The Foundations of Our
Extinction
By Butler Shaffer
"The human failing I
would most like to
correct is
aggression. It may have
had survival advantage
in
caveman days, to get
more food, territory or
partner
with whom to reproduce,
but now it threatens to
destroy us all. "
– Stephen Hawking
March 10, 2015 "ICH"
- "Lew
Rockwell" - The
central premise of much of my writing over
the years has been that the psychopathic
nature of the political establishment has
reached a critical mass. Like the nuclear
weapons that so represent the state’s war
against life, this critical mass threatens
the very existence of mankind. The
collective madness implicit in every form of
political structuring has brought humanity
to a breaking point that can no longer be
ignored, and from which there is no turning
back. The human species has invested too
much of its energies into the creation,
support, and attachment to, organizational
systems which are to be considered ends in
themselves. These organizations have amassed
sufficient power over their creators as to
threaten not only the material and spiritual
well-being of human beings, but our species
itself. If we are to avoid this fate, we
must transcend the violent, destructive
thinking that got us to where we find
ourselves. In the words of Albert Einstein:
“We cannot solve our problems with the same
thinking we used when we created them.”
We have produced, through our thinking,
institutions that embody no life of their
own, but thrive only by cannibalizing the
energies of depersonalized men, women, and
children who have been conditioned to
subjugate their individuality to
state-managed collective purposes. Every
spark of energy capable of being mobilized
by human beings is expected to be made
available to the satisfaction of
institutional ends, with only as much left
over for individual interests as established
authorities will allow in order to keep the
zombie class complacent. The modern state
insists upon the authority to micro-manage
every detail of life’s expressions, and to
regard every human being as an expendable
“resource” for the accomplishment of its
ends.
The “state” – defined as an entity that
enjoys a monopoly on the use of violence
within a given territory – is dependent upon
the amassing and regular exercising of
power. It is not enough that political
systems have a theoretical power to employ
violence: such effective force must be
constantly exerted, lest it atrophy by
nonuse, leaving a vacuum in its place. This
is the meaning of Randolph Bourne’s
observation that “war is the health of the
state.”
The madness of war – against constantly
changing, fungible “enemies” – continues to
metastasize, accompanied by the detailed
control and surveillance of the movement,
eating habits, child-raising,
communications, purchases, health-practices,
reading interests, learning, and other forms
of human behavior. The increased
militarization of police, including the use
of tanks and armored troop carriers; the use
of drones – both for surveillance and
attack; torture; imprisonment without
trials; asset forfeitures; no-knock entries
into private homes; police killings and/or
brutalization of individuals – all with
virtually no accountability; are some of the
more apparent examples of the state’s war
against people.
If we are to end our intra-species combat
with one another in time to avoid becoming
the first known species to engineer its own
extinction, we must identify the causes of
our aggression. My first book, Calculated
Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and
Human Survival focused on the conflict and
violence that arises from our willingness to
identify ourselves with collective
abstractions. Whether we find our identity
in our nationality, race, gender, religion,
lifestyle, social class, ideology,
geography, or any other groupings, our
attachment to one category separates us, by
definition, from those who do not share our
identity. These categories are what
Frederick Perls described as “ego
boundaries.” This does not mean that being a
member of one race rather than another; or a
male instead of a female; or a resident of
America rather than Brazil, China, or Spain,
necessarily creates conflict. It is only
when it becomes existentially important to
be associated with any group; when one’s
sense of being and direction are tied to one
or more abstractions, that
mutually-exclusive divisions arise. The
source of our societal difficulties is to be
found within our thinking, the place to
which we must repair if we are to avoid our
collective suicide.
This is an undertaking that most of us find
discomforting to take. We have become so
conditioned to looking beyond ourselves –
whether to gods, philosopher-kings,
political leaders, or state systems – that
we ignore our personal responsibility for
what we, as a species, have become. Those
who manage the political machinery have
encouraged – even insisted upon – our
entwining ourselves with mutually exclusive,
clashing abstractions with such fervor as to
render it difficult to become disentangled
from their seductive imagery. Whether the
abstraction with which we identify ourselves
is endangered or benefited; experienced as
an embarrassment or an achievement, becomes
a reflection upon our sense of being. To
illustrate just how inseparable these
personal and institutional identities can
be, try describing yourself without making
reference to “ego boundary” abstractions.
You begin to experience the difficulties
provided by the caterpillar’s persistent
question in Alice in Wonderland: “who are
you?”
What passes as “news” in today’s culture is
largely centered upon hostilities between or
among persons or events that can be
exploited for the purpose of further
empowering the state not only to resolve the
immediate conflict, but to mobilize the
energies of massive numbers of persons to be
galvanized into demanding a governmental
response. If, for instance, a white police
officer shoots an unarmed black man, those
who identify themselves with the race of the
victim will likely react with a more intense
anger than might be the case if a white
policeman shot an unarmed white man. The
mainstream media would likely make the same
distinction – perhaps not even reporting the
latter shooting – unless, of course, the
white victim was gay, a fact that would
arouse a more vigorous response from a
different “ego boundary” group.
Those who manage the apparatus of state
violence care less about the specific
collective identities of those who demand
governmental action than they do that a
sizeable mass of human energy can be
activated and channeled into
politically-controlled policies. The
inter-group squabbles are fungible. They can
arise from our willingness to separate
ourselves from one another through
mutually-exclusive boundaries. As long as
such divisions exist – or can be
manufactured by those proficient in the
skills of political propaganda and
manipulation – societal conflict will
persist. Paradoxically, it is not in Thomas
Hobbes’ “state of nature” that we discover
the foundations for his imagined “war of all
against all,” but in his remedy, the
leviathan state. Bourne got it right: it is
the continual condition of war upon which
the state thrives, and war can be made a
permanent condition only when people insist
upon identifying themselves through
groupings that separate themselves from one
another.
Whether as individuals or as a species,
human beings thrive only in conditions that
are conducive to life. Life can sustain
itself only when individual liberty, mutual
respect for the lives and property of
others, contracts and other forms of
cooperation, tolerance for the myriad of
differences that have their roots in our
individually unique DNAs, and free-markets
rather than coerced mandates, exist. Those
who bother to read human history will
recognize these life-enhancing qualities. It
is the “health of the state” – the creation
and mobilization of the machinery of death –
that will destroy mankind.
Butler Shaffer [send
him e-mail] teaches at the Southwestern
University School of Law. He is the author
of the newly-released
In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign
Against Competition, 1918–1938,
Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to
Peace and Human Survival, and
Boundaries of Order. His latest book is
The Wizards of Ozymandias.
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