Understand what sort of witchery, subtlety, and hypocrisy belong to tyranny.
Marcus Aurelius
The most essential characteristic of tyranny is hypocrisy. Tyranny is the devolutionary weaponization of structure against that structure’s own evolutionary design. It is the hypocrisy of holding society responsible to the established standards of systems while simultaneously using the systems to betray those standards. It is weaponizing courts against law while expecting others to observe the integrity of courts as though they remain true to their purpose of upholding law; it is weaponizing education against knowledge and understanding while expecting others to observe the sanctity of education as though it were faithfully executing its directive; it is weaponizing public health systems against society for the advancement of agendas unrelated to health while expecting others to observe the importance of safeguarding public health; it is weaponizing media against truth and information, while expecting media to be treated as honest purveyors of news. In all cases, it is the use of an institutional cachet to advance a devolutionary character which betrays the evolutionary purpose of that institution.
Society is often said to be too chaotic to facilitate the organization required to actualize tyranny; that it lacks the cooperation and organization necessary for such a large scale project to be realized. And although it is true that society is chaotic, it is also true that society is highly preorganized in many respects; there are political systems, banking systems, healthcare systems, education systems, media systems, law enforcement systems, conservation systems, licensing systems, and various infrastructure systems, among others, all of which can be weaponized by the devolutionary hypocrisy of tyranny.
Those claiming that society isn’t sufficiently organized to accommodate covert objectives have therefore misunderstood a crucial point, namely that the character of tyranny is to make use of preexisting organization, it is not to generate organization de novo, which would actually reflect the evolutionary spirit of cooperation along the lines of principle. It is doubtful that the hypocritical spirit of tyranny could successfully build or maintain systems or institutions aimed at anything, since it requires both the sustained cooperative efforts of people and the disciplined observance of principle, rather than the divisive service of immediate power. As a devolutionary colonization of preexisting systems, the essential terrain necessary for tyranny to expand and flourish is ironically the preexisting organizational structures of society that service evolution.
As the evolutionary spirit in society creates systems, the devolutionary spirit in society coopts and redirects them toward the consolidation of power. It may seem like a balance but for a secondary factor which progressively favors tyranny, that being the increasing complexity of systems making the clear discernment of purpose more difficult. Tyranny can be expected to fluorish in proportion to the public’s ability to discern clear meaning of what their social systems are doing. As the complexity and abundance of systems increases, the public’s ability to reliably make such discernment decreases. Moreover, as the conditions of life force attention away from the operation of social systems, a rift develops around wealth. Those working to make ends meet may take the operation of social systems at face value, and may not have the time to carefully vet the idle rich playing games at social engineering. Even those people operating within social systems may not be cognizant of the weaponization as it takes place around them if their duties remain largely the same in either case.
As a result, the current level of social evolution makes the creation of far reaching and highly complex systems a greater threat to our continued collective well being than the problems they are set up to address in most cases. It therefore seems prudent as a guiding principle to limit our centralized social systems to that essential number and level of complexity which the public can reasonably be expected to track. The contemporary ideology supposes that a public of limited discernment requires complex systems to support society’s continued evolution, yet the operation of systems exceeding public discernment makes democratic elections irrelevant.
It also seems prudent to limit the scope and reach of social systems, which is likely best accomplished through maximally decentralizing those systems. The devolutionary failure of local social and political systems is less catastrophic than the failure of such systems on a global scale. If the devolutionary force of tyranny is able to colonize and control global systems, then the devolutionary force of tyranny will control the world until power can be wrested from it. It is for this reason that the current trend toward globally organized social and political systems is dangerous and requires reversal.
The Meta Monocle 