In Charles Mann's 1491,
about the (surprisingly big and diverse) cultures that existed in the Americas
before the arrival of smallpox, he offers this:
"The celebrated anthropologist Clifford Geertz has half-jokingly suggested
that all states can be parceled into four types: pluralist, in which the
state is seen by its people as having moral legitimacy; populist, in which
government is viewed as an expression of the people's will; "great beast," in
which the rulers' power depends on using force to keep the populace cowed;
and "great fraud," in which the elite uses smoke and mirrors to convince
the people of its inherent authority. Every state is a mix of all these
elements..."
Which of course leads to speculation about where today's US is on such a spectrum.
Obviously, this is an eye-of-the-beholder kind of debate, but from the libertarian/gold-bug
perspective it's been clear for some time that we're lurching from pluralist/populist
to a toxic combination of "great fraud" and "great beast," and that the process
probably won't end well.
The table below lists recent developments that seem to fit into each of the
latter categories:
These just scratch the surface; there are plenty of other compelling examples,
with more apparently in the pipeline. Together they paint a picture of a system
that's trying hard to confuse its citizens while building an apparatus to
coerce them into obedience when its lies are exposed. For more, here's a recent
Zero Hedge article on
the rights we've already lost.
What does this mean? Again, from a perspective that values transparency and
individual liberty over near-term efficiency, it means we're not the same
country that we once were. Americans are being secretly taxed via inflation,
lied to about the economy, spied upon by no-longer-constitutionally-constrained
authorities, and arrested/harassed/murdered without due process. "Great Fraudulent
Beast" indeed.
