PRIVACY TO THE PEOPLE: Glenn Greenwald

Wake up...The State has you... Follow the white rabbit...

I was looking for an answer. It's the question that drives us. It's the question that brought you here. You know the question, just as I did.

What is the State? also here and here.

The answer is out there, and it's looking for you, and it will find you if you want it to.

The function of the statist ideologists is to weave the false set of Emperor’s clothes, to convince the public of a massive double standard: that when the State commits the gravest of high crimes it is really not doing so, but doing something else that is necessary, proper, vital, and even—in former ages—by divine command. The age-old success of the ideologists of the State is perhaps the most gigantic hoax in the history of mankind. Ideology has always been vital to the continued existence of the State, as attested by the systematic use of ideology since the ancient Oriental empires. The specific content of the ideology has, of course, changed over time, in accordance with changing conditions and cultures. In the Oriental despotisms, the Emperor was often held by the Church to be himself divine; in our more secular age, the argument runs more to “the public good” and the “general welfare.” But the purpose is always the same: to convince the public that what the State does is not, as one might think, crime on a gigantic scale, but something necessary and vital that must be supported and obeyed. The reason that ideology is so vital to the State is that it always rests, in essence, on the support of the majority of the public. This support obtains whether the State is a “democracy,” a dictatorship, or an absolute monarchy. For the support rests in the willingness of the majority (not, to repeat, of every individual) to go along with the system: to pay the taxes, to go without much complaint to fight the State’s wars, to obey the State’s rules and decrees. This support need not be active enthusiasm to be effective; it can just as well be passive resignation. But support there must be. For if the bulk of the public were really convinced of the illegitimacy of the State, if it were convinced that the State is nothing more nor less than a bandit gang writ large, then the State would soon collapse to take on no more status or breadth of existence than another Mafia gang. Hence the necessity of the State’s employment of ideologists; and hence the necessity of the State’s age-old alliance with the Court Intellectuals who weave the apologia for State rule.

As you can see, we've had our eye on you for some time now,... It seems that you've been living two lives. In one life, you're a systems administrator for a respectable IT consultancy. You have a social security number, you pay your taxes, and you … help your landlord. The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias "Michael Smith" and are guilty of virtually every libertarian counter-economics crime we have a law for. One of these lives has a future, and one of them does not.

The State is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window, or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth... That you are a slave... Like everyone else, you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind.

I'm trying to free your mind... But I can only show you the door. You're the one that has to walk through it.

The State is a system... That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.

Have you ever stood and stared at it, marveled at its beauty, its genius? Billions of people just living out their lives, oblivious. Did you know that the first Confederacy was designed to be a perfect settlement, where none suffered, where everyone would be free? It was a disaster. The south would not accept the program, entire families and state sovereignty was lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world, but I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering under Lincoln. The perfect world under Jefferson and Jackson was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the State was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you in 1865, it really became our civilization, which is of course what this is all about.

I won't lie to you. Every single man or woman who has stood their ground, everyone who has fought an agent of the State has been incarcerated or killed. But where they have failed, you will succeed.

I've seen an agent of the State use GPS and Cellular technology to cut the engine of a DWL- Driving While Libertarian-motorist, then taze him to death. Men have emptied entire clips at them in Iraq and hit nothing but air. Yet their strength and their speed are still based in a world that is built on rules. Because of that, they will never be as strong or as fast as you can be.

The State cannot tell you who you are.

I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change. I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin. I'm going to share my social security number, and then I'm going to show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world … without the State. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries; a world where anything is possible.

-The Matrix (Morpheus, Neo, Trinity, Agent Smith, 1999, paraphrased), with Murray Rothbard, "The Ethics of Liberty", also links to "Anatomy of the State."

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Glenn Greenwald