Holy Shi... erm ... Cow

- courtesy freedomain radio

There are over 10,000 gods around the world, which look pretty ridiculous to just about everyone. If you weren't raised with them, they have no emotional resonance, no mythological power. They just look sort of like breakfast cereal cartoon characters gone wild or strange stone statues that look sort of like comic book characters. People do kneel and pray and chant and sing to them, which always looks kind of funny, yet, to them, it is a powerful and eternal god. To others, it is just, well, you know, a giant stone cow.

How we are going stop using hierarchical violence to slowly destroy our world, our economy and ourselves, and start building peaceful and voluntary solutions to 'complex' social problems. The answer is rather simple.

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Every moral evolution in history has been preceded by incomprehension, and was followed by incomprehension. Slavery, the subjugation, especially of women and children, the denial of property rights, any and all rights, all seemed perfectly normal until they were vanquished, and afterwards, it is hard to believe that such evils ever existed at all, yet ... they still exist.

The same goes for a stateless society, it only looks impossible because a truly free and peaceful society has yet to be achieved, but once we get there, people will look back at governments as ridiculous, bloody and evil hangovers from the primitive and drunken adolescence of our species.

Your government cannot protect your property by stealing half of it first. It cannot protect your life by threatening you with endless violent edicts. It cannot protect your money by forcing you to use a currency that it counterfeits at will. It cannot protect your children by sealing them up in 18th century mental prisons for years on end while selling their futures off to the highest bidder.

Foreign gods always look silly, and statism is just another religion. Statism has its churches, its symbols, its deities, its rewards and punishments, and it relies on the control and abuse of children.(*) The parallels are obvious and endless.

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So, how do we end statism? Well, exactly the same way that we end religion, by revealing it as just another giant stone cow. If you don't grow up kneeling beneath the grim shadow of some foreign god, it looks ridiculous, and so has no power over you. If you don't grow up speaking Esperanto, it just sounds like gibberish.

To save the world, to free the world, to end war and imprisonment and abuse and torture and indoctrination and enslavement – and the taxes and debts that enable all such evils – we need to stop teaching our children the language of the state.

If we raise our children without aggression, without raising our voices, without raising our hands, without bullying, without control, without punishment, without manipulation - but with gentleness and firmness and love, they will never fear authority, they will never submit to a brutal hierarchy, and they will never accept the moral authority of those who call themselves “the state”.

Our children will clearly see the evil foolishness of institutional violence, because it will come as a shock and a surprise to them, instead of, as is so often the case now, an inevitable extension of how they are raised. When something is utter foolishness to you, it has no power over you and you simply don't comply, and you cannot control people with something that makes no sense to them because of its sillyness and will thus be on their way. When you are not being taken serious, you have no power and are left standing, like a giant stone cow.

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Violence is a language we must unlearn, and the only path to a peaceful future is to never teach our children that language to begin with. Then, and only then, all the ugly bullying and violence and control and herding and kidnapping and imprisoning and counterfeiting and indebting and enslaving and worship and fear and obedience will no longer be charged with the power of myth and the petty religion of statism - the “state” will just be revealed as a silly superstition; a comic book god, a primitive hangover from yesteryear, nothing to be worshiped or obeyed or revered, or even feared. Just an old and dangerous toy we have outgrown.

When that great dawn comes, when myth falls from delusion, then the state will be revealed as just another giant stone cow, which we can all leave behind, in the jungles of history it came from, and where it damn well belongs.

a child sacrificed to the bull, moloch

But, there's a catch ... to be truly free is both very easy and very hard because we know about what free is but no one has ever really experienced it.

Thus, human society cannot be rationally understood until it is seen for what it is: a series of farms where human farmers own human livestock.

We therefore avoid the horror of our enslavement because it is painful to see it directly. We dance around the endless violence of our, now dying, system, because we fear the attacks of our fellow livestock.

However, we can only be kept in the cages we refuse to see. After all, the strongest lock on any cage is avoidence, not violence.