Doug's Darkworld

This is kind of a generalist conspiracy theory post. There’s conspiracy theories about an incipient USA police state, North American Union government, world government, or some combination of the three. And as I’ve said before, no one has a crystal ball, and human history has gone down all sorts of unexpected and unlikely paths before … so pretty much anything is possible. That being said, here are some of the general reasons why I don’t lose any sleep over any of these albeit alarming possibilities.

The first is the simple observation that global power and wealth is more concentrated than at any time in history, a tiny handful of families and corporations control the lion’s share of the world’s assetsd. Many of these families have been accumulating this wealth and power for centuries. When you are already King of the Hill, there’s no where else to go. IE the powers that be don’t need a police state to control us, they already control us through advertising and the “media.” This alone is the primary reason I don’t lose any sleep over incipient police states or such. It’s too late.

Secondly, there’s the problem of the essential practicality of such an undertaking. No matter how much technology the police state has at its disposal, sooner or that that information has to be filtered through human brains. IE there is a limit to what can be accomplished by trying to micromanage people’s lives from the centre somewhere. This is borne out by twentieth century experiments in same. The big three experiments along totalitarian lines, Nazi Germany, Mao’s China, and the USSR … all ended badly. That doesn’t mean someone won’t try, but even if they do, I think it’s doomed to failure. There is some limit to the size of a police state, and I don’t think it’s very high.

Thirdly, usually when someone wants to control the very lives of their subjects, it’s because there is ideology or personality involved. And by personality, I mean some central character with malignant narcissism like Hitler. Well, the powers that be in the west are diffuse enough that it seems unlikely that some single individual will be able to assume world wide (or even US wide) dictatorial powers. (The idea that Obama is going to be some sort of dictator doesn’t pass the laugh test.) And if there’s any real ideology to capitalism, I haven’t seen it. Greed, ambition, and lack of scruples isn’t an ideology. It’s a pathology, but I digress.

Lastly, I ‘ve been around for awhile. And I’ve been seeing the same recycled imminent police state theories since the mid seventies. Hell, they’ve been a literary genre since the end of World War Two. That alone should give people pause. It’s already 25 years after 1984, and there’s no world wide police state yet. It makes me think that a good argument can be made that this belief is part and parcel of the modern human experience, more myth than real possibility. The endless choices that face people in the modern world are bewildering, it’s not surprising that it’s easy to believe that some evil entity could control it all. Or some good entity, there is a striking morphological similarity between  NWO conspiracy theories and belief in the second coming.

Which oddly enough leads me to the one situation where there is the possibility of an ideologically driven police state or even global police state. And that would be some sort of Evangelical Christian police state. Certainly not a new idea, it too as a conspiracy meme has been around since at least The Handmaid’s Tale. How likely is that? Damned if I know. I think my final observation, and again one I have made before under similar contexts, is that I think that people who worry about the unpleasant possibilities of a new world order are missing the point. We already have a very unpleasant situation where the rich are ever getting richer, let’s deal with the devil we have instead of the devil we might have.

Moving right along, I’ll post on the Ft. Sills massacre sometime soon, as is usually the case with something like this, I want to wait awhile for the facts to settle out of the dust. It’s pretty sickening though, both the act itself … and what some people have said in response. In fact the later is even more sickening in some ways. Jesus wept.

Have a great weekend everyone.

(The above image of a swastika shaped building is from Google Earth and I’m claiming it as Fair Use under US copyright law. It’s not being used for profit and its use here in no conceivable way interferes with the copyright holder’s commercial use of the image. It’s the barracks for the navy Seals and as far as anyone can tell its shape was purely accidental. IE it’s a great shape to maximize window exposure and have some courtyards to boot, window exposure is important as it was built in the pre-air conditioner era in Coronado California. The Navy has taken so much criticism that they are going to spend over $600,000 to change the shape of the building so it no longer looks like a swastika from space. Yeah, that’s a good use of taxpayer’s money.)