It all started with a door-to-door salesman. Circa 1980, my folks bought the set of Funk And Wagnalls New Encyclopedia, opening up the world I suspect existed yet needed the data to explore it. The A to Z articles crammed with information and pictures not only confirmed and explained what was happening in the world around me but I got to understand who I was, my heritage, and how I got to where I was.
When the era of school came around, I expected to learn more and get help in comprehending the hard text and complex ideas, instead what they taught in the education industrial complex was compliance.
History was dumbed down to basic timelines and anecdotes stripped of context. No real astronomy. There were nine planets and that was it. No politics. None, except that Thatcher was bad. Science was a little more fun but nuclear energy was consigned as bad. And ACDC is evil. All that was left was maths and English and the banality that went with it.
The boredom killed me. One morning, maths had finished and we were well into religion lessons. I was called upon to answer a question. Not paying attention, I gave my answer as “obtuse’, in reference to triangles from the class earlier. The class laughed and I should have been humiliated. I wasn’t embarrassed one bit. All I felt was contempt.
The use of the carrot and stick system taught you to shut up, listen, and memorise the answers or formulas, and repeat them on command, the same way one trains a pet or circus animal. Most of the kids were compliant just to survive, the promise of the good life hanging over their heads. They were under the impression that this was what intelligence was; monkeys and puppies taught new tricks.
Some of us though had had enough, and when the boredom grew too much, nature took over and compliance went out the window, literally and figurately. Thus the cult of misbehaviour was established, with the rough kids at first, the dysfunctional ones from less ambitious backgrounds. Eventually, this rebellion infected the whole class, even the goody tow-shoes. The punishment was swift and as drastic as the propaganda. We were made to stand against the wall every lunchtime, in the summertime.
Eventually, that too got ungovernable, with the authorities giving up after a week of strict enforcement and asinine teacher-parent meetings.
Next, high school. Did that turn out any better? Did we march down the halls of discovery and enlightenment? Nope, just another six eternal years that to this day seem longer than the decades that proceeded it.
What did they teach there? Well, Keynesian economics is the only economic paradigm in existence. Communism is good since Stalin and Mao are great heroes and we need to know everything about them (except the mass murder). That God is dead (this is from a Catholic school) And they taught compliance. Do this or you are a loser. Do that or you are a loser. Comply and you’ll be safe from retribution, be included in society and be rewarded with the good life. So the kids complied to survive, even though most suspected this to be all bullshit. Teenagers, unlike children, know enough to understand that life was shit whether you complied or not.
Compliance is lazy.
And laziness is bad for you and hazardous to your health.
When an individual complies, they are trusting the authority they are submitting to, without question, without vetting the authority. Trust requires no energy or effort. If confronted by a uniform or anyone carrying a badge, the laziest thing any individual can do is trust them unreservedly.
Here are a few universal facts to consider before bowing down to somebody bearing any official insignia.
- Corruption exists.
- Greed exists.
- Self-interest exists.
- Human animals who lie to cover up the above, exist.
Go ahead and deny the existence of these facts, or pick or choose when these facts a relevant. Deny reality. See where that leads you. You can’t spend the majority of your life ‘knowing’ that the government is corrupt, knowing they lie, then all of a sudden start believing they are benevolent, that they care about you as an individual. That hypocrisy is a mental illness. Governments and bureaucracies are not sympathetic to you, they don’t give a fuck about you except when it comes time to manipulate you for your vote or support. These power-hungry human animals exist, they lie, and they prey on the vulnerable and the dumb. Whether they are your regular psychopaths, egotripping cop, keyboard warrior or nameless politician, these sheep wolves will take you down like a predator takes down an antelope.
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The psychology of compliance and how it messes with one’s morality is highlighted in an independent 2012 movie called, Compliance. People are programmed to trust every form of authority whether it be a traffic coordinator in an orange vest or a doctor with a dozen acronyms against their name. They do this because it’s easy. Do what the cop says and avoid hassles. Who wants to write letters of complaint or go to court?
Nobody.
Who wants every problem to be dealt with by a central authority?
Everyone.
Problems are hard to resolve, so it’s easier to make it someone else problem. The problem is, that this system relies on compliance. What does everyone think a Social Credit System is? It’s a reliance on centralised authorities to deal with problems nobody wants to take responsibility for. All it takes is one offender and everybody is cracked down upon by the authority given the mandate to manage the problem.
Think it too far-fetched of a Social Credit System to infect your little corner of the ‘free’ world. Try putting a piece of styrofoam in your recycling bin. Wait until you get the ‘whoops’ you’ve-been-naughty sticker from your local government. The notice will give you three strikes and you’re out. Ring them up and find out what the repercussions will be. Delve deeper, and find out about the economics of the recycling industry and what kind of dodgy mess that is, how efficient or effective it is in solving waste management issues, how corrupt or mishandled it is, or how much logic goes into exporting and importing and burning and burying of raw trash. Once you’re smacked with an infringement for non-compliance you will demand more Social Credit Systems to govern your life because you enjoy being compliant.
A false sense of security.
The promise of compliance is a safe, risk-free life. Compliance seems to buy you insurance. This is a false promise. What you are actually buying is a guarantee that a small group of people will dedicate all their energy to preserving their own existence. Solutions to problems will cease being a thing. Instead, the problems need to persist indefinitely, forever. The moment you relinquish your independence, your responsibilities, and your freedoms to some centralised authority, what do you think this authority is going to do? Once they are handed the power they will switch to survival mode. Then the problem becomes you, the existential threat to the centralised authority is you.
Does a central bank seek to create a more efficient and prosperous economy? The old problem of decentralised banknote issuance is redundant. Technology has fixed this old nineteenth-century issue of lagging markets, but reserve banks the world over refuse to modernise. If they did, they wouldn’t have a reason to exist.
Does the justice system seek to keep the peace? Catching criminals has the oversupply of lawyers well-fed, but solving and confronting hard crime is high-hanging fruit, and requires effort and skill. It’s the low-hanging fruit that the judiciary has established as its main function. Soft civilian targets are easy takedowns but also pose the biggest threat to the police-industrial complex. The old problems of murderers, criminals and crazy folk are now a tertiary mission for the judiciary.
Its number one mission is to protect the government. Stop protestors, prevent them from even happening, hunt down and stomp out defiance and disobedience. Use anti-terrorism laws against soft targets, normal citizens who voice their concerns, and who speak up against the government.
Number two is revenue.
When you comply you turn yourself into a sitting duck, low-hanging fruit that any authority can bully, coerce, or nullify. You acquire no skills to take them on, you retire all personal power to stop them. There is no hiding from them. Coping a fine for driving twenty over the speed limit is one thing most citizens can avoid, but getting smashed with a fine for driving one kilometre over, by a private enforcer hiding behind bushes, is something nobody escapes. The fines start small, but when there’s no pushback; when everyone complies, these fines grow, eating away at your slim prosperity.
Survival of the truth.
Misbehaviour trains you to survive. It teaches you defiance. It teaches you limits within social, moral and ethical frameworks. Questioning authority gets you closer to the truth. Authorities deploy the holy trinity of government, corporate and police institutions to manipulate the truth and distort reality. Even the education system has fallen prey to the sociopathic centralised bureaucrats that are obsessed with preserving their power, holding on to their existence, and taking away your ability to cull them by tricking you into handing away your freedoms.
Disobedience teaches you what freedom really is. You are not born with it, it’s not some inalienable right. Freedom is what we all give to each other and what we deny from each other. If you don’t believe this, try to infringe on another citizen’s allotted rights and you will find out promptly. It is an unadulterated mob mentality equation. What freedoms the majority grants is what goes, and the holy trinity knows this, hence the lies, the manipulation, and the eroding away of your personal liberties which were once taken for granted. Hence the enforcement of compliance in our education at the expense of knowledge and enlightenment, gateways to personal empowerment.
Noncompliance is a defensive tactic, not an offensive one. It curbs a would-be oppressor’s ambitions. It brings the cost of governance high enough to buy you the freedom you desire. It teaches you the limitations of how far you can go. Push too far and you become a liability, you disrupt more than your oppressor’s plans, and you risk upsetting the nature of things.
Defy gravity in the wrong way, gravity ends you. Kill another human being for no reason and society ends you. This doesn’t mean you take the easy route and comply.
Challenge everything. Dispute your teachers, don’t accept everything they push as fact. Question authority, don’t cower from challenging an unfair or illogical infringement that isn’t based on any element of truth. Sometimes you may be wrong, but that is how you get closer to the truth.
This is how you learn about the world and how you fit in it. Compliance takes that experience away from you, so stop complying and start educating yourself. The only thing humans should only ever totally comply with is nature and God’s will, and even then, humanity would not have survived had it not challenged the universe, this existence, this ‘reality’ we find ourselves in.
