Submitted by Mad Max on
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"Black Magic is essentially the promise that a friendly superior force will solve your problems if you abandon your fate in its hands. It is the faithful abandonment of responsibility. It is the sweet bliss of
Government lives on Black Magic. Government produces Black Magic. But government is not Black Magic. More precisely, the Principle of Government is the main instance of Black Magic; however the body of people and activities known as "government" is not. Though they are historically, emotionally and semantically related, these two meanings of the word "government" must be distinguished, if we are to apply White Magic rational thinking to the underlying concepts, instead of merely Black Magic emotional feeling of them.
On the one hand government – its Authoritarian Principle – will monopolize, absorb and corrupt the production or delivery of goods and services actually produced through White Magic, and now made part of government – the Administrative Body. Government – the principle embraced by the rulers of the administration – will later use these monopolies as justifications for its existence: "public goods" that only It (the Body) provides, because It prohibits competition or regulates it away. However, the goods and services being monopolized by government, the productive parts of the administration, are in fact creations of White Magic. Hence, these parts of government – the Administrative Body – we do not seek to destroy, but verily to free and regenerate: we wish to remove the chains that subject these services, their producers and their consumers to the Authoritarian Principle of government.
Now not only is government (the Body) not made of pure Black Magic (since it absorbs White Magic components), but Black Magic is also very much present outside government (the Body) and even to some degree outside of government (the openly claimed Principle). There are plenty of accomplices to the activities of governments as such, who albeit having a status of "private" people and organizations, end up benefitting from public privileges; these accomplices serve to "privatize" the rent captured by those who hold power. There are also plenty of candidates who wish to replace current governments with new governments of their own, based on even more retrograde forms of Black Magic than currently rule: this includes all the religious fundamentalist movements, the worst among them being the socialist revolutionaries, etc. Then there are plenty of frauds who feed on the credulity and superstition of other people, though on a much pettier scale than instituted governments. Finally, Black Magic exists as part of the activities of many people who otherwise live through White Magic: political activists who do their best to get some party elected, trade unionists who demonstrate in the streets for their corporate interests, businessmen who pay lobbyists to court politicians, all these people have both this Black Magic activity of political manipulation, and (usually) a main White Magic activity of production. The latter kind of people constitute the major body of black magicians; though most of them are victims of Black Magic, they serve to propagate the mental illness.
Thus, government, as an instituted body, is not the main enemy, it is but the manifestation of the enemy. Should we manage to destroy the current government, evil as it may be, if we didn't dispel the belief in Black Magic, then Black Magic will spin off a new government, just as evil as the preceding one; and any violent means we used to destroy the previous government will only have resulted in pain and destruction. Our main enemy is more elusive, it resides in people's minds; it is the very belief in Black Magic, it is a disease from which we want to cure people. It is not government as a body, it is government as an idea; it is not the state, it is statism; it is not the political militants, it is politics. Our enemy is a mental illness, not the victims it infects. Our enemy is a view of the world where the interests of people are antagonistic instead of harmonic. Our enemy is the principle behind Enmity itself.
Let us not overestimate the enemy: it is not a devil endowed with a personal will; it is not capable of any coherent synchronized overall action; it cannot design concerted plans of action. Black magicians may be animists, we are not; we know that some phenomena emerge without any wilful intent nor any concerted action. On the other hand, let us not underestimate the enemy: it is not susceptible to be destroyed by a focused, narrow action, whereby we'd neutralize a few key people. Of course, such surgical actions may be necessary as a small but important part of an overall treatment, to inhibit the catalyzers of Black Magic; but the treatment cannot be narrow, for the meme of Black Magic is widespread in the human population, and is active even inside those of us who are conscious of its nefarious nature. The treatment will involve some form of education, to build some awareness of the Evil in those who think about politics, and to build some healthy reflexes in everyone.
Among the most potent obstacles that we will face, the more dangerous and evil people will not be the victims completely infected by Black Magic, those mindless superstitious people who abandoned their lives into the hands of Authority; these people are incapable of initiating rational, efficient action; though they may act in evil ways, their mechanisms of thought can be well understood; their actions can be foreseen; remedies can be found for them. Our most dangerous enemies will be those who use White Magic to efficiently cultivate Black Magic in other people, so as to unilaterally exploit them. Our most dangerous obstacles are grey magicians, who master enough of both forms of Magic so as to rule other people into serving them. These people understand the issues at hand; they can use White Magic techniques of rational design to lead and move the masses infected by Black Magic; and their interest is in preserving some form of Black Magic in other people. We must learn how these grey magicians think, how we can counter their work of evil, how we can turn some of them to our side, how we can use them to neutralize each other, how we can subvert their activity against Black Magic itself. Now, these grey magicians will adapt to our action; they will design new plans; they too will try to neutralize us, or to subvert our actions to their profit.
If we want our actions to be efficient, we must eradicate the source of the evil that destroys our freedom. It may be expedient to fight the visible manifestations of Evil, and indeed it is sometimes even necessary to do it. But the only useful fight on the long run is the fight against Evil itself. And it is the fight in which the fewest people actually participate. As Henry D. Thoreau put it:
- There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.
Compromising on results is a necessity of life: the moral choice of the best of available opportunities is constrained by the set of available opportunities. Fighting the manifestations of Evil is thus an everyday endeavour, that will always exist, that can never fully succeed. It is a part of life; but it is not the cause that we are defending. Any results achieved while fighting the manifestations of evil are short-lived when the original Evil is untouched and keeps spawning ever more subtle new manifestations. The cause we are defending, the cause of Freedom, requires us to dissipate Evil at its very source. This is why we cannot compromise on our goals, on our discourse. Compromission about principles, compromission about means of action, is yielding to the evil of Black Magic; it is abandoning the very cause of Freedom that we ought to defend.
We must learn to fight Black Magic itself, not its manifestations. So as to eradicate this parasite, so as to open the eyes of its ignorant victims, we must design a cure for this disease; and so as to design such a cure, we must understand enough of this illness and its mechanisms. We must understand how it works, and what efficient countermeasures there are. We must understand how it spreads, and how we can best prevent contamination. In other words, we must approach this problem with the White Magic attitude of engineering solutions, which supposes that we first develop a science of the mental mechanisms involved, call it "political psychology," "thaumaturgics" or "power memetics."
Our endeavour is Memetic Engineering for Liberty. We must engineer memes of White Magic that will successfully compete with the memes of Black Magic; this engineering includes successfully marketing the engineered memes. We must identify the psychological resources that Black Magic feeds upon, compete for those resources, and starve Black Magic from these resources. We must find and attack the weak defenses of Black Magic: the memes with the least negative feedback for Black Magic and most positive feedback for White Magic. We must discover by which chains of control grey magicians maintain the belief in Black Magic among the population, and disorganize, cut or subvert the longest of these chains.
This article may sound melodramatic. It is meant to. I plead guilty as charged of trying to raise emotion about the Evil that lies beneath government. Actually, I would have failed in my attempt, if I didn't sound melodramatic enough. Yet, there is hope. And hope is very important for raising emotion, too. Without hope, there is no need to worry; whereas with a great hope, the greatest difficulties will be happily faced.
In his 1860 article Panarchy, P. E. de Puydt suggested that someday, people would cease to consider violence as a legitimate way to impose political opinions, just like they don't consider violence anymore as a legitimate way to impose religious opinions. This is our hope: someday, in civilized countries, governmental oppression will be remembered as a nightmare of ancient barbarian times, something unthinkable to civilized people, just like Wars of Religion now seem a barbarous thing of the past to inhabitants of most civilized countries.
And indeed, this utter delegitimation of aggressive violence will be but the final achievement of a long process of individualization of society. It is the same process by which religion was individualized, with the recognition that each individual has to seek his salvation independently from the collective, and much later with the official separation of Church from State. This process will be complete when people commonly accept the separation of Morality from Justice.
And there are good reasons to be optimistic in the long run. First, remember that Black Magic can exist but as a parasite to White Magic. Black Magic may always appear to be winning, dominating, etc. But deep down inside, White Magic is always the strongest. It is up to us to make this strength prevail in the open. One way to see Black Magic is as a parasite meme; we may say, to paraphrase Einstein, that like the measles, it is an infantile illness of mankind. We may then hope that we'll find good medication to cure this polymorphous evil. Then again, looking at things on a grand scale, we may actually consider that Black Magic is a relic of the past, a gangue of mud out of which Mankind is quickly emerging – quick in evolutionary timescales.
Indeed, from an evolutionary perspective, social interaction has long been limited to coordinating common interests against predators and preys, and otherwise managing the intrinsic conflicts of interests between group members. What the conscious mechanisms of thought were used for was recognizing friends and foes, preys and predators. Nature took care of all the engineering, through innate mechanical reflexes, internal biochemical processes, etc. Black Magic was the only kind of thought. The design of dynamic strategies of social interaction for hunting, escaping predators, reproducing, warring, is novel in evolutionary times. And modern man is unique in using conscious design of dynamic strategies to domesticate nature, to build new structures, to invent tools. This ability of dynamic thinking, of conscious engineering, is the distinctive trait of Mankind: it is the criterion by which we can distinguish the human being from his animal ancestors. It is the criterion by which we are superior to them, and by which our descendants will hopefully be superior to us. It is also the very principle of White Magic. White Magic is thus a great but relatively novel thing.
Black Magic is a remnant trace of primitive animality, of wild savagery, of ignorant barbarianism in man. White Magic is the principle of Mankind, a principle that has been tremendously successful at accelerating an evolution of Life toward new limits previously unconceivable and unconceived.
François-René Rideau
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