May
23
No man or woman in the United States today wants the Feds to know too much about what he or she is really doing. Since the government long ago passed the point of “anything not forbidden is compulsory” and now also wishes to enforce “anything not compulsory is forbidden,” we all suspect that we are technical criminals at least, although like Kafka’s hero we are never quite sure which statute or statutes we may have violated.
We thus arrive at a situation that in the Army is called Optimum Snafu. Those at the top are never told what might cause them to punish the informant, and those at the bottom keep their mouths shut about more and more of what they actually see, hear, smell, taste, or otherwise sense of the environment. In the long run, the top people in the pyramid are attempting to regulate things they know nothing about, based on reports that have been invented by liars and flatterers to prevent them from using their awful powers too destructively.
But if most people always lie a little in dealing with the State, the State must have a very weird and inaccurate picture of who the people are and what they really think and want. Laws will therefore direct themselves to a fictitious citizenry, not to the people we really are. Thus, the laws increasingly make no sense to the folk who have to endure them, and more hostility to government appears.
All these cycles make up a set of Strange Loops and Vicious Circles from which there presently appears no exit. Unless, as suggested before, the funding runs out or Divine Intervention occurs, conspiracy theories will flourish, both among the increasingly anxiety-ridden citizenry and among the politicos and bureaucrats who try to command them. And every voice that tries, or pretends, to tell the truth in this schizoid situation immediately comes under suspicion as another possible Deceiver and Manipulator whose yarn has to be looked at as critically as any Post-Modernist would look at the Declaration of Independence or the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
We are all Deconstructionists now, whether we ever heard the word before or not. Robert Anton Wilson, Miriam Joan Hill, “Everything Is Under Control: Conspiracies, Cults and Cover-ups”
We thus arrive at a situation that in the Army is called Optimum Snafu. Those at the top are never told what might cause them to punish the informant, and those at the bottom keep their mouths shut about more and more of what they actually see, hear, smell, taste, or otherwise sense of the environment. In the long run, the top people in the pyramid are attempting to regulate things they know nothing about, based on reports that have been invented by liars and flatterers to prevent them from using their awful powers too destructively.
But if most people always lie a little in dealing with the State, the State must have a very weird and inaccurate picture of who the people are and what they really think and want. Laws will therefore direct themselves to a fictitious citizenry, not to the people we really are. Thus, the laws increasingly make no sense to the folk who have to endure them, and more hostility to government appears.
All these cycles make up a set of Strange Loops and Vicious Circles from which there presently appears no exit. Unless, as suggested before, the funding runs out or Divine Intervention occurs, conspiracy theories will flourish, both among the increasingly anxiety-ridden citizenry and among the politicos and bureaucrats who try to command them. And every voice that tries, or pretends, to tell the truth in this schizoid situation immediately comes under suspicion as another possible Deceiver and Manipulator whose yarn has to be looked at as critically as any Post-Modernist would look at the Declaration of Independence or the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
We are all Deconstructionists now, whether we ever heard the word before or not. Robert Anton Wilson, Miriam Joan Hill, “Everything Is Under Control: Conspiracies, Cults and Cover-ups”
