Effective Tyrannicide
or
Why you shouldn't kill the President "America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards."
- Claire Wolfe, 101 Things to Do 'Til the Revolution
You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy
We live in dark times, in what Mark Twain referred to as a 'gilded age'. We have all the comforts one could ask for available, from SUV's to large screen TV's with 200 channels. Bread and circuses for the masses. As long as we remain complacent and comfortable with that it might seem like we live in the freest, greatest country in the world. And maybe we really do, but at this stage that's kind of like being valedictorian at summer school; we're the best of a sorry lot. And even that is debatable, considering we have the world's highest rate of incarceration, and a hideously corrupt government that tries it's best to control, regulate, or criminalize every aspect of our lives. Some brave souls have struck out on their own, abandoning the job culture and living under the radar of the powers that be. I respect them for that, and even want to join them, but for some of us there are factors that keep us stuck in society. And as long as we are here, many of us face a daily risk of attack by criminals. Not the private citizen type, who simply want to take your possessions, but the massive criminal gang we call the government. These criminals want far more than our money; they want our freedom. So adamant are they about this that many of us fear the day will soon come when we have no choice but to 'plead the second'. In fact, there are some who have been pushed to that extreme already. And no doubt there are others who think it's past time for us to start killing politicians. I personally would not shed a tear over the loss of those parasites in our government, but as with all vermin, if you kill one there are unlimited others ready to take their place. Tyrants are the worst sort of vermin, and the most difficult to exterminate completely. We finally get rid of the tyrant klinton, and we end up with a worse sort in george bush. If one were to remove him from office, by voting either at the ballot box or from the rooftops, we would be stuck with an even worse parasite in the form of kerry or cheney. So what the hell can we do?
The answer may be in the study of ideas and how they shape the world we live in. The study of memetics could give us the key we need to free us from our chains. Or maybe not. But it certainly warrants a look.
There are some who dispute the notion of contagious ideas supposedly evolving under Darwinian rules of natural selection. Certainly, like all theorys about information, memetics is imperfect and cannot account for everything. But it remains a useful model.
For most of human history one of the prevailing memes was that some authority figure was needed, either to speak to the gods on behalf of us mere mortals, or to create and enforce the rules without which, we are assured, society would collapse. Then a competing meme began to propagate. This meme was the idea of individual liberty, and it was spread by some of the finest minds our species has ever produced. But that meme has been targeted for destruction by authoritarians of all stripes, and today it is limited to a very few segments of the populace. And that, it seems to me, is the root of the problem. In order to regain our freedoms we have to spread that meme, and insure that it takes hold and flourishes. Not an easy task.
So how can we replace the defective authority meme with the liberty meme? In the past memes were usually removed by killing those who had been infected. Typically this was done by groups advocating competing religious memes.
Alternatively there is the possibility that people will see the benifits of a new meme over the currently accepted one. But this requires rational thought on the part of most humans, something which is not very likely.
So what other options are there? What is needed is a memekiller, a method of destroying harmful memes without killing the person infected with the idea.
Next - new ideas in memekilling.
UNDER CONSTRUCTION