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Invisible Government



That government is best which governs least.

Government used to be something that lived far away in a place called Washington, DC. But nowadays, like American Express, the government is everywhere you want to be. They listen to your phone calls; they read your emails; they even look at your MySpace page. And that’s just the stuff we know about through the news media. (Incidentally, I wonder if the “outrage” expressed by the media in uncovering these stories is a feigned social experiment designed to allow us to feel outraged, while simultaneously making us acclimated to a new lower standard of privacy…?)

It seems like if they could, the government would like to live inside your head. And that may just be their goal according to a (somewhat questionable) conspiracy book I’m reading entitled Psychic Dictatorship in the USA. The book details alleged mind control technology and experiments run by various government agencies on unsuspecting citizens. To the skeptic, these ideas surely sound like the wet dream of paranoid sci-fi nerds. But it’s important to remember that there is a great deal of serious science behind these things, and we’re inching closer to their commercial reality every day.

If the government could live inside your head though, would it still need to live outside of it? What if Washington, DC became - instead of a geographical location - a deeply ingrained pattern layered into your mind? Maybe this is the true purpose of the conspiracy bugaboo known as the Invisible Government - to truly become invisible; to become like water to fish, or air to the beasts of the land and sky. Ever-present, even a source of sustenance. The vaunted “withering away of the state” championed by idealistic communists. (Maybe even a nanotech plugin built into the brain - or the archonic predators giving us their mind, as according to Don Juan)

Though it might be the height of paranoia to do so, I’d like to entertain this as a possibility: that the government which would most fully control us would be the government which we believe we have beaten back and thrown down, but which has surreptitiously crawled inside of us and taken up permanent residence. If that were the case, we might be able to spot evidence of a transformation in the works. And it might look like a government in the process of transforming itself from the Rule of Law and the concept of the Social Contract to one which rules through direct invasions of the mind and heart: propaganda, electronics, surveillance.

If this theory has any use beyond simply scaring ourselves like a ghost story around the campfire, then the implications of it would be grave. It might mean that what seems like a government careening out of control is a government which is in fact designed to break once it has reached its technocratic flash point, once it is able to live wholly inside us without our knowledge, leaving in its wake the sense of freedom we thought we wanted…

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7 Reader Responses

  1. Tim Boucher Says:
    August 5th, 2006 at 9:11 pm

    I also wanted to grab something I posted to the Technocracy, Inc forums about the scientific philosophy of Positivism, which I believe is a hidden by operational force within society:

    The idea is that scientists can and have discovered “Laws” of nature: gravity, thermodynamics, etc - rules which are constant throughout nature and which can be discovered through the scientific method and then applied for the progress of the human race. Positivism says that these same Natural Laws must therefore exist for human societies and behavior, and that they can be uncovered by means of the scientific method. And once we work out these rules, we may manipulate them for the betterment of the human situation.

    *If* such thinking is true (and most contemporary sociological thinking claims it’s not, even though the science of sociology sprang from Positivism), then we could imagine that there would be an endpoint in which scientists have uncovered the Laws of Human Society and Behavior, and manipulated them so that the “negative” aspects of human society were eliminated, and government as we know it becomes totally anachronistic, cumbersome and unnecessary.

    Why run a police force when you can have a self-regulating system which prevents people from even conceiving of criminal behaviors? Why take over countries with military force when you can stimulate a culture’s behavioral circuits to give you what you want?

    This, I’m afraid, would be the ultimate perfected form of government.

  2. Tim Boucher Says:
    August 7th, 2006 at 12:55 am

    I guess what I was trying to say here, in shorter form is that I imagine somebody somewhere believes that if we could simply correct human nature or educate people well enough, then we wouldn’t need government…

  3. Kylark Says:
    August 7th, 2006 at 1:03 am

    If Washington, DC became - instead of a geographical location - a deeply ingrained pattern layered into your mind? Maybe this is the true purpose of the conspiracy bugaboo known as the Invisible Government - to truly become invisible; to become like water to fish, or air to the beasts of the land and sky. Ever-present, even a source of sustenance. The vaunted “withering away of the state” championed by idealistic communists. (Maybe even a nanotech plugin built into the brain - or the archonic predators giving us their mind, as according to Don Juan)

    I liked where you were going with this.

  4. Tim Boucher Says:
    August 7th, 2006 at 1:09 am

    What do you mean “were,” kemosabe? Did I not go there?

  5. Kylark Says:
    August 7th, 2006 at 1:10 am

    Oh, yes. Yes you did.

  6. Crystal Says:
    August 7th, 2006 at 3:49 am

    Why run a police force when you can have a self-regulating system which prevents people from even conceiving of criminal behaviors? Why take over countries with military force when you can stimulate a culture’s behavioral circuits to give you what you want?

    I agree. There are more peaceful methods to getting people to see your point of view. Bees like honey.

  7. barbarahoney Says:
    August 7th, 2006 at 10:16 am

    …i always wondered whether michael moore was designed to make us feel like somebody was doing something about bringing the truth to light,and to distract people from the fact that nothing was changing…….



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