“My dear brothers, never forget, when you hear the progress of enlightenment vaunted, that the devil’s best trick is to persuade you
that he doesn’t exist!”

Charles Baudelaire, Le Joueur généreux, February 7, 1864

Forget everything you think you know about politics. It is probably wrong.

There is no left or right. Communist, Socialist, Liberal, Conservative, Progressive, Democrat, Republican, those are all meaningless terms. They are used to confuse people so they miss the
point. The most important point about politics there is. There are only
two schools of political thought and they have predictable
results. All the names and labels for them are just smoke and mirrors.

Political ideology is designed by elites to trick the masses into doing what they want. Each side tells you something designed to get your emotions going so they can play you. They get you to agree to give
them more power, money and control over your lives by telling you some
kind of story.

We need to put that vicious cycle to an end. It’s time to understand what their real goals are. But to free your mind, you need to be educated first. Only
by seeing the road ahead can you avoid tripping on stones or falling
off cliffs.

There are only two real political choices to make. And it has nothing to do with parties. It has to do with core beliefs. You are for one side or another. These sides are diametrically opposed. The best
way I can describe the two choices is, freedom or slavery. That is what
it boils down to. And the slave in question is you.

Do you want to be a slave or a free person? It’s your choice.

I’m sure some of you reading this have your guard up now. So take a deep breath and walk with me for a second. I am going to open your eyes.

There are only two forms of government. Every kind of government is a branch or variation of one of the two forms. All the side issues, are just window dressing because the root form of government determines a
lot of crucial matters that effect everything else.

The first form has many branches and is called many by names. It is common. It is the oldest form. It is, in fact, ancient. It has many names because so many of those names have fallen into disrepute. So
they keep re-branding it and try to sell it in a different package. But
no matter what name it takes, it still leads to the same end result.

The second form has very few branches and is rarer than any precious stone. It is something many people want but few have had. The believers in the first form are always trying to destroy this second form. They
lie about it. Try to corrupt and subvert it. Because they know it will
always be more popular with the people if they knew they had a choice.
So the second form must always be defended from the predators from the
first, because it is precious. I like to refer to each system as the
minus and plus system. But we’ll call them BG or LG here. Big
Government or Limited Government.

Those who believe in BG go by many names, and many of these believers don’t even know that they’re supporting the same goals as people they think are bad. But they have been tricked into selling out
their own freedoms to enrich someone elses. All BG systems lead to the
same result. I classify this as a minus system because it’s negative.
The end result of a BG system is bad for most involved.

The BG system is designed to feed all resources to a few at the top. All else are diminished in power and wealth. But the citizens are told that they must support the government and its rules in order to receive
some kind of “benefits.” In order to get the treats the government
doles out, you have to give up your freedoms and your property. It
sells the idea of some glorious future that is never attained and only
gets worse over time. But it always maintains that it will lead to some
kind of paradise.

It never does. It usually leads to some kind of hell. But it always finds people to subscribe to its ideas who become fanatical in defense of it, no matter how much the system abuses them. And it deludes many
others into wanting it because it preys on their human nature, the very
thing that destroys it in the end.

The LG or Limited Government system is the best system for human freedom. As a result it has been very rare in human history. Where it has been allowed to flourish, human beings have flourished. But those
who believe in BG are always trying to corrupt and destroy LG
societies. This is because LG denies ultimate power to those who seek
it. An LG system is more fair because you get what you put in. You have
the ability to advance to any level as long as you don’t abuse the
success that you have made or use it against others.

Before we explore how each system works, we need to understand the mindset of the people who believe in either system. I once did a cartoon illustrating the philosophies ^[1]
in the form of two Greek Philosophers, Aristotle and Plato. Each
philosopher created the groundwork for understanding these schools of
thought.

LG (Plus) believers are Aristotlian. They are like engineers. If something is proven to work, then they believe in it. They are not opposed to experimentation, but only if it involves proven
principles. Ideas that are demonstrated to fail are rejected. They
understand that human beings are flawed creatures. Humans are born
hungry and spend their lives seeking to fulfill those hungers. In
science terms, humans are driven by genetic hard wiring. It is part of
their nature. In religious terms, humans are born with “original sin”.
We can’t radically change who we are and remain human. We can only seek
to improve ourselves through discipline, education, reason and morality.

LG believers understand that humans are often given to a lust for power because we all want some kind of control. LG societies are designed to limit governance so the state can never become tyrannical.
It realizes that human nature is a constant so you have to develop a
system that works within its framework, and keeps its basic problems in
check. That way a politician’s greed is limited by what they are
allowed to do by laws. The less interference a government has in human
affairs, the more free the people are to progress on their own and
flourish. LG believers are for individual rights. They believe a
perfect society may not be possible, but it can be best achieved by
respect for others rights and liberties. They believe in a social
contract and the rule of law. They want people to be free in order to
live their life without interference, as long as they respect other’s
rights. The LG is there to enable the society to function and keep the
peace, but it is not there to dominate or dictate how one should live.

BG (Minus) believers are Platonic. They posit that there’s an ideal form of society somewhere in the future, a utopia populated by an idealized form of humanity. This can only be achieved by forcing
people to change through rules, laws and governance. It wraps itself in
good intentions, but it ignores human nature, believing people can be
changed by rules. Making the public follow orders will correct their
bad behavior as the state sees it. It does not believe it can be
tyrannical because BG systems are always sure they’re correct, not
matter what happens. Dissenters are ridiculed or punished. No matter
how many mistakes a BG society makes or disasters it causes, it does
not admit its fault. BG believers preach dependence on the state. It
denies individual empowerment or freedom and instead promotes group
think. It pushes the group over the individual to keep people in check.
It does not want leaders so much as followers. Its leaders are usually
the hungriest for power that make their way to the top by gaming the
system.

BG societies are constantly creating diversions to keep the public focused on policies it wants to sell. So it often creates “crises” of some kind that the people are supposed to rally around. In order to get
them to give up more freedom or personal wealth, it often uses scare
tactics. Threats of invasion, threats of nature, etc. The elites in a
BG system always live vastly better than those at the bottom, but it
always promises some kind of “equality” that never exists in reality.
And because the BG system is large and complex it relies on
bureaucracies to manage them. But because bureaucracies are made of
humans, human nature always corrupts these systems. A bureaucracy
becomes inefficient and corrupt in direct proportion to its size. The
larger, the less effective, the more corrupt.

BG systems usually lead to economic collapse and stagnation. Usually with dire consequences for millions of people. That is why citizens in BG societies often yearn to go to LG societies. Many of them risk their
lives to escape from BG societies that hold them captive. Because in
worst case scenarios, BG systems imprison their citizens. They are all,
to some extent, anti-freedom. It’s a matter of degree.

In part one, we revealed there are only two kinds of government when you strip away
all the smoke and mirrors. Big Government (BG) or Limited Government
(LG). Or as we will see in this chapter, “top down” or “bottom up.” The
choice you make determines if you support freedom or slavery. Today
we’re going to talk about why in more detail.

To start, I need to say that this chapter explores the role of religion as a tool of statecraft. It’s going to discuss how rulers use religion to get what they want. It is not a comment on the merits of
any religion, just on how it’s been used.

The earliest form of government is the tribe. The tribe had a chief of some kind who made all the big decisions. The tribe went out and gathered resources and the chief got the pick of the spoils. This
system was expanded as civilization grew into villages, towns and
cities. There was one person at the top, a ruler. Below them was his
support group, a court. And they were the major beneficiaries of
whatever wealth the society created. Everyone below them got
diminishing returns. This system is still in use today in varying
forms. It’s called a top down system. BG systems are all top down no
matter how they try to spin it.

In order to motivate the people to agree to this arrangement, the rulers used soldiers to impose their will. But even an army isn’t enough to keep people in line. These rulers needed them to perform
well, to be focused on producing goods to benefit the state. So they
used the earliest form of ideology: religion.

The first cities were ruled by priest-kings who claimed to have a direct line of communication with the gods. Using religion as a tool, rulers were able to get their citizens in line and get them to do
whatever they wanted. The system worked fairly well for thousands of
years. Religion worked because it served a dual purpose. It created the
first set of laws which governed behavior. And it gave people people a
reason to follow orders besides the threat of the sword. Most people
wanted to go along with the program because they believed in their
faith.

But the problem with this system is the same reason Big Government systems always fail over time. Human nature. Human beings are flawed. Many of them are corrupt. In most top-down societies, you are stuck
with whatever position you were born into. But religion offered a
single path to power an ordinary citizen could aspire to. Those who
craved power entered the temple for that purpose and corrupted it from
within. The temple became a force unto itself and the rulers eventually
had struggles with it.

Another problem with early religion is they had a god for every thing under the sun. This is because these religions were invented to explain things that people needed an answer for. Why where there
storms? What caused illness? Why were there crop failures? If people
didn’t like the explanation their religion gave them, they would move
to another faith or invent their own. This made it harder for the
temple and the state to keep people in line.

Then Christianity came along. It had one god, one unifying powerful message. It had a strong moral code. Roman Emperor
Constantine
saw the value in it. At that time Rome had an untold number of gods and
religions. New ones were being created almost every day. It was out of
control. So Constantine converted the Romans over to Christianity by
law. The
Eastern Roman Empire lasted for nearly 1000 years until the Muslims
invaded it.

During the Dark Ages Viking King Harald
converted the Vikings to Christianity to unify them more effectively.
Christianity became the dominant religion in Europe and helped lead to
a stabilization that brought about the Renaissance and the Age of
Reason. But the power clashes between the church and rulers continued.
Christianity started splitting off into different sects. Clashes
between faiths caused divisions and wars.

When the industrial age came around, the old Agrarian model began to crumble. Since the dawn of civilization most people worked on
farms with the rest living in cities. Now, people started moving to
cities for factory jobs and the dynamic changed. Factory jobs gave
people marginally more freedom than farm life. A more secure income.

Society was changing and two men named Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, perhaps thinking of the Platonic Utopia, saw a way for humanity to get out of the trap they’ve been in for thousands of years. Up till
then, humans all worked for the benefit of a few elite. Marx and Engels
developed Communism and refined Socialism (as a step toward communism)
so that everyone could “benefit” from the wealth a society produced. It
envisioned some kind of perfect society where kings and popes no longer
ruled the masses. The people did. And everyone would get a “fair share”
when the “wealth was spread around.”

To this end, Communist governments rejected religion and tried to replace it with their political ideology. But the problem with Marxism is it fails to understand that human nature would undermine any such
society. It sounds good on paper, which is why it seduces so many
academics and alleged intellectuals. But it lacks the moral core that
religion provides. It tries to supplant them with laws. As a result,
where Socialism and Communism have been attempted, more
people died
due to the vagrancies of its leaders and their policies than all the
wars of the 20th century combined. The end result for the Soviet Union
was economic collapse. For China, it had to move toward Capitalism to
survive.

Despite the failings of these systems and the others, Marxism was seductive to many elites. Socialism provided a way for the state to control all the resources and production while appearing benign. By
providing “benefits” to the people, they were tricked into thinking
they were “sharing the wealth.” In truth, the leaders lived in wealth
and excess while the rest were forced into a narrow kind of poverty of
which there was no escape unless you “joined the party” and became part
of the corrupt political class.

While communism has been largely discredited, the lovers of socialism keep trying to sell it under different guises, claiming it’s never worked because “it hasn’t been done right yet.” But they refuse
to deal with the reality that it can’t work because it depends on
bureaucracy which is ruled by an elite group, which creates a top down
society. And bureaucracies are always corrupted by human nature.

Almost 100 years before Marx, another political revolution happened in America resulting in the formation of the Constitution and the United States. The people who formed this country wanted to escape the
tyranny and oppression of the British monarchy. They also wanted free
speech, religious freedom and the right to bear arms. This is why these
three issues form the first two amendments to the Constitution’s “bill
of rights”. Other rights were given as an answer to legal abuses the
British had used against the people.

America based its government in part on the Roman Republic. But it was unique in the history of the world. The founders understood
the problems of previous governments throughout human history. They
knew that human nature, being what it is, leads people to try to
corrupt the state to suit their own personal gain. The Roman Republic
suffered that fate. So they created one of the greatest documents in
human history: The U.S. Constitution. It creates the government and
assigns power equally to three branches, Administration, Legislative
and Judicial. It created the federal government and only have it a ten
square mile plot of swamp land in Maryland to rule over. The rest was
given to the states to rule themselves, as long as they guaranteed the
rights and laws the U.S Constitution provides. Their own constitutions
are subservient in that respect, but the states were semi-autonomous.
This was an LG, bottom up form of government. So named because the
people decided who their leaders would be and those leaders only had a
limited run in office to prevent them from establishing a dynasty.

The United States operated under this LG model for 100 years, with no income tax and a limited Federal government. But when Marxism came along many elites found some appeal in the ideas. They did not want to
make the mistakes the Soviets made by forcing it on the people through
civil war and severe hardship. So they decided to apply some of the
principles slowly through a “progressive” system that the people would
gradually succumb to. One of the first Progressive presidents was
Woodrow Wilson who gave us income tax, the Federal Reserve and the
early form of the United Nations.

In Part three we’ll discuss how the Progressives undermined our Limited Government, how they were friends of the Fascists in Europe until they weren’t and how, in many respects, they are the
New Fascists.