Romans 13:1-7 establishes the dogma for obeying the worldly authorities, and from this religious thinking, all of the conflict we see in the world today. There is no law, culture, politics, philosophy, without religion. Yes, religion preceded all of those, it was the lowest bar to clear for a group of people to have a shared set of beliefs. Opinions about ethics, morality, law, in isolation from religion are misinformed at best. To understand the sorry state of humanity requires an investigation of the history of religion: what it says is more of a reflection on us as a species, than about the supernatural world. The ancient ruling class all believed they were superior to the rest of mankind, as if they were even a different species. They were above the rules, treated the rest of us as human cattle, they still do but now they have to hide their intentions behind closed doors and private islands (Epstein case). Religion was the tool they used and co-opted to legitimize their authority.
Humanity's noosphere, or the world mind, is basically a schizophrenic person who is atheist, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Taoist, Mohist, Jainist, all at once, nonsense at the speed of neuron activation. Misled by all of the spiritual conmen, promising eternal peace and bliss, freedom from suffering, salvation or whatever. These load-bearing delusions continue to exist, and likely will continue to exist until the extinction of our species, there is actually no way out of delusion. We can only replace one delusion with another, even secular human values which we take for granted today will be righteously seen as barbarism by future humans, and their future generations, and so on. But do not mistake this for the myth of progress, there is no progress at all, we are only progresing towards our own extinction.
The policeman in your mind
All of the religious institutions and cults have the end result of turning unique individuals into automatons, not following their own will, just a strict set of arbitrary rules. They all depend on your internalizing some rules that others made up to their advantage, while telling you it's for your own good. You will be made to feel guilty, that you cannot uphold their law, their ideal of perfection, and that before the law you are unworthy. You will be declared Haram and denied entrance to Jannah. Doomed to another reincarnation in the cycle of Samsara.
The Court is within you, and it is outside of you. The metaphysical Court is what you do to yourself, the belief that you have done something wrong or not meditated enough or failed in any dimension, the idea that God is watching you at all times. We have the secular version of this, the surveillance state that is always watching you, which supersedes the old supernatural God who was blind to begin with. We failed to reject the surveillance state as a society, as a culture, because it's impossible to escape this framing of an authority watching us at all times, it has been baked into human psychology at this point.
The outside Court is everywhere, not just in the courtrooms. Kafka's Court in The Trial took place in hidden offices in tenement attics and private buildings; the Court today is unmarked rooms in telecommunications centers, government blacksites, backrooms of private buildings, on your electronic communication devices, and hiding in plain sight. It is everywhere yet nowhere it is seen, as it's commonly assumed that only bad guys need to worry about privacy. The apparatus of the Court was never meant to catch criminals, it was meant to create them from whole cloth.
Reneged social contract
| Harmful institution |
Less harmful alternatives |
|---|---|
| Military | Nothing :) |
| Judiciary | Nothing :) |
| Religion | Nothing :) |
| Tax collection | Nothing :) |
| Academia | Nothing :) |
| Corporations | Nothing :) |
Kafka's Court was about a nonsensical legal framework where guilt is assumed, basic information is kept secret from its victims, and the state has absolute power, which is the system we live in today. It was as if Kafka saw a glimpse of the future, and scribbled it down. The civilization in this novel did not work for its constituents, it worked against them, it was an inversion of what we assume to be true: we sacrifice some of our autonomy for some social benefit. Even if there were such a totalitarian system that genuinely helped the majority of its constituents, the problem is still that you have limited autonomy in it. Such a system would derive its legitimacy entirely on whether the people benefit, one may call it socialism or communism but the legitimacy of any such ideology always depend on outcomes and results, when they fail it becomes just as absurd as any capitalist hellscape that is short-sighted and thinking only about shareholder earnings in the next fiscal quarter.
Western societies, and increasingly Eastern ones, have bet their continued survival on a greater fool, whether that is another generation of people who will work harder for less, importing immigrants from poor countries, or even from rival countries. It expects those fools to work for little to no benefit to themselves. Work in and of itself has been reified as a sort of a secular virtue, beyond its Protestant roots, it is a service of worship for the holy market. When one provides nothing of economic value, one is as disposable as a single-use battery. We have put blind faith in artificial, political and economic systems, civilization at large, to sustain the life of our species.
Most people will believe that authority exists for the benefit of all mankind, from these religious and philosophical foundations, the same institutions which have caused massive excess deaths in the modern era. Governments do not try to benefit their people out of the goodness of their hearts, it is only done to prove their legitimacy. Without legitimacy, there is the impending threat of collapse and political violence, therefore it is not love but mutual terror which keeps the system running. Whether a government is doing a good job at uplifting its people, or threatening them to do what they want, the motivation to stay in power is the same, the desire to submit to an external authority is the same.
Against ideological anarchism
A great dogma is a dogma whose opposite is also a great dogma. I am misquoting Niels Bohr, who said "a great truth..." out of frustration that all of our desire to know the truth, leads to no truth being found, only more illusions. There are great writers such as Leo Tolstoy, who argued in favor of Christian anarchism, who had a radically different hermeneutics for the New Testament. In "The Kingdom of God Is Within You", Tolstoy argues to the abolish all courts, police, armies, and conscription, since all state function reduces to organized violence. To this I agree, but he has read the Bible in a way that is against all mainstream thought, most Christians I have spoken to tend to equate following the law as obeying God. The Roman state adopting Christianity and converting subjects through military might speaks much louder than the outsider Christians. It requires mental gymnastics to arrive at anything but statism from reading Romans 13.
Most Western anarchists are of the leftist variety, who share a desire for violent revolution to overthrow government with the communists. The right wing types tend to be principled libertarians, who just want no state to tax their property. None of them have any realistic chance of overthrowing power, and then relinquishing it. The Western tendency to be the hero, to do something about it, to take action, is worse than the problem they are trying to solve with violence. This is how spree killers are groomed by the feds, they have some grievance that they think justifies them to take action. The intellectual types think that by reading more theory, they can know how to enact anarchy once they seize power which is ironic in its own right, but all they accomplish is accumulating more useless knowledge. As any tyrant knows, one doesn't argue with intellectuals, one kills them.