EP2 The Demon's Name Is Surveillance: Monologue
Six discusses the tools used in the war on terror and how they are used against liberty at home.
We often refer to the concept of home to describe a place that we come from. A place where our family resides. Where our property exists. This term can expand to our town, our state, and our country.
For most adults, home comes with responsibility. That responsibility is placed on any individual that claims sovereignty over their home. When you own a home, its your responsibility to take care of it. If any force outside of your home causes damage to it, then you have rights, through whatever legal means the society you live in offers, to help settle the damages.
Example: If your home catches fire, you can file a legal claim through your insurance. If it turns out that someone set fire to your home, then you file a police report. These actions are all done after the loss has already occurred and the fire department does its best to salvage your life and property.
There are also preventative measures like calling the fire department if you see a fire hazard near your house. You can call the police if you suspect that someone is attempting to set fire to your property. Anyone caught doing so faces punishment from you and your insurance company in civil and criminal court. All of these actions require the individual to make a decision on how to act in the particular situation. It's your responsibility as a home owner in this example to file the claims and the lawsuits or seek legal council. It is your responsibility to file the police reports, or to call the fire department, unless you have a good neighbor that beat you to it. But what if the situation was turned upside down? What if the state made it the duty of insurance companies, police, and fire departments to make sure that your house never caught fire, by surveilling or occupying your home, gathering every piece of information available about you, everyone around you, and then taking action?
Some could argue that insurance companies that have already invested trillions into predicting the outcomes of situations would be better suited to help reduce the risk of fire. That police, with trillions of dollars spent and rigorous training could help prevent arson. That firefighters, again with trillions of dollars worth of spending could predict or prevent your house from burning down. But where does the cost outweigh the benefits? And who ultimately decides what costs should be paid in exchange for what amount of benefit?
It has long been a desire for mankind to control its environment. We take these steps in having insurance, a police force, and a fire department so that we can maintain that space of our own that we call home, in a civil society. But if we didn't have a choice to file an insurance claim because the insurance company surveilled us all the time, and filed it themselves, that conflict of interest might make home ownership much more of a burden. I think most homeowners probably wouldn't welcome insurance adjusters into their homes, to file claims every single day at the cost of themselves for very long. But what about the other two examples here?
Regardless of how they feel about them, I bet most people wouldn't want to allow police to occupy their home and investigate them and everyone they come in contact with in order to protect them at all times. I'd also wager that people would not allow firefighters to turn their hoses to their house every time they lit a barbecue or if their neighbor posted something online about having a fire.
I don't think any of those things would sound reasonable to most people. Those preemptive actions would most certainly lead to problems in how individuals choose to live in their homes. People in large numbers would reject such a ridiculous concept because they wouldn't want someone else running their household like that. There would be conflict, maybe even violence against such actions if they were being taken without the people's consent. Many people know that type of intervention and potential overreaction to a problem makes other problems. So why are we letting businesses and governments do that with our bodies?
You may not own a home, but unless you are not mentally or physically capable of taking care of yourself, you own your body. You, by way of your consciousness and your will, have sovereignty over your own body. Especially once you reach adulthood. Once that distinction is attained your responsibility then is to decide which interventions you would allow in order to solve certain issues. And in the place we find ourselves now, all throughout western civilization, forces outside of your body are attempting to preempt any occurrence of an illness or its spread without your consent. How have we let it get this far so fast?
Its not a simple explanation, and I'm sure that many people would have reasons for wanting to give up their personal or bodily sovereignty in exchange for the security promised by those now taking action upon them. There are limitless amounts of arguments that can be made from the position of uncertainty, of fear, or of the acknowledgment that people sometimes do have more expertise in taking care of your body than you do. But when it comes to how much of your life's decisions should be delegated to someone else, shouldn't that depend on each individual owner? At what point does consent not govern the actions taken against us?
One way a collective can legally take away the decision making of someone is if that individual presents a threat to others. As in the example of the person you would call the cops on if you caught them setting fire to your house. In civil society we codify those actions that present threats to others into law and delegate others to enforce those laws to protect us from those threats. But those laws and actions are mostly at the behest of the governed. We get to decide how far the law goes to accomplish its goal. If we don't like a law or if a law is unjust or ineffective we can get rid of it through the legal process. The laws we choose, are to be administered with due process, where both parties are given a chance to defend against or prosecute the violation of that law. Where has all of that gone lately in relation to our bodily sovereignty?
Its been suspended due to an emergency. An emergency that can only be declared by the people we have delegated to protect our rights, our property, and our lives. With most actions taken against someone by these entities there first needs to be an establishment of probable cause. If that can be observed objectively then the appropriate action taken under the law is required. What have our representatives in government, and those who control our markets in business, presented to us to justify the actions that they have taken? Do you think those actions have been just thus far? How do we audit these actions to prove or disprove whether they are working or not? And finally, when or will these people holding this immense power over us relinquish that back to each individual and rightful owner?
In many cases this week we can see that relinquishment of power back to you and I, will not simply be a mechanism of how our systems work. We can see what the Military Industrial Complex does to the populations it occupies and surveils on the other side of the world. The age of information has enabled a new and powerful technocratic class to assist them. It's systems developed and skills sharpened in battlefields far away are now to be employed at your local restaurant or venue. Maybe soon your hospital or in some sort of camp. These new systems of bureaucratic management being forced on us are a product of our own war machine. And now that machine is being brought back home to be part of the public private partnership our corporatist government rebranded itself as.
From the crypto currency you exchange on your phone, to who has possession over your information, to what can be done with that info, the pattern of behavior of the people offering this solution doesn't seem to favor individual liberty. Perhaps the real danger isn't in asking someone to act on our behalf, but losing control over what those actions are and all of the other problems that can occur because of them?
This week we're gonna be talking about the weapons and tactics we employed in the war in Afghanistan and how those are now being used to fight against individual liberty. Companies you probably never heard of, who used the war on terror to research and develop their product, which is how to gather the most intelligence on you, so that you can be predicted or manipulated or punished. And they're being employed along with our military domestically to make sure you get that shot in your arm, that you don't resist, and that it stays that way.
Most people don't know who the people are behind these companies and what they have done, and what they continue to do. Today we shine a light on the demons we birthed in the hell of war and refused to stay there. Those bumps in the night you've heard, have slid from beneath your bed, and are looking to possess every interaction you have with the world. The sooner we can confront them and chase them back to the darkness where they belong, the sooner many of us will get a lot more sleep.