Political Dead Ends

My flesh is hesitant to discuss it, but my spirit drives through to the truth: Political activism is downright stupid.

Let’s talk reality, dear political activists. If all you want is a slice of the pie, you can get it. That means you have to compete and disenfranchise someone else, because the shares available are limited. You’ll either take your place at the trough among the other servants of evil, or you’ll go hungry. Change the system? That’s just too freaking braindead to justify taking you seriously, because you aren’t willing to do what it takes to really change anything.

So, let’s say for example you want to press forward with something like the old Occupy movement. You plan to have people gather in mass numbers in peaceful protests, crowding into various symbolic places and refusing to leave. You want to “scare” the 1% folks with your ability to marshal and offer some vague threat to their position and power.

Let’s presume for a moment that this somehow has a real effect. What’s the mechanism for change? How do you get them to let go of their power? Are you simply pissed that someone has the audacity to use the current system to their personal advantage? Are you so utterly stupid as to think human nature can be adjusted based on some dream of peaceful coexistence and appeal to their better nature? You deserve to starve, you fraudulent waste of oxygen. However, I wonder if you see past your anger and impatience at these rich oppressors to how you would remove them from power. Do you even know much about the system that keeps them there? Are you prepared to take over, because I can guarantee you they won’t simply shake in their boots and dismantle the system for you. What stands behind them?

That’s why it’s a pipe-dream. Yeah, it’s fun and entertaining, and you’ll feel good about yourself and the fight for moral good, as you imagine it could be. But if you understood any part of what holds it all together, your tactics would be totally different. What you might gain is attention and some superficial changes that cynically pretend to accede to your demands, but nothing fundamental will be different.

Do not underestimate their willingness to see you all slaughtered. The only reason they haven’t already done so is because it costs money. They are seeking the lowest cost to themselves in keeping things where they want it. Yes, there will be some moral outrage if they do that, but as long as the only real loss is a few numbers in electronic banking accounts due to a few lawsuits, the system is working just fine for them. Guess where that settlement money is coming from? The folks you pretend to represent, not the 1%. You might be skimming off a little from their broader source of revenue at best. It’s not the quickly inflating dollar figures that bother them. It’s the system that serves their desires. Screaming at materialism doesn’t make it go away.

And if all you want is to root out some evil folks and put in their place your own, forget it. Different ideas about how to distribute the mass of human productivity will only go so far before the people are bought off or removed again from the system. Musical chairs might get you a cake, but they won’t throw away the chairs or the game. You are still just kids being pacified. You aren’t reckoning with the people who keep this whole thing in place. If the system cannot seduce you, it will chew you up and spit you out.

Real change only comes when you kill the people who actually run things. Not all of them, of course, but a whole lot more than you might imagine. You still have no idea who they are. It’s not as if you couldn’t find out, but your silly posturing in naming a few with dark tales of plutocrat intrigue is not going to remove them from power. You’ll have to assemble an army of elite assassins who can’t be bought, and they’ll have to employ tools you can’t imagine and kill an awful lot of people in a short time.

Then you’ll have to implement something totally different, which means fighting a mass of humanity who don’t like change. That means facing protests worse than the ones you are willing to engage yourselves right now. Are you ready to kill a bunch of them, too? Do you imagine you can pacify all that with simple education? That’s been tried, and the only thing that works is a multi-generational program of religious structure. How do you think we got into this mess in the first place? Humans are inherently religious and always will be, so if you don’t give them good religion, you’ll end up with lots of bad ones.

It has nothing to do with positive vibes and all that garbage. Don’t be so stupid as to imagine that hasn’t been tried with endless flavors of failure. It didn’t fail because someone didn’t get the formula quite right; it failed because the inputs available cannot possibly bring forth the outputs you seek. All that hope and dream stuff can work, but not for the goals you imagine are worthy. Your single greatest mistake is assuming that changing the political situation can possibly bring good. That is, so long as you are willing to let the global nation-state system exist, then nothing has changed. If you aren’t willing to turn civilization itself upside down and bring about a global revolution in how people live, things will not be any different in the future. And I’m willing to bet what really can work, what has worked for thousands of years of human history, is unacceptable to you. The majority of you insist we can have it all, keeping all our modern conveniences and style of life with everyone singing Kumbaya. Peace and prosperity arises from a fundamental moral code woven into the universe, and you don’t have a clue about that code.

You aren’t smart enough to change the world.