ClaytonB
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The Futility of Violence
The LORD knows all human plans; he knows that they are futile. (Psalm 94:11)
Has not the LORD Almighty determined that the people's labor is only fuel for the fire, that the nations exhaust themselves for nothing? (Habakkuk 2:13)
Hans Hoppe defines the State as follows: "The State [is] a compulsorily-funded territorial monopolist of protection. That is, a monopolist of defense and the provision and enforcement of law and order." Because it is funded compulsorily and because the State seeks to monopolize the use of violence within its territory, the State is inherently violent, and aggressive. All other ways of defining the State that seek to avoid this naked fact are euphemistic, propagandistic and delusional.
The State, being violence-incarnate, is also inherently lawless, because violence is, in its essence, a lashing out at law. Violence in all its manifestations is diametrically opposite of reason.
Because the vernacular language surrounding these issues is so confused and infused with propaganda, it is necessary for me to over-explain my terms a bit. By "law", I specifically do not mean the kinds of statutory government policies adopted by legislatures. Rather, the word "law", in this context, refers to that which is so, whether anybody believes it or not, whether anybody likes it or not, whether anybody accepts it or not. Gravity is a law of the natural world. You may leap from a high cliff while telling yourself you can fly by flapping your arms, if you choose, and for a few brief moments before you impact the earth below, no one can contradict the "evidence" that you are indeed flying. But none of that changes the law of gravity, which determines that you will, indeed, fall and die. And note that I am not speaking of gravity, here, in any technical scientific sense -- I am simply referring to gravity as we understand it from childhood: the exceptionless tendency of things to fall when unsupported.
In philosophy, we speak of "the laws of logic". These laws are much stronger than the law of gravity and, without them, it would be impossible to even reason about gravity or talk about it all. The laws of logic are absolute in the sense that they must be true in any logically-possible universe. We can specify exactly what is meant by the previous sentence to any desired degree of precision but I will spare the reader from a rigorous treatment on the topic here and I will simply point out that you can't contradict the laws of logic without also contradicting your contradiction of those laws (thus, affirming them again).
In 2008, Eliezer Yudkowsky proposed (and performed) an experiment to test the theory that a super-intelligent AI could be contained. The purpose of the experiment is to demonstrate that an ordinary human intelligence can escape containment and, thus, a super-intelligent AI would be able to do so even more easily. Yudkowsky agreed to have a confidential instant-message discussion with another individual whose goal was to act as the Gatekeeper. The Gatekeeper's job was to keep the AI (Yudkowsky) contained in an isolation box. If Yudkowsky suceeded in changing the Gatekeeper's mind, then the Gatekeeper would send an email to a group of observerse indicating that he had let the AI out of the box. Otherwise, he would send an email indicating that the AI had remained inside the box. Surprisingly, Yudkowsky succeeded in persuading the Gatekeeper to send this email, although the details of how this was done have never been published (and remain secret by prior agreement to this effect).
We don't know how Yudkowsky persuaded his opponent to yield, but one of the easiest and most common methods to get people to do something they don't want to do is coercion. From the Godfather:
I doubt that Yudkowsky used coercion but the point, here, is that he could have, for all we know. Even more importantly, it is very easy for us to mistake a condition that has been brought about by coercion for a condition that has been brought about by persuasion. The end-result can look identical in both cases, as when POW Jeremiah Denton was reading communist propaganda on broadcast television, but blinking "TORTURE" with his eyelids. There was no other indication that he had not sincerely been converted to communist beliefs and this further demonstrates the point. Just because an outcome appears to have been brought about by consent or by rational persuasion does not mean that it has, in fact, been so brought about.
This might seem to be an "obvious" point, but the ramifications are very far-reaching. Another area where persuasion and truth can seem to disagree is in betting. The man who believes he can fly by flapping his arms proposes a bet: "Let's bet. I will leap from the cliff and if I fly, you will pay me $1 million, otherwise, I will pay you $1 million." Knowing this is a cinch, his opponent takes him up on the bet, and a $2 million dollar pot is secured, going to whoever wins the bet. The moment after he leaps from the cliff, the suicidal cliff-jumper yells over the radio to the contest-judges "I'm flying! I told you I can fly! Now sign the money over!" Little did anyone think to place a time limit on the meaning of "fly", and so the money is signed over as the arm-flapper falls to his death, making his heir wealthier by $1 million. A macabre inheritance, to be sure, but also a lesson in the dangers of failing to completely define your terms.
Thus, we see that betting, dares and other forms of challenge-games can lead to perverse outcomes where the obvious case which ought to succeed by all rights, does not succeed. And here's the lesson: Just because something is contradictory and truly violates the laws of logic, does not mean that the contradiction is instantly apparent at every point in time. For this reason, an illusion or genuine paradox can persist for a duration of time, until the inherent contradiction has worked itself through the system and finally becomes manifest. It is almost impossible to exaggerate the importance of this time-delay between causes and consequences, especially in a world where we are supposedly following "empirical" truth and "data". All the "data" for the duration of the arm-flapper's fall clearly showed that he was falling and would die. Nevertheless, he was airborne for that brief duration and, thus, he could truly claim that he was "flying" (since he was aloft, not yet in contact with the ground).
In political discourse, we often hear the quip, "The pen is mightier than the sword." This is essentially the point that I am making here, but I want to narrow and strengthen the point considerably. Let me rephrase it slightly in order to state my thesis: "The Logos is mightier than all pens and swords, added together." The Logos is the war-smasher. "[The LORD] will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore." (Isaiah 2:14) God is not just going to smash his enemies, he is not just going to slaughter their armies, he is going to destroy warfare itself, in all its manifestations. This is why he is called The Prince of Peace. He is the Prince of Peace as opposed to the worthless princes of war.
In human affairs, the concept of the divine right of kings does have a kind of internal logic. "We had a war, and I won" can be interpreted as a kind of divine omen. If God or the gods had intended the other king to win, then that is what would have happened. But it didn't. So since I won, I rule by divine right. While God has permitted this inherently carnal line of reasoning to persist down through the centuries, it is on a very short appointment with catastrophe.
There is coming a final human king, the Bible calls him the Beast or the Antichrist. He will seize power everywhere in the world and will have a stranglehold on the entire world at once. This king will exhaust the logic of "divine right of kings (presidents/popes/government/etc.)" to the uttermost. Revelation says:
To the modern, "secular" ear, the idea of worshiping anybody may seem a bit alien. Worship is just an ultimate expression of loyalty. Everybody has loyalty to something. That is because those who truly have no loyalty to anything inevitably self-select from society (they unexist themselves). So, if you're breathing and have a pulse, you worship something, even if you don't know what it is. In any case, I want to focus on the latter part of the verse: Who can make war against him?. The Beast is going to be un-fight-able. That's the point of that rhetorical question -- his power is so overwhelming that who can even try to fight him? Not only can no one beat him, no one even dares to try. That is the power with which the Beast will come. He will be absolutely overmatched versus all human weapons and human methods of war, including nukes, aircraft-carriers and even drones and "AI". Those who will attempt to turn to human weapons for hope are unspeakably deluded.
The concept of "rule by divine right" is finite violence. The end of the Age will manifest infinite violence. All bluffs will be called. It will not even be a war, just a slaughter, see Rev. 19:11ff. God's power is overmatched against the futile rebellion of the wicked, specifically including the Beast who will be killed by a mere breath, 2 Thess. 2:8. In Psalm 2, the united nations under the final ten kings of the earth are compared to brittle clay pots which are shattered with an iron rod. You can crack a bisque-fired clay pot with a light rap from a knuckle. The imagery of the iron rod conveys that the power of God is vastly overmatched against the pathetic resistance of creaturely rebellion, even heavenly rebels like Satan and his angels.
Here's the punchline: "Who can make war against the Beast?" is an expression of absolute despair. Mankind comes face-to-face for the first time with his absolute impotence in respect to heavenly affairs. But the Beast is just a creature and the power he wields, delegated from Satan, is that of a creature. How great the despair that God's judgment will bring against all rebels against him!
Until that time, the Beast System just continues doubling-down and raising the bet. Like the insane man flapping his wings as he falls to his death, screaming, "See! I told you I can fly!", this will work until the bluff is finally called. And that will be the Apocalypse, the moment when human hubris and delusion makes contact with the concrete. In this Age, Jesus promised us, we will have trouble. But the Age to come is when all the bluffs will be called, all accounts settled, and all pretenders slaughtered without ceremony and fed to the birds. Violence and war in every form are absolutely futile in resistance to God.
The LORD knows all human plans; he knows that they are futile. (Psalm 94:11)
Has not the LORD Almighty determined that the people's labor is only fuel for the fire, that the nations exhaust themselves for nothing? (Habakkuk 2:13)
Hans Hoppe defines the State as follows: "The State [is] a compulsorily-funded territorial monopolist of protection. That is, a monopolist of defense and the provision and enforcement of law and order." Because it is funded compulsorily and because the State seeks to monopolize the use of violence within its territory, the State is inherently violent, and aggressive. All other ways of defining the State that seek to avoid this naked fact are euphemistic, propagandistic and delusional.
The State, being violence-incarnate, is also inherently lawless, because violence is, in its essence, a lashing out at law. Violence in all its manifestations is diametrically opposite of reason.
Because the vernacular language surrounding these issues is so confused and infused with propaganda, it is necessary for me to over-explain my terms a bit. By "law", I specifically do not mean the kinds of statutory government policies adopted by legislatures. Rather, the word "law", in this context, refers to that which is so, whether anybody believes it or not, whether anybody likes it or not, whether anybody accepts it or not. Gravity is a law of the natural world. You may leap from a high cliff while telling yourself you can fly by flapping your arms, if you choose, and for a few brief moments before you impact the earth below, no one can contradict the "evidence" that you are indeed flying. But none of that changes the law of gravity, which determines that you will, indeed, fall and die. And note that I am not speaking of gravity, here, in any technical scientific sense -- I am simply referring to gravity as we understand it from childhood: the exceptionless tendency of things to fall when unsupported.
In philosophy, we speak of "the laws of logic". These laws are much stronger than the law of gravity and, without them, it would be impossible to even reason about gravity or talk about it all. The laws of logic are absolute in the sense that they must be true in any logically-possible universe. We can specify exactly what is meant by the previous sentence to any desired degree of precision but I will spare the reader from a rigorous treatment on the topic here and I will simply point out that you can't contradict the laws of logic without also contradicting your contradiction of those laws (thus, affirming them again).
In 2008, Eliezer Yudkowsky proposed (and performed) an experiment to test the theory that a super-intelligent AI could be contained. The purpose of the experiment is to demonstrate that an ordinary human intelligence can escape containment and, thus, a super-intelligent AI would be able to do so even more easily. Yudkowsky agreed to have a confidential instant-message discussion with another individual whose goal was to act as the Gatekeeper. The Gatekeeper's job was to keep the AI (Yudkowsky) contained in an isolation box. If Yudkowsky suceeded in changing the Gatekeeper's mind, then the Gatekeeper would send an email to a group of observerse indicating that he had let the AI out of the box. Otherwise, he would send an email indicating that the AI had remained inside the box. Surprisingly, Yudkowsky succeeded in persuading the Gatekeeper to send this email, although the details of how this was done have never been published (and remain secret by prior agreement to this effect).
We don't know how Yudkowsky persuaded his opponent to yield, but one of the easiest and most common methods to get people to do something they don't want to do is coercion. From the Godfather:
I doubt that Yudkowsky used coercion but the point, here, is that he could have, for all we know. Even more importantly, it is very easy for us to mistake a condition that has been brought about by coercion for a condition that has been brought about by persuasion. The end-result can look identical in both cases, as when POW Jeremiah Denton was reading communist propaganda on broadcast television, but blinking "TORTURE" with his eyelids. There was no other indication that he had not sincerely been converted to communist beliefs and this further demonstrates the point. Just because an outcome appears to have been brought about by consent or by rational persuasion does not mean that it has, in fact, been so brought about.
This might seem to be an "obvious" point, but the ramifications are very far-reaching. Another area where persuasion and truth can seem to disagree is in betting. The man who believes he can fly by flapping his arms proposes a bet: "Let's bet. I will leap from the cliff and if I fly, you will pay me $1 million, otherwise, I will pay you $1 million." Knowing this is a cinch, his opponent takes him up on the bet, and a $2 million dollar pot is secured, going to whoever wins the bet. The moment after he leaps from the cliff, the suicidal cliff-jumper yells over the radio to the contest-judges "I'm flying! I told you I can fly! Now sign the money over!" Little did anyone think to place a time limit on the meaning of "fly", and so the money is signed over as the arm-flapper falls to his death, making his heir wealthier by $1 million. A macabre inheritance, to be sure, but also a lesson in the dangers of failing to completely define your terms.
Thus, we see that betting, dares and other forms of challenge-games can lead to perverse outcomes where the obvious case which ought to succeed by all rights, does not succeed. And here's the lesson: Just because something is contradictory and truly violates the laws of logic, does not mean that the contradiction is instantly apparent at every point in time. For this reason, an illusion or genuine paradox can persist for a duration of time, until the inherent contradiction has worked itself through the system and finally becomes manifest. It is almost impossible to exaggerate the importance of this time-delay between causes and consequences, especially in a world where we are supposedly following "empirical" truth and "data". All the "data" for the duration of the arm-flapper's fall clearly showed that he was falling and would die. Nevertheless, he was airborne for that brief duration and, thus, he could truly claim that he was "flying" (since he was aloft, not yet in contact with the ground).
In political discourse, we often hear the quip, "The pen is mightier than the sword." This is essentially the point that I am making here, but I want to narrow and strengthen the point considerably. Let me rephrase it slightly in order to state my thesis: "The Logos is mightier than all pens and swords, added together." The Logos is the war-smasher. "[The LORD] will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore." (Isaiah 2:14) God is not just going to smash his enemies, he is not just going to slaughter their armies, he is going to destroy warfare itself, in all its manifestations. This is why he is called The Prince of Peace. He is the Prince of Peace as opposed to the worthless princes of war.
In human affairs, the concept of the divine right of kings does have a kind of internal logic. "We had a war, and I won" can be interpreted as a kind of divine omen. If God or the gods had intended the other king to win, then that is what would have happened. But it didn't. So since I won, I rule by divine right. While God has permitted this inherently carnal line of reasoning to persist down through the centuries, it is on a very short appointment with catastrophe.
There is coming a final human king, the Bible calls him the Beast or the Antichrist. He will seize power everywhere in the world and will have a stranglehold on the entire world at once. This king will exhaust the logic of "divine right of kings (presidents/popes/government/etc.)" to the uttermost. Revelation says:
To the modern, "secular" ear, the idea of worshiping anybody may seem a bit alien. Worship is just an ultimate expression of loyalty. Everybody has loyalty to something. That is because those who truly have no loyalty to anything inevitably self-select from society (they unexist themselves). So, if you're breathing and have a pulse, you worship something, even if you don't know what it is. In any case, I want to focus on the latter part of the verse: Who can make war against him?. The Beast is going to be un-fight-able. That's the point of that rhetorical question -- his power is so overwhelming that who can even try to fight him? Not only can no one beat him, no one even dares to try. That is the power with which the Beast will come. He will be absolutely overmatched versus all human weapons and human methods of war, including nukes, aircraft-carriers and even drones and "AI". Those who will attempt to turn to human weapons for hope are unspeakably deluded.
The concept of "rule by divine right" is finite violence. The end of the Age will manifest infinite violence. All bluffs will be called. It will not even be a war, just a slaughter, see Rev. 19:11ff. God's power is overmatched against the futile rebellion of the wicked, specifically including the Beast who will be killed by a mere breath, 2 Thess. 2:8. In Psalm 2, the united nations under the final ten kings of the earth are compared to brittle clay pots which are shattered with an iron rod. You can crack a bisque-fired clay pot with a light rap from a knuckle. The imagery of the iron rod conveys that the power of God is vastly overmatched against the pathetic resistance of creaturely rebellion, even heavenly rebels like Satan and his angels.
Here's the punchline: "Who can make war against the Beast?" is an expression of absolute despair. Mankind comes face-to-face for the first time with his absolute impotence in respect to heavenly affairs. But the Beast is just a creature and the power he wields, delegated from Satan, is that of a creature. How great the despair that God's judgment will bring against all rebels against him!
Until that time, the Beast System just continues doubling-down and raising the bet. Like the insane man flapping his wings as he falls to his death, screaming, "See! I told you I can fly!", this will work until the bluff is finally called. And that will be the Apocalypse, the moment when human hubris and delusion makes contact with the concrete. In this Age, Jesus promised us, we will have trouble. But the Age to come is when all the bluffs will be called, all accounts settled, and all pretenders slaughtered without ceremony and fed to the birds. Violence and war in every form are absolutely futile in resistance to God.
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