Thus he who leaks state-corporate data to the public; criminal. He who steals private data from the public; businessman of the year! He who works a few hours part-time while claiming benefits; criminal. He who defrauds an entire country, gambles away their assets and buys up their public resources; knighthood! She who wrecks a fighter-plane destined for the Saudi Arabian extermination of Yemen; criminal. She who annihilates Libya so that oil companies can move in; feminist heroine! He who kills because he wants someone dead; murderer. He who kills because his government wants them dead; war hero! No need to explain why all this is so; the facts speak for themselves.
Talking of feminism (see myth 29), the latest push into the creation of an entirely statutory context, is to criminalise such things as ‘looking at a woman’s breasts,’ ‘trying to hook up with an employee,’ ‘touching a woman you don’t know without her consent,’ ‘feeling betrayed that a woman didn’t sleep with you,’ and ‘initiating sexual content without explicit consent.’ The reason that these are increasingly unlawful is that women increasingly make laws. It has nothing to do with the fact that sexist men slobber over women, use their strength and power to coerce women into bed or sexually assault them. Women in power seek to criminalise context-free acts and feelings for the same reason that men in power do. Sure, it gets genuine creeps, rapists, reptiles, thieves, murderers and madmen out of the way, excellent, but it also serves to suppress everyone who threatens the [would-be] powerful woman, everyone capable of criticising her.
The second purpose of the law is to permit elite theft through the legalisation of property and the transmission of wealth (aka inheritance). It’s not very complicated, this. The powerful steal land and resources, convert their theft to coin, use their money-power to steal more and to confer their spoils to their children, each step protected by law and, by extension, the professionals that elites employ to justify their interests and remove anyone who threatens them; anyone who acts on the idea, for example, that there is a difference between property — stolen land and resources — and possession — things that an individual, and by extension her community, uses. Owners and managers do everything in their power to discredit such an idea. That absence of property and sanctity of possession has been the basis of human society for thousands of years and is never far from the conscience of the great mass of humankind is irrelevant. All that matters, to property owners and their whores, is that they keep their hands on the loot.
The third purpose of the law, is to put the fear of God into the godless. Law — the harsher the better — takes the place of hell as the source of terror for ordinary people, particularly the lower-classes from whence the only serious threats to the system arise. The owners and managers of the system couldn’t care less about tyrannical legislation, provided it only ever actually applies to those without sufficient means to circumvent it. Liberal types might have pangs of conscience from time to time when they see the police and the army go to work, but the security of their gated communities, their bank accounts and their conspicuously privileged children trumps moral qualms about living in a militarised police state.
The fourth purpose of the law is that of every profession; to exclude ordinary people from the meaning of their lives (see myths 28 and 32) with jargon and ritual; in this case the forest of technocratic pseudo-language and the preposterous, quasi-religious legal ceremonies that lawyers spend a large part of their lives learning to decipher and participate in, with a straight face. These are unconsciously designed to bewilder, confuse and pacify the uninitiated into submission and, it goes without saying, into dependence on the professional middle-men of the law.
The final, and most important purpose of the law, which includes and subordinates the other three, is simply to keep the wheels of the system running, as a device for administration and organisation. The reason it is illegal to be without the right forms of identification and accreditation, or to act independently of professional authority, or to sell your wares on the high street, or to paint works of art onto bridges, is less because these acts are a threat to established interests, although of course they are, and more because they are independent of or antagonistic to systemic techniques of measurement, management and control. Customs and rights in traditional, pre-civilised societies could be unfair and prejudiced but they were responsive to the incredible complexity of natural and social life, specific to the case, specific to place and people and alive, adaptable to changing situations; in other words a complete nightmare to the civilising lawmaker for whom all and everything must uniformly conform.
And not merely outwardly. Laws do not just address how individuals act, but how they think and feel, which must also come under unified legal systems of measurement and control. Thus gathering mushrooms from a Prince’s forest is intolerable to the system; but so is eating them to dissolve time and space. Thus stealing food from the back door of a supermarket must be made illegal; but so must running naked through the front door going ‘weeeee, weeeee, weeeeeeeeee!’
But, hold on, what would we do without the law? Wouldn’t we all be tearing each other apart to get what we want? How would we protect ourselves without the police and the army? Imagine for a moment we removed all legislation which exists solely to protect class-power, and then we dispensed with all those laws that guidelines, custom and man’s innate sense of fairness can far better deal with than the vast, lumbering, context-immune and largely corrupt bureaucratic machine of lawyers, law-courts, judges and prisons. Imagine it was impossible to accrue wealth through accumulating property, or power through dominating common resources. Imagine that there were no such thing as money (see myth 2), and that therefore rent, debt, destitution and the wretchedness that goes by the name of ‘work,’ simply could not exist (see myth 21). Would there be crime? The taboo of the law — of ‘defenders of the law’ and that most untrustworthy class of human-being, the law-abider — is that the answer to this question could possibly be no. The law, we are told, protects us from injustice, suffering, inequality and ruin. That its purpose is to proliferate iniquity and, via hyper-rational standardisation of human-experience, control, is unmentionable; for the obvious reason that dealing with the actual cause of crime is not good for business. Money cannot be made by eradicating injustice, redistributing power, land and wealth, fostering self-reliance, allowing ordinary people to take responsibility for their environment or freely shaping it to their needs or those of nature; and so defenders of the law must criminalise such activities and focus exclusively on the deleterious effects of living in monstrously unjust, stupefyingly boring, sickening, stupid and painful societies. Thus lawyers, thus law courts, thus police, thus prisons, which are to crime as doctors, psychologists and teachers are to pollution, madness and stupidity.
And so it is said ‘there are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root’3.
Lawyers, like journalists (see myth 9), have no useful skills and produce nothing of value. This forces them to create an integral category of charitable activity, ‘pro-bono work,’ in order to convince themselves and others that they doing good and not merely rescuing a few people from the system for which they work, during their paid hours, to uphold and into which, non-professional interference is never tolerated. See Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds.
Get it into writing!
Henry David Thoreau.
15. The Myth of Nice
Beria, now thirty-six, was complex and talented with a first-class brain. He was witty, a font of irreverent jokes, mischievous anecdotes and withering put-downs. He managed to be a sadistic torturer as well as a loving husband and warm father but he was already a priapic womanizer whom power would distort into a sexual predator. A skilled manager, he was the only Soviet leader whom ‘one could imagine becoming Chairman of General Motors,’ as his daughter-in-law put it later.
Simon Sebag, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
Humans are forced to build, maintain and defend an inhuman system. They can only do this by being inhuman · · · Many people find this unpleasant, and so they lie to themselves and others. The chief lie is in being nice · · · Modesty, humility, complaint and charity all perform the same justifying functions.
‘I know some nice / hard-working / humble / frugal / kindly / friendly / generous / creative / intelligent / sensitive (delete as applicable) aristocrats / bankers / ceos, / managers / landlords / doctors / teachers / lawyers / politicians / consultants / rock-stars / modern-artists / journalists (delete as applicable).’
The manager or owner may be any kind of man or woman, he or she might be ‘a beautiful person’ or a ‘great boss’ or even ‘a bit of a lefty’, but only when not called upon to defend his class interests or those of the system. No matter how much someone who has power in the system protests that he ‘hates the word boss’, no matter how well a workplace is organised to mask class-relations with exalted job-titles, open plan offices, roles-off teambuilding, collective piss-ups and dress-down Fridays, the second the owner’s profits or the manager’s position or the needs of the system come under threat, he or she will pull rank; gently, perhaps, with infinite concern, implicit solidarity and many protestations that ‘I have no choice’ and ‘I hate to say it’. I call this unconscious sliding between the psychological states of human being and employer-employee ‘moding.’
Members of the professional management-class can — indeed must — mode between Mr Jekyll the fellow human and Mr Hyde the Responsible Professional, and then deceive themselves about Hyde’s part in the system and justify his shifty cruelty and cowardice as tragically unavoidable, logical, ‘realistic’ or even, most ridiculously, fair. Occasionally systemacrats have vestigial consciences informing them that they are actively participating in a profound wrong. This compels them to consciously deceive themselves which in turn gives rise to great moral stress; but more often than not they have no idea that they have achieved their power by amputating their humanity and effortlessly mode from nice colleagues to nice tyrants to nice lunatics.
And so it is everywhere there is a middle or management class there are calls for decent housing, decent education, decent broadband, decent brioche — but never decent class relations1; and everywhere there is class inequality there is aid, protests, petitions, pro-bono representation and advertising campaigns for being lovely, tolerant and peaceful — but never a step taken towards actual equality or genuine independence from the system, unless and only unless mass-agitation seriously threatens established systemic power (then a few reforms might be necessary; see myth 31); and everywhere there are slaves there are ‘kindly’ owners and managers, convinced that they are good or doing good, convinced that the madness and rebellion of those who generate their wealth is due to every other imaginable cause than their slavery or confinement2 and, coincidentally, getting a lot more out of the workforce by being nice to them.
In contrast to the manager and professional, the owner or senior manager often knows very well that he or she is extracting profit at the expense of the alienated worker and the terminally exhausted planet and, at least when out of the glare of the public eye, can openly despise the powerless classes. Learning not to let this mask slip is one of the more important tasks of elite education. When the young elite produce outrageous expressions of snobbery, their parents wince and grimace. Don’t worry though, she’ll soon learn the value of compassion, hard-work, charity and modesty.
Modesty (humility, frugality, etc.) is a central technique of expiating self-justification used by the wealthy during times of potential social unrest. When everyone is clamouring for wealth in an expanding economy the individual capitalist can afford to look and feel rich, but when poverty strikes the masses, and fear and guilt strike those who benefit from the impoverishing system, the colours become muted, the gold is locked away, a rosy tinge of socialism is applied to philanthropic acts and there is much complaint of hardship and tightening of belts. The corporations which hold and augment elite wealth continue to build ever vaster monuments to their world-eating power, allowing the wealthy themselves to dress down, save money, cut costs and be just like the rest of us.
Likewise the exploiting classes love to work hard, to be busy. They moan about it, but the proud subtext is ‘I deserve my privilege.’ The poor are supposed to be grateful that the rich pay them to produce their comforts and privileges, not complain about criminally impoverishing class-relations. This is why the wealthy are so eager to present to the world the classic excuse; ‘I work hard for my money!’
Another increasingly popular tactic used by the wealthy to atone for the intense mediocrity and sickening guilt of their lives, is to develop depression, ocd, clinical anxiety, anorexia or some kind of fashionable sleeping disorder. Naturally the possibility that such ‘illnesses’ are tactics (albeit unconscious ones), that they are culturally determined3 or that the patient is in any way responsible for their onset or outcome is greeted with maximum outrage (see myth 30).
But for the systemoid who is threatened by the stirrings of his conscience or, more often than not, by the outrage of those beneath him, nothing comes close — in importance, prevalence or effectiveness in dealing with the fear and guilt of privilege — to reform (directing one’s frustrations at the baddies in power; see myth 31) and to charity.
My God they love charity; we all love it. In pre-capitalist days guilty rulers and the anxious masses would wash the blood off their hands by confessing their sins or purchasing indulgences from the church — effectively a soul-cleansing token at God’s laundromat. Now they donate to a good cause, or organise a fund-raiser. Who, after all, but a monster could object to raising money for the poor children in Africa, or for clinics to cure malaria, or for dentists to treat the homeless, or for teams of crippled children to plant buddleia for the butterflies? It doesn’t occur to those who worship our benevolent overseers that ‘charity’ might be a vast business concern deeply embedded in the system, and profoundly reactionary to its core, or that the word charity — the love of humankind — should perhaps mean working to end a system in which the philanthropy of the rich, or of the swindled poor, is unnecessary.
Yes, a very nice person, the philanthropist. Other examples of nice people include your postman, your toddler’s kindergarten teacher, your doctor, the guy who came to clear away the wasteland at the back of your house, the woman next door who works abroad counselling people with ptsd, the men who built the first atom bomb and the people who work for bae systems4. Lots of Nazis were nice, lots of Romans, no doubt plenty of Mongols too, and I daresay there are some nice lads in the Isreali army. President Obama? very nice. The Queen of England? Prince William? Exceptionally nice!5
Fuck nice.
Which is not an invitation to act like a prat, to be cruel and insensitive or to spit on the generosity and sweet nature of good people. Certainly not a recommendation to nurse anger, feed off it, or nurture the dark self-righteous delight of the goody. It is to see how nice is deployed, how it is used — consciously and unconsciously — to conceal or deflect attention away from not so nice. Easy to see in other people, this, particularly when you are on the receiving end of niceness. Not so easy to see in yourself. Not so easy to spot your own moding, from a conscious individual to a caring professional. Not so easy to see how niceness instantly justifies avoiding a difficult confrontation, or standing up for what is right. Not so easy to see your own cowardly lack of responsibility in handing it over to the system. Not so easy to see how deep the system reaches into your own conscience or consciousness. Partly this is because ego cannot allow itself to be seen for what it is, but also because a hugely important component of the system is the generation of justifications and the continual insistence that there is no place on earth for anything but an upbeat can-do attitude, infinite resilience and a cheerful telephone voice.
David Harvey, Companion to Capital.
School shootings? Workplace massacres? Slave rebellions? What could be the cause? Why, it must be due to mental illness, smart-phones, alcohol, moral turpitude, guns, video-games and radicalisation. It can’t have anything to do with the experience of being a student, a worker and a slave. See Mark Ames, Going Postal.
Ethan Watters, Crazy Like Us.
I know a few — lovely people!
John Zerzan, The Nihilist’s Dictionary.
16. The Myth of Democracy
Popcorn pictures have always ruled. Why do people go see these popcorn pictures when they’re not good? Why is the public so stupid? That’s not my fault. I just understood what people liked to go see, and Steven [Spielberg] has too, and we go for that.
George Lucas
There is no country on earth that is democratic. Democracy does not apply to the market, and it is the market which runs the world. ‘Democratic’ actually means ‘good for business’ · · · What nobody can accept however, on the left or the right, is that democracy is inherently authoritarian, coercive and combative · · · The most destructive outcome of democracy is that it eliminates personal responsibility. Nobody is responsible in a democracy, which is why nothing intelligent ever happens democratically.
The system runs on the outlandish assumption that we have something called ‘democracy’, a system in which people can elect representatives who will ensure that the country will be run by and for the ‘will of the people’. That’s the idea, and many people seem to think it’s a good one.
What we actually have, in our actual lives, is a system in which we are forced to spend most of our waking hours in hierarchical organisations through which orders flow in one direction only; down. We do not vote for capitalism, nor for its managers, ceos, judges, landlords, teachers, doctors and owners. ‘Democracy’ doesn’t apply to the organisations which actually run the world, in which unelected, unaccountable and usually unseen officials command, via their financial or institutional power, the workforce (the clientele, the student body, etc.), and shape the environment for their own ends. The correct, if now clichéd, term for this system is totalitarianism.
