Buddy
The Living Force
After reading the SOTT article mentioned at the end of this post, I felt such an expansion of understanding, I felt moved to write something based on it. The below is my effort.
Axiom or basis of this Parable-like piece of writing:
In a free society the Master (the people) has the right and responsibility to hire (vote for), pay (tax-paid salaries) and give direction to willing servants (the state) just as any employer hiring and directing the activities of employees who wish to earn money assisting with business objectives.
The Master and the Servants
There was a Master who was tricked into becoming a servant in his own house.
The Master was born and raised in poverty, but had a good heart and a strong desire to earn his own way and help make life better for everyone he knew and loved.
Having attained much success with hard work and trade, the Master's wealth and property grew exceedingly large.
Establishing agreed-upon relationships with a select number of willing servants, the 'Master' continued in his business and became complacent in his day-to-day affairs. The Master always trusted that the servants were acting in the his best interest. This trust appeared justified to the Master since the servants not only depended on the income the Master provided but also depended on the Master being able to continue in his business, status and ownership so that they would always have something to manage.
While the Master was preoccupied with making a living and nurturing relationships with family and business associates, the servants, having grown accustomed to their low-effort well-paid life, conspired and took over the house, and deceptively created the illusion that the Master still owns his liberty and property and would always need their help to maintain it.
Over time, the servants convinced the Master that more and more servants were needed to keep up with the responsibilities of protecting the Master, his property and his family. The Master agreed and hired more servants, paid even more salaries, and was generally happy in the illusion that the servants were working for HIM.
Now and then, when the Master found himself unable to do as he pleased he began to wonder what was going on in his own house and on his own land. The servants, seeing this concern, would always stage some kind of problem, usually involving a natural disaster or criminal activity on his grounds - or close enough to be a threat. They also created whatever lies were necessary to make the Master shrink back to the safety of a narrower and narrower portion of his property. The Master always willingly complied. The servants found that this technique worked so well, it was then used often to discourage the Master from exercising his full authority over all that he owned in his efforts to enjoy and share the fruits of his labors.
Having accepted the lies of the servants time and time again as well as their projected illusions of being loving protectors, the Master never realized he had subjected himself to a profound slavery. He even began to fight to maintain it, simply because to see the truth of his predicament is beyond his comprehension. Having invested so much time, trust, belief and assets into the structure of his day-to-day life, to see that structure challenged risks seeing it fall - with the inevitable consequence that severely uncomfortable truths would have to be faced.
At some level the Master knew this so he struggled and fought to maintain the illusion; he continually rationalized the events around him in a manner that is not collinear with reality. He was the Master. HE was the one who employed and PAID the servants. HE was the one everyone depended on. To the Master, the possibility of having been living as a servant, himself, was inconceivable, so he began to preoccupy himself with all manner of distractions to avoid giving attention to the deep-down feeling that something just wasn't right.
For the Master to have survived and regained some control over his own life, it was essential for him to have brought himself to understand that the real criminals and terrorists were his own servants and their envious servant friends and allies. He must also have come to realize that he was of no value to them except as a slave; everything he held dear, his life and the lives of those he loved were really irrelevant to the servants - meaningless and worth nothing except as slaves.
Should he have been able to recognize it, the Master had an advantage in that the servants were terrified of the Master. They knew that should he have discovered their crimes and found the courage to rise up against them using a peaceful, yet authoritative approach with documented facts, justice and his own finances as effective tools, the tables would have been turned, the servants would have fallen and their dishonest, effortless, parasitical livlihoods would have crumbled into the dust.
The Master continued in his self-blinding diversions and would not realize, until too late, that while he 'slept', servants fearing eventual discovery were hastily initiating policies and agreements so that in the very near future no transparency at all will exist for the Master should he attempt to peer into the murky depths of the servants' activities fearing evidence of wrongdoing directed against him and his house.
This part of the story is where we are today.
If this point is allowed to be reached, the Master may be lost forever - doomed to live out the rest of his days as a slave, never really knowing exactly what happened, steadily losing the energy to care and watching...as Death moves in quickly to close the gap.
--EDIT: Rewrote the 'Parable' to make it mine, changing the tense and rewriting some parts that used Simon's words.
--------------------------------------
The above work inspired by, the following:
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/179622-Entropy-Chaos-and-Power-Part-1-
Entropy, Chaos and Power (Part 1)
Simon Davies
SOTT.net
Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:46 UTC
Axiom or basis of this Parable-like piece of writing:
In a free society the Master (the people) has the right and responsibility to hire (vote for), pay (tax-paid salaries) and give direction to willing servants (the state) just as any employer hiring and directing the activities of employees who wish to earn money assisting with business objectives.
The Master and the Servants
There was a Master who was tricked into becoming a servant in his own house.
The Master was born and raised in poverty, but had a good heart and a strong desire to earn his own way and help make life better for everyone he knew and loved.
Having attained much success with hard work and trade, the Master's wealth and property grew exceedingly large.
Establishing agreed-upon relationships with a select number of willing servants, the 'Master' continued in his business and became complacent in his day-to-day affairs. The Master always trusted that the servants were acting in the his best interest. This trust appeared justified to the Master since the servants not only depended on the income the Master provided but also depended on the Master being able to continue in his business, status and ownership so that they would always have something to manage.
While the Master was preoccupied with making a living and nurturing relationships with family and business associates, the servants, having grown accustomed to their low-effort well-paid life, conspired and took over the house, and deceptively created the illusion that the Master still owns his liberty and property and would always need their help to maintain it.
Over time, the servants convinced the Master that more and more servants were needed to keep up with the responsibilities of protecting the Master, his property and his family. The Master agreed and hired more servants, paid even more salaries, and was generally happy in the illusion that the servants were working for HIM.
Now and then, when the Master found himself unable to do as he pleased he began to wonder what was going on in his own house and on his own land. The servants, seeing this concern, would always stage some kind of problem, usually involving a natural disaster or criminal activity on his grounds - or close enough to be a threat. They also created whatever lies were necessary to make the Master shrink back to the safety of a narrower and narrower portion of his property. The Master always willingly complied. The servants found that this technique worked so well, it was then used often to discourage the Master from exercising his full authority over all that he owned in his efforts to enjoy and share the fruits of his labors.
Having accepted the lies of the servants time and time again as well as their projected illusions of being loving protectors, the Master never realized he had subjected himself to a profound slavery. He even began to fight to maintain it, simply because to see the truth of his predicament is beyond his comprehension. Having invested so much time, trust, belief and assets into the structure of his day-to-day life, to see that structure challenged risks seeing it fall - with the inevitable consequence that severely uncomfortable truths would have to be faced.
At some level the Master knew this so he struggled and fought to maintain the illusion; he continually rationalized the events around him in a manner that is not collinear with reality. He was the Master. HE was the one who employed and PAID the servants. HE was the one everyone depended on. To the Master, the possibility of having been living as a servant, himself, was inconceivable, so he began to preoccupy himself with all manner of distractions to avoid giving attention to the deep-down feeling that something just wasn't right.
For the Master to have survived and regained some control over his own life, it was essential for him to have brought himself to understand that the real criminals and terrorists were his own servants and their envious servant friends and allies. He must also have come to realize that he was of no value to them except as a slave; everything he held dear, his life and the lives of those he loved were really irrelevant to the servants - meaningless and worth nothing except as slaves.
Should he have been able to recognize it, the Master had an advantage in that the servants were terrified of the Master. They knew that should he have discovered their crimes and found the courage to rise up against them using a peaceful, yet authoritative approach with documented facts, justice and his own finances as effective tools, the tables would have been turned, the servants would have fallen and their dishonest, effortless, parasitical livlihoods would have crumbled into the dust.
The Master continued in his self-blinding diversions and would not realize, until too late, that while he 'slept', servants fearing eventual discovery were hastily initiating policies and agreements so that in the very near future no transparency at all will exist for the Master should he attempt to peer into the murky depths of the servants' activities fearing evidence of wrongdoing directed against him and his house.
This part of the story is where we are today.
If this point is allowed to be reached, the Master may be lost forever - doomed to live out the rest of his days as a slave, never really knowing exactly what happened, steadily losing the energy to care and watching...as Death moves in quickly to close the gap.
--EDIT: Rewrote the 'Parable' to make it mine, changing the tense and rewriting some parts that used Simon's words.
--------------------------------------
The above work inspired by, the following:
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/179622-Entropy-Chaos-and-Power-Part-1-
Entropy, Chaos and Power (Part 1)
Simon Davies
SOTT.net
Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:46 UTC
