Entire books have been written on the difference between orthodoxy and orthopraxy, enough to fill shelves in seminary libraries. Orthodoxy is right beliefs, and orthopraxy is right actions. More or less. In theory, certain Judeo-Christian religious sects place vast emphasis on one or the other, but not both. In practice, however, often both are zealously enforced. I find it an intriguing exercise to apply the same principles to governments.

Your typical statist government uses laws to prescribe and describe criminal behavior. Thou shalt not rape, with a definition of rape spelled out in exquisite detail both in law and by court decisions. Governments have long been orthopraxy based. The courts hate trying to find intent, and with good reason. Recently, the hidden Beliefs Which Shall Not Be Questioned have come to the forefront, however. Thus, if you proclaim that Black Lives Matter, arson is not a crime that is enforced.

All communities, whatever their size, have Beliefs Which Shall Not Be Questioned. They are small in number, but you will most certainly know by the time you hit puberty, what exactly those beliefs are. All communities, whatever their size, also have Actions Which Shall Never Be Committed. These are also small in number. You won’t always know what these actions are, because they are not even supposed to be committed by fictional characters, lest somebody want to copy them.

Do we question climate change? Or is that taboo? Do we question the efficacy of injectable gene therapies? Or is that taboo? Do we question whether The Science Experts are wrong? What if they don’t actually agree, and there is only a manufactured consensus? I can question these, in the right company, because there is no longer a community. What was once United, no longer is, broken by the social isolation of lockdowns which killed more than they could have saved.

We’re not supposed to question, because questions lead to disobedience. The Rulers prefer trained circus monkeys, who blindly obey their every command, and believe what they are told to believe. Is that all that I am? A trained circus monkey? Dancing and clapping and jumping through hoops for my dwindling ration of food? My mind can’t stop the questions. I’m far too curious. I have an insatiable need to know truth. That also means that I have an insatiable need to do right action. Unfortunately, even I, as intelligent as I am, do not actually know what right action is. I don’t trust anybody else to know either, especially midwits who are lied to by their minions so that the minions don’t get fired for bringing an unpleasant truth to their attention. Midwit bureaucrats and politicians can’t know right action either, and they can’t know the truth. New truth is always found on the margins, and old truths are carefully handed down over thousands of years to people worthy of understanding them.

Is that all that government is? Just a belief system that obeying the prescribed laws will bring greater good to the community? Then that is why questioning whether something truly IS for the greater good instead of enriching a corporation off of the increased suffering of others, is something which must be quashed with zealous hatred by the religious fanatics, oh sorry, statist government fanatics. They share the same human hierarchical structure, after all.

Perhaps that is why I have trouble with “follow the science.” Science is a tool, and tools can be used to commit genocide. Science has in fact been used to commit genocide in the past, and will be used in the future for the same purpose. The assumption, the Faith Statement, that technology leads to progress which leads to the greater good and towards utopia, is not something that I hold to. Following the science leads to nuclear fallout and deformed babies. The alternative is to follow the government officials who are lying about following the science but are actually following the money, but that leads to the same atrocities. The problem seems to be a quite fallible human hand on the trigger of the technology, and not the technology itself. We have not fixed greed, envy, sloth, lust, nor pride. Nor shall we.

I don’t know what the greater good even is. I can’t see it, the same way I can’t see a heaven that is not just a cleaner Borg cube, without individuality, without anything but slavery for eternity. Forced obedience always leads to dystopias, not utopias. I know that a lot of people are all about “saving lives.” That might be a transfer of beliefs from Christianity into the government sphere. “If it just saves one life.” No. I’ll not be party to that. It was not the purpose of humanity to fill the Earth with humans until there was nothing left but humans, with no land left for crops, so that the humans were left eating other humans for all time. (shudders in horror) The Earth is not a clown car, and human bodies should never ever ever become immortal.

There I go again, questioning one of those Unquestionable Beliefs. Human spirits are immortal then. I don’t hold to “progress.” It doesn’t make sense. Cycles make sense. The rise and fall of civilizations, of heart beats, of Hollywood Video stores, the rise and fall of Ma Bell and Enron, these make sense. Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great conquering vast empires, which subsequently break up into pieces and go their own way, makes sense. Even the rulers of vast imperial empires of the past, don’t pretend to micromanage the entirety of their citizens’ bodies. Sure Mansa Musa the black guy owned tens of thousands of slaves, but he didn’t own the entirety of Egyptian villagers’ bodies. There are limits to empire, same as there are limits to growth. There are also limits to decline and death.

OMG We’re All Going To Die! No, we won’t all die. You don’t understand. The spirits and the gods won’t allow it. A ton of us are going to die in the die off. That is true. Not ALL of us are going to die though. Come on, think it through. You know why. You know that a mom will feed her children and go hungry herself. You know that a mom will hide her baby in the rushes to be raised by a princess, or the other way around where a princess will give her baby to the huntsman who will be raised by a simple farmer deep in the woods cut off from the crazy castle politics. You know that villages get together, know how much food they’ve got, and determine who is going to get fed this winter, either poisoning those who won’t get fed, or pushing them out to never come back and try their fortune elsewhere. Some will hide away in caves, and some will spend their lives at sea. Some will live in the cities, dependent upon the raiders to bring them food using violence from the surrounding farms. Some will travel from place to place, seeking a place that is better than the last.

We all die eventually. Just some of us sooner than others. I am not responsible to save the planet. Nor am I responsible to save somebody’s grandma from an upper respiratory infection that everybody else in her community is getting and spreading. I am not responsible for saving lives. I am not even responsible for saving my own life. Why should I be? Because the government owns my body and seeks to acquire all of the fruits of my labor? Why should I labor and suffer for them? Contract law underlies this. They must keep their promises, and I must keep mine. They have not kept their promises, and they don’t intend to do so.

I remember the long debates by doomers, both here and on fascistbook.  Oh noes!  We’re all going to die!  The arctic is going to be ice-free soon and the methane clathrate gun will fire and it will destroy the (mumbles a bit) ecosystems all over the planet so humans won’t have any food!  Or was it oxygen?  I know, I was on the ice-free team for a while.  Then a clearer head on an obscure forum reminded me of hysteresis and latency using actual math for thermal mass conversion.  Not that he’s right about other things, but I still can change my mind when presented with evidence.  Timing is still everything, it seems.

Eventually, I figured out that the entirety of Near Term Human Extinction narratives of all kinds were being coopted for centralized top-down control.  OMG we’re all going to die and therefore we must obey the science and follow the science.  It is so much bigger than just a virus.  It is so much bigger than climate change.  It isn’t that I reject climate change.  I don’t.  The other planets’ climate is changing too.  It’s that I reject the Hegelian solutions offered.  It’s the “and therefore we must all unite and obey and conform and be poor” part that I reject.  “If only we all just got 100% jabbed, we could go back to normal.”  “If only we all just stopped driving to work, we could all be happy while owning nothing.”  It’s the same structure as all religious movements based upon organized hierarchy.  If only we all just got baptized and obey the Pope, we can all go to heaven when we die.  No, not that Pope, the other one.  It’s an impossible promise, which can never be delivered upon, even if we impossibly fulfill the conditions for it.

Here’s the thing: If it is in fact true that we’re all going to die in 5-10 years from (pick your fear-mongering scenario, there’s so many to choose from), the LAST THING I want to do with my remaining time left on this planet is to obey some community organizer bureaucrat who can’t deliver on their promises to save the planet in the exact same manner that they can’t reliably deliver the mail or the cream cheese during a blizzard.  Complying does nothing but make me suffer needlessly, and I ain’t got time for that.  It’s not that I’m against suffering.  I’m fully aware that I’m capable of suffering intense pain for a very long time and coming through the other side the stronger for it.  I’m against needless suffering; the kind where you suffer for no reason, no purpose, no meaning, just because somebody gets off on telling you what to do and stealing your labor without reward.

Eventually, I have enough of being told lies just to get me to suffer in my obedience.  So, if we’re going to die, then let it be quickly instead of slowly, and let it be with honor and dignity and a ton of fun, skidding into the grave sideways while exclaiming what a ride it was.