(2020-09-15) Guinn The Projection Racket Part1

Rusty Guinn: The Projection Racket (Part 1). It’s not a protection racket. It’s a projection racket. It is the steady replacement of the power to direct the course of our own lives with right-sounding stories.

If you’re willing to get creative, there really are an awful lot of ways to surrender your liberties. When it comes down to it, though, free people usually pick one of three methods.

Most often, I think free people give up liberties because we become convinced it is necessary. Usually because of some implacable and existential threat

Only slightly less often, I think, and often overlapping with the first, we pretend that giving up our liberties will be temporary.

There is a third way we surrender rights and liberties, however, and it is far more difficult to spot. We give them away, piece by piece, in exchange for the mess of pottage that is the narrative of liberties.

History tells us fewer of these stories. It tells us fewer of these stories because when stories of steady usurpations of rights become history, our memories of the past have usually crystallized.

That decades-long stream of gradual offenses becomes a single event, a betrayal that should have been obvious to anyone who was paying attention

We are breathtakingly arrogant when it comes to understanding history.

It should not be a surprise to us, then, that it is also much harder for a free people to become agitated about the dangers of a slow erosion in liberties taking place under the aegis of powerful narratives of liberté, égalité, fraternité, that sort of thing.

It’s not a protection racket.
It’s a projection racket.
It is the steady replacement of the power to direct the course of our own lives with right-sounding stories.

Why am I bringing all of this up? Because I know that it makes some of you uncomfortable when you read “Burn it the $!# down“ or “BITFD” on these pages or on social media.*

In theory, when we say BITFD, IT is any persistent institutionalized corruption which takes from the people and gives to existing concentrations of political, social or financial power.

We mean “when laws, policies and enforced norms make it structurally more likely that the rich will get richer, ceteris paribus.” We are not communists. In principle, IT is social, political and financial structures that are (1) entrenched by law, narrative or strong game theory equilibrium and which (2) constrain self-expression, self-determination or rewarded risk-taking by individual citizens.

In practice, IT is (at the very minimum):
Our two-party political system
Our federal tax code
Our antagonistic, militarized model of policing
Our system for establishing for-profit state enterprises
Our politically broken news media
Our broken relationship with elite universities
Our Federal Reserve’s realized mandate
Our “independent board” system for shareholder representation
Our monopolies (of several varieties)
Our forever wars. (BigWorld)

IT rarely refers to the institution itself.

These are not institutions in need of burning down but building back up to a purpose that can serve both the rule of law and political, social and financial self-determination. To that end, we most often think that each IT is a proximate source of the erosion in the purpose of these institutions and systems embedded in law, policy or cultural common knowledge.

In practically all cases, each IT is also likely to be defended by a Projection Racket

The sophistication of these memes will permit us – encourage us – to embrace a mealy-mouthed sort of half-agreement that bemoans the “corruption” of crony capitalism as only a fault of unethical individuals without identifying the systemic causes in law and policy.