Freedom and empire
May 25th, 2008 by I.C.
Depending on who you ask, anywhere from one quarter to one half of Americans — anywhere from 75 to 150 million people — suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder.
If we are to believe these statistics, there are literally tens of millions of people today, or even hundreds of millions of people, who have trouble finding happiness.
America today is filled with so many alienated, struggling people. There is so much loneliness. Even in crowded places, people feel alone.
And there is so much hardship. You have to work very hard in America today if you want any chance of bettering yourself. If you want to have basic necessities such as food and health care, you must pay for those things; they are not provided. If you want to have a stimulating job with good career opportunities, you must take out a loan for many hundreds of thousands of dollars to obtain a diploma that will get you such a job. If you want to own a home, you have to go to areas with little development, places like the desert, to find an affordable piece of real estate.
In what time period has a civilization ever flourished in a desert? This is where America finds itself today.
Why so much hardship and suffering? America suffers because America is no longer free. It is no longer free because America is an empire.
People forget that there are great costs associated with maintaining an empire. An empire needs taxes to fund the military. An empire needs strong police powers — powers such as indefinite detentions and general warrants — if it is to control dissent and maintain authority.
But there is also a psychological cost associated with an empire — the cost of lies. An empire must lie. It must lie continually, to the rest of the world and to its citizens.
For example, an empire has to lie about its reasons for war. Typically, it has to say that invading another country is an act of self-defense, even when this isn’t true. Somehow, the American government convinced its people that the invasion of Iraq was an act of self-defense, despite the fact that Iraq had no economy and no army to speak of. This was a tremendous lie. Even the Nazis claimed that invading Poland was an act of self-defense.
Then there are the lies that come from the atrocities committed by the empire — torture, rape, summary executions. All empires commit such atrocities, and all empires deny they are taking place. Teenage boys and girls fresh out of high school suddenly find themselves armed with the tools of a grand inquisitor.
There are numerous lies in an empire. The government lies, the president lies, the media lies, the politicians lie. There are lies about the state of the economy, the state of the war, the state of the country in general. There is a great cost in having to listen to the lies and determine for yourself what you believe and what you don’t believe. It gets very tiring to have to piece through all the lies.
And when you are constantly surrounded by so many lies, you stop believing other people. You stop seeing the world as a place that is beautiful, because lies are not beautiful. Lies are very ugly. And when you have to go through all this ugliness all the time, everything in life starts to seem ugly.
Is it any surprise that so many people today are so unhappy, and suffering? How can anyone possibly be happy when they must work so hard for so little while being told nothing but lies, over and over? This is a hell I describe, yet this is the reality.
There is no greater joy in living than the joy of freedom. I mean freedom in a spiritual and psychological sense — the two are related. When you are free, you have complete liberty in your thoughts and your actions. You can choose for yourself what you want to do, what you want to feel, what you want to think. There is a great beauty in feeling this sense of control over your life, knowing that the future is yours to mold as you see fit.
This joy is absent today, for millions of people. It is absent because freedom is no longer the concern of America. And this is a great tragedy, because freedom was supposedly one of the main purposes for why America was founded in the first place.
When you look around and you see so many people unhappy today, so many people who cannot live in joy, who have to medicate themselves so that they can get up in the morning, what you are witnessing is a land that is bereft of its freedom, that is swimming in lies and mired in debt.
Today, Americans suffer from their empire. It is difficult to see this, but this is the truth. They suffer from high taxes, they suffer from oppressive government, and they suffer the psychological burdens that must weigh on them as a result of the aggression committed in their name.
I know that the instinct for liberty and joy is so pervasive in humanity that if people could just see the burdens they must go through in their everyday lives to sustain the barbarity of their military government, they would immediately reject all participation with it. But there is a lot of brainwashing that must be done away with if this is to happen. We have all been so brainwashed since birth to follow authority, to worship the government and the churches and the various noble families who find themselves placed into power over and over again, we have forgotten our instinct to just exist in simple joy.
There will come a point when the hardships are so tremendous, and the suffering so total, that even the most hardened adherents of the status quo will raise their hands to an emotionless heaven and ask for assistance. But assistance will not come from the skies; assistance will only come when that person looks deep down inside and sees how totally used they have been, taken advantage of by the powerful so as to sustain a monument of falsehoods — a monument to empire.
We can seek freedom now, here, at this very moment. Freedom requires nothing more than the realization that we are in control of our lives at every second. When we accept responsibility for that control, we exist in a state of joy because we become the authors of the future.
It is possible for America to be happy again, to throw out the pills and get up from the therapist’s chair and live in joy. It is possible for the entire society to live in this joy. But it will only happen when Americans, individually, take responsibility for their freedom. And it will only happen when Americans end their empire.
