Know Your Enemies
Gods
There is no benevolent god that demands obedience. It is only man that demands obedience.
Man learned that it was far easier to control others with the threat of eternal damnation than with the threat of a sword. And that the promise of eternal paradise in the next life would make men suffer far greater injustices in this one.
The notion that “man is made in God’s image” is profound arrogance. It suggests that all of our evolutionary baggage– anger, jealousy, insecurity– are divine traits of the Almighty Creator. It justifies a punitive and vengeful version of God who demands our worship.
God is unknowable. Any scripture that claims otherwise is a work of fiction. Any man who claims to speak on behalf of God is a fraud.
God is not a cleave to separate us from them. They are not wicked and we are not pure. We are all God’s children, trying to make our way through this difficult world.
God is not a tool of oppression. No man is holy, and no man has any authority to impose some claimed will of God.
Only you can know your God.
Kings
No man demands a ruler. Man is born free and wishes to live free.
Power is never given, it is only taken by conquest and coercion. We live in a conquered world and therefore suffer the power of others.
History is written by the victors, and subjugation is normalized. We are taught that civilization began with kings when in fact it began tens of thousands of years earlier in tribes with no hierarchy. Kingdoms and war are not the natural order.
Democracy is a tool of liberation, but only if it demands the electorate be knowledgeable and it holds its elected leaders accountable.
Without knowledge, we cast our votes based on the lies and false promises of our chosen political party, and parties have come to represent cultural identity far more than actual policy.
Without consequences, our elected leaders become tyrannical rulers and serve only themselves and their rich benefactors.
When faced with a power-hungry tyrant, man remains free by banding together to eliminate them. There are always more oppressed than oppressors. Always.
The Rich
The rich are our true masters. They control our access to basic resources in the obscene amounts of wealth that they hoard. In previous times, the rich were the kings, but with the advent of democracy they have found it easier to be puppeteers of corrupt politicians than to do the tiresome work of ruling.
The rich have written the rules, and they use the state to enforce them through use of force. The rise of a democratic state was meant to be a safeguard against the tyranny of the rich and powerful, but the rich have corrupted politics to serve their own interests rather than the interests of the people, all while maintaining the illusion of freedom.
The rich control the media and therefore control access to knowledge and truth. The media keeps us misinformed and undermines our democracy. They suppress any truth that threatens their power. They craft narratives to make the rich appear strong and smart and generous. They push propaganda about merit and self-made men. They preach bootstraps and curate their stories to make you believe that you, too, could one day be wealthy if you follow the rules and work hard.
The rich will never admit that they are parasites, products of generational wealth and of unique circumstances that cannot be replicated. They will not admit that they continue to stack the deck against the common man to maintain their hoarded wealth. They will not admit that their gluttonous excess requires the exploitation of others by definition, because there is no non-exploitive way that 5% of people could claim ownership to more wealth and resources than the 95% of people that are doing the work, day in and day out. This is not a fair system… it is a normalized form of slavery.