The Individual vs the Collective- this little treasured principle that Libertarians keep locked away in some abyssal, far-away ideological fortress nestled in the most distant and marginal political mountains shrouded by the nimbus of aged and rusty epistemology:
The Individual vs the Collective- the relic that Libertarians occasionally allow Conservatives and Republicans to glimpse, and in a glimpse be inspired to great heights of magisterial hypocrisy, articulated as The Individual American Citizen vs the Collectivist Federal Government.
Here I have slipped past the guards, slit the watchman's throats, and from slit throats have put my hands on the priceless treasure, which I deliver now, to you. It is YOURS after all.
You have been told truths, but only half of the truth. The Individual is indeed the Individual, but the Collective is far more than the simple, stumbling, stupid, Federal Government. The Collective is also the Uber-Corporations. International Companies that somehow, by some trick, have been afforded all of the legal rights that our American Constitution recognizes as belonging to the Individual alone.
The Collective fears, more than anything else, that you, the individual, will discover this fact. That you will lay your eyes upon the treasure and be bold enough to claim it as your own. That you will realize that the boot on your neck contains not only the foot of the Federal Government, but also that of the massive, Government-Like Corporations.
They fear worse than anything that Libertarians and the Conservative movement overall will see beyond the half-truth that it has been consuming for many decades now, that it will realize that Big Brother comes at least as much from Wall Street as he comes from Washington DC.
What a terrible sight, this priceless treasure, when finally you lay your own eyes on it. When something is described to you, be it through words, or images or sounds, your experience of the thing is determined almost entirely by the will of the narrator, so that the difference between the narrative and your knowledge of the thing is almost entirely nil.
They are coming, many of them, and they come quick and in force. Old habits of thought, miserable comfortable convention, the half-truths, and the guards we have slipped by for now. What will you do? Will you be an obedient statistic, give the treasure back over to them, go back to your world of little boxes (house, cubical, car, classroom, computer, television, radio) and enjoy the simple narrative that you have been lulled with for so long?
Or will you take this precious gift, the tempered, razor sharp steel of our fore-fathers Will, and stand by my side and cut the liars down as they come?
sshhhh, the hour is late and They are upon us. Shrink back to your numb world of pop-political porn and faux individuality, lay comfortably in your little box of unrealized integrity, your unrealized dream, until you lay forever in a dreamless sleep, the world never even knowing or caring that you were here.
