As I alluded to in my previous post, recently, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking on the nature of honor, power, and reality. The past two weeks I’ve had a lot of time to ponder over it as I spent time moving, looking for work, writing with either Star Trek: TNG or VOY in the background (or Criminal Minds), or screwing around at Khan Academy in their programming, physics, or algebra courses.
The fact that our entire society seems to have begun a psychotic break has given me even more food for thought as it were. Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen a flare up over the Confederate flag that has gotten so unhinged that several state governments as well as the federal government no longer fly the Mississippi state flag. On the heels of that came the Obergefell v. Hodges decision from the US Supreme Court which mandated legal recognition and issuance of licenses of same-sex couples in all fifty states which was okay but then, suddenly, it became a race to see who could be the sorest winner. Before people had time to process that, there were (provably false) accusations against Sir Tim Hunt that he was a sexist, then the shooting in Chattanooga that killed five Marines, the US giving Iran carte-blanche to develop nuclear weapons, and yet another salvo in the on-going war between the movie industry and the tech industry.
Truly, we live in interesting times.
But there are two thoughts that keep running through my mind right now. The first can be summed up in this quote:
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
What this means is that governments — any and all governments — derive their powers from the people. Monarchies, republics, democracies, dictatorships, whatever; they all exist only so long as the populace agrees they exist and they only have the powers that the populace agrees that they have. Governments are a kind of mass consensual shared hallucination that a nation participates in because anarchy (or the brutal rule of the strong over the weak) sucks donkey balls. So, if tomorrow a sizable portion of the US populace woke up and decided they no longer believed in the current government (effectively withdrew their consent), the whole thing collapses. Oh, sure, they can try to use force (the military, the police, the alphabet bureaus) to batter people into consenting but that really only works short term (see also the USSR and the Eastern Bloc). It also only works if the military and police go along with it (which is not a sure thing) and if the populace is unable to fight back (also uncertain).
The disbelievers don’t even have to break the law, really. Just stop believing in the government. Note that I don’t say “consider it illegitimate” or “rebel” or “secede.” I say “stop believing.” If someone claiming to represent the government approaches a disbeliever, the disbeliever will be politely confused — much like the average person will be when a conspiracy theorist starts raving about how the Illuminati is behind Everything Bad In The World.
Does this mean that disbelievers don’t pay taxes? Well, that’s the tricky part. That’s the part I’m not sure about. Why? Because:
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
The simple fact is that, whether one believes it or not, the US government exists. And, even though not all of the police and military would use force to make disbelievers fall in line, enough of them would and enough people have a vested interest in keeping the government in existence (and the current crop in power) that merely disbelieving by itself probably wouldn’t be enough. Either a truly massive number of people would have to withdraw consent (at least 45%) and actively stop supporting the government by ceasing to pay all taxes as well as recognize and respect all symbols and claims of authority, an active rebellion would have to be launched (including setting up a parallel government), a governors’ convention of states would have to be called, or an enterprising intern could introduce a “technical amendment” in a bill that would effectively repeal the entirety of the federal legal code, all treaties, all judicial decisions, and all executive edicts issued since 1800. I would suggest sneaking it into one of those really big bills that no one reads anyway.
So, what can be done then, really? Well, sit back and really think about what “consent of the governed” means. It’s pretty revolutionary, actually, and it’s the seed we’ll be building from in the future as we keep exploring the nature of power and reality.
— G.K.
