Author’s Foreword
I’ve been working on this, in my head and on paper for a very long time now. I’ve decided to assemble my thoughts on this rather sprawling topic into one place and publish them now, in hopes of getting some feedback on them. Having spent so many years pondering things along these very lines and deciding they make an awful lot of sense to me, I am eager to hear a thought on this that didn’t originate within my skull.
I also published this now because I realize that I will never actually be “done” mulling this matter over in my mind, so, there was no way to wait until I was “done” thinking about it so as to then begin writing about it. There would even be less of a way to be comprehensively done writing about it as I’d never be done thinking about it. So, what’s here today will likely change somewhat over time. I wouldn’t expect a sea-change as I can’t imagine I’m far wrong here, but who knows? At any rate, someone please tell me I’m not totally crazy anyway.
Also, as this is a work in progress and a product of my mind, it’s a bit sweary; reader discretion is advised. Pussy.
Cheers!
Kyle A. Lohmeier,
25th August, 2016
Introduction
According to the Internet, scientists have long been working on something called the Theory of Everything; a big concept that unites the various disciplines of physical science into a comprehensive understanding of the known universe. I’m told they’re not there yet, not that I’d necessarily know or not; my life isn’t likely to be much changed whether or not science achieves this end in my lifetime. Not that such pursuits aren’t noble or important, but I’m just a asshole living in Ohio – replicating the instant the universe came into being in the large hadron collider at CERN doesn’t do me a shit ton of good. Just saying.
I do find the idea of a Theory of Everything interesting as an amateur philosopher, however; and I myself have long been working on what I call the Theory of Nearly Everything Else, or TNEE (“Tee-Nee”). By definition, TNEE covers the sorts of things the people who know what a large hadron collider is and how to operate it aren’t working on. Things like human interaction, government and culture. And, how those things interact with each other to create what most of us living in the United States perceive as our day to day lives.
While the physicists concern themselves with how neutrinos blast through our planet mostly uninterrupted, I have spent the last 20 years wondering how our society, culture and government all blast through our consciousness to paint for us the world we see everyday. While physicists of the standard model concern themselves with electromagnetic, weak and strong atomic attraction, and how those forces shape our world, I believe that for the homo sapiens sapiens living in the United States in 2016, society, culture and government are three forces more immediately recognizable as defining all life. Just like the fundamental forces of the universe interact to create the physical reality we exist in, the forces of society, culture and government are all inextricably intertwined; society produces culture – government springs from the weaknesses society allows culture to show.
“Society,” as I describe it for the purposes of this thought exercise, is the entirety of the lifestyles and mindsets we as a modern species agree, more or less, to accept as “normal.” “Culture,” is the sum-total of the ways we choose to amuse, bore and infuriate each other. “Government,” is of course, government, the State.
Society
Our society, in the United States of America in 2016, is that of a people who are willfully ignorant in many ways. At some point in our recent past, it was decided that the responsibility for knowing even basic things about how the world works was too much to ask of an individual citizen. Over years, thanks to public education in large part, we have a citizenry that is accustomed to, and indeed expects, having government do a lot of their critical thinking for them. We have a multitude of government agencies that stand between us and consumer goods of all sorts. We don’t have to ask ourselves if it is really a good idea to go mucking about with our body’s endocrine system; the Food and Drug Administration approved the testosterone-replacement therapy, right? We don’t have to worry about buying a bare-bones entry-level car that lacks expensive electronic driving aids for “safety,” the government forces car-makers to upgrade what counts as “standard-equipment” every so many years; and in so doing prices many people out of new vehicle ownership as those “upgrades” are expensive and the cost gets passed on to the consumer. We don’t even have to think about politics and philosophy; our government has given us two pre-approved brands to choose from.
So, as a society, we’ve grown lazy and dumb. We don’t connect FDA drug recalls and government-mandated vehicle recalls with the fact the same government approved those products at some point to begin with. If the big, expensive government agencies we all pay for are getting it wrong all the time, why do we keep paying for them? Why not just save everyone some money and at the same time force consumers to pay more attention to what they put into their bodies, or what they put their bodies into? Seems reasonable. In fact, it echoes a society and related culture of an America long since past. But, our society is what it is; and it is largely apathetic, entitled, ignorant and lazy. This is reflected in our culture.
Culture
One only needs to peruse the offerings on cable TV channels to gain an appreciation of where American culture is now, particularly the old MTV. That network gave us “The Real World,” which put young people in the unreal situation of having a TV network film their day-to-day lives in the expensive big-city pad the network put them up in, and “Teen Mom,” “Catfish,” “The Jersey Shore” and other thoughtful portrayals of society. One cannot blame MTV really. I’m sure they focus group tested the concepts for those shows and only give audiences what they clearly wanted. After all, our society creates its culture. The networks bring us what they know we’ll watch, what they know we want. What we want is easy, vapid and base – most people don’t want to be challenged by someone else’s cleverness. This is why Nickleback is more popular than Clutch; why Michael Bay’s movies draw more eyeballs than Terry Gilliam’s. Butt-rock and explosions are more accessible than more cerebral fare.
Among the more fascinating confluences of society and culture in the last few years has been the new face of the campus protest movement. Even though campus’ have had a war to protest for 15-some years, giving them a chance to hearken back to the glory days of the 60s and 70s anti-Vietnam-War protest movement, they’ve mostly eschewed that cause in favor of more me-orientated identity politics. Instead of advancing some sort of noble goal, the main focus of attention now is on sanitizing speech and expression as much as possible so as to avoid “triggering” anyone’s hurt feelings via a “micro-aggression,” like holding a door open for a woman, or not, or something. To accommodate those same “triggered” people when the ostensible thinness of their proverbial skin is brought up, campus life has invented the “safe space,” where no contrary, or impartial even, opinions are allowed within shouting distance. That this sort of mindset flies in the very face of what academia is supposed to be all about goes without saying, which is just as well as it goes ignored anyway.
Government
Lording over all of this, brooding, scheming and always probing for weakness, like a demon from a Terry Brooks novel, is the government.
It bears repeating here that government is unique among all institutions created by humankind. In our mindless weakness, we invented a monster and imbued it with the most fearsome power a civilization can give it: the monopoly on the legal initiation of violence. The state is violence incarnate. Only it can steal with impunity, kidnap on speculation and then hold the victim for ransom legally. Every law, no matter how benign sounding, is underwritten with an explicitly implied threat of violence.
With these fearsome powers at its disposal, how government does things falls into a reliable pattern of disruption and destruction. It has forever been in vogue to criticize corporations as “greedy,” for seeking to use the government to help themselves and/or hurt their competitors. Again, the government has only so many tools, unique and powerful as they are. To ask it to do anything is to ask it to do so violently. As long as government has such powerful tools to employ, one can barely blame a private corporation for seeking to guarantee it uses that power against its competitors; lest those competitors gain control of the beast first.
But, government isn’t really some monolithic thing, a Cthulhu-like beast speaking an indecipherable tongue, rising from the deep to enslave mankind. Not quite, anyway. It is, in reality, nothing more than a collection of people, individuals. And like all individuals, they too see the world as we all do, shaped through the prism of our society, culture and government. Individuals, and individual institutions within government have goals and motivations like any other individual, or institution. As it is with any individual or institution, the first among these goals and motivations is survival.
For the last two centuries, government has done nothing but grow. Early on, the growth was small and slow. In the last century, and the last several decades in particular, there has been an explosion in the growth of the size, power, cost and intrusiveness of government. The mechanisms of our corporatist economic system and toxicity of our culture and society allow the government’s cancerous growth to be self-sustaining. There will always be some new “need” to arise that only government can “fix,” and in so doing, that “fix” will hurt some people and help others; the trick is to make sure you’re always on the “help” side. When computing their annual budgets, the individual institutions within government, run by individuals who want to keep their easy jobs, are motivated first by survival. As such, no government agency will ever come to the correct conclusion that the best thing said agency could do to the industry it regulates is disband itself immediately. Quite the opposite. Survival dictates finding more to do.
So it was with the Food and Drug Administration’s recent unilateral decision to declare all electronic cigarette devices to be “tobacco products” and thereby subject to the onerous scrutiny of the FDA and their expensive approval processes. Big actual tobacco companies with lots of money and lobbyists were able to get the FDA to essentially regulate their competitors out of business.
With each new usurpation of power from the people, the government creates another opportunity for a well-heeled corporation to step in and exploit that new power for their benefit. Taxi companies and the unions that represent their drivers are making successful attacks on the newcomer ride-share apps like Uber and Lyft by having government regulate and tax such companies. Sometimes, the ride-share companies are forced out of a city altogether, unable to comply with stifling regulations and still operate profitably; just as the taxi companies that lobbied for those laws and regulations intended.
Yet, most people still view government as, at worst, a necessary evil. Many naively see it as some sort of messianic figure, solely capable of delivering them from all harm and offense if only the “right” people are elected. In fact, many people believe the government has the ability to prevent them from coming to almost any harm. By regulating other people’s behavior tightly enough, by requiring enough licenses and permits and inspections and fees, by regulating and licensing and permitting every single aspect of life, we can all live nearly indefinitely; and will certainly never be injured by a person with a gun or by some consumer good. Such is, of course madness. It is a symptom of the same sort of entitled mindset that drives many people today and fuels this theistic adoration of the state.
Just as people have now come to count goods and services that require being paid for by the labor someone else’s body performs as a “human right” (food, health care, shelter, etc.), so too are people coming to believe they are “entitled” to go through life free of physical or emotional injury. Hence the very idea that it makes sense to allow someone shot by human using a gun to sue the gunmaker. Hence the very idea that people should sanitize their speech to avoid hurting a person’s hyper-sensitive feelings. Hence the idea that we should all have unfettered access to all the expensive medical care we could ever possibly need, regardless of our ability to pay for it.
In short, somehow, the cultural, societal and governmental nexus that defines the day-to-day “reality” of the average American in 2016 has come to include the expectation of being forever free from injury. Should an injury somehow occur, furthermore, it is vitally important that someone be blamed, although that person needn’t necessarily be the one at fault. In fact, the fundamental sickness of our society has made it culturally acceptable to go to massive lengths to shift blame from where it obviously belongs to a place as remote as can be. This is the reason Black Lives Matter exists.
The solution
So, having described the problem, or more aptly, having described the current state of our nation as a problem, what then is the solution? Is there one, even?
There is, but like most actual solutions to problems, it’s difficult, would require deliberate, concerted effort and will be painful at first. And, therefore, it’s unlikely to even be attempted. But, I’m going to describe it anyway.
Mind your own shit
Most of the bizarre and silly things we fight over today have a common root cause; someone, somewhere is not minding their own shit. Whatever it is; Islamic terrorism, racism, homophobia, you name it; almost all of the problems facing mankind today are created by people not minding their own shit. Therefore, the place to start with the solution is to teach people where the line that marks the end of their shit and the beginning of someone else’s shit is. Most people think the line is way, way further away from the tips of their own toes than it really is.
Basically, a human being has two legit gripes; someone’s harmed them, or someone’s harmed their property. Other than that, whatever it is, probably isn’t their shit. And pay attention to the word choice there; harmed them, or their property. No where in there is a mention of “feelings.” This is because people’s feelings, whatever they are, aren’t terribly important and certainly aren’t more important than an individual’s rights. It is when we make the mistake of pretending feelings are more important than a person’s rights are that we excuse all sorts of monstrously discriminatory laws. White people’s “feelings” about blacks were obviously held to be more important than the individual rights of blacks in the Jim Crow era, and we can look back and see the horrific results. When society and culture allow, excuse and encourage government to act on their prejudices, evil is the inevitable result; such is how the USA rationalized interring Americans of Japanese descent without due process during WWII.
Whatever a person’s feelings today about the couple from Syria that just moved in down the block are, or whatever a white person living in a formerly all-white neighborhood thinks about the black couple that just moved in, they don’t have anything like a legitimate gripe unless and until they come physical or financial harm by said people. Likewise, the liberal progressive with a recently minted BA in Women’s Studies doesn’t have a gripe about the Gadsden Flag-flying, NRA-hat-wearing, multi-gun-owning, beer-swilling, country-music-enjoying “redneck” she moved in next door to unless and until the very unlikely event he harms her. Same goes for what church guy thinks about the new gay couple on the block. Same goes for what some dickhead rocking back and forth on the floor of a mosque somewhere in Pakistan thinks about how Americans live their lives. Same goes for frogs who don’t like looking at Muslim women in burkinis on the beaches of Nice. Same goes for the liberal legislator who thinks private property owners should be forced to have their own internal bathroom policies dictated to them by the state. Same goes for the former governor of New Mexico who thinks Christian bakers should just bake the damn cake for a gay couple, they don’t have to decorate it, after all.
Mind your own shit!
It’s just that simple people. This is not a new or novel ideal. It’s not mine by a long shot.
“The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts that are injurious to others; but it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god; it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” – Thomas Jefferson
One of my very favorite quotes, period, and one of my favorites by Jefferson, obviously. The wonderful thing about this quote is that Jefferson, wittingly or no, has left us a beautifully simple test that we can apply to any political issue throughout time. Simply replace everything between the semicolons with the issue du jour and re-read the passage. If it rings true, then any effort by government to regulate said activity is inherently illegitimate.
So. “…;but it does me no injury for my gay neighbors to have sex in their own home; it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Yep, all “sodomy” laws are unjust.
“…; but it does me no injury for my neighbor to wash down an evening of speed balls and highballs with a few bong-loads of kush; it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Yep, all drug laws are inherently unjust.”
“…; but it does me no injury for the super-christian baker to refuse to bake a cake for my wedding, there are other bakers in town and; it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Yep, pay attention, Gary.
“…;but it does me no injury for my neighbor to go downtown, pick up a hooker, bring her home for an hour or two and then send her away in an Uber; it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Yep, all vice laws are inherently unjust (not to mention laws governing ride-share services).
“…;but it does me no injury for my neighbor to blow half his paycheck betting on football every Sunday; it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Yep, all gambling laws are inherently unjust.
“…;but it does me no injury for my neighbor to own a fully-automatic, belt-fed machinegun; it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Yep, all firearm restrictions are inherently unjust.
“…;but it does me no injury for my neighbor to decide she cannot possibly afford the time or money to properly raise a child and instead has an abortion; it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Yep, all abortion laws are inherently unjust. And, no, the fetus doesn’t count. You can’t give a fetus rights without taking them away from the adult woman carrying it; and there is no logical reason an adult woman should lose all anatomical sovereignty just because she’s contracted a rather common medical condition that only affects women. And I don’t care how old she is, if she’s preggo, she is for all intents and purposes an adult when it comes to the decisions she makes about her own body.
And so on. The test is endlessly applicable and flawless. The trick is getting people to get over themselves and admit they don’t have a legit gripe and that they should instead go home and take up a new hobby. Some of this compulsion toward non-own-shit-minding is based in religious belief, and that makes disabusing oneself of the perceived righteousness of their cause rather difficult. Fortunately, religiosity in general seems to be waning, so, the problems attendant to it may soon sort themselves out as well.
Unfortunately, self-righteous indignation is in no way unique to the religious right. If anything, the towering moral narcissism of the common leftist at least matches, if not exceeds the godly self-righteousness of an evangelical. The similarities between the two camps are eerily similar, despite their polar opposite stances on most issues. Individual members of both camps hold themselves out as superior to others based on the fact they were clever enough to choose to believe the right thing. For the christian, it’s the bible as their pastor explains it to them. For the Leftist, it’s the accepted dogma of “correct thinking” from the left: socialism good, capitalism bad; public good, private bad; government good, private companies bad; climate change is all man-made; gender is a social construct; individual gun ownership is evil; white privilege is a thing; male privilege is a thing; white male privilege is a huge thing; etc.
To be a non-believer is an affront to either camp. To the christian, thinking the wrong thoughts can get your soul sent to hell upon death. To the devout Leftist, thinking the wrong thoughts should be punishable by the state; hence their fixation on “trigger words” and “micro-aggressions.”
Neither knows how to mind their own shit. Almost no one does, save, naturally, libertarians, AnCaps, voluntarists, etc.
Cultural Reflection
So, getting back to the promised solution, we have to first make everyone aware of the fact that most of them aren’t minding their own shit, and that that is the biggest part of the problem. From there, we then, as I mentioned, re-apprise people of where there shit ends and the next person’s shit begins.
If, in the infinitesimally remote chance we as a society came to correctly reassess what is and what is not our shit, our culture would start to reflect that change. The whiny victimhood of the Left would disappear as being hopelessly out of vogue, an anachronism, a throwback to a lousier time no one wants to repeat, that no one romanticizes even in fiction, like the early Dark Ages. Instead, our culture would begin to reflect a society that values individual liberty and personal responsibility; where not being a pain-in-the-ass is something humans naturally aspire to as bare minimum standard of decency. What a refreshing change that would be from today’s culture, which rewards pains in the ass for being so with quick and handy rationalizations for such behavior. As the culture comes to reflect a healthier society, that in itself drives further evolution of its culture, the confluence of the two will soon make it apparent to society that they absolutely do not need so much government. Reflecting that, a cultural disdain for our over-sized government will take hold and grow.
It will be then and only then that the leviathan of a state we’ve erected can start to be pared back. A better, stronger society and culture will outpace the regenerating hydra’s heads and slay the beast that the state has become. Once the state has been put back into an even remotely proper place, humankind can then begin its trek down through the rings to the right. Anywhere along the bottom half would be an improvement over today. I believe we as a species, society and culture can eventually arrive at a state of minarchism – where government controls only a modest military, police force and court system. While my heart yearns for pure anarcho-capitalism, minarchism would be a comparative heaven-on-earth and the highest achievement of any human society to date.
I’d say that’s something worth aiming at, even if it means ultimately trying to actually work within a bloated and corrupt system, something “pure” AnCap voluntarists despise, despite there being no real alternative. And again, changing government is the last step, we first have to change society, which will drive a change of culture that will mandate a change in government. Presently, out society and culture sucks, and our government is a reflection of that.
“Every nation gets the government it deserves,” – Joseph de Maistre
Let’s be better, and then get a better government.
(First Revision – 9/16/16: “Selena Gomez” reference replaced with “NIckelback,” additional comparison between Bay and Gilliam added. A few random punctuation adjustments and other edits.)
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