This is a comment that I put up on Foster Gamble’s recent blog post: PEOPLE STANDING FOR JUSTICE
(http://www.thrivemovement.com/people-standing-justice.blog)
If we look at it carefully, there is actually no such “thing” as government. What we call government is an organized structure composed of people using the concept of government as an organizational principle under their direction. Under this principle, the preservation and actualization of the imaginary structure of government itself is the preeminent imperative. The constantly propagandized need for this structure is the multifaceted and mind-numbing justification for the use of whatever means are necessary to protect and preserve, not the people who are supposedly subjects of the government, but the government structure itself. Whatever means necessary include the use of lethal force. History shows that the levels of lethal force used are limited only by the technological tools at the disposal of government actors and their ability to control the reactions and consciences of the governed. The latter is sometimes called manufacturing consent.
While the population can work, often at the cost of extreme suffering and sacrifice, to limit the irrationality and violence of the structures to which they’re subject, we see that over time people taking the role of government officials always tend to enlarge the scope of their powers, as well as the power of the technology and systems they control. The nature of the government concept inevitably attracts people without ethics against the misuse of power into pursuing power in its structure. In fact, the only way to succeed in rising to power is to abandon ethical considerations and, again, to use the means necessary to prevail over other state officials. As John Trudell said, “Their violence works. It hardly ever fails.”
A simple analytic for the validity and legitimacy of human behavior is to see if it involves violence or aggression toward other people or toward living systems. If it does, then we must be called by clear realization to not support it, whatever the rationale or justifications. As people seem to be realizing very rapidly now, it is impossible for us, however lofty our notions or rhetoric, to reach an ethical result through unethical or aggressive behaviors. This is not a matter of compiling a complicated set of rules, but by a clear seeing of what’s going on under our noses. Adopting such a simple ethic is certainly not the easiest course for our egos to take. It can be very rigorous and demanding. On the other hand, if we really want to transcend the cycles of violence and increasing suffering and destruction in which we’re now embedded, this ethical consistency and determination will be more easy than any other alternative
