Government by Gimmick Won't Last

posted by J.B. Shurk at American Thinker

The system's too powerful!  You can't beat a "big brother" police State!  The globalists control all the money and have all the leverage!  I've heard every reason under the sun why individual liberty will continue to lose out to the rapidly advancing technocratic surveillance structure extinguishing Western freedoms today.  I say, "So what?"  The bigger they come, the harder they fall.

Our whole human story is a repeating pattern in which power accumulates, empires emerge, power corrupts, divisions grow, and empires come crashing down.  Anyone who thinks an international oligarchy of corporate behemoths, central banks, and Intelligence Community spy chiefs will succeed where the Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Carolingian, Byzantine, Ottoman, Yuan, Ming, and British empires all failed makes the mistake of giving today's power brokers more credit than they deserve.  International oligarchies commanding unbeatable militaries and hoarding unparalleled wealth are nothing new.  The "unbeatable" are always beaten.

When we are overwhelmed by those who choose to torment us, we tend to unfairly reward them with even more semantic power by referring to them as an ever-shifting, all-knowing, globular "they" that cannot be tamed, let alone specifically named.  Individual politicians, companies, institutions, and agencies end up looking so invincible that they are treated as omniscient gods.  Well, they are not divine; they are just ordinary men and women who have acquired tremendous wealth and power over others; and they exist at the top of society's artificially constructed hierarchical pyramid only so long as society chooses.  Their authority is neither fixed nor eternal; it disappears the moment enough ordinary people recognize the illusion of power as mere delusion.

They control the news, social media, the banks, the food supply, the flow of gasoline, and they're set to use the excuse of tracking our "carbon footprint" as a means to monitor and control us throughout our lives.  Well, that sounds scary, but those aren't exactly new powers being wielded for the first time in history.  Aztec priests engaged in human sacrifice to appease their gods during pandemics and droughts; "climate change" priests seeking to control population growth by stifling food and energy production are not at all different.  Just because population control has been freshly weaponized behind digital computer systems, facial recognition technology, and artificial intelligence platforms does not alter the age-old power structure of a group of "rulers" claiming the "divine" prerogative to tell a group of "subjects" what they can and cannot own, say, or do.  Whether some high priestess from the Stone Age, a First Dynasty pharaoh, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, King Louis XIV, Napoleon, Stalin, or Klaus Schwab's World Economic Forum, those who presume to have the power to command others what to believe and how to behave do not last.  

What is more powerful than the people who appear so powerful?  Ideas.  Give my enemies more weapons, money, and soldiers to wreak havoc and conquer what is not theirs.  I'll take the power of an idea over a blade in any conflict at any time.  Force is effective only in achieving momentary compliance; ideas upend whole systems like trickling water seeping through tiny cracks never before seen.  You plant the seeds of a new idea, give that idea room to spread, and let it grow right through the floorboards of a system of power unable to fend off attack — that's how real revolutions unfold.

The Marxists have been playing this game for over a century, except the seeds they have planted throughout the West are nothing but poisonous weeds.  They slowly took over the arts, institutions, schools, churches, and corporations until, unbeknownst to most Westerners, Marxist socialism had become their lands' dominant species.  Because so few defenders of freedom cut back against Marxism's invasive growth, its weeds spread over everything, and the only way now to remedy the immense damage is to sow such powerful ideas that vibrant, healthy growth overtakes the twisted, parasitic rot.  

The good news: man's yearning for liberty is as fierce as any inherent need, and when conditions are right, nothing can stop its vigorous bloom.  You open a population's eyes to its own enslavement, reawaken its forgotten thirst for freedom, provide it with the seeds for rejuvenation, and the lifeblood of liberty beats harder and flows stronger the longer it has been denied.  How do you eradicate the thorny weeds of Marxist globalism destroying the West with pernicious strains of totalitarianism in the twenty-first century?  You plant the seeds of liberty and let them grow into such tall trees that Marxism can find no sunlight, water, or soil beneath freedom's canopy.  How do you bring down an unhealthy system that nonetheless presumes to be all-powerful?  You let those trees of liberty flourish into wild orchards that overgrow all else.

We are right now in an interim period that might best be called a kind of government by gimmick.  Nothing our "leaders" say is bound by much truth.  Three years of pandemic lockdowns, forced experimental injections, government-sanctioned censorship, and other unconstitutional COVID-1984 measures were moronically justified as necessary because government health bureaucrats and politicians were acting at the "speed of science."  What kind of nonsense is that?  When has real science ever been anything but methodical and slow?  Yet that authoritarian policy directive has justified three years of reckless tyranny across the West, and too many minds squeezed by Marxism's weeds simply complied.  

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security habitually lies about America's borders being "secure," even though illegal immigration has never been worse, and so long as corporate media parrot government lies, reality is ridiculously distorted.  Climate change, which is an immutable planetary phenomenon, has been transformed into irrefutable proof that centralized government authority must intervene in all economic activity — the exact policy objective, coincidentally enough, that forms the foundations of Marxist power.  When Elon Musk's recent "Twitter Files" release confirmed that the FBI has been actively directing policies of censorship and speech punishment against the American people, the lawless law enforcement agency accused anybody with eyes and brain sufficient to comprehend the Bureau's constitutional betrayals of being "conspiracy theorists" pushing "misinformation."  Why should federal police confess to crimes when only they, not the people, have the power to make arrests?

Not only have Western governments partitioned free speech into new categories of "mis-," "mal-," and "dis-information" that have miraculously lost any legal protections, but they have also decided to ban all "hate" speech outright — which again, completely coincidentally, includes any anti-government language governments would naturally hate.  So the same Western governments that pretend to be bastions for freedom and democratic principles inexplicably insist that they can both declare what kinds of things the people may freely say and whether what the people ultimately say will be tolerated.  In the not so distant past, such government actions were understood as prima facie examples of tyranny, but in this era of government by gimmick, Western governments have simply redefined their tyranny as "protecting democracy."

By distorting the meaning of words, Western governments have destroyed their legitimacy.  For this reason, Westerners who wish to fight back can start by doing three things: (1) reject appeals to authority; (2) embrace the role of "conspiracy theorist" or any other derogatory label governments use when they seek to manipulate the public; and (3) consciously choose to elevate virtue, morality, and the pursuit of excellence in life.  

Appealing to authority, instead of truth, has always been a false path.  Today, however, when our "leaders" embrace obvious lies and the redefinition of words, positions of authority should hold no special value.  When those who commit crimes call the innocent criminals, no Westerner should be cowed by government name-calling.  And the fastest, most direct road back to a prosperous civilization grounded in personal freedom rejects Marxist relativism and embraces steadfast virtue.