Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

Terrible crimes are being committed against the citizens of America. While the overt evil of fanatical terrorists has dominated the mass media, there is an even more malignant evil abroad in the world - an evil that has caused far greater harm to our economy and society than the terrorist violence it exploits. While the public's attention has been distracted by sensationalized terrorist violence inflicted on individual citizens, this greater evil has been using our irrational fears to destroy the essence of who we are both as a nation and as free individuals.

This greater evil is a creature of fear. It gorges on the fears of its victims, insinuating its tentacles into their perceptions of the world around them, turning their everyday lives into a living terror that exists only in their own imaginations. Exposed to the cold hard light of reason, this greater evil can be easily shamed and ridiculed into little more than the stuff of children's fairy tales. But rationality is not humanity's natural state, and is only allowed ascendancy in times of greatest desperation - if even then.

In one of the most tragic absurdities of human nature, the unthinking masses who demand only transparent fabrications to justify their fears, aggressively resist even considering the incontrovertible proofs offered by rationality. Many of the fearful have allowed this greater evil to so corrupt their minds that they've come to perceive the rationality that should be their salvation, to be instead the source of their fears. Better to hide in fear of imagined terrors than to risk exposure to a reality that might force them to question the delusions they've nurtured for so long at the core of their being.

The most virulent forms of evil can only be committed by those claiming to be defending against the evils of others. An external enemy must overcome both the collective and individual defenses of its victims. The most virulent forms of evil attack a society from within - perverting society's collective defenses into fearsome weapons that isolate and emasculate the individual defenses of its victims, leaving only scattered pockets of resistance to be individually destroyed in detail.

This greater evil has no formal structure or central leadership. It functions as a self-organizing conspiracy of shared interests. Its most insidious aspect is that its practitioners commonly deny the reality of their actions even to themselves. Most of its members would vehemently deny participation in their conspiracy of convenience, but the real world results of their actions are the true measure of their membership.

We are each the heroes of our own movies, and this also true of the evil among us. Some hide their evil from themselves by only seeing their own actions from the perspective of what they hoped to accomplish. They carefully avoid recognizing the real world results of their actions. Some only see the most localized short term effects of their actions, while remaining blind to the larger long term ramification. Some justify their aberrations of the moment as a "necessary evil" in the service of a greater good. Some are convinced that anything they do must be good, and that only those who resist them can be evil. Regardless of their stated intentions and denials, their actions result in far greater evil than the limited overt evil of criminals and terrorists.

The primary identifying characteristic of this greater evil is the incitement and exploitation of purposefully created hysteria to justify fear-driven transfers of power and control from individuals to the state. Those who implement the larger goals of the terrorists in the name of "responding to the terrorist threat", in reality serve an even greater evil than the terrorists - and by their actions become the most dangerous enemies of the people and principles they claim to be protecting. Defeating this greater evil would by default also defeat terrorism by eliminating the functional value of terror. Defeating individual terrorists without first defeating this greater evil would only accomplish the pyrrhic victory of allowing our precious freedoms to be destroyed in the name of defending them.

Terrorism is intentional and purposeful. It may be implemented as irrational violence against random victims, but there is always an intended purpose behind the random violence. Terrorist acts will continue to be committed as long as terrorists believe they can achieve their objectives through terrorism. The primary motivation for acts of terrorism is the expectation that they can accomplish larger objectives than the limited direct harm of the actual acts, and return greater value to the terrorists and their cause than their costs.

Terrorism will continue to be an attractive strategy as long as it continues to be an effective weapon against compliant enemies. Terrorism only succeeds when it can inspire self-destructive fear in those with little actual potential of being directly harmed by terrorists. The first step in eliminating terrorism is to recognize that it can only be effective against those who cooperate in being terrorized.

On the first most obvious level, the terrorists must be able to accomplish their initial limited offenses. Their direct victims must not be capable of effectively defending themselves against acts of terror. The bodies of dead terrorists, eliminated by an armed and angry citizenry before they can accomplish more than minimal carnage, aren't very useful for spreading self-destructive hysteria.

The single most effective deterrence to terrorism is an armed and involved citizenry. A population that is confident in its ability to defend itself is unlikely to be a cooperative victim of terrorism. The traditional freeman response to mad dogs and sociopaths has not been to hide in their beds hoping that if they're quiet and don't attract attention to themselves, the malignant evils lurking just outside their doors would decide to savage their neighbors instead. The traditional freeman response has been for armed citizens to resolutely defend themselves and their neighbors by dealing effectively and conclusively with such diseased creatures at the moment of the first attempted aggressive violence. If the intended victim of the initial attack wasn't able to conclusively deal with the crazed animal, he made sure his neighbors were well informed and fully prepared to put the beast down for good the next time it attempted to manifest its evil.

Cold calculating anger and grim determination to exact a horrific revenge when attacked have long been the hallmarks and proud traditions of freemen. These attributes have also accumulated a long historical record as an exceptionally effective deterrent, and necessary component of any real peace. Appeasement and irrational self-loathing have accumulated a similarly long historical record of encouraging escalating coercive violence, and as precursors to enslavement. The most effective defense is the one that is so credible that it never needs to be used. The most robust peace results when there is no expectation of cost effective gain from breaking the peace.

The natural response of an armed and involved citizenry isn't to cower in fear, but rather to aggressively seek out and eliminate the source of danger before it can cause further harm. This is not the response desired by the terrorists and their de facto allies. Terrorists specifically target victims that have already been stripped of any meaningful ability to defend themselves. They don't target citizen militia groups or gun shows for their mass murders - they target schools, airports, cities and states where their victims have been cooperatively prepared for senseless slaughter by their de facto allies.

The last thing a terrorist wants to do is compete with the state for simple body counts. One of the most consistent and disturbing statistics, often demonstrated with extraordinary violence even for a century of wanton butchery, is that citizens are far more likely to be murdered by their own governments than by an external enemy.

The actual direct harm to a nation of millions resulting from the violent elimination of a dozen of its individual citizens, is insignificant in real terms. More citizens are typically killed with even greater violence in a single day's traffic accidents. Murdering a dozen randomly selected citizens would no doubt cause a dozen focuses of pain and anguish that would ripple outward through the victim's individual networks of friends, relatives, and associates. While the sense of loss and harm would no doubt be intense at each focus, the actual personal impacts of the crimes could only propagate outward as far as individuals a few steps removed from direct contact with the murder victims. If the direct murder of individual citizens was their real objective, terrorists could accomplish equivalent mayhem through the simple expedient of bad driving.

The emotional reaction of those far beyond the direct effects of their crime is the ultimate target of terrorists, not the actual crime itself. The object of the terrorists isn't to murder a relatively small number of actual direct victims, but rather to create an irrational expectation of danger in the minds of the general population that far exceeds the relatively minor actual danger. Terrorists are dependent on their de facto allies to transform the public perception and reaction to their relatively minor crimes into self-destructive hysteria.

The key to eliminating terrorism is to eliminate its value to the terrorists. The objective of terrorism is to cause wide-spread disruptions in the economy and society of its victims. It can only accomplish its objective if the targeted population cooperates in being disrupted. Unfortunately, terrorists have some very powerful de facto allies in their efforts to leverage limited crimes into wide spread irrational self-destructive hysteria. Those dependent on fear for their own power and privilege inevitably become the de facto allies of those who provide the source of their power and privilege. It is these de facto allies of terror who inflict the greatest harm, and are the most virulent manifestation of evil.

The core of the conspiracy of common interests between terrorists and their de facto allies in government, media, and special interest groups, is their shared hostility to the concept of individual freedom. They all believe that a strategy of "preemptive defense in detail" to perceived terrorist threats will benefit their own agendas.

We're told that the fundamental rights and freedoms on which our nation was founded are the reason terrorists are able to attack us. We're told that the only way to defend ourselves against terrorism is for all citizen to abandon those rights and freedoms that might be used by terrorists. We're told we must surrender our right to be secure in our persons and papers from warrant less searches in a growing number of places - airports, government buildings, sports events, etc. We're told that we must submit to our freedom of movement being violated by security checkpoints, police roadblocks, and surveillance cameras. We're told that many of the sophisticated means of communications we've created can also be used by terrorists, so we must surrender our freedom of speech, and tolerate the tapping of our phones and surveillance of our Internet accounts.

Preemptive defense in detail against individual terrorist acts is incompatible with the most basic principles of a free society. Western freedom was founded on the principle that an individual is only responsible for his own actions, and should be free to live as he chooses as long as he doesn't cause harm to others.

The tools of terrorism are often the same tools that in the hands of freemen citizens created our modern world. Any attempt to restrict terrorism by restricting access to the means of committing terrorist acts, must by definition also restrict access by freemen citizens. In order to cripple the ability of terrorists to use our own tools to attack us, we must by definition cripple our own rational use of those same tools.

Consider the real world actions of the self-proclaimed heroes of the recent sniper-terror - the police, mass media, and various "public safety" special interest groups. While loudly claiming to be the "good guys", all of these self-interested groups lied to the public, and aggressively undermined the real safety of the citizenry in order to use the resulting terror to promote their own outrageous victim disarmament schemes - all in the name of "public safety".

The first priority of law enforcement was clearly to preserving and expanding its own power and control, and aggressively discourage the public from questioning the value of depending on the state as their sole protection from evil. The only way that law enforcement could "catch" the killers, without the overt participation of an armed and involved citizenry, was to ensure that the killers kept on killing until they became sufficiently emboldened and over-confident that even the incompetent police couldn't avoid "catching them". The police actively prohibited any meaningful exercise of self-defense by the intentionally disarmed and emasculated citizenry, ensuring that the public would remain helpless targets for the sniper-killers.

True to form, the police got so caught up with exploiting the crisis, they failed to notice the killers' repeated attempts to give themselves away. Countless innocent white men in white vans were subjected to undeserved violence based on false information distributed by government agents, while repeated accurate descriptions by witnesses of dark skinned men in a dark sedan were contemptuously dismissed by the authorities. Citizens discovered to be exercising their Constitutional right to bear arms were violently assaulted, while the real killers where repeatedly expedited through police roadblocks and security checks - with the police apologizing to the killers for the inconvenience!

The massive disruptions of police road blocks, and black hooded paramilitary assaults on the homes of "white guys" rumored to be exercising their right to bear arms, were the tactics of choice - not because of their potential for success against the terrorists, but rather because of their effectiveness at intimidating and disarming freemen citizens. The truth was rejected out of hand by government agents because it didn't serve their long standing objective of demonizing the disorganized citizen militia by creating false associations in the public mind between the most effective means of defending freedom and the agents of evil.

The police continued to lie to the public even while actively seeking negotiations with the killers. While the police played games in the hopes of tricking the killers into betraying themselves in ways that were sufficiently obvious that even the police couldn't avoid noticing, innocent citizens continued to be violently murdered as a direct result of the willing complicity of the police in aggressively prohibiting the only proven effective defense against terrorism - an armed and involved citizenry. In the minds of the "authorities", the lives of a dozen murdered citizens were a trivial price to pay for an excuse to further disarm and emasculate the freemen citizens that have always been the primary obstacle to ever growing police power. The police only released sufficiently accurate descriptions of the murderers for involved citizens to put an end to the murders when increasing numbers of frustrated citizens started rejecting their assigned roles as helpless victims, and began arming themselves in spite of all the police interference and intimidation.

The self-interests of most citizens are diametrically opposite those of the police state. Deterring crime is the preferred alternative of most rational citizens - eliminating crime before it happens by eliminating the expectation of cost effective gains in the mind of a potential criminal. First and foremost, there must be an expectation of success in the mind of the criminal - an expectation that any attempted self-defense by his victim will be more restrained and "civilized" than the malicious violence he's willing to use against his victim. The intention of the criminal is to cause harm to the victim, not to be harmed by his intended victim.

The role of the police is to "investigate" crimes after they've been committed. The more crimes are committed, the greater the perceived need for police, and the greater the size and budget of the police department. The police have a direct self-interest in there being a continuing supply of crimes to investigate - which requires a continuing supply of innocent victims as well. The power and budgets of police departments increase when citizens become victims of crime, and shrink when the lives of citizens are free of crime. A crime victim is of far greater value to the self-interests of the police state than a freeman citizen capable of effective crime deterrence.

Fear is also an extraordinarily profitable business. The mass media has created a major profit center out of terror mongering. Driving the attention of viewers by infecting them with irrational fears is far more cost-effective than earning their attention with quality information and entertainment. Millions of fearful citizens will watch endless hours of over-hyped coverage of an event in which only a few individuals have any direct involvement, if the "news" coverage can spin the relatively insignificant capabilities of the actual perpetrators into a froth of unfounded personal fears in the minds of those millions of individual viewers. The only profit draining creativity required for this new "reality tv" is figuring out how to keep repeating "nothing is happening at the moment" in new and exciting ways.

In an offense against reason as well as principle, the ongoing assault on the individual rights and freedoms of freemen citizens in the name of "homeland security" continues in spite of overwhelming evidence that it is the worst possible response to terrorism. Instead of "defending against terrorist acts", the predictable results of further disarming and emasculating the freeman citizens of America will be to encourage and facilitate future terrorist attacks - guaranteeing more terrorism while claiming to be fighting terrorism.

The true measure of a man isn't found in the lies he tells to conceal his intentions, but in the good or evil that results from his actions.

The greatest evil abroad in the world today is the conspiracy of shared interests that seeks to use the fear of terror to destroy the only effective means of defending against terror.