Countries as cults

[Mike Fleming]

There is a lot of confusion amongst people about why their governments do the things they do.  Why they lie, misrepresent themselves and everything else.  I always shared this confusion.  It was when I put the idea of a government in the framework of an extortion racket, that things started to coalesce in my mind.  It still wasn't adequate though, and I began to think of cults.  Cults are really just a particularly pernicious form of extortion racket.  If you think about this in the context of the globe, you will see many countries where it is obvious to everyone that the government is just an extortion racket.  But the really successful governments of the world, those of the West like America, Canada, Australia etc, are as successful as they are because they have been able to enact a form of more sophisticated cult brainwashing upon their followers.   Rather than being mere extortion rackets, they have been able to convince their followers that they are desperately needed and they can't live without them, just as the cult leader convinces his followers that they need him.

 

Some of the ways it then becomes obvious is in things like censorship.  Cult leaders will always want to censor the information their members have access to.  This can be done in subtle and non-subtle ways such as directly censoring the internet or enacting a soft form of censorship on the mass media in general.

 

The NSA.  Just as the cult leaders want to restrict access to themselves they want every single bit of information they can get on their followers in order to more effectively manipulate them.  The government is constantly more invasive and more intrusive because it is the central means of control over the populace.

 

Fear.  Keep your followers scared.  Keep them scared of the outside world, beyond the borders of the cult.  Always keep them in state of fear by creating threats in their minds.  The communists.  The terrorists.  The drug dealers.  The illegal immigrants.  Global warming.  etc

 

Have songs and chants which glorify the cult.   The national anthem for example.

 

Flags and colours which evoke memories of the colours and symbols used by neighbourhood gangs.  Just like neighbourhood gangs also they will occasionally have disagreements which explode into a war that have nothing to do with the populace and their daily lives.

 

Of course religion has almost always been directly associated with the State.  The members of the state even today in many places are called Ministers.

 

Controlling the education of the children, just as cults do.

 

Thinking of the state as a cult just brings a lot of clarity to it's behaviour.  When everyone seemed to jump in uproar against the NSA, it just seemed, to me, that this was no surprise.  It entirely fit into the profile of the state that I had in my mind.

[FreedomPhilosophy]

I like this analysis, I see the parallels, thanks.I think it's clear the state arose from but then apart from the church. I also suspect that what gave rise to this is the arising of anthropocentric religions. The older pagan religions saw nature in terms of mysterious natural force, as we came to demystify nature the gods became more human and more subject to divination and expression of a projected will.

[Magnus]

Very good observations -- the State embodies the worst aspects of both racketeers and cults.

 

The State is a corporation with two lines of production -- slavery and lies.

 

The Lying Department is extremely important. In Medieval Europe, the Church was a kind of parallel government. It owned huge tracts of land, had courts, its own body of law, a corporate hierarchy, imposed taxes, etc.

 

Since the late 1800s, the Lying Department's functions have been taken over by schooling and the "news" media. They are the new version of the monasteries and the priestly caste of old.

 

But the main enterprise has always been the Slavery Department -- a caste of armed parasites directing and siphoning off the productivity of others.

[Jer]

Nice post Mike. Cult is a highly charged word and I think illustrating these parallels might be a good way to get a "blue pill" person to reconsider the virtue of the state.