Instructions for Revolution: Part 1

After writing a post on tyranny, I thought it would be profitable to post something about how I thus far understand, in my inexperience, how tyrannies are destroyed.

I say "destroyed" because make no mistake, in order to stop tyranny in any of its corporeal or noncorporeal (physical or nonphysical) forms you will be engaged in battle. When I say "destroyed" however, I do not necessarily mean that the entire nation or person must be erased, but that it is reduced to a state in which it can no longer exert its malevolent control over your person or persons.

History illustrates that war is not a battle unto complete annihilation of one side. As John McCain recently aptly pointed out of the current war in Afghanistan and terror in general, war is "a battle of wills". When one side has lost the will to fight, the war is over. A nation may lose the will to fight because it cannot stand casualties or seemingly unnecessary expenses (which would seem to be our current situation), or perhaps it has lost the will to fight because its general has been captured or killed in battle (This was Alexander the Great's favourite tactic), or perhaps most commonly, the nation has lost the ability to effectively put up a fight and thus surrenders to avoid disastrous damage to its homeland (Partly the issue for Imperial Japan in 1945).

The first step to destroying any system of governance (Tyrannical or not) is to destroy its values, the values held in the hearts of the people or person it governs. This holds two functions, it destroys the ability of the governance to control and manipulate by what rewards it offers for compliance. Secondly, undermining or proving false the values of a system and replacing them gains a convert or converts to the new ideology which then has:

a) The will to fight against what it now recognizes as falsehood, and;

b) The resilience to reject bribes or settlements from the tyranny.

A sure sign that you are dealing with a tyranny is that its values are not centred around the value of truth. Usually this takes the form of appealing to humanity's dark nature: self praise, material possessions, self-gratification etc. It may not be so very obvious though, and deception wouldn't be deception if it didn't try to hide itself at least a little. At the end of my last post I gave some indication of where good governance stands. I argue that humanity does have an inherently dark nature (some political systems will attempt to make you place abundant faith in man's or a single man's/party's overall goodness, like communism or fascism or totalitarianism). What are the signs of good governance?

a)Where there are signs that a person or persons is/are working against the grain of their darker moral nature(s); When the values of the government, expressed by word and deed are in line with, and reflect a primary interest in inalterable universal moral principles.

For example, liberty should have been to all people in the United States from the moment the constitution (a reflection of a nation's values) stated “All men are created equal”. But racism, like any other human crime, is a neverending battle, the Civil War was a major turning point for the United States, and the seeds of that victory gave men like Martin Luther King Jr., the liberty to further demolish ingrained racist tendencies and structures in American Society.

King was able to do what he did because of the revolution in American thinking that men like Abraham Lincoln fought for so desperately. The point stands however, that the encapsulated moral values of the US constitution have made it the bastion of liberty (all cynicism aside) that it is today. Anyone questioning that liberty, at least as it stands today, needs to have a look around the world. Of course, liberty is not something one can leave to the vagaries of human nature lest it be lost.

b) The first sign of good governance was the 'easy' part. The real test is truthfulness; the truthfulness of its ideas. Even presuming that your personal or national governance tells the truth about its intentions, and thinks that its moral stance is best, its moral stance may not reflect truthful values. I have already argued that the best governance comes from universal objective moral principles, and a large part of my reason for doing so is the fact that these kinds of principles are the least susceptible to common human weaknesses. Moral principles are not physical substances, so they rely indirectly for false or truthful fulfilment. What I mean is that the payoff from moral principles is one step removed from say the reward of millions of dollars in illicit cash. It is terribly easy to be bought off by millions of dollars in cash, while manipulating based on moral principles requires more leg work.

The safety of moral principles as a system of value is that in order to achieve effective governance they must be believed by the people or person being governed/tyrannized. Simply put, it is harder to convince someone to your ideology than it is to just pay out some kind of direct bribe (wealth, health, etc.)

The dangerous and powerful aspect of moral principles as a system of value is that if adopted over and above those baser human desires, it produces an adherent (for good or ill) which will be far more likely to remain fanatically loyal to the principle, since the moral principle goes far beyond the individual interest and stretches to the universal.

For example, fighting for “freedom” can be a great and good thing wielded by a genuine leader and can spur political, diplomatic or military action, but wielded by a deceitful or self-interested ruler 'freedom' or 'democracy' can be code words for enslavement. The Nazi's did not call themselves fascists, they were called “National Socialists”. The murderous communist regime of Russia likewise called itself the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”. Under less extreme conditions, some socialist ideas can produce compassionate social change. Unbridled faith in a communist or National Socialist ideal; does not.

What causes then, an unbridled faith in certain principles to lead to the very disaster the creator may have intended to avoid? Friedrich Nietzsche probably wouldn't have been thrilled to learn that key parts of his philosophies had been adopted in hearty approval by Nazi Germany. The key problem is not precisely the ideal scenario philosophy, it is the factors that we decide to put faith in to make the 'ideal scenario' a reality. An edifice planned to be invulnerable cannot be built with vulnerable parts. A pure glass of water cannot be poured using contaminated water.

If we allow that human beings are fundamentally flawed creatures which tend toward evil rather than good (I leave that to your examination) then a system of governance which places excessive faith in an individual (even self), a ruler, a party or even in fact many people (Plato called democracy the worst form of government! I don't, for the record.) we are bound to end up in disaster. Additionally, we must concede that the 'ideal' scenario or utopia, can never exist. As a corollary, or side point, we must also concede that excessive faith in any factor which can be manipulated by human intervention or dependent upon human satisfaction (eg. Technology, economic prosperity, disco robots) will also fail as a means of creating utopia.

The consequence of the above paragraph is that in order for faith or trust to be well rested in an idea, the idea must rest in a true appraisal of its objects of concern. That is a general philosophical way of saying that if you want to govern human beings, you have to have a realistic or truthful notion about who human beings are, what they need, how they interact, what they are, and are not capable of and especially, how they are flawed. Thus the lament of Solomon in Ecclesiastes 5:8, “If you see oppression of the poor and denial of justice and righteousness in the province, do not be shocked at the sight, for one official watches over another official, and there are higher officials over them.”

Solomon's disparaging message about human nature is a problem which evokes spiritual despair at the spiritual condition of humanity, at the condition of self before God. But politically speaking it is not something to cause us terrible anguish. Solomon's check and balance measure is just a few lines earlier in Eccl 4:9-13, where he expresses the power and survivability of a team working together. Although “one sinner can destroy much good” as Solomon said elsewhere, Eccl 4:12 tells us that “a cord of three strands is not easily broken”.

Although one cannot make an invulnerable armour out of that which is vulnerable, something very strong can be made out of many vulnerable parts. A kevlar vest is made of synthetic fibres woven together. It may not be invulnerable, but it has the power to slow or even stop a piece of pointed lead travelling at incredible speed.

The 'excessive' faith ideologies that I have mentioned are good examples of ideologies which, regardless of their moral stance, have failed the truth test of good governance. Promises are empty if they are based on a false sense of who we are as human beings; and they may even indicate a ruler waiting to exploit his advantage to create a tyranny.

I've already yakked long enough but maybe I'm making up for a couple month's posting. There's just one more thing. You don't really have to be a philosopher to weigh out all the ideas, in fact if you get caught up with just theories, you'll be lead astray. Perhaps the best way is to follow the guidelines that Christ gave when he said, “You shall know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes, nor figs from thistles, are they?” (Matthew 7:16)

The Pharisees had all sorts of moral rules for Jews but Jesus consistently saw through their hypocrisy and saw that although they “washed the outside of the cup” they did not wash the inner. The claims for morality did not match the inward reality of love for God and neighbour. The golden rule of treating others the way you wanted to be treated was the “Law and the prophets” (7:12), not the empty commandments of legalism.

It's kind of common sense that there's something fundamentally flawed with an ideology or value system that says one thing and does another; or claims to be good but all it does is oppress. That being said, its still easier said than done to ascertain the standing of a way of thinking. Tread carefully but decisively when it comes time to consider starting a war against tyranny. You may have to adopt an entirely new sight picture before you start shooting.

My idea in this first installment has not been to lay out to you the reader all the ways in which an ideology may be true or false. That is the task of a lifetime. You probably already have a good idea where I place my abundant faith, but that isn't really the point either. The truly difficult part of revolution is ascertaining the one's own values in relation to the values of the supposed tyranny, whether that tyranny is spiritual, mental, national, familial etc.

If one is not careful in this step, the project is misguided. An untruthful value system, no matter its promises of morality, will in the degree of its delusion, so also promote destruction and of course, tyranny. Just as demons can be cast out of a person and the demon return with seven worse than the first return, as Lenin replaced the self-centred Czarist system with murderous communism, so also can we be guilty of enslaving ourselves or others to an even worse conclusion than the first. Unbridled faith in an ideal can lead to tyranny. Unbridled faith in one's own revolution can be too.