How It Was Supposed To Work

 Few "American" have any clue how their country was supposed to work.  They have never read more than the first paragraph of  the Constitution, civics classes have been replaced with condom-rolling lessons, and at every turn, the media and politicians pound minsinformation into their heads - not that those idiots have any better clue.

Let's take a moment to imagine what the United States would be like today if it was still the united States.

There is no nation called the United States, and no such citizen as a US citizen.  There are 50 semi-autonomous nations who have delegated certain functions to a central body to share the cost of defense and military command, regulate interstate traffic of goods and ensure people could travel freely among the States, and formulate foreign policy for the mutual benefit of all the States, and most of all to mint a single currency for use in all the States with equal weights and measures to facilitate commerce.

There is no such thing as a US passport and no individual is subject to federal law.  In fact, the only internal power the federal government has over the States is to adjudicate disputes between themn and issue a tax bill every year to fund the federal budget.  

The tax bill is apportioned to each State according to its representation in the federal government (population).  The States then determine the means by which they will collect the taxes and pay the bill - be it sales tax, per capita tax, lottery, or some other means.  The feds have no control over the internal workings of the States, except to protect the rights of individuals from usurpation by the State.  The only other tax the federal body could collect is tariffs on imports and exports.

The decadal census determines how many people live in each State, a number of Representatives is approtioned to the State, then the State divides its population up into equal units, called Districts.  Each District elects their Representative to the federal House.

The people also elect their own Legislatures, who in turn choose the two Senators that each State has.  In this way, the people hold the Legislators accountable, who in turn hold the Senators accountable, who in turn approve of every major action taken by the Executive branch, including appointments and treaties, to ensure the Executive is held directly accountable to the interests of the States.

Other than border patrol and customs, and federal district courts (one district for each Supreme Court justice), there are no federal agencies allowed to operate within the sovereign territory of the States.  The federal government cannot own land, there are no national parks, there are no territories or protectorates (Virgin Islands, Guam, Puerto Rico, etc.), and in fact the only possession of the feds is 100-square mile plot of swamp land called the District of Columbia, which essentially means it is held in commonwealth for the States.

There is no Department of Homeland Security, no FEMA, no FBI, no Parks and Wildlife, no Health and Human Serices, no Department of Education, no NASA, no National Endowment for the Arts.  The Cabinet could publish advisories on Best Practices for the States, but they could not enforce anything.

The only laws that affect individuals are passed by the States for their own citizens and according to their unique cultures and situations.  This keeps the process and enforcement of laws close to the people who must follow them, because people who live in Connecticut have different sensibilities and living conditions than those in New Mexico.

Folks living in the State have almost no interaction with the federal government other than the gold and silver coins they use in commerce.  There is no national bank.  For those who prefer, the State banks print paper certificates equal to the amount of gold and silver in the State banks, so people can carry and use paper notes in their daily affairs, rather than heavy coins.  

Most folks who travel State to State will cash in their notes before leaving the State, unless the State has a transfer agreement with other States, which most do, since the weight and measure of the coins is regulated by the federal treasury and is the same in all States by Constitutional requirement.

Imagine a world where anonymous jack asses living high on the horse while digging in your pocket don't exist, where your representative lives down the street from you, where hordes of uniformed thugs have no power over you.  Imagine a world where they were treated and acted like servants to sovereign individuals who lived on the land, not citizens.  Imagine a world where your money had had the same value for 6,000 years and couldn't be inflated because they couldn't manufacture it out of thin air.

Image a world where there was only one legal system for everyone, great or small.

That's what the united States were supposed to be.

Eyes Rolling Hard

 

The only thing more insane than a right-wing conspiracy theory is a left-wing conspiracy theory.

A right-wing conspiracy theory (RWCT) is at least based on people doing research, examining history, seeking evidence and trying to draw conclusions from seemingly random and disparate events. Left-wing conspiracy theories (LWCT), on the other hand, "me too" emotional reaction to things they don't understand and refuse to learn about.

For example, an RWCT might posit that an obscure CIA memo in 1957, led to the Joint Chiefs taking such-and-such an action, which created thus and such agency that fomented the Capitol riots in 2021.  No problem.  I can look up the documents, read the transcripts, check the salient facts and allegations, and come to my own decision.

An LWCT sees no historical connection to anything, other than it is all evil Patriarchy, offers no documentation other than an article in the sacred New York Times, tells the reader how to feel about it all, assigned some random highly-edited facts, then demands that you believe it without any critical thinking, because the person espousing the theory is the only credible source for the information.

I've been quiet here for some time because I honestly can't separate the wheat from the chaff.  Firsst, we have to determine what is pure lie, what is part lie and what is true (not Truth, mind you).  Then we have to assemble the pieces like a giant jig-saw puzzle and see if we can make out a coherent image.  Then we apply the Laws of Thermodynamics to discern cause and effect.  If we begin to see a Big Picture, then we assume that we are on the right path, while at the same time trying to digest the profound implications of that Big Picture.

It's all very complicated and it is so easy to get bogged down in the minutiae.  To visualize the situation, we can think of it as a giant jig-saw puzzle, where ever piece is itself a separate jig-saw puzzle.  In other words, it's a fractal puzzle.  Fractals are usually mind-boggling to look at, but they are often very simple formulae and once you grasp the correct key, the lock bends to your will.

Nature abhors centralized power.  When we look out into her bowels, we see not one planet, but quadrillions; not one star, but trillions; not one galazy, but billions.  Nature has scattered her power over unimaginable time and distance.  Taking over an entire planet or solar system would hardly rate as an footnote in Nature's Handbook of History.

Bringing this grand vision down to a human scale, there has been a millennia-mong effort to centralize the worldly powers under one fist.  The Sumerians, Babylonians, Akkadians, Mongols, Mandarins, Greeks, Romans, Maya, Aztec, and hundreds more all tried to conquer their worlds.  They rose to incredible power and complexity, and then in a flash, they vanished.

I trace the current effort at empire to a single Papal Bull issued by Boniface VIII, called Unam Sanctam, published in 1302.  Essentially, the Roman Church laid claim to the entire Earth and all creature in, on and over it, in trust for the return on the Christ to claim His worldly kingdom.  This one document launched the Age of Exploration.  Expeditions were funded and sent to the ends of the Earth to map the Church's domain, quantify it's flora and fauna, and plant flags in anything that would sit still long enough to get a painting of it.

Oh, and pick up any gold and silver lying around to fund more of it, while you're at it.

This worked pretty well for a couple of centuries, based partly on the element of surprise (wait, where'd these guys come from?), and partly on superior war technology (wait, is that a metal sword?).  But a crucial event happened a little over a century after Bonnie the 8th staked his claim.

In Mainz, Germany, in the early 1400s, a guy named Johann Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg had the bright idea to combine a wine press with his inventions of moveable type and oil-based ink, and overnight torn a gaping hole in his world.

That invention led to something called the Age of Enlightenment, which had the audacity to posit individual humans were their own sovereigns and could only be ruled by central authority by their consent to hand over limited powers to others.

This set off a wave of revolutions and independence movements across the entire globe, which peaked in the decade after World War II, but to a certain extent still simmers today.  With that, the Holy Roman empire finally died, along with the European royal houses whose power was entirely based on fealty to Roman.

Human nature being what it is, though, the collapse of one empire only creates the desire in some folks to create what they think will be a bigger, better empire that won't make the same mistakes as all the others, and put this group of greedy individuals in charge.  And it worked for 80 years or so.

In the wake of World War II, the United States (not the united States) was the only major power left with an intact power structure and currency.  Some folks saw this as an opportunity to recreate the world in the Enlightenment Image (nationalist-populist), but some other folks saw the opportunity to milk the world for their personal benefit (socialist-democracy).  The two have been battling it out in a low-level war behind the scenes ever since, with the latter having the upper hand with better propaganda.

But something changed.

In the 1960s, the US military created the ARPAnet, an electronic matrix of computers across nearly any physical space, with each terminal having a unique identifiers called an IP address, that allowed the military and their weapons developers to trade information quickly and secretly.

Folks thought this was pretty nifty and by the 1990s, the World Wide Web took root.  Suddenly, folks didn't need to access specific libraries with rare books and information, they could point and click and never leave the comfort of their couch/desk/dinner table.  If Gutenberg torn a hole in the world, the internet ripped it wide open.

This seemingly innocuous invention has done more to undermine global power structures than any combnation of events in all of human history.  There can be no elites when everyone has access to the same information.  There can be no centralized power structures when every individual with a terminal is just as powerful as any other.

Prove it? Wikileaks, GameStop, Bitcoin, the hundreds of sites that reproduce high-resolution scans of ancient and obscure documents (such as Unam Sanctam), YouTube, and on and on.

Oh sure, there are major efforts underway to censor various individuals, outlets and information, but information is a slippery thing.  The tighter you squeeze it, the more oozes through your fingers.  Like trying to block a river, eventually the water will find another way out - over, under or around, and in the end evaporation.  The breach in elite control occurred decades ago and there is nothing they can do to stop it.

Except conspiracy theories.

Recent years have seen the weaponizing of conspiracy theories.  We have seen the Qult and now the Insurrection, the Jews, the Jesuits, Black Popes and helicopters, Clubs of Rome and 300, Masons, Templars and Nazis.  All of these are distrctions.  These theories intend to keep folks focued on a single puzzle piece, while attempting to hide all the others.

The problem is, the internet is an insurmountable force.  For every bubble of secrecy inflated, there are thousands of pins salivating for the opportunity to pop it.  As the self-appointed elite try to build ever more exotic locks, the plebes build ever more sophisticated picks.  The demise of the system we have all gown up under is dying, and there is no palliative that can stop it.

The thing about our modern world is that we can pick any random point in time and space, and no matter how far back or forward we go, it is all the same - a fractal.  It seems, though, that we have reached a point where the Big Picture is going non-linear.  Truly, there is nothing new under the Sun, and as people scramble for answers, they find only different scales of the same problems.

It seems we have reached the end of usefulness for the current paradigm.  One of the axioms of critical thinking is that when you come to a dead end in one line of reasoning, you must change your perspective to find solutions.

The centralization of power and the specialization of knowledge in the the current paradigm is the poison pill that has lurked at its heart for centuries, the One Great Secret that no one was supposed to know.  But the Secret is out: we have reached the logical end of this line of reasoning.  There is no way to put a plaster on the current paradigm and keep it hobbling along like a beater car that has reached the end of its structural integrity.

Whether we want it or not, we are faced with the imperative to change or perish.  Like bacteria in a Petri dish, we have mined all the nutrients in our environment and must now change our environment or the colony collapses.  The environment is not just a reference to our physical surroundings, but a mental and spiritual realm, as well.

For myself, I leave the closed minds to fight over the bleached bones of yesterday's meal.  I choose to find a new and better source on which to dine - preferably one whose bounds are limitless and equally accessible by anyone willing to let go of the dry and nutritionless detritus the old world.

Behold, for I make all things new - Revelation 21:5