Statism: The belief in the legitimacy of a central authority and it's rule of written law by violence and coercion.
Cognitive Dissonance: Mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time.
To believe in the legitimacy of central authority is to contradict the basic morality that we all share. What is basic morality? It is the understanding of one's own mortality, one's own vulnerability as a self conscious being. To know what will destroy you is to know how to destroy others. Even though rapists and thieves and murderers choose to violate others this does not negate universal morality as they would defend themselves from the same attacks; they don't want to suffer and die either. Every culture, every individual has varying degrees to which they may feel violated, but there is not one person who in their heart of hearts doesn't know that rape, theft, murder, coercion, and trespass, are wrong.
Government is a contradiction of morality. It is an involuntary relationship with terms that nobody would accept from an individual, yet framing it in authority allows for great exception. If your neighbor steals from you it is clearly theft. If the government steals from you they call it taxation, but it is theft by definition. If your neighbor kills you it is murder. If the government kills you, well, they have lots and lots of terms and excuses for that: collateral damage, national security, negotiations, spreading democracy, operation Iraqi freedom, Vietnam... War. Nobody does murder better than when governments go to war.
War is murder plain and simple. The massive and pervasive idea that it is justified by collective defense and security is why opposition to it fails. When you use the proper magic spell, the proper words, people suddenly accept all kinds of atrocities. So long as we are convinced that bombing innocent people is somehow keeping us safe from similar attacks we are fine with it. This contradicts our basic morality and gives rise to moral relativism: it's not OK for those people over there to kill, but it is OK for these people over here. See the costumes and symbols they wear? That means they're special!
So when I hear weeping and wailing for guns to be taken away from good innocent people on the claim of reverence for the sanctity of life, it makes me wonder where the deep compassion really comes from. In fact I almost never hear gun control advocates denounce war for the same reason, or at all for that matter. The vast majority of these folks say nothing in the way of opposing war, yet they are compelled to take to the streets and the airways at the command of the TV when their heartstrings are plucked in the way they've been programmed. How can one be so inconsistent? Cognitive dissonance.
Government can kill and murder and steal all day every day and hardly anyone bats an eye. Every now and then a lone nutjob (which none of the proposed legislation concerning gun control would effectively stop) kills some people and everybody loses their minds. It makes zero sense if you don't understand how cognitive dissonance disrupts logical consistency, and perfect sense if you do.
We have been trained by government to hold two opposing views in our minds partitioned by emotion. This is akin to how schizophrenia functions, and is exactly what composes George Orwell's “doublethink” in his indispensable dystopian novel 1984. The infallibility of Big Brother, or the state, is pounded into us from birth by ways of fear, anger, intimidation, inferiority, and false collectives. Even when BB contradicts inarguable logic he is correct (2+2=5). If the government murders and steals, it is right. The term “the greater good” is a perfect example of false collective: individuals are expendable to the group; the group is more important than the individuals it is comprised of. Killing a few people to benefit everyone else is perfectly justified. Yet if you were the one being expended by and for the group, you would see the folly in this thinking pretty quickly. It is the people cocooned by their culture and government, spoon-fed by mass media and unable to think for themselves that accept these terms without question and are thus all the more susceptible to further programming and indoctrination.
If we are ever going to have peace in this human existence (there will always be a bad apple somewhere) we must address the root causes. We cannot allow some people to have rights that others do not. We cannot say that one person may violate without consequence while others may not. We must apply consistency in logic and reason and morality. What will that look like? I have no idea, all I know is that this is the first step on the path to get there, to get free, to get good.
This is essentially a rewrite of my last article just with an added perspective. I hope you are enjoying my content, please give me some feed back so I can continue to improve and provide more coherence and value!
