Illusions of Freedom"The Matrix is one of the greatest metaphors ever. 'Machines invented to make life easier end up enslaving humanity. This is the most dystopian theory in science-fiction. Why is this fear so universal, so compelling? Is it because we really believe our toaster and our notebook will end up as our mechanical overlords? Of course not. This is not a future that we fear but a past that we are already living.
Supposedly governments were meant to make human life easier and safer. But governments always end up enslaving humanity. That which we create to "serve us" ends up "ruling us." The US government by and for the people now imprisons millions. It takes half the income by force, over-regulates, punishes, tortures, slaughters foreigners, invades countries; overthrows governments, imposes seven hundred imperialistic bases overseas and crushes future generations with massive debts. That which we create to serve us ends up ruling us.
The problem with the state as servant thesis is that it is historically completely false; both empirically and logically. The idea that states were invented by citizens to enhance their own security is utterly untrue. Before governments in tribal times, human beings could only produce what they consumed; there was no excess production of food or other resources: Thus there was no point in owning slaves because the slaves could not produce any excess that could be stolen by the master.
If a horse pulling a plow can only produce enough additional food to feed the horse there is no point hunting, capturing and breaking in a horse. However when agriculture improvements allowed for the creation of excess crops, suddenly it became highly advantageous to own human beings. When cows began to provide excess milk and meat, owning cows became worthwhile.
The earliest governments and empires were in fact a ruling class of slave hunters who understood that because human beings could produce more than they consumed they were worth hunting, capturing breaking-in, and owning. The earliest Egyptian and Chinese Empires were in reality, human farms: Where people were hunted, captured, domesticated and owned like any other form of livestock. Due to methodological and technological improvements the slaves produced enough excess that the labor involved in capturing and keeping them represented only a small sub-set of their total productivity.
The ruling class farmers kept a large portion of that excess, while handing out gifts and payments to the brutalizing class; the police, slave hunters and general sadists, and the propagandizing class, the priests, intellectuals and artists. This situation continued for thousands of years until the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries; when again massive improvements in agricultural organization and technology created the second-wave of excess productivity.
The enclosure movement reorganized and consolidated farm land resulting in five to ten times more crops, creating a new class of industrial workers displaced from the country and huddling in the new cities. This enormous agricultural excess was the basis of the capital that drove the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial revolution did not arise because the ruling class wanted to free their serfs; but rather because they realized how additional "liberties" could make their livestock astoundingly more productive.
When cows are placed in very confining stalls they beat their heads against the walls, resulting in injuries and infections. Thus farmers now give them more room, not because they want to set their cows free but because they want greater productivity and lower costs. The next stop after free-range [In Chickens] is not freedom [It's chicken McNuggets].
The rise of state capitalism in the nineteenth century was actually the rise of free-range serfdom. Additional liberties were granted to the human-livestock, not with the goal offsetting them free; but rather with the goal of increasing their productivity. Of course Intellectuals, Artists and Priests were and are well paid, to conceal this reality.The great problem of modern human-livestock ownership is the great challenge of enthusiasm. State Capitalism only works when the Entrepreneurial Spirit drives creativity and productivity in the economy.
8 Maart 2010
Jim Kirwan
http://www.rebelnews.org/opinion/americas/194452-illusions-of-freedom
