If religion is the opiate of the masses, then the Democratic Party is the methadone of those who have learned to use a Web browser.
Of course, it’s not religion that is the opiate, but politics. Anyone who thinks that one can harness the power of the State to steer the State in the “right” direction is addicted to a drug far more powerful than heroin, and far more deadly. The nature of the State is violence, its power the ultimate sanction, death, and long ago, the prophet Isaiah described the thinking of those who seek a covenant with such a Power:
“We have made a covenant with death,
and with Sheol we have an agreement;
when the overwhelming scourge passes through
it will not come to us;
for we have made lies our refuge,
and in falsehood we have taken shelter.”
Sound familiar? Where the present administration has taken us is merely the inevitable consequence of years, decades, centuries of this kind of thinking: the belief that one can harness the power of death to accomplish good ends. But the State observes no compromise for long with its innate drive to ultimate power, and it has more time than short-lived humans. Eventually, as Isaiah says,
…your covenant with death will be annulled,
and your agreement with Sheol will not stand;
when the overwhelming scourge passes through
you will be beaten down by it.
As often as it passes through it will take you;
for morning by morning it will pass through,
by day and by night;
and it will be sheer terror to understand the message.
For the bed is too short to stretch oneself on it,
and the covering too narrow to wrap oneself in it.
We have made our bed, and we must lie on it, and no election, no candidate, no political program imposed from above can save us. The only hope of survival lies in community, which our blood-and-oil-fueled life-style has steadily eroded for almost a century. Look to your friends, your family, your neighbors, not the State. There only will you find life.
Withdraw your consent!
2 Comments
Write a Comment»Pulp–
1) I can only speak for myself, but I certainly don’t believe, and have never stated, that “all states behave in exactly the same murderous fashion at all times, and that differences among states are therefore non-existent or insignificant.” It’s obvious that’s not true. But all states share the same violent DNA, and all evolve towards oppression, albeit at varying paces.
2) As a Christian anarchist, I’m less interested in abolishing the state than in calling people to live in the reign of God, the only “arky,” as Vernard Eller terms it, with any real validity. Like the poor, we will likely always have the state with us. But to whatever extent possible, I think people should strive to live in a true community, rather than in the false community offered by the state.
I don’t wish to be obnoxious, but libertarian and anarchist blogs such as yours leave me with two basic conclusions.
(1) Anarcho-libertarian writers seem to be saying that all states behave in exactly the same murderous fashion at all times, and that differences among states are therefore non-existent or insignificant. This, it seems to me, is empirically and logically false. The Roman Empire of 70 CE did not behave in the same fashion as Costa Rica of 2008. Surely different states behave in different ways at various times, and these differences are important to the lives of ordinary people. I work in healthcare, and it makes an enormous difference in the lives of people I work with that the nation-state in which I live, the United States, has chosen not to implement the kind of government-run universal healthcare system adopted, to the benefit of working people, by most other developed countries. For anarchists to imply that this difference in state behavior is insignificant might be offensive to the millions of human beings who have been harmed by the health care policy of the American nation-state.
(2) Identifying the state as a uniquely evil human institution implies that it can or should be abolished. An abundance of evidence suggests that this is impossible to accomplish in a large human society. Ever since human beings began to build cities roughly 5,000 years ago, every large human population has created governments to organize its societal affairs. There is not a single recorded instance in the last 5,000 years of a large human population that existed without a government. Only small hunter-gatherer bands have done so. If anarchists are advocating a return to primitive hunter-gatherer lifestyles, they should say so. If, on the other hand, their only goal is to forever criticize The State without feeling the need to propose a viable alternative, then they should ask themselves how ethical it is to sit back and snark from the sidelines while the rest of the human race tries to save as many people as possible from global disasters like peaking energy supplies and biosphere collapse.