Statism as Mental Illness

Freeman at http://freemanlc.blogspot.com/2005/06/government-as-mass-psychosis.html#comments links to Anthony Gregory's post where he describes acceptance of government as "mass psychosis". If this diagnosis is accurate, we can hope for psychotropic medications to be developed to combat the disease, or we can hope that years of intensive therapy will effect a cure. It seems clear to me from talking with statists and having labored under the statist illusion for most of my life that very few people consciously adopt the statist stance. Rather, they find it thrust upon them insidiously and overtly through a constant barrage of state-supporting memes. The idea of the state becomes by this process unproblematic and part of the unquestioned substrate of social reality. The idea becomes self reinforcing as it is necessary to interpret all experience in the light of the statist background.

Professor Herve Varenne of Teachers College, Columbia University once remarked in a seminar that he thought of nationalism as a virus, a disease to be treated. I have come to think of all aspects of statism, including nationalism, as a cognitive disorder, an infection by a cognitive virus, and it is necessary to attack the virus, comprised of a complex of statist memes, in order to heal the patient. All humans have some level of immunity in that just about everyone has a point where they will view the state as too intrusive and everyone has some capacity to reason. My kinsmen of the last generation, to whom I paid insufficient heed in my youth, also had a tradition of suspicion of government and love of liberty to protect them from the statist illusion.

But the statist virus feeds on certain natural human tendencies. For example, we are a social animal, and we tend to want to belong to a pack. The state disguises itself as the pack writ large and undermines other voluntary groupings. We are quick to adopt in-group/out-group thinking. We are also pretty gullible in our juvenile phase to render us receptive to teaching, and the state takes advantage of this by filling our heads from an early age with statist nonsense. We also tend to reify abstractions such as the state itself and come to think of them as having an unproblematic concrete existence. Moreover, we live in a fairly complex world where most of our dealings with others are anonymous "traffic relationships", and the state plays on our fear of our fellow man. Once you accept the premise of the legitimacy of the state, there may be no limit to what you might empower the state to do, especially if your fear is heightened.

Short of a massive re-education effort, complete with camps surrounded by concertina wire, what is to be done to combat the statist disease? The key is for the uninfected to fight memes with memes and to problematize and deconstruct the idea of the state at every opportunity. The point of attack should be to question relentlessly the very legitimacy of the state. We want to engender cognitive dissonance in the minds of the masses. Much of what the state does depends for its effectiveness on obscurity, and the very act of shining a light on these processes will serve to weaken their impact.