osan

America was founded on the Empire model, meaning that slavery of one form or another is an inherent feature for all, including the masters, for they also live in cages, the presence of gilding making it no less a prison than the dank and dark cell. The architecture of the mindset that lead to the design of this land as a nation-state was inescapably Empire in its corner stones. How else could it have been? The men who designed the United States were marinaded in Empire, just as are we, for it was that in which they were born and it was all they knew. It was something of a small miracle they were able to think "outside the box" to the degree that they had. The very notion of supplanting the king was unthinkable for most. The king was a given in all of the known world, save for those places peopled by so-called "savages".

Note that last bit. People of the "new world" were regarded as uncivilized, which was true for the most part, but what does that really mean? The savages had neither recognizably great cities nor great works. There was no overt evidence of "high culture" to the European eye; no architecture; no science; no Christianity; no industry; little to no evidence of sedentary life. In short, there was no evidence of most of the things that in the minds of such men as the Europeans constituted civilization, and they were largely correct. Therefore, the native people were indeed savages in the sense of being "untamed", which is to say "unbroken", "undomesticated" in the way dogs and cows are.

The great flaw, or disconnect in the European perception laid in the depth of their fallacious presumption that the absence of such features in a society was somehow inherently abhorrent or otherwise inferior. They were unable to accept that such absences as witnessed in the savage tribes could be the hallmarks of any sort of life that was even remotely worth living. For the Europeans, and indeed the rest of the civilized world all these hallmarks such as huge public works were absolutely essential to any life worth living and the creation of such works almost invariably necessitates slavery of one form or another. Without such elements of civilization, the only existence deemed possible was hell on earth. Those men were trapped by the limitations placed upon them by the assumptions that for them were so "obviously true" that they could never be questioned. Therefore, the fundamental elements of tyranny had to be incorporated into the basic architecture of this nation. Those men had no choice precisely because not only did they not recognize those elements as such, they perceived them as essential to the preservation of an orderly society, order having been apparently ranked above the element of freedom in importance.

Valuing order above freedom is very understandable, precisely because people fear chaos so deeply that they would prefer a predictable tyrant king to unpredictable individual caprice running amok across the land. The Gordian knot of entangled layers through which an analyst must pick in order to get to the heart of the nature of the human being is daunting. Suffice to say here that for various, often subtle, and frequently cryptic reasons, people of the Empire mindset fear chaos more than they want true freedom. This is a truth that perhaps damns the human race to perpetual slavery and misery.

Because the Framers were the products of their age and history, they were able to wander only so far from the plantation. Because of the depth and the sheer power of their fundamental assumptions, the free lives of the savage people were beyond any possibility as considerations for America. This is all very understandable, of course. How many of us would envision a rightful nation where any man was free to apprehend small children and rape them with impunity? I will go out on a limb here and say not too many. Most of us recoil with some violence at that thought, rightly or otherwise. For most of us there is no discussion on the matter; sex with a child is something seen as so abhorrent, perceived as so fundamentally wrong and evil, that we do not give it any consideration whatsoever and that indeed to do so is to raise hackles and tempt one's fellows to consider that a beating might be in order. For the Framers, so it must have been in their minds when regarding savage life vis-à-vis civilized.

Indeed the fundamental assumptions about the two modes of living, savage and civil, are so deeply ingrained in us as the latter being "right" and "good", the other "wrong" and "evil", that we have come to make use of the very words "savage" to connote the chaos and violence we generally fear and abhor, and "civil" to connote all good propriety. "At least they were civil with each other throughout the divorce", and "James beat his random victim savagely" are but two humble examples illustrating how deeply seated are our prejudices regarding the perception of what it means to be civil v. savage. They are so deeply seated as to not be even noticeable, much less questionable, and that is one of the primal failings of human beings in general. That anything exists which cannot be questioned damns us as a species either to ignominious extinction, or to a future holding no better potential for us than as inmates within the insurmountable and impregnable walls of the prisons we erect about ourselves in our minds.

Because of this seemingly unbreakable habit, the Framers were unable to escape recreating Empire. The "clean sheet" that the Constitution purported to represent was anything but. This was not, however, perforce the result of evil intent, but of an inability to see past certain mental boundaries those men held in place as artifacts of the era and culture in which they were raised. For this they cannot be held to blame because breaking away from one's most closely held and fundamental beliefs is perhaps the single most daunting thing a human being can be called upon to do, even in the face of overwhelming evidence compelling them to do so.

Therefore, the fundamental elements that invariably lead to tyranny were woven into the very fabric of the American Constitution, likely unbeknownst to a plurality of the architects, if not the totality. They were simply incapable of escaping their assumption precisely because they could not envision a world where there were no rulers, for that is anarchy and we all know where that leads: chaos and death. There was nowhere else for them to go because in their minds there had to be written law. Their chosen solution has been empirically tested and it has failed miserably. It has proven itself a key enabler of one of the Four Necessities: Lassitude.

The structure of American governance fails by the simple fact that it establishes government in the first place. This fact alone holds the potential for conceptual separability, which is to say that "government" by the very nature of the notion becomes separated from those whom it governs in the mind of the individual. Conceptual separation leads directly and with some rapidity to functional separation. Practically speaking, government becomes its own entity separate and apart from non-government in the minds of people. Thought forms reality. This is precisely what has happened in America, just as it has with every other constituted Empire throughout all of humanity's written history. There are no exceptions to this because there can be none. This habit of separating, the byproduct of categorization and is something human beings do very naturally and with great force of habit.

Therefore, when "government" becomes its own reality in the minds of people, the tendency is for people to at first begin to rely upon it, thereby relieving them of an ever increasing proportion of their individual responsibilities to themselves and their fellows to govern themselves and to act as governors when others fail in their capacities of proper self-governance. Inevitably, reliance gives way to obligation as the full-time governors seek and invariably receive ever greater latitude in their discretion to dictate and enforce. At that point, tyranny has stepped into the shoes of the king and the individual finds himself once again faced with the choice of singing the ancient tune of the whipmaster or being consumed, for at that point no other options are tolerated, much less offered.

Most of us are hopelessly trapped in the mental prisons we erect about ourselves with the help of our fellows. So long as that truth and habit persist, we will be doomed to the repetition of the same old dance over and over again into what can only be viewed as the bleak landscape of a grim future. The advances in technology cement the guarantee of this with ever greater certainty. We are indeed at a crossroad, for before much longer technology will have clearly swept beyond a threshold where so much power will reside in so few hands that no amount of resistance will overcome the will of the tyrants.

Tyranny is a necessary characteristic of Empire. One cannot have the latter without the former precisely because the former is part and parcel of the definition of the latter. Tyranny is the very foundation upon which Empire is built and so long as people want something for nothing and are willing to tolerate the use of violence to get it, which is the essence of Empire, tyranny will remain with us and freedom as shaped by the principles of proper human relations shall remain, at best, as a mere and curious abstraction with no evidence of manifestation of which to speak.

Time is here.