nydwracu niþgrim, nihtbealwa mæst

I must admit to having employed a bit of false advertising. In my last post, I explained how to carry out a process that will have the same results as a revolution; however, that is only one form of revolution, and not the one that commonly comes to mind when a revolution is mentioned. The common conception of ‘revolution’, which I will call a reboot, is a single, abrupt event of which the beginning and end can be easily pinpointed. The process that I described, which I will call a Roman revolution (remember that the Roman empire still called itself a republic), is not abrupt; instead of a quick surgical strike at the old order, it eats away at that order from within and, once it is gone, wears its skin Buffalo Bill-style, resulting in something that I suppose could be called, in the spirit of alliteration, a Gumb government. (Although it occurs to me that duocodical bureaucracy might be a better term.) The difference between a Roman revolution and a reboot should be obvious; it is clear that a Roman revolution has occurred in America, but, unlike with the American Revolution (a military reboot), no starting point can be named.

Due to their origins, Gumb governments can only take on certain forms: they outwardly appear to be identical to the governments they replaced, albeit possibly more bloated, while inwardly operating on what Tom Ball termed the Second Set of Books: the heuristics it uses in place of the laws that have become too unwieldy to enforce, the mechanisms used to justify the new order in the eyes of the old, and so on. Certain other forms of government are clearly impossible, or at least unrealistic, to bring about through Roman revolutions: to bloat a government until it shrinks is a contradiction in terms, unless the method by which it is expected to shrink is a reboot—a full replacement of the old order, structures, philosophy, and all, usually in the form of a revolution. (And obviously, the result of a reboot could not be a Gumb government!) So Roman revolutions may be viable roads to power for philosophies centered around one strong central government (a New Order, one could say), but what if the intended new order is not a New Order? If that intended order is sufficiently different from the old order, a reboot is clearly in order, but it’s not as simple as throwing the bums out. Nature abhors a vacuum, and, as Hobbes et al. made clear, power vacuums are no different. A reboot leaves an open playing field, on which you may well lose. Notice that nobody knows what’s going to happen in the Middle East; the bums have been thrown out, but it’s anyone’s guess as to whether the liberals, Islamists, or Martians will be next on the throne.

What, then, is to be done?

For a new order to take power after a reboot, it must already exist as a viable institution—a set of existing, developed organizations with the support of its subjects (or at least most of them), the capacity for self-defense, and the ability to govern and carry out the functions of government in the absence of the currently existing government. If your institution is currently viable, it can be called an ungovernment, since, by definition, it has the ability, but not the power, to act as a government. Parts of an ungovernment, or organizations that could be incorporated into an ungovernment were one to be built, can be called ungovernmental organizations, as can organizations that realistically could become such.

Ungovernmental organizations take many forms, from church organizations to local currencies. The one thing that they have in common is that they are all alternative organizations, not reliant on the government, that perform, or have the capability and the legitimacy to, in the absence of the currently existing government, perform functions normally delegated to the government.

So far, we have seen two sorts of revolution: the ungovernmental revolution and the Roman revolution. To this I would add a third, the übergovernmental revolution: the creation of, as the name implies, an institution (the übergovernment) encompassing multiple existing governments, followed by the gradual strengthening of said übergovernment at the expense of the sovereignty—that is, the governmental status—of the former governments, resulting in one übergovernment ruling over some amount of ungovernments. Übergovernmental revolutions have taken place in both America and Europe, but the American case shows some of the characteristics of a reboot.

But the question remains: what sorts of governments can be created through ungovernmental revolutions? For ungovernmental revolutions to have unlimited possibilities would break the pattern established by Roman revolutions, which create Gumb governments, and übergovernmental revolutions, which create federations.

Ungovernmental revolutions appear to be less limited, since they can bestow sovereignty upon any viable ungovernment, but it seems to me that ungovernments and ungovernmental institutions would be more likely to form, and more viable once formed, on a smaller scale and in areas with higher social capital, meaning that such revolutions would be most likely to bring about small, localist, communitarian governments of the sort advocated on sites such as Front Porch Republic.

That, for reasons that should be obvious, make them my preferred form of revolution. Especially since, if the reboot never comes, the ungovernmental institutions may very well be more effective than the equivalent governmental institutions; I live in an area where, when it snows, someone on the block will usually drive around in a pickup truck with a snowplow attachment and get the roads cleared days, sometimes weeks, before the government snowplows show up.

Remember Tom Ball? The man who said that this country is run by a shadowy dictatorship of unelected bureaucrats, and then set himself on fire in front of a New Hampshire courthouse?

Well, he got the dictatorship part right.

From his last statement:

Any one swept up into legal mess is usually astonished at what they see. They cannot believe what the police, prosecutors and judges are doing. It is so blatantly wrong. Well, I can assure you that everything they do is logical and by the book. The confusion you have with them is you both are using different sets of books. You are using the old First Set of Books- the Constitution, the general laws or statutes and the court ruling sometime[s] call[ed] Common Law. They are using the newer Second Set of Books. That is the collection of the policy, procedures and protocols. Once you know what set of books everyone is using, then everything they do looks logical and upright.

Translated into grammatically correct English with proper terminology, this essentially says that such concepts as separation of powers and rule of law are now irrelevant; instead of laws being written entirely by legislative bodies, many are now written by the other two branches. In the current political climate, of course, this makes sense to a degree; the laws are so complicated and so far-reaching that to consistently enforce them would require far more resources than are realistically available.

But what this means is that separation of powers is a myth. What we have instead is a dictatorship of the bureaucrats, the shadowy, unelected masses who have amassed pervasive power through their role in writing policies, procedures, and protocols. Tom Ball’s case promarily involved lower-level government, but it is trivial to see that the same principle applies at the federal level.

For example:

Now, DHS and the Department of Justice will convene a working group to evaluate, on a case by case basis, the files of everyone facing deportation, and those whose cases are dropped will be eligible to apply for work permits. The move will not grant any of those people legal status, nor will work authorization be guaranteed. But they will not have to leave the country.

For years, immigrant rights advocates have pushed Obama to exercise his executive authority, which allows him prosecutorial discretion over who the country prosecutes and deports. The numbers within Obama’s record-breaking deportation effort showed that a majority of those being deported, contrary to what the Morton memo called for, had no criminal background whatsoever. Outrage over this fact escalated after the failure of the DREAM Act last December, which would have allowed a select portion of undocumented youth the opportunity to gain citizenship if they cleared a host of hurdles. In April, 22 senators sent a letter to Obama urging him to issue deferred action to DREAM Act-eligible young people, and reminded him of the menu of options he had to ease the lives of undocumented youth.

President Obama was a vocal supporter of the DREAM Act, yet his immigration authorities were still sending deportation orders to DREAM Act-eligible youth. Obama ought to bring his policies in line with his rhetoric, immigrant rights advocates argued. Thursday’s policy change was his administration’s response to those demands.

The Obama administration has instituted a policy that amounts to a laxer version of a law that has been defeated in Congress multiple times. And those in favor of this move openly admit it. Separation of powers is dead, and it died a slow, silent death.

So, you ask, how does this tie into the title? How can this teach you, a budding revolutionary, how to overthrow the Evil Regime™ of your choice in a bloodless coup with a very high probability of success?

Unfortunately for you, it probably can’t. This method only works for those in favor of instituting a bureaucracy, and I doubt this blog would attract anyone but reactionaries, libertarians, and stone-cold paranoiacs, who are generally not the sort to support such absurdities. But if you happen to be a progressive, a globalist, or some other flavor of Vogon, here’s how you’d do it:

1. March through the institutions. Manipulate public opinion, especially the opinion of the bureaucratic classes, in the direction of supporting moral judgments favorable to your agenda.
2. Institute overly broad laws, or laws that would dramatically increase the workload of those enforcing them, to flood the system. If you can’t get that done yourself, rustle up some idealists or opportunistic capitalists to muscle some through for you.
3. Point out that the system has been flooded and claim that heuristics (policies, procedures, and protocols) must be installed to deal with the caseload.
4. Guide the codification of those heuristics to ensure that they support your agenda. This should not be hard, since if you carried out step 2 properly, the bureaucrats should already think your agenda is sensible policy.

Then sit back and watch as your perverse vision of heaven on earth becomes reality. If opposition arises, infiltrate, discredit, and disrupt.

Good luck pulling this off in America, though; it’s clearly already been done.

In what may be my greatest act so far of petit-bourgeois irony, I picked up a copy of The Coming Insurrection a few days ago in the closing sale at Borders. I haven’t gotten around to starting it just yet, as I’m already halfway through Beowulf and I long ago gave up on the hope that I could read two books at once without getting confused. But I did do some background research, and in the process, I found this:

Maybe we should question the basis of the liberation we aim for: you read shit that says “the more anonymous I am, the more present I am,” but what does that mean? That I must lose the emotions and experiences that make me who I am in the process of becoming a revolutionary actor?

It is my ennui that draws me to the street, my resentment that throws the brick, my desire that makes the nights in jail bearable – and these emotions don’t come from nowhere. Are all emotions beyond nihilist anger invalid and antirevolutionary? Because if they are, the lucidity and liberation I find through them are as well.

This should remind you of something quite unlike what I’m sure the author intended; namely, Lasch:

The contemporary climate is therapeutic, not religious. People today hunger not for personal salvation, let alone for the restoration of an earlier golden age, but for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic security. Even the radicalism of the sixties served, for many of those who embraced it for personal rather than political reasons, not as a substitute religion but as a form of therapy. Radical politics filled empty lives, provided a sense of meaning and purpose. In her memoir of the Weathermen, Susan Stern described their attraction in language that owes more to psychiatry and medicine than to religion. When she tried to evoke her state of mind during the 1968 demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, she wrote instead about the state of her health. “I felt good. I could feel my body supple and strong and slim, and ready to run miles, and my legs moving sure and swift under me.” A few pages later, she says: “I felt real.”

In the politics of the narcissistic mind, change becomes a means not to a better society, but to better feelings; “lucidity and liberation” is found not through living in a better society brought about by said change, but through the translation of emotions into the political realm in the form of that change. Revolutionaries must hold on to their emotions, and they must do so to reach purely emotional ends. The emotions, in fact, may very well be the ends, since the proclaimed goal is clearly far too utopian to be realized, at least in the lifetime of the revolutionary, who is almost certainly narcissistic. Sorry, kids; you’ve been pwned. And memes are very adaptable, especially the ones that radicals of all sorts are currently fighting against, so it would be absurd to think at least some of them could not outlast a revolution.

The application of this principle to certain other current events should be obvious. When a protest against the police in the most notorious police state in the developed world degenerates into an orgy of consumerism surpassing even Black Friday, when ‘the people’, whoever they are, turn a perfect opportunity for mass mobilization against patently absurd political abuses into a Mammonic mockery, a rally for free shoes, can it really be said that there is any hope of attacking the roots of the problems? Of course not!

The left will never be successful. Why? Because the left has all been pwned, and once you’ve been pwned, you can’t be un-pwned. How can you have a successful revolution when you can’t even break away from the values of the ideology you’re trying to destroy? How can you educate the next generation in such a way that they will not be infected when your ideology cannot produce any learning materials that do not contain the virus?

Notice, however, that I said specifically that the left will be successful. If you buy the above, it follows necessarily that the only revolution that can succeed is a reactionary one.