Government: It Always Comes Down to Force

It must have been nearly 20 years ago when a woman acquaintance, said, in passing, that "government is force."

I confess to being a little shocked, at the time. But now "Government is force" is one of my official Maxims. Oh, did I mention that I go on with:

Government is an armed minority, occupying territory, and taxing the inhabitants thereof to reward its supporters.

All government is unjust, because government leaders reward their supporters before the rest of the people.

The only warrant for government power is an existential peril.

What people want from government and political leaders is protection.

There are a couple of articles out there today illustrating my point. The first is the rather chilling battle of the experts over a girl that had been sickly since childhood. One set of expert doctors felt that the girl was genuinely sick; the other set of expert doctors thought that her problem was "psychosomatic" and that her parents were encouraging her belief in her illness.

So, the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (DCF) was called in. Justina was declared a ward of the state, and confined to a room in the hospital’s psychiatric unit.

Woah! Using government force to imprison a child over a disagreement between experts whether she was sick or faking it?

Hmm. I'd say that the bar on the use of government force and imprisonment needs to be set just a tad higher than that. But you can see the point. If you are an expert, and 97 percent of experts are right, then just who are you peons to resist their expert decision?

Whatabout experts and the Wu Flu? How much do we believe them and how much should government officials implement their recommendations for the use of force and shutting down the economy and enforcing Social Distancing dicta.

Then there is Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Bartholet. She thinks that homeschool education is a problem and that the state ought to prevent parents from going off piste and ignoring the advice of education and moral experts like her.

Homeschooling “not only violates children’s right to a ‘meaningful education’ and their right to be protected from potential child abuse, but may keep them from contributing positively to a democratic society.” Because of the dangers of homeschooling, Bartholet recommends that it should be presumptively banned either by the courts or various legislatures.

See what I mean? It is one thing for parents to be wrong. It is another for the state to step in and force the opinion of its experts upon the parents. But then with Curtis Yarvin's three layer theory, the upper class Gentry are the state.

Put it this way. Is there a right to be wrong? And if so, how far does it go?

Here's another look, this time from the Zman. He is making an Order vs. Chaos argument about the election of Trump in 2016.

Through the ballot, the public had injected a foreign body into the political system. How the system would react to that foreign body was unknown, but... What we are getting is chaos. Everything about the old order is suddenly in question, as everything about it is breaking down.

Think about it: that is the whole point of the "revolution, baby" of our lefty friends. You can't have "change" without chaotically destroying the Order of the old regime. And, of course, the people most distressed by the Trumpian chaos are the educated Gentry and the experts of the old regime. They cannot understand, cannot bear the chaos that has been unleashed upon their cosy assumptions and sinecures by the Trumpian hurricane.

In other words, our Gentry friends are completely against "revolution, baby" when it turns out that the revolution is going to upset their apple cart.

And now Trump has decreed a temporary halt to immigration! The nerve!

Actually, we can now understand the concern of the "intelligence community" back in 2016. They had, just had, to spy on the Trump campaign. What would you do if you were the Guardians of Order and this Trump chaos agent came in an started upending things right and left?

If you are a Jungian like me you understand that the question of Order vs. Chaos is central. We need Order, and yet Order is also hierarchy and hegemony. We cannot long survive Chaos, and yet the very center of life is facing up to Chaos and trying to bring it under control.

And the whole point of social animals is to reduce the resort to force.