The Wizards of Ozymandias by Butler Shaffer

Author:Butler Shaffer [Butler Shaffer]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-61016-549-5
Publisher: Ludwig von Mises Institute
Published: 2012-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

1Calaprice, ed., The Expanded Quotable Einstein, p. 317.

2Economist.com, October 9, 2008.

3Tim Wise, Red-Baiting and Racism: Socialism as the New Black Bogeyman. August 10, 2009, redroom.com.

4New York Times.com, April 3, 2010; bloomberg.com, March 27, 2010.

5Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” 1837. www.emersoncentral.

CHAPTER 27

Civilization in Free-Fall

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

—T.S Eliot

The news story and accompanying photo were quite startling. According to the report, Sony—a dominant firm in the electronic industry—held a party to announce a new computer game it was putting on the market. As part of this soiree, a goat was decapitated, with the photo showing its not fully severed head hanging over the table on which it lay, having been sacrificed to the gods of corporate sales. Party guests were even encouraged to reach inside the goat’s body cavity to remove and eat the offal to be found therein.1

All around us can be found the evidence of a civilization in its death throes; a culture that has devolved from the creation of life-sustaining values to the ritualistic celebration of death. Dr. Pangloss’ “best of all possible worlds” has backslid into an anti-life swamp. Sony’s public relations stunt did not generate this collapse, but only reflects it.

Upon reading this news report, my first response was to seek the confirmation of its validity elsewhere. Might this be nothing more than a dark side version of one of my favorite websites, The Onion? Jon Stewart, The Onion, and a few other sources have helped us to appreciate the difficulties associated with satirizing absurdity; only a faithful commitment to reciting the ludicrous details of what we now accept as “reality” will suffice.

Where does one begin to describe—much less analyze—our institutionalized commitment to death? The war system is certainly the most dramatic, having accounted for some 200,000,000 deaths in the twentieth century alone. So insistent is our culture on the perpetuation of this corporate-state slaughterhouse that those who sponsor debates among presidential aspirants have systematically excluded the two candidates—Democrat Mike Gravel and Republican Ron Paul—who have most consistently opposed continuation of the war in Iraq.

And what of the academic and corporate institutions that derive so much of their income from designing and producing “new and improved” weapons systems that reduce the unit costs of butchering others, thus fostering the values of “efficiency” by which the spiritually-bankrupt calculate their bottom-lines?

The state—with its recognized powers of deadly force—manifests this same hostility to life. Its very nature is to compel people to do what they do not otherwise choose to do. Life is a spontaneous, self-directed process; and to forcibly intervene in human action is to make life become or do what it does not choose to be or do. Because uncoerced people will always act for the purpose of achieving their desired outcomes, governmental action will, of necessity, produce lesser degrees of well-being.

And why does the state engage in such life-depleting behavior? Part of the explanation lies in the fact that there will always be some segment of humanity that enjoys the exercise of coercive power over others.

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