Project CertoPower -- Page 8

Smash the Idols
of Civilization
in your Head!

Sally Kempton: "It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head."

Steve Biko: "The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed."

The enemy/oppressor plants IDOLS in your mind to serve as "outposts in your head." These "outposts" are used to gain control over your mind, so you can be controlled, manipulated, and exploited. Think of it this way: There are "Bullies of Civilization" who want to control you. If they plant their "god-idol," and/or "democracy idol," and/or "government-idol" inside your head, then you have your own "god-idol," and/or "democracy idol," and/or "government-idol" in your head to do the controlling. You do the controlling the way they want. So they can control you without doing anything further. You must smash the idols of civilization and get them out of your head!

You can also think of the idols as a "citizen mask," as described by Claude Steiner. So take off your "citizen mask!"

Éttiene de la Boétie: -- (Discourse of Voluntary Servitude - 1552/1553):

"Poor, wretched, and stupid peoples, nations determined on your own misfortune and blind to your own good! You let yourselves be deprived before your own eyes of the best part of your revenues; your fields are plundered, your homes robbed, your family heirlooms taken away. You live in such a way that you cannot claim a single thing as your own; and it would seem that you consider yourselves lucky to be loaned your property, your families, and your very lives. All this havoc, this misfortune, this ruin, descends upon you not from alien foes, but from the one enemy whom you yourselves render as powerful as he is, for whom you go bravely to war, for whose "greatness" you do not refuse to offer your own bodies unto death. He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite numbers dwelling in your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you."

George Washington: -- "Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master."

Thomas Jefferson: -- "A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine."

H. L. Mencken: -- "A good politician under democracy is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar."

Lord Acton: -- "The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the party that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections."

James Bovard: -- "Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner."

Christian Michel: -- "Democratic law does not say, "Thou shalt not kill." Instead, it designates certain people who have the right to kill -- soldiers and state police. Democratic law does not order, "Thou shalt not steal." It says that only certain people have the right to steal -- tax and customs agents. What does "power to the people" mean when the people enjoy fewer rights than their supposed servants?"

Edward Bernays: -- "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."

Oscar Wilde: -- "All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and it degrades those over whom it is exercised... The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people."

L. Neil Smith: -- "The first and most important thing to understand about politics is this: forget Right, Left, Center, socialism, fascism, or democracy. Every government that exists -- or ever existed, or ever will exist -- is a kleptocracy, meaning "rule by thieves." Competing ideologies merely provide different excuses to separate the Productive Class from what they produce."

George Bernard Shaw: -- "A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul."

Voltaire: -- "In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other."

Mark Twain: -- "No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session."

Frederic Bastiat: -- "Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."

Max Stirner: -- (edited from The Ego and Its Own):

"I no longer humble myself before any supposed "power," and I recognize that all powers are only my power, which I have to subject at once if they threaten to become a power against or above me; each of them must be only one of my means to carry my point, as a hound is my power against game, but is killed by me if it should attack me personally. All "powers" that attempt to dominate me I then reduce to serving me. The idols exist through me; I need only refrain from creating them anew, then they exist no longer; so-called "higher powers" exist only through my exalting them and abasing myself.

Man, your head is haunted; you have idols in your head! You imagine great things, and depict to yourself a whole world of "gods" that has an existence for you, a "spirit-realm" to which you suppose yourself to be called, an "ideal" that beckons to you. You have fixed ideas!

Do not think that I jest or speak figuratively when I regard those persons who cling to the "higher" as veritable fools, fools in a madhouse. The vast majority belongs to this category. What is it, then, that is called a "fixed idea"? An idea to which a man has subjected himself. When you recognize such a fixed idea as folly, you lock its slave up in an asylum. And is the "truth of the faith," say, which we are not to doubt; the "majesty of the people," which we are not to strike at; "virtue," against which the censor is not to let a word pass, so that "morality" may be kept pure -- are these not fixed ideas? Is not all the stupid chatter of most of our newspapers the babble of fools who suffer from the fixed ideas of "morality," "legality," and so forth? Fools who only seem to go about free because the madhouse in which they walk takes in so broad a space?

Touch the fixed idea of such a fool, and you will at once have to guard your back against the lunatic's stealthy malice. These lunatics assail by stealth him who touches their fixed idea. They first steal his weapon -- free speech -- and then they fall upon him with their nails. Every day now lays bare the cowardice and vindictiveness of these maniacs, and the stupid populace hurrahs for their crazy measures. One only has to read today's journals to get the horrible conviction that one is shut up in a house with fools. But I do not fear their curses, and I say, my brothers are arch-fools.

Whether a poor (or rich) fool of this insane asylum is possessed by the fancy that he is "god the father," the "emperor of japan," the "holy spirit," the "president of the usa," or whatnot -- or whether a poor fool in comfortable circumstances conceives his mission as being a "good christian," a "faithful protestant," a "loyal citizen," or a "virtuous man" -- these are all fixed ideas.

Just as the schoolmen philosophized only inside the belief of the church; as "pope" (so-called) Benedict XIV wrote fat books inside the papist superstition, without throwing a single doubt upon these beliefs; as authors fill whole folios on the supposed "state" without calling into question the fixed idea of "the state" itself; as our newspapers are crammed with politics because they are manacled to the fancy that man was created a political zombie - so also "subjects" wallow in "subjection," "virtuous" people in "virtue," and "liberals" in "humanity"; without ever putting to these fixed ideas of theirs the searching knife of criticism. Undislodgeable, like a madman's delusion, those thoughts stand on a firm footing, and he who doubts them - lays hands on the "sacred!" Yes, the fixed idea, that is the truly "sacred"!"

"The decision having once been made not to let oneself be imposed on any longer by the extant and palpable, little scruple was felt about revolting against the existing State or overturning the existing laws; but to sin against the idea of the State, not to submit to the idea of law, who would have dared that?"

Friedrich Nietzsche: -- extracted from Thus Spoke Zarathustra -- Of the New Idol:

"The state? What is that?
The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies, too; and this lie creeps from its mouth; 'I, the state, am the people.'
Where a people still exists, there the people do not understand the state and hate it as the evil eye and sin against custom and law.
But the state lies in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it says, it lies -- and whatever it has, it has stolen.
Everything about it is false; it bites with stolen teeth. Even its belly is false.
It would like to range heroes and honorable men about it, this new idol! It likes to sun itself in the sunshine of good consciences -- this cold monster!
It will give you everything if you worship it, this new idol: thus it buys for itself the luster of your virtues and the glance of your proud eyes.
Yes, a death for many has here been devised that glorifies itself as life: truly a heart-felt service to all preachers of death!
I call it the state where everyone, good and bad, is a poison-drinker: the state where everyone, good and bad, loses himself: the state where universal slow suicide is called... life."

Friedrich Nietzsche: -- (Ecce Homo):

"All questions of politics, the ordering of society, education have been falsified down to their foundations because the most injurious men have been taken for great men... I do not count these "pre-eminent men" as belonging to mankind at all -- to me, they are the refuse of mankind, abortive offspring of sickness and revengeful instincts: They are nothing but pernicious, fundamentally incurable monsters who take revenge on life..."

Jonathan Swift: -- (A Tale of a Tub: Written for the Universal Improvement of Mankind):

"...[A]t a grand committee, some days ago, this important discovery was made by a certain curious and refined observer; that sea-men have a custom when they met a whale, to fling him out an empty tub, by way of amusement, to divert him from laying violent hands upon the ship. This parable was immediately mythologiz'd: The whale was interpreted to be Hobbe's 'leviathan,' which tosses and plays with all other schemes of religion and government, whereof a great many are hollow, and dry, and empty, and noisy, and wooden, and given to rotation."

Jonathan Swift: -- (Gulliver's Travels):

"...[H]e was at a loss how it should come to pass, that the law, which was intended for every man's preservation, should be any man's ruin. Therefore he desired to be further satisfied what I meant by law, and the dispensers thereof, according to the present practice in my own country; because he thought nature and reason were sufficient guides for a reasonable animal, as we pretended to be, in showing us what he ought to do, and what to avoid."

Although it's obvious to any "reasonable animal" that the notion is absurd that "governments can make laws," do you have the intellectual courage to remove the "law idol" from your mind?

If you do remove the "law idol" from your mind, you may want to be careful about who you tell that you've done so. In particular, it's prudent to realize that there are millions of "lawnuts" out there, some with uniforms and guns!

Don Lancaster: -- (The Incredible Secret Money Machine):

"A "granfalloon" is any large bureaucratic figment of people's imagination. For instance, there's really no such thing as the Feds or the General Veeslefeltzer Corporation. There are a bunch of people out there who relate to each other, and there's some structures, and some paper. In fact, there's lots and lots of paper. The people sit in the structures and pass paper back and forth to each other and charge you to do so... All these people, structures, and paper are real; but nowhere can you point to the larger concept of "government" or "corporation" and say, "There it is, kiddies!" The monolithic, big "they" is all in your mind." (See also "Does the government really exist?")

Kurt Vonnegut: -- (Cat's Cradle):

"If you wish to study a 'granfalloon,' Just remove the skin of a toy balloon."

Timothy Leary: -- (Neuropolitics):

"We have been robot-trained to believe that democracy, as practiced in this country, is something sacred. Everything we have been taught is dangerously wrong... Everything printed in our newspapers is a selective fraud. (I know that you know this, but we have to keep reminding ourselves.)

Representative government, as practiced today, is a brief and now outmoded historical phase designed to bridge the period between the rise of national states and the emergence of globe-linking electrical-electronic communication...

Guilt, innocence, punishment, forgiveness, law and order, rehabilitation -- all constitute the mythology that masks the simple reality of badly-wired robots bumping into one another. Most agonizing -- and supposedly intractable -- social problems are caused solely by our ignorance of the brain's capacity for rote repetition and abrupt change.

Brainwashing is happening to all of us all the time. Knowledge of brain function is our only protection against it. The solutions to our predicament are neurological. We must assume responsibility for our nervous systems. Our robothood can remain static if we endlessly repeat the imprints of infancy to adolescence, or it can be drastically altered by brainwashers without our consent, or we can take control of our nervous systems. If we don't assume this personal responsibility, somebody else will; if we do take over the control board, we can each be any person we want to be."

James J. Martin: -- (Introduction to No Treason by Lysander Spooner):

"Since late Neolithic times, men in their political capacity have lived almost exclusively by myths. And these political myths have continued to evolve, proliferate, and grow more complex and intricate even though there has been a steady replacement of one by another, over the centuries. A series of entirely theoretical constructs, sometimes mystical, usually deductive and speculative, they seek to explain the status and relationships in the community since it became discernibly organized politically.

It is the assault upon the abstract and verbal underpinnings of this institution ("the State") which draws blood... those who seek to destroy the abstract/verbal justification for such "play" ...are its most formidable adversaries."

Francis Bacon: -- The Idols of Human Understanding (Novum Organum) (condensed and edited)

"The idols and false notions which are now in possession of the human understanding, and have taken deep root therein, not only so beset men's minds that truth can hardly find entrance, but even after entrance obtained, they will again in the very instauration of the sciences meet and trouble us, unless men being forewarned of the danger, fortify themselves as far as may be possible against their assaults.

There are four classes of idols which beset men's minds. To these, for distinction's sake, I have assigned names:

1. Idols of the tribe;
2. Idols of the cave;
3. Idols of the marketplace;
4. Idols of the theater.

The idols of the tribe have their foundation in human nature itself, and in the tribe, race, and culture of men. It is a false assertion that the measure of man is the measure of things. On the contrary, all perceptions as well as the sense of the mind are according to the measure of the individual and not according to the measure of the universe. And human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.

The idols of the cave are the idols of the individual man. Everyone has a cave or a den of his own, which refracts and discolors the light of nature; owing to his personal and peculiar nature; or to his education and conversation with others; or to the reading of books, and the authority of those whom he esteems and admires; or to the differences of impressions, accordingly as they take place in a mind preoccupied and predisposed, or in a mind indifferent and settled; or the like. So that the spirit of man (according as it is meted out to different individuals) is in fact a thing variable and full of perturbation, and governed as it were by chance. Whence it was well observed by Heraclitus that men look for sciences in their own lesser worlds, and not in the greater or common world.

There are also idols formed by the intercourse and association of men with each other, which I call idols of the marketplace, on account of the commerce and consort of men there. For it is by discourse that men associate; and words are imposed according to the apprehension of the vulgar. And therefore the ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding.

Lastly, there are idols which have immigrated into men's minds from the various dogmas of philosophies, and also from wrong laws of demonstration. These I call idols of the theater; because in my judgment all the received systems are but so many stage-plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion."

Take off Your Citizen Mask!

"The only way you can control anybody is to lie to them."
-- L. Ron Hubbard

Legal Scholar Lysander Spooner Exposes the Pretended "U.S. Constitution" as a Hoax, Fraud, and Scam!

Quoted from No Treason No. I and No. VI, The Constitution of No Authority (1870) [emphases added]:

"...[T]wo men have no more natural right to exercise any kind of authority over one, than one has to exercise the same authority over two. A man's natural rights are his own, against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime, whether committed by one man, or by millions; whether committed by one man, calling himself a robber, (or by any other name indicating his true character), or by millions, calling themselves a government... Clearly all this is the work of force, or fraud, or both... The Constitution has no inherent authority or obligation. It has no authority or obligation at all, unless as a contract between man and man. And it does not so much as even purport to be a contract between persons now existing... Those persons, if any, who did give their consent formally, are all dead now. Most of them have been dead forty, fifty, sixty, or seventy years. And the constitution, so far as it was their contract, died with them... The proceedings of those robbers and murderers, who call themselves "the government"... The "nations," as they are called, with whom our pretended ambassadors, secretaries, presidents, and senators profess to make treaties, are as much myths as our own... Certainly, too, there is in existence no such firm, corporation, or association as "the United States," or "the people of the United States," formed by any open, written, or other authentic and voluntary contract... The lesson taught by all these facts is this: As long as mankind continue to pay "National Debts," so-called --- that is, so long as they are such dupes and cowards as to pay for being cheated, plundered, enslaved, and murdered --- so long there will be enough to lend the money for those purposes; and with that money a plenty of tools, called soldiers, can be hired to keep them in subjection. But when they refuse any longer to pay for being thus cheated, plundered, enslaved, and murdered, they will cease to have cheats, and usurpers, and robbers, and murderers and blood-money loan-mongers for masters. ...Inasmuch as the Constitution was never signed, nor agreed to, by anybody, as a contract, and therefore never bound anybody, and is now binding upon nobody; and is, moreover, such an one as no people can ever hereafter be expected to consent to, except as they may be forced to do so at the point of the bayonet, it is perhaps of no importance what its true legal meaning, as a contract, is. Nevertheless, the writer thinks it proper to say that, in his opinion, the Constitution is no such instrument as it has generally been assumed to be; but that by false interpretations, and naked usurpations, the government has been made in practice a very widely, and almost wholly, different thing from what the Constitution itself purports to authorize. He has heretofore written much, and could write much more, to prove that such is the truth. But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain --- that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist."

Potential Action Based on Lysander Spooner Surveys

Lysander Spooner (January 19, 1808 - May 14, 1887) "[W]as an American individualist anarchist, entrepreneur, political philosopher, abolitionist, and legal theorist of the 19th century." A Lysander Spooner website is maintained by Randy E. Barnett, Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal Theory, Georgetown University Law Center. On 9/19/07 there was a poll on the home page with the following results:

Do you agree with Spooner that the U.S. Constitution is without Authority?

Yes    - 61.8% - 21,247
No     - 24.7% -  8,501
Unsure - 13.5% -  4,648
Total:           34,397

Statistics for surveys on the Spooner site as of 12/12/07:

Do you agree with Spooner that the Constitution is without Authority? (Numbers on 12/12/07)

Yes    - 61.8% - 21,437
No     - 24.7% -  8,570
Unsure - 13.5% -  4,685
Total:           34,693

Do you agree with Spooner that government should not have a monopoly on the production of money?

Yes    - 71.2% - 1,608
No     - 15.8% -   356
Unsure - 13%   -   294
Total:           2,260

Do you agree with Spooner that authors and inventors obtain property rights in their ideas?

Yes    - 52.4% -   804
No     - 27%   -   415
Unsure - 20.6% -   316
Total:         - 1,537

Do you agree with Spooner that the postal monopoly is unconstitutional?

Yes    - 72.4% - 1,332
No     - 14.6% -   269
Unsure - 13%   -   240
Total:         - 1,843

Do you agree with Spooner that slavery was unconstitutional before the 13th Amendment?

Yes    - 80.1% - 2,344
No     - 11.4% -   334
Unsure -  8.5% -   248
Total:         - 2,928

We assume that Barnett maintains his Lysander Spooner website because he has a high regard for Spooner's writings and he therefore encourages others to read them. We wonder if Barnett agrees with the implications of Spooner's writings, particularly No Treason No. I and No. VI, The Constitution of No Authority (1870) -- partially quoted above.

"...[P]retended ambassadors, secretaries, presidents, and senators, ...robbers and murderers, who call themselves "the government."

"...[C]heats, and usurpers, and robbers, and murderers and blood-money loan-mongers for masters."

"...[S]uch dupes and cowards... [who] pay for being cheated, plundered, enslaved, and murdered."

Assuming that Spooner's "Constitution of No Authority" is correct, would it be reasonable to conclude that the entire "US Government system" is a fake, a fraud, a scam, and a hoax?

Would it also be resonable conclude that if Spooner is correct, then it would be absurd to believe that the government "usurpers, robbers, and murderers" can make so-called "laws?"

We wonder how many people, after reading Spooner's No Treason No. VI: The Constitution of No Authority, still believe that the government "usurpers, robbers, and murderers" can make so-called "laws?" -- and how many realize it's just a silly superstition?

We also wonder if, when Professor Barnett teaches "constitutional law" he does so with an inward smile or with his fingers crossed behind his back? Does he agree with Spooner and therefore think that in reality there's no such thing as "constitutional law?" -- just another part of the hoax? Or does he think Spooner got it all wrong? We find it very interesting that in the above polls, 21,000+ people (61.8% of respondents) thought Spooner got it right!

Barnett is a Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute -- a libertarian-leaning think tank. Spooner is well known among libertarians. In January 2004, Laissez Faire Books (a libertarian publisher) established the Lysander Spooner Award for advancing the literature of liberty.

According to the above polls, 21,000+ people (61.8% of respondents) had "agreed with Spooner that the U.S. Constitution is without Authority," i.e., a fake, a fraud, a scam, and a hoax. Now, how many of these 21,000+ people would go further and agree that, "If the U.S. Constitution is without authority," then the entire "US Government system" must be a hoax, and the idea that government "usurpers, robbers, and murderers make laws" must be absurd?

It may depend on how many, and to what extent, the 21,247 are still intellectually trapped Citizens of Civilization -- for how many of them their logic continues to be trumped (overridden) by "subjective social agreement."

If a thousand of the 21,000+ (less than 5%) were to make a special attempt to expose the government hoax -- for example, by posting videos to that effect on YouTube, Google, Yahoo, etc. -- would they have any success? Is it worth creating a political equivalent of "The Blasphemy Challenge?"

Further reading:

• The Government Hoax by Marc Stevens;
• The Great Voting Hoax! by David T. Freeman;
• Deep Anarchy by Max T. O'Connor;
• Pretendities;
• Discourse on Voluntary Servitude;
• The Constitution of No Authority;
• The "Constitutional" Delusion;
• Ernst Cassirer and "Primeval Stupidity";
• The Anatomy of Slavespeak;
• The Nature of Government.