Control is evil. It never benefits those being controlled. Things are okay if you voluntarily submit, because the nature of things permits you to voluntarily un-submit, too. Anything really worth doing will find plenty of volunteers, or it should not be done. When you can’t say “no”, it’s not voluntary; it’s control and it’s evil.
I rejoice when someone manages to disrupt control. So when hackers came up with software which breaks the monopoly controls on the Kinect device for the Xbox, I smiled. It’s not because I care in the least about the device, and have no desire to own one. It trumps yet again the evil of control. Yes, a small gesture, but there are some folks in this world wholly deserving of the symbolic middle finger.
Folks who want control deserve that and more. For Christian Mystics, the last thing we want is control for ourselves or anyone else. The ultimate power of mysticism is not following some other human’s channel. We must all stand before God on our own. Each human individual remains effectively dead so long as they are not free (children are a special case). God alone has the right to control, and He does it just fine without our assistance, without our acquiescence. It is His divine right as Creator. Everyone else seeking control is flipping off God, and we are not obliged to cooperate except for tactical reasons.
Already we are facing the assertion of controls many older people find mind boggling. They remember when things like the TSA would have been dismantled by popular uprising. It’s just barely facing any resistance right now. Here in America, particularly, do we find the vast majority cowardly going along with abuse. The scanning devices are not safe; by some estimates you lose the equivalent of 42 minutes of your life each time you step into the device (see the comments to that article). The alternative pat-down is just a term to disguise sexual abuse (I’m an ex-cop). Neither accomplishes anything but conditioning us to be more sheep-like. The protests from pilots and flight attendants is anemic, at best.
The declaration the President can simply execute anyone he doesn’t like is really just going too far. The declaration alone is an impeachable offense, but it won’t happen here. Instead, Congress does things like planning to insure the MERS fraud is federally approved after the fact. The Constitution is just a piece of paper, after all.
No, we don’t care. Rather, not enough care enough. So it falls to those few of us left who do see the evil of it all to do those few things we can to disrupt such control in some hope we can set just one more person free, to bring a little sanity to a psychotic world. When we do those truly sane things, even if they don’t change much, we bring to bear the glaring light of truth into the inky darkness around us.
