You feel the power of these magical institutions. Some of the autonomous among us decide to no longer comply with government rules and stop paying taxes, fines, and debts. They still believe in the concept of money because it is handy, although the government can print as much as it likes. Thus, not all trust is gone. After some time, the autonomous notice the empirical truth that Power exists:
- The idea of yourself is removed from the idea of your house by the police.
- The idea of your partner cannot handle it anymore and leaves.
- Your bank account is empty.
- In a totalitarian state, you might be nudged to fight some war.
Now, were those abstract ideas always there? Can you always trust these ideas? Who invented them, and why?
Part 1: The Engine of Fear (Thomas Hobbes 1588-1679)
Hobbes designed a theoretical society fueled entirely by paranoia. Terrified of the unpredictable actions of the Golems around him—everybody fighting everybody, the Golems howling for power—the Hobbesian bird-brain traded all individual autonomy to an absolute dictator (the Leviathan).
By granting this sovereign a strict monopoly on violence, the citizens are kept in a state of awe and terror; if a member of the herd attempts to harm another, the state crushes the offender, forcing everyone to settle disputes through the law rather than the herd using sticks and stones.
Hobbes built a massive iron cage to protect the herd from each other, but completely failed to account for the psychopath’s rise to power. Thus, a large part of the current world remains fundamentally Hobbesian. There is a lot more to say about Hobbes, read this post on the forever wars.
Painting below: Golems Howling for Power
Part 2: The Conflict of Interest (John Locke 1632-1704)
Locke spotted a fatal engineering failure in the Hobbesian blueprint. He recognized that if the same entity writes the laws and holds the exclusive rights to violence, the unobserved ego of the dictator will inevitably rewrite reality to serve itself. His solution was physical accountability: the lawmaker must be subject to their own law. However, Locke could not imagine how fundamentally different the psychopath is from the mainstream herd; a psychopath in power will simply murder and ensure he and his cronies are never convicted. The law is for everybody but them.
Part 3: The Mechanical Brakes (Montesquieu 1689-1755)
Montesquieu proved that voluntary self-restraint is biologically impossible for the Golem. Power always expands until it hits a solid wall. He engineered a mechanical solution—forcing opposing institutions (Trias Politica) to grind against each other so that power physically stops power, making it much harder for a disordered mind to seize the entire control board. Montesquieu minted the word despotism. He discovered the psychopath.
Part 4: The totalitarian state (Nietzsche's sister 1846-1935)
The totalitarian state became possible with the will to power, which was normalized by Friedrich Nietzsche's sister. See our post on the History of the Will. During this time, the herd was not yet conditioned with the abstract reasoning of Montesquieu and later philosophers. They were sleepwalking into war. Nowadays, the new sleepwalkers are conditioned by means of social networks and media owned by oligarchs. For an example, read "free speech policy enforcement".
Part 5: The Banality of Evil (Hannah Arendt 1906-1975)
Arendt revealed that the slaughterhouse runs by means of state-regulated processes; it requires sleepwalkers bravely doing their daily jobs. She diagnosed the ultimate bureaucratic automation of the ego. The perfect machine for the psychopath is built when individuals:
Refuse to question their own thoughts.
Succumb to the fear of state power.
Blindly execute the administrative processes of the system.
Hanna Arendt noted an automatic mechanism where unwillingness to share Capital leads to the forever wars. Read this post.
Part 6: Ponerology, The Study of Evil (Andrzej Łobaczewski 1921-2008)
When Montesquieu's brakes fail and Arendt's sleepwalkers stop paying attention, the machine is captured. Łobaczewski documented how unchecked power acts as a literal magnet for primary psychopaths. Empathy is systematically purged, and the state mutates into a "Pathocracy"—a system where war and paranoia become the standard operating tools of the disordered mind.
Part 7: Golemism (Guru GolGull the Almighty 1967-2267)
Guru GolGull exposed the Root Causes of WAR with a simple, easy-to-grasp bypass for the bird-brain. The bird-brain is occupied with immediate, daily survival. For this reason, Preventing War must be explained in the simplest possible terms—creating an intuitive, physical recognition of the mechanisms behind power without forcing the herd to read 10,000 pages. Modification of the bird-brain is necessary to break the causation of the second root cause of war. Breaking causality seems hard because the social networks are owned by those in power. The true believers behind the old belief systems worked for 10 to 20 years on their strategies to condition the members of the herd forever, fixing their minds just as Goebbels did during WWII. Luckily, this is all just thought in your mind. It falls apart so easily.