly power, later became the great kingships of Europe.
Portugal, Spain, England, France, The Dutch Republic, Denmark-Norway, Sweden.
During their development, these kingdoms were in a constant arms race to see who could exploit their subjects the most efficiently. The reason France and England became so powerful is a direct result of the systems for taxation and military conscription that they developed. The other kingships scrambled to follow suit.
Eventually, the want for the treasures of the east—Asia; which had gone through its own process of forced state-building and sophisticated exploitation far earlier in history—drove these entities to seek gold and silver in the western hemisphere to trade for them (because many of the Asian societies were too far and too tough to steal from).
I think we can all guess how they got that gold and silver.
Did you guess rape and plunder? If so, you are correct!
I said all of that to convey that the eastern hemisphere—the part of the world that essentially gave birth to massive and sustained centralized and hierarchical power structures— has a history that is extremely, pitifully, easy to simplify into a long series of stealing from, killing, and exploiting both their own people and others.
So is it really any wonder that our current governmental system, which was derived largely from that system, couldn’t do a good thing if it tried? It doesn't even know what that looks like.
The thought reminds me of that episode of South Park where the evil Eric Cartman decides to be nice, and so he puts on a nice sweater and proceeds to act exactly the same.
Getting anything from Leviathan is like wishing on a monkey’s paw, or making a deal with the devil; expect things to go very wrong no matter how you go about it.
It HAS to be US!
Our societies are held together by the common person’s will to survive; by the fact that, deep down, all we really want is to just live. If we were as prone to chaos and violence as simps like Thomas Hobbes would have you believe, there is no way we would have ever become a social species capable of advanced cooperation.
I stand with minds like David Graeber and David Wengrow who assert that we, as a species, have simply gotten stuck in a loop: powerful dominance hierarchies cause history to repeat itself due to the fact that not much is possible under their control. Murphy’s Law.
We are in the grip of a powerful, far reaching, creature, but also a very simple and ignorant one. No matter what developments may happen due to the innovation and tenacity of the human race, they will always be warped towards its aim to consume everything that it can.
You can bet that there will be conflicts for resources.
That there will be haves and have nots.
On people’s chance to have meaningful lives always depending on their ability to be of use to entities that care nothing for them.
If we aren’t the ones to improve society, it will never happen. The same tragedies will keep happening to us, just with spacesuits on.
(Have you ever seen that American sci-fi series: ‘The 100’?)
Where I’m sure I do need to explain my reasoning is in my stance that this is a structural issue.
I know this is a bitter pill to swallow, but Preambles are just sales pitches; H/C/Gs simply cannot represent us. They have their own interests separate from ours, and since they have all the power, you can bet that those will always take precedence. Leviathan cannot do more, or even as much, for us as we do for it; it’s very anatomy will not allow it.
Now, this could be changed. How? Well, the same way someone could make you spin your head 360 degrees: with enough force. The experiment would kill you, though, and just as violent revolutions of the past have retained the same power dynamic between common people and their governments—changing only the level of subtlety in their bondage—nothing meaningful would be accomplished.
The Pretense of Government
Someone cries out: “But, the government fulfills vital functions for society! They provide infrastructure, public education, and monitor private businesses to protect consumers!”
That is correct. I call it: “The Pretense of Government”.
Everything that the state provides is done under this pretense: that fostering the general welfare of the people is their one and only goal in providing these services. Sorry to break it to you, but what the state gets out of it is the true purpose. What you happen to get out of it is only their justification for taking your money and giving you a mugging, a beating, a bullet, and/or free room and board, if you don’t comply. The truth of this is seen in the poor quality of these services. Including, but not limited to:
Crumbling infrastructure, especially roads.
A public education system that leaves you unprepared for life
Regulatory agencies that claim to protect you while businesses shake you down
How many times have you sat in infuriating traffic and asked yourself why the roadways aren’t more efficient? It wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to think of something better than two lane roads and forty million stoplights, after all. Ever felt like public school wasted years of your time and left you clueless about how to build a life for yourself? Have you ever had to fight tooth and nail with a government agency to get what you're legally entitled to, only to feel like you're being gaslit or stonewalled by the system, all while exploitative businesses get off scot-free?
I’m sure at least one of those three questions will bring up frustrating memories for you. This frustration is a result of taking these services at face value; supporting you is not their true purpose.
Roads exist in case military deployment is necessary—not for you to get home from work faster. In times of invasion or rebellion, guess who won’t be using them much? You. Unless you happen to be a soldier, that is.
Public education is designed to create workers, not thinkers. It ensures you can keep a job and provide steady tax revenues. Whether or not you find fulfilling work for sufficient pay? That’s your problem.
Regulatory agencies exist to prevent crime waves, not to save you from being exploited. The government’s goal isn’t to eliminate corporate abuses—just to keep them under a red line so the economy—and their tax money—isn’t ruined by a tidal wave of retaliation. (Remember that UnitedHealthcare CEO?)
Whatever use the people happen to get out of roads, the education system, or regulatory agencies, is an afterthought. These things are good enough for the state and so they are good enough for us pissants.
The only public services that are never lackluster are those directly tied to the power of the state; chiefly, the military. An H/C/G will spare no expense in having everything it needs to threaten foreign ones that get pig eyes for their food—and by “their food” I mean us, our lands, and everything we own that is taxable—and to threaten their food too if we ever get any ideas about taking ourselves off the menu.
I assure you, if there was some way to get consistent and considerable tax revenues from a population that was constantly under the threat of foreign invasion, or prone to violent uprisings, our militaries would be just as shitty as our roadways, schools, and regulatory agencies.
But shouldn’t H/C/Gs get some credit for accomplishments like civil rights or social security?
No.
Why? Because they’re the ones that caused the problems that created the need for those solutions in the first place.
If I smash a huge hole in your roof, and then fix it, should I get to use that as justification for ruling over you? No. That would be stupid and evil. Now, let’s make that even more stupid and evil by making this metaphor even more true to what H/C/Gs have “accomplished”:
What if I fixed the roof, but I used your money to do it? Hell, what if instead of me fixing the roof, you had to beg me to allow you to fix it with your own money and labor. Now imagine you had to beg for generations, suffering the leakage, the cold, and the heat that comes with having a gigantic hole in your roof. All the while I punch and kick you for daring to ask for the right to repair your roof that I damaged. Finally, after decades on decades, I relent and allow you to finance and install the repairs. Should you be grateful?
Under an H/C/G social neglect, hell, social abuse, is a feature, not a failure. The system isn’t broken; it is accomplishing its true goal—to perpetuate itself. This is why politicians can rarely deliver real change.
Politicians’ promises are usually just a means to get your vote. As soon as they get into office they may very well try to keep them, only to find out just how resistant to change the government is. Or, they may just make accusatory excuses, fling them at the other party, and immediately start fundraising for the next round of elections—as they never had any plans to make good on their promises anyway.
Why even vote then? What’s the point?
Vote to Gain Leverage!
To address whether or not voting has any purpose, I must bring things back around to the purpose of this book; my plan for heterarchical and decentralized communities (H/D/Cs).
The only time an H/C government aligns with the people’s interests is when private individuals with deep pockets push for it. Lobbying is the politically correct name for it (it is formally known as “oligarchy”. Or “bribery” for short) and what lobbying demonstrates to us is that the only force powerful enough to compel Leviathan is game theory.
Game theory is the study of how people or groups make decisions when their choices affect each other, and lobbying is an example of game theory in action. Corporations give money to politicians to influence policy, while politicians weigh financial support against voter expectations. It’s a game, and we—the common people—are pawns.
It is unfortunate that the livelihoods of so many millions of people have become tied up in this game, but crying about it won’t solve anything; the plan in this book very well may, though. If we solve the two fundamental issues of society by becoming functionally independent of the market and the government, we become players at the board in our own right.
So, why vote at all? Personally, I vote for politicians that would make the above easier to accomplish. I vote for politicians whose plans just so happen to facilitate my plan in Chapter Two.
Don’t vote to fix the system—because there is no fixing this system—vote to create leverage we can use to build something better.
And I assure you, creating leverage by which we can control our own fates is indeed our best move. Why? Because even when H/C governments try to improve society for the sake of their people, things get worse.
Why the Government Can’t Be the Answer
You know, whenever I begin to pitch my plan for self-sustainable, heterarchical and decentralized communities ( H/D/Cs) to someone who leans Modern North American Liberal, the first thing they ask me is something like:
“So, is this a rallying cry to petition the government? A grassroots campaign to make them muster and organize the means to make this happen”
It is hilarious to see their flabbergasted faces when I answer “of course not!
Then I explain to them that having politicians handle this would just mean taking our chain from the market and handing it to the government instead. What do you get when you mix socialism with hierarchical and centralized power structures?
Most of the time you get Communism—and that’s been tried before.
To say the least, that didn’t go well. And guess what? Wage labor was still mandatory, and the government still didn’t represent the common person’s interests. Both of the root issues of modern society were still present!
Socialism started out as a good idea being worked on by great, patient, and thorough minds like Peter Kropotkin. But then guys like Karl Marxx, his hype man Friedrich Engels, and the most successful opportunist in the world Vladimir Lenin, grabbed it, ran off with it, didn’t do all the math, turned it into Communism, and that led a lot of people to dark times.
Socialism + H/C/Gs ≤ communism
Remember that equation kids; socialism works best if it is done by people, for people, with no government middleman in between. It typically does NOT mix well with H/C/Gs; this will either equal out to communism, or to something less than communism but not quite socialism either. (Like a heavily compromised welfare state constantly under siege from private interests. Speaking of which…)
Highly socialized democracies, such as the Nordic and Nordic-modeled countries, are the best-case result to this formula. Their governments are still hierarchical and centralized (though less so than most, which is probably why they get good results) but they have robust social services and worker protections.
This relatively better societal model was only arrived at after centuries of struggle against the exploitative efforts of H/C power structures, and that struggle continues even to this day. Market entities often use their capital to push back against policies that prioritize the common good over profits, and when H/C/Gs fight each other—be it by direct or indirect (cold) warfare—these countries suffer greatly from their proximity. What these nations have achieved is constantly under threat on all fronts; wolves at the margins and serpents among them.
Democratic socialist countries are better places to be for working class people, but they are still very much subject to the whims of Leviathan. This is largely because H/C/P structures are inherently less stable than H/D/P structures are.
Why is this so? Because it doesn’t matter what kind of system you put into the hands of an H/C/P structure, especially one as powerful as a national government. Anything, sooner or later, from within or from without, will be warped into a method of resource extraction and control. That is literally what the purpose of these societies always was. The DNA of modern H/C governance was set long ago, and ancient Rome is an excellent case in point.
The DNA of Hierarchical and Centralized Power
The current world order’s legal systems are heavily based in Roman Law.
Everyone is always on about how noble and advanced those romans were for having such sophisticated law codes
Do you know how Rome started?
As a gang of thieves and rapists.
They made a lifestyle out of taking other people’s stuff—and other people, at that (slaves)—by force. When a bunch of thieving, raping, assholes decide to live together at the base of a hill, yeah, you’re going to need rules to figure out whose stuff it is never okay to take, whose stuff it is okay to take under certain conditions, and whose stuff is free game because they aren’t actually people in the eyes of the law. Without such rules, things would get messy real quick.
It just makes sense given the crowd you’re dealing with.
In the beginning, a warrior elite of aristocrats held the Roman Empire together. They spread through Europe and the Mediterranean conquering people as they went. Most settled into Roman rule because, ruthless though they were, their terms weren’t terrible: worship our emperor along with your god(s), pay your taxes, and you’ll get by and have our protection.
But, through the generations, the descendants of this warrior elite devolved into bloated aristocrats fit for nothing but orgies, drugs, and stuffing their faces. More and more of the burden of sustaining Rome fell onto the common people. The terms got worse and worse. Higher taxes, less freedoms (any of this sounding familiar?)—and to top it all off—Rome became spread so thin that it could hardly defend its conquered peoples any better than they could defend themselves.
To the group of people who had become most responsible for upholding it, Rome was no longer worth the hassle. So, it collapsed under its own weight with just a few nudges from hostile barbarians.
Then, the pieces of its dead body were carved up and divided by the catholic church and those barbarian tribes. These tribes, culturally fused with the remnants of Rome, sometimes strengthened and sometimes played against each other in The Vatican’s quest to latch onto worldly power, later became the great kingships of Europe.
Portugal, Spain, England, France, The Dutch Republic, Denmark-Norway, Sweden.
During their development, these kingdoms were in a constant arms race to see who could exploit their subjects the most efficiently. The reason France and England became so powerful is a direct result of the systems for taxation and military conscription that they developed. The other kingships scrambled to follow suit.
Eventually, the want for the treasures of the east—Asia; which had gone through its own process of forced state-building and sophisticated exploitation far earlier in history—drove these entities to seek gold and silver in the western hemisphere to trade for them (because many of the Asian societies were too far and too tough to steal from).
I think we can all guess how they got that gold and silver.
Did you guess rape and plunder? If so, you are correct!
I said all of that to convey that the eastern hemisphere—the part of the world that essentially gave birth to massive and sustained centralized and hierarchical power structures— has a history that is extremely, pitifully, easy to simplify into a long series of stealing from, killing, and exploiting both their own people and others.
So is it really any wonder that our current governmental system, which was derived largely from that system, couldn’t do a good thing if it tried? It doesn't even know what that looks like.
The thought reminds me of that episode of South Park where the evil Eric Cartman decides to be nice, and so he puts on a nice sweater and proceeds to act exactly the same.
Getting anything from Leviathan is like wishing on a monkey’s paw, or making a deal with the devil; expect things to go very wrong no matter how you go about it.
It HAS to be US!
Our societies are held together by the common person’s will to survive; by the fact that, deep down, all we really want is to just live. If we were as prone to chaos and violence as simps like Thomas Hobbes would have you believe, there is no way we would have ever become a social species capable of advanced cooperation.
I stand with minds like David Graeber and David Wengrow who assert that we, as a species, have simply gotten stuck in a loop: powerful dominance hierarchies cause history to repeat itself due to the fact that not much is possible under their control. Murphy’s Law.
We are in the grip of a powerful, far reaching, creature, but also a very simple and ignorant one. No matter what developments may happen due to the innovation and tenacity of the human race, they will always be warped towards its aim to consume everything that it can.
You can bet that there will be conflicts for resources.
That there will be haves and have nots.
On people’s chance to have meaningful lives always depending on their ability to be of use to entities that care nothing for them.
If we aren’t the ones to improve society, it will never happen. The same tragedies will keep happening to us, just with spacesuits on.
(Have you ever seen that American sci-fi series: ‘The 100’?)
