The Ambitions of Empire and the Exclusivity of Cults

By Greg -
Are psychopaths autonomous agents of their personal ambitions? Are they thoroughly independent of the identities which the rest of us, as tame as sheep, have adopted without question? The question is rhetorical because the answer is unquestionably, No. If anything, the psychopath is the very archetype of group identity. He or she embodies the culture, the country, or the creed, without suffering the inconvenience of an individual conscience or the indignity of doubt. 

Sociopaths, on the other hand, disregard group identification and construct their own, idiosyncratic and narcissistic identities. Whatever family or tribe a sociopath might recognize would be synonymous with a cult, home-schooled and incestuous. At best, the sociopath is a critic of the psychopath's unwavering defense of empire, while the psychopath is, at best, the charismatic leader of a broadly unifying ideological identity (racial, religious, national, economic, etc.), and a critic of those cultist identities that divide us. 

The power of cultists and ideologues should, in a healthy society, always be mediated by social and political institutions that protect those individuals whose allegiances are fluid, who create their own identities while recognizing the validity of others'. Empire and cult should never be synonymous with government. When government itself is infected by the fear of alternative world views, whether official (as in an ideology) or idiosyncratic (as in a cult), society is imperiled. 

Government is constituted with the purpose of defending its citizens against the dehumanizing forces of empire, and the divisive influence of cults. Both empires and cults are versions of utopia, and utopia is the complete and final eradication of dissent.

Empire is neither good nor bad. If empire is a machine, we are its interchangeable parts; our concerns are local; our happiness and prosperity is relevant only insofar as it serves empire's ambitions, which are neither conscious nor human. We fight its wars, we manage its organizations, we work in its factories, and labor in its mines. What empire wants is only what its technology wants: to exercise power and dominate chaos. Governments, awed by its achievements, have neglected their duties, failed to check its excesses, and enabled empire's unsustainable growth to the point of global apocalypse.

The objects of our allegiance and worship have, historically, been the world views of psychopaths and sociopaths. Civilization will remain unconscious as long as it's equated with the ambitions of empire and identified with the exclusivity of an ideology; and government by consensus, the conscience and consciousness of civilization, will continue to elude us.

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