So, you just got effective control of a nation’s government, by means we’ll not go into here (very inconvenient, the superpowers stopping as soon as you got this far). Your goal, naturally, is to extend your power, but no longer can you rely on supernatural means. Instead, you need to look at the old playbook of tyranny. You need to figure out how to get the people to make you a despot, as currently you have only a fraction of the totalitarian power you desire.

Now, popular will is the basis of all forms of government. This assertion holds true in principle, first, in that God gave the fundamental power of government, the sword of justice (Rom 13:1-4), to the people directly (Gen. 9:5-6); the government is the institution designed to wield that authority, preventing any individual from abusing it. Practice, however, bears out this principle even more thoroughly. Even North Korea’s current regime runs on the consent of the governed; while that consent is manufactured by fragmenting the society into individuals and then pressuring each individual with the mass of the other’s consent, at the end of the day, if the entire North Korean populace decided to erect a new government, the outcome would not be in doubt.

In representative governments and in regimes less thoroughly oppressive than North Korea, this nature is even more clear. The power of the government lies in the consent of the governed to its authority; so long as the people-as-a-whole consent to the government, the government rules. If the people as a whole refuse any demand made by the government, though, the government simply cannot force it, not without a massive loss of authority (via the appeal to force) which will likely end in a death-spiral. The art of tyranny, therefore, is convincing people to give you more and more perceived authority, wielding that authority as power, and shaping the society so that no consensus or significant movement against your ‘authority’ can survive, can find the strength to challenge your ‘power.’

You, as it turns out, have access to a modern law enforcement system. Rather than the old model of heavy reliance on citizen militias assembled to carry out warrants, you have a large and accepted police force. Already, thankfully, people have accepted this institution as something of an alternative to self-defense (though some recognize the absurdity of the idea- not too many, you should hope). What we’ll see today is how to turn that police force into part of a feedback loop towards tyranny.

The first step is to be judicious in how you use your police force. Anti-government crimes, like tax evasion and refusal to obey bureaucrats, should be dealt with to the fullest extent public relations will allow, with an eye to making such crimes as near to extinct as possible. Crimes against the citizenry…. Well, you’d be well advised to become ineffectual there. In this struggle, a corrupt, institutionally compromised, power-hungry, cowardly judiciary is your best friend.

The people will naturally observe both that you have a large police force and that crime is really not pleasant for them, rising as it is. With some judicious handling, they can then be guided to the proper conclusion: in order to reduce crime, law enforcement powers must be increased. More men and more weapons, of course, but much more important is the compromise of various rights. Evidence seized illegally should be less protected; the question should not be ‘Did you punish only the guilty?’ but ‘Did you punish all the guilty?’

Second, now, use your new power. After, if prudence advises, a short period of crack-down on crime against citizens, allow the institution, already thorough seeded, to drift back towards the emphasis from before: anti-government crimes, particularly defending those new inroads you made on the people’s rights. Be careful, at this stage, to victimize the unlovely, the outcast, and the out of sight. If a part of your apparatus messes up too badly, use that corrupt judicial system to ‘punish’ some fall guys; the rest, perhaps, can go vacation in the corporate world, in the intelligence-organized crime ecosystem, or, well, they can commit suicide. You understand.

The two-step here is simple, elegant, and, if history is any indication, rather effective, at least for a time. There’s going to be some tetchy moments, of course, points where your control hasn’t gotten fully established and a few too many critics start noticing. Here, you’ll have to do some fast talking, some brutal hatchet-work, but I have confidence in your ingenuity. The key idea is that the people are to be trained always to look to the government for a solution to the crime problem, and the government is to be very good at never quite fixing said problem, incentivizing the citizens to give the government ever more power. As a part of this, too, the people will become demoralized and lose internal trust, sabotaging their ability to counteract you or to convince each other you need to be counteracted. Take caution, though; completing the process is nearly impossible unless you coordinate with a more comprehensive societal degradation.

Addendum

Now, I don’t believe this process, as it shows up across the Western world, is basically malicious, not in the sense of an overarching plan. Many have undoubtedly conceived of the process; they have likely justified it as a necessary step to the totalitarian utopia. Destabilizing society is an essential part of various ideologies and atheologies, such as communism, Marxism (not quite the same), fascism (the real deal), liberal democracy (meaning the West’s totalitarian, bureaucratic regime), and all their flavors. It’s an essence of Cultural Marxism, so famous of late.

But the truth is that the people who actually implemented this process are and were in large part merely corrupt, foolish, incompetent, and cowardly, in different mixtures, motivated by short-sighted, selfish pursuit of their own self-interest, their own power, without care for what they did to the future (or with an array of more-or-less ideological reasons to rejoice in the harm). They certainly never assembled in a grand conspiracy (not even the conscious destabilizers did that- they had conspiracies and have them, but not one: a thousand, viciously fighting each other to take the top, with greater hatred for each other than any other except God).

The Moral

You, obviously, aren’t running the nation you live in. Even the president doesn’t do that (his power is not only Constitutionally limited but massively curtailed by the courts and the administrative state, with the complicity of the courts and legislature); even a dictator has limited power, albeit the limit is soft and prudential (meaning many forget it) and of little comfort to the people.

Furthermore, you don’t actually want to impose tyranny. Thankfully, that framing was a literary device.

Where do we go from here?

We must look with skepticism at ‘law and order.’ Law and order are very good, but only if they are righteous law and Godly order. If what is offered is tyranny, we should reject it. More, we should recognize that people are people, and thus our personal virtue will not suffice to decide what everybody else does, what our government does. Above all, rejecting the poison offered as cure does not mean we should stop seeking a cure, not when God’s given it to us.

The answer to rising crime is not merely more government power. As I’ve illustrated here, such power easily becomes merely a means to foster more crime. Government has an incentive to use its power to accumulate more power, rather than actually fix the problem (see: all of bureaucracy). The answer is to hold the government accountable, to seek righteous laws, and to press for righteous enforcement of those laws by both executive and judiciary (including enforcement against the government itself and against the government’s officers. Get rid of sovereign immunity.). The answer is to look to God’s law, as we find it in Scripture, and apply it with care and an eye to circumstance (not mechanically); in that law, we find true freedom (Matt. 11:30).

God bless.

Using Crime and the Police to Rule – UNPUBLISHED – TD

So, you just got effective control of a nation’s government, by means we’ll not go into here (very inconvenient, the superpowers stopping as soon as you got this far). Your goal, naturally, is to extend your power, but no longer can you rely on supernatural means. Instead, you need to look at the old playbook of tyranny. You need to figure out how to get the people to make you a despot, as currently you have only a fraction of the totalitarian power you desire.

Now, popular will is the basis of all forms of government. This assertion holds true in principle, first, in that God gave the fundamental power of government, the sword of justice (Rom 13:1-4), to the people directly (Gen. 9:5-6); the government is the institution designed to wield that authority, preventing any individual from abusing it. Practice, however, bears out this principle even more thoroughly. Even North Korea’s current regime runs on the consent of the governed; while that consent is manufactured by fragmenting the society into individuals and then pressuring each individual with the mass of the other’s consent, at the end of the day, if the entire North Korean populace decided to erect a new government, the outcome would not be in doubt.

In representative governments and in regimes less thoroughly oppressive than North Korea, this nature is even more clear. The power of the government lies in the consent of the governed to its authority; so long as the people-as-a-whole consent to the government, the government rules. If the people as a whole refuse any demand made by the government, though, the government simply cannot force it, not without a massive loss of authority (via the appeal to force) which will likely end in a death-spiral. The art of tyranny, therefore, is convincing people to give you more and more perceived authority, wielding that authority as power, and shaping the society so that no consensus or significant movement against your ‘authority’ can survive, can find the strength to challenge your ‘power.’

You, as it turns out, have access to a modern law enforcement system. Rather than the old model of heavy reliance on citizen militias assembled to carry out warrants, you have a large and accepted police force. Already, thankfully, people have accepted this institution as something of an alternative to self-defense (though some recognize the absurdity of the idea- not too many, you should hope). What we’ll see today is how to turn that police force into part of a feedback loop towards tyranny.

The first step is to be judicious in how you use your police force. Anti-government crimes, like tax evasion and refusal to obey bureaucrats, should be dealt with to the fullest extent public relations will allow, with an eye to making such crimes as near to extinct as possible. Crimes against the citizenry…. Well, you’d be well advised to become ineffectual there. In this struggle, a corrupt, institutionally compromised, power-hungry, cowardly judiciary is your best friend.

The people will naturally observe both that you have a large police force and that crime is really not pleasant for them, rising as it is. With some judicious handling, they can then be guided to the proper conclusion: in order to reduce crime, law enforcement powers must be increased. More men and more weapons, of course, but much more important is the compromise of various rights. Evidence seized illegally should be less protected; the question should not be ‘Did you punish only the guilty?’ but ‘Did you punish all the guilty?’

Second, now, use your new power. After, if prudence advises, a short period of crack-down on crime against citizens, allow the institution, already thorough seeded, to drift back towards the emphasis from before: anti-government crimes, particularly defending those new inroads you made on the people’s rights. Be careful, at this stage, to victimize the unlovely, the outcast, and the out of sight. If a part of your apparatus messes up too badly, use that corrupt judicial system to ‘punish’ some fall guys; the rest, perhaps, can go vacation in the corporate world, in the intelligence-organized crime ecosystem, or, well, they can commit suicide. You understand.

The two-step here is simple, elegant, and, if history is any indication, rather effective, at least for a time. There’s going to be some tetchy moments, of course, points where your control hasn’t gotten fully established and a few too many critics start noticing. Here, you’ll have to do some fast talking, some brutal hatchet-work, but I have confidence in your ingenuity. The key idea is that the people are to be trained always to look to the government for a solution to the crime problem, and the government is to be very good at never quite fixing said problem, incentivizing the citizens to give the government ever more power. As a part of this, too, the people will become demoralized and lose internal trust, sabotaging their ability to counteract you or to convince each other you need to be counteracted. Take caution, though; completing the process is nearly impossible unless you coordinate with a more comprehensive societal degradation.

Addendum

Now, I don’t believe this process, as it shows up across the Western world, is basically malicious, not in the sense of an overarching plan. Many have undoubtedly conceived of the process; they have likely justified it as a necessary step to the totalitarian utopia. Destabilizing society is an essential part of various ideologies and atheologies, such as communism, Marxism (not quite the same), fascism (the real deal), liberal democracy (meaning the West’s totalitarian, bureaucratic regime), and all their flavors. It’s an essence of Cultural Marxism, so famous of late.

But the truth is that the people who actually implemented this process are and were in large part merely corrupt, foolish, incompetent, and cowardly, in different mixtures, motivated by short-sighted, selfish pursuit of their own self-interest, their own power, without care for what they did to the future (or with an array of more-or-less ideological reasons to rejoice in the harm). They certainly never assembled in a grand conspiracy (not even the conscious destabilizers did that- they had conspiracies and have them, but not one: a thousand, viciously fighting each other to take the top, with greater hatred for each other than any other except God).

The Moral

You, obviously, aren’t running the nation you live in. Even the president doesn’t do that (his power is not only Constitutionally limited but massively curtailed by the courts and the administrative state, with the complicity of the courts and legislature); even a dictator has limited power, albeit the limit is soft and prudential (meaning many forget it) and of little comfort to the people.

Furthermore, you don’t actually want to impose tyranny. Thankfully, that framing was a literary device.

Where do we go from here?

We must look with skepticism at ‘law and order.’ Law and order are very good, but only if they are righteous law and Godly order. If what is offered is tyranny, we should reject it. More, we should recognize that people are people, and thus our personal virtue will not suffice to decide what everybody else does, what our government does. Above all, rejecting the poison offered as cure does not mean we should stop seeking a cure, not when God’s given it to us.

The answer to rising crime is not merely more government power. As I’ve illustrated here, such power easily becomes merely a means to foster more crime. Government has an incentive to use its power to accumulate more power, rather than actually fix the problem (see: all of bureaucracy). The answer is to hold the government accountable, to seek righteous laws, and to press for righteous enforcement of those laws by both executive and judiciary (including enforcement against the government itself and against the government’s officers. Get rid of sovereign immunity.). The answer is to look to God’s law, as we find it in Scripture, and apply it with care and an eye to circumstance (not mechanically); in that law, we find true freedom (Matt. 11:30).

God bless.