October 2011 issue of Freedom's Phoenix magazine - fr33aid

Fight the Narrative:
Breaking the Matrix of Government Supremacism
By Bill Buppert
Make a Comment • Email Link • Send Letter to Editor • Save Link
“All political thinking
for years past has been
vitiated in the same way.
People can foresee the
future only when it coincides
with their own
wishes, and the most
grossly obvious facts
can be ignored when
they are unwelcome.”
- George Orwell
We all experience the world through the shared
stories and anecdotes that illuminate who we are
and where we come from. Our educations, both
formal and informal, drive the worldviews we
develop over time. These are influenced universally
by the transmission mediums we listen
to or read about. Whether we are reading books
(an increasingly uncommon practice), watching
television, interacting on the internet or engaging
in conversation with friends and family, all
of these activities consistently and irrevocably
develop and refine the way we view the world
around us. First and foremost, our language
and employment thereof has the most significant
impact on us. I do not want to bother with
the noxious collectivist apologias familiar to the
deconstructionists like Chomsky and Foucault
who profess that literary texts and contemporary
conversation are freighted with the various
Politically Correct bugbears like race, class and
gender which to me is a neat but erroneous substitute
for thinking things through. But they do
make an important point: our language, in this
case, English, informs and prejudices cogitation
in an unconscious fashion that can short-circuit
clear and conscious thinking.
For example, prior
to 1860, the use
of the phrase “the
United States are”
was far more common
than the post-
1865 notion of the
“the United States
is”. Mark Twain
“observed that
the Civil War was
fought over whether
‘United States’ was singular or plural”. Some
attribute this to Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve,
Professor of Greek at Johns Hopkins University,
who wrote in 1909 that “if I chose (sic), I might
enlarge on the historical importance of grammar
in general and Greek grammar in particular.
It was a point of grammatical concord that was
at the bottom of the Civil War – “United States
are,” said one, “United States is,” said another.”
The genesis of a bloody and, in the end, inglorious
conflict may have been a dispute over grammatical
construction which informed the consciousness
of millions.
The larger point is that a lack of specificity, introspection
and careful use of language after a
consistent regimen of critical thinking can turn
entire peoples into Helot populations subject to
the vicissitudes and grasping of their rulers.
We are surrounded day after day by friends,
family and neighbors who have become wholly-owned
subsidiaries of the State through the
brilliant manipulation of the government media-
13
education complex and its tentacles grasping at
the articulation and meanings of words in our
culture.
Here are a few examples:
• “If we get the right man in office…”
• “But if the cops go on strike, who will protect
us?”
• “If the government does not build roads, who
will?” (My answer is always simple: people
will)
• “Guns are dangerous…”
• “The government ought to do something…”
These are all crimes against the moral imagination
because, in the end, what folks are actually
saying is what level of violence must I employ
against others against their will to force the surrender
of their time and resources for my benefit?
There are no other explanations. Yet that is
the foundational concept behind the lion’s share
of the narrative framework in America. Narratives
and meta-narratives are the stories and legends
that inform why people (and nation-states)
do what they do. These are the historical motifs
like anyone can be president in the United States
or one can become a millionaire if you simply
work hard enough in America. During the last
three terms of George Bush II (2001- Present),
the former is unassailably true. The latter not
so much after taxes are accounted for. Most of
these narratives are works of fiction founded in
a nugget of truth. For a variety of reasons to include
human laziness and insecurity, the idea of
living at your neighbor’s expense against their
will has become the foundational characteristic
for the American culture at large. One finds
small enclaves of libertarians, Free Staters and
Rothbardian anarchists who think the exact opposite
but they do not have tremendous influence
on the culture at large nor is the majority of
the population subject to believing that a nonslavery
system will be superior to the tax/regulatory
slave system currently popular around
the globe.
Let’s be clear on the meaning of slavery, it is
the means by which another person other than
the individual has discretion on the use of that
person’s time and resources absent a contract. I
am a skeptic of the notion of wage slavery but
not of tax and regulatory slavery. Our rulers can
usually excuse the most barbaric excesses with
a simple phrase: “through lawful authority”. I
can certainly be homeless and avoid work and
the concomitant burden of taxes and regulations
but as soon as I am employed in an above-ground
economy job or enterprise, the sky will darken
while regulators and tax collectors parachute in.
One can play the legal definitional standards all
you want and they are written by the government
after all. The bottom line is that I am supposed
to have given implied consent to participation
in the job market and having more than sixty
percent of my earnings taxed, a hundred percent
compliance with the ocean of regulations
that drown and harass productivity in this particular
tax jurisdiction known as America and
be responsible for having intimate knowledge
of quite literally yards of Federal Regulations
on a bookshelf. Implied consent is nice legal
fiction to get around the troublesome annoyance
of a formal signed contract.
Continues on Page 14
13