Do you doubt me? Well...
Let's say you believe in a god- let's call it "Unext"- your god can't harm me. It isn't real and can't really "do" anything. Right?
But you can harm me because of your belief in Unext, if you thought Unext wanted you to do so.
Just like a cop or Brownshirt of some other variety could kill me for "the government". It's not the imaginary thing which is dangerous, it is the believers (and those who don't necessarily believe, but are just using it as an excuse to pillage).
So, while government, by itself, is utterly harmless because it isn't really there, the belief in government has been the most deadly mental virus ever to infect the mind of any species on Earth.
.
And with this, Kent, you've uncovered what the late Delmar England called "...the language of slavery..." -- reification. David Calderwood called it a "demon". Because it allows the perpetrators of violence to hide behind a lifeless abstraction, and not to be held accountable for their violent behaviors. Calderwood, in the linked article, described "the state" thusly:
ReplyDelete"...The state is the central abstraction by which a catastrophically wrong idea is placed into practice. It is the organized system for employing violent action (or its threat) on the part of individuals, for as noted before, only individuals act. This rationalization occurs on two levels, first by diffusing responsibility to a fiction and second by inducing a group-think inversion of standards..."
Sam
Kent,
ReplyDelete"...the belief in government has been the most deadly mental virus ever to infect the mind of any species on Earth."
Good metaphor. I'll deposit that one in my head where I can get to it easily.
Dave