Anarcho-Tyranny is when the managerial state either loses the will or the capacity to control real criminals so they harass the citizenry. The best example I can conjure is your car. In most American communities, the cops don’t even bother to look for stolen cars. They take a report and put the car in the system. The car could be on fire in front of the station and they don’t bother to notice. Car theft is simply not their concern. That’s the anarchy.
On the other hand, every street corner and intersection now has a camera for spotting violations. In my two mile commute to the office, I pass through a dozen cameras. Then there are the cops looking for broken taillights, drivers not wearing seat belts and any of an endless list of potential violations that have nothing to do with safety. That’s the tyranny.
In Britain, the process is far more advanced than in the US. There, the authorities truly are game keepers, policing every little thing about the public. If I were located in Britain, this blog would have me rotting in prison because I’m obviously a threat to the progress of mankind.
If that sounds farfetched, consider this from yesterday.
A former Monty Python cameraman has been arrested for harassment over a series of homemade satirical posters mocking local councillors.
John Wellard, 71, said the episode was “completely pythonesque” and told the six police officers who arrived at his home on Friday night: “I wasn’t expecting the Spanish Inquisition.”
The pensioner was questioned by police for two hours after the police received complaints that a series of light-hearted posters appearing in Faversham, Kent, amounted to harassment of members of the town council.
Residents have been locked in an on-going dispute with councillors over fears the town’s historic creek area will be developed into expensive flats.
In the last few months, posters have been handed around local pubs and posted through doors, along with brown envelopes stuffed with copies of old Venezuelan banknotes bearing the note: “If you find this message please return it to your councillor.”
One poster depicts a Tory councillor on a donkey riding through the town, while another describes the town’s mayor and other local figures as “a growing problem in the heart of Kent”.
Mr Wellard, who refuses to confirm or deny any involvement in the posters, believes his name had been given to Kent Police because one of the posters involved a joke from the 1979 Monty Python film Life of Brian.
He told The Mail: “It was completely Pythonesque. Lampoonery and satire have been part of British public life for centuries.
“Why have six policemen threatened to go through my belongings just because a few feathers have been ruffled? Freedom of speech is being whittled away.”
Mr Wellard, who was interviewed under caution at the local police station, chose to give a ‘no comment’ answer to every question.
“It’s irrelevant who’s done what because I do not believe any offence has been committed,” he said.
“I refused to make any comment, not as a measure of my guilt but I don’t believe that I, or anyone else concerned, have done anything wrong.
“In politics people make criticisms and say all kinds of insulting things – if they can’t take the joke they shouldn’t join.
“When the six police were about to search the house I joked that “I wasn’t expecting the Spanish Inquisition”, but it fell a bit flat.
Of course it fell flat. Authoritarianism is humorless and that’s the heart of managerialism. From top to bottom the system is staffed with the narrowest of narrow minded bureaucrats, who live for the chance to fill out forms about the plenary session of the third department’s planning session for the annual meeting to discuss the last annual meeting.
Managerialism is rule by toll booth operator. Every soulless automaton in the system has one job and they are charged to do it with a ruthless efficiency. That’s how they are measured and that’s how they think. Humor, by its nature, is coloring outside the lines and that becomes a high crime in the managerial state
In Britain, Pakistani pimps are permitted to rape little English girls because that is easier for the custodians than the alternatives. That’s the anarchy. The people in the bureaucracy can never look up from their screens long enough to consider the wider implications of their actions. That risks stepping out of line and being noticed for something other than ruthlessly adhering to the rules.
On the other hand, local cut-ups make sport of the mandarins threaten order and that cannot be tolerated so they send out the cops, probably walking right past some Pakistani pimps, to harass an old man over posters. That’s the tyranny and it is coming to the US like a tsunami of sewage.
Always been a lack of humour/humor in the UK at the top. Ruling people has always, and will always be, a serious job not taken lightly.
One of the reasons is that a lot of Brits were brought up to be polite no matter what (now they are brought up to fearful of consequences and others being ‘offended’) so when man called Henry Root (a fictitious character) who would write utterly stupid and weird letters — this was the age before tinterwebz so everything went snail mail — to the great and good then it brought nothing but politeness. The man known as Root then published the letters and the replies in a couple of books.
All very jolly, and while he was inventive in his weird ideas the only one I can recall, (which is not a great example) was sending a five pound note to a top British upper-crust school with huge annual fees saying that he was sure his as yet unborn child child would be a boy and thus eligible for a school place, so this money should be enough to guarantee the lad’s admittance in a few years time. The reply was formal and carful and the money returned.
But this was the whole point: no matter how obviously funny or strange or even downright rude the letters Root sent, the response was polite and proper and respectful. No one ever said “Go screw yourself, you lunatic.”
That meant that anything a bit funny or odd had to be still treated with care and the easiest way to do that was to be officially serious all the time.
Now as I say we are fearful of consequences and offence being taken, so the police — who haven’t the courage to jump on the nut cases who scream for the death of ordinary British people while staging ‘protests’ about UK intervention in some desert rathole — have something to do.
Easier for the authorities to go after the mildly irritating than take on the shaggy bearded kiddy-abusers.
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Solzhenitsyn never tired of pointing out that the NKVD camp guards used the violent criminals to intimidate and help control the pasty-faced, soft-handed 58s (political prisoners).
We raise suburban kids to be veal, as someone in the blogosphere just put it. We raise urban kids to be thugs. In another generation or two, if the suburbs get uppity, we release the urban thugs for a few days of rapine, larceny, and murder and the suburbanites get right back in line.
Yeah, I know. Wells covered this a while back. But what I always thought H.G. missed was a gatekeeper class. If natural selection was operating, the Eloi would select for less gracile and more robust, warrior-like characteristics. So who keeps the Eloi the Eloi and the Mordocks the Mordocks? Or to quote someone of whom Wells was a big fanboy, “Who, whom?”
At all that, he’s better off in the UK.
In the US, they’d have come at him with a SWAT team. You have to know that. (Because he’s known to have pointy pencils or some such…)
He will not be charged, I’d rather be him than subjected to the current john doe warrant disgrace.Both our countries have their idiocies,I feel free enough here to do and say as I wish both online or in person.