I was up before the sun today so I could head out to the new house and avoid sitting in a traffic jam for hours. In the Baltimore – Washington area, traffic starts around seven in certain areas and is a mess everywhere by eight. The same people who tell us they know why Gaia is angry with us also designed the road system that results in millions of cars idling for hours every day, making Gaia angry. Regardless, I avoided being one of those cars be getting outside the wire by six this morning.

An hour into the drive, a sedan came up behind me so I moved over to the travel lane to let him pass. I was probably doing eighty but he wanted to go faster. The road is straight and wide so you can drive as fast as you like for the most part. The only real hazard is the dumb people who camp out in the hammer lane doing the posted speed limit, which is a well-known problem in these parts. These rolling roadblocks are the result of extensive use of lead paint in Baltimore.

A few miles down the road I see that car pulled over by a state trooper, no doubt getting a ticket for speeding. The maps app on my phone warned of a speed trap, but presumably that guy does not use that app. That driver will now get a big fine and spend the next three years paying higher insurance premiums, because the duty officer assign Barny Fife to traffic duty today. He did this because they have quotas to meet every month, despite their claims to the contrary.

If the driver bothered to ask the state trooper why he is pulling people over for speeding on a quiet stretch of highway, the trooper would probably say it is not safe to exceed the posted speed limit. He would say this knowing it is a lie, but that is what he says because it is what allows him to think the job has a purpose beyond raising revenue for the government and providing him with an income. A big part of policing is convincing the cops that they stand between civilization and anarchy.

If the driver called bullshit on it, the trooper would fall back on the line every cop learns after a few weeks on the job. He is just doing his job. This is the most factually true thing any cop ever says in any setting. That trooper is told to write tickets and he knows how many he needs to write before he can finish his shift. If the trooper wants to keep his job, he does what he is told and never questions it. If he is told to randomly shoot people on the highway, he is going to do it.

This is not to pick on the police. They are just the most egregious example of the “I’m just following orders” mentality of this age. If you want to keep your job at Mega Corp, you better not be the first guy to stop cheering at the pep rally. Do not let the boss hear you making sport of his new initiatives. Much of what people do is what they feel they have to do in order to avoid negative consequences. To some degree, everyone is just following orders, because that is the least bad option.

This is much more novel than it seems. Not that long ago the line, “I am just following orders” had very negative connotations. The “Nuremberg defense” was treated as worse than the alleged crime. The argument was that if you follow immoral orders then you are worse than someone who thinks the orders were moral. The latter could be rehabilitated, while the former is someone without scruples and therefore can never be trusted to do the right thing.

We no longer hear anyone condemn the Nuremberg defense. In fact, it has been flipped on its head now. When the cops beat up people exercising their rights in order to defend Antifa rioters, the so-called conservatives rush in to remind us that the real victims are the cops who are just following orders. The people in charge, the people we call the left, love the idea of people following orders. They really love seeing the cops unquestioningly following orders.

It is one of life’s many ironies that in this age where everyone is supposed to search their heart every day for fascism, we can gain some insight into why the German people went along with the Nazi program. In the total state, survival depends upon not questioning the system. If you can put yourself in jeopardy by questioning the orders, then naturally you will take care to never be suspected of questioning the orders, which means enthusiastically following orders.

For those who get the sads when the Nazis are cast in a negative light, the same dynamic came to dominate communist Russia. This set in before Stalin decided he needed to purge the people who might not follow orders. The Bolsheviks, like the fascists after them, figured out that you cannot get to the promised land if you are endlessly explaining yourself to the people who refuse to follow the rules, so the expedient solution was to remove those people.

Anarcho-tyranny is a feature of managerialism, not a bug, because it is what is necessary for managerialism to survive. The people at the top of the system must remain at the top of the system and the only way to ensure that is to make sure everyone is following their orders. The stated goals of the system are a means to an end and the end is to perpetuate the system. The reason you must follow orders may change, but you must always follow orders.

Eventually this advances to the point where the system becomes so conservative and brittle it is unable to adapt. We cannot know how fascism would have ended, but we saw how communism ended. In its final days it was old men desperately trying to hold onto power by enforcing rules that no longer made sense. Once people stopped following orders, the whole thing collapsed. It is something to think about the next time you are pulled over for speeding on a lonely highway.

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