J.B. Shurk – For millennia, monarchs ruled by some form of divine right. If not asserting god-like powers, they claimed to be acting as God’s emissaries here on Earth. You can imagine the effect this had on devout peoples of any faith.

How could the great unwashed masses dare question any royal’s divinely inspired orders? This paradigm kept government authorities towering over those they ruled.

The Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution crashed through the walls of absolute monarchies and reoriented political systems on the foundations of natural law, religious toleration, constitutional government, and individual liberty.

Twentieth-century postmodernism later led to a rise in religious agnosticism and a growing uncertainty about even the existence of God. First, philosophers stole monarchs’ divine right to rule; then they convinced new generations to question God altogether.

Unsurprisingly, both of these intellectual revolutions weakened the innate authority upon which governments relied. Stripped of any divine pretense for exerting power over their subjects, governments have been attempting to justify their existence ever since.

From this perspective, it is easy to see why those with power today have gone all-in on “global warming” fearmongering. By replacing God with the apocalyptic threat of “climate change,” governments have effectively created a “higher power” that they exclusively control. Instead of beseeching citizens to follow God’s will here on Earth, governments beseech them to “follow the science.”

The “science,” for its part, is treated as some kind of infallible religious scripture that can never be questioned. It doesn’t matter that climate models have been wildly incorrect, that research has been fabricated, that sea levels are not rising, or that the proposed “solutions” for manipulating naturally dynamic climates will accomplish nothing. Governments have decreed, “The science is settled,” and once the “science” has spoken, no lowly heretic may disagree.

In truth, the “global warming” con is about three things: gods, money, and control.

Those who hold the authoritative flame of “science” have regained their divine right to rule. Governments effectively give their citizens a spiritual choice: they can either follow oppressive carbon-neutral regulations that micromanage every detail of life…or they can burn in a fiery apocalypse.

You might not think John Kerry, Klaus Schwab, and Bill Gates are gods, but they certainly think they are. It might make no sense for Barack Obama to own two luxury beach houses if he actually believes the oceans are rising, but his disciples are asked to ignore his actions and devote themselves entirely to his empty words.

Climate taxes and “green”-energy-induced inflation are essentially religious tithes — except all these new “global warming” fees far exceed 10%! In order to “save the planet” (and be redeemed), we must hand all our property over to the State and beg Swedish gnome Greta Thunberg for absolution.

Ruling governments have always viewed ordinary people as their most dangerous enemy and therefore spend the majority of their time figuring out how to herd them into a pen. What does a religious-like belief in “global warming” provide for government if not a religious-like obedience from their postmodern parishioners? The “climate change” hoax is entirely about control.

Government is not the people. Government does not even represent the people. It may pretend to represent the people, but it is concerned with only one proposition: self-preservation. If the people must be abandoned, so that their government may survive, the powerful few will sacrifice the powerless rump without a second thought.

You might have noticed, for instance, that the U.S. government has spent the last seventy years building nuclear silos in “flyover country” while fortifying a small number of secret bunkers for high-ranking apparatchiks and their friends.

Any attack on our intercontinental ballistic missile chambers would require so many devastating enemy strikes for “success” that the middle part of the country would be utterly annihilated. Thus, it is the official policy of the federal government to sacrifice the vast American middle in a barrage of mushroom clouds, so that a tiny slither of coastal elites might live to worry about carbon emissions and internal combustion engines.

What sane person would agree to that arrangement? Easy answer: none. The government must therefore spend all its time and resources convincing otherwise rational individuals to voluntarily embrace absolutely irrational things.

Government is most secure when the people under its boot struggle to imagine life any other way. As unnatural, clumsy, and often violent as a government’s thrashing tentacles tend to be, most people look at the bizarre bureaucratic Leviathan pushing them around and accept it as perfectly normal.

They become accustomed to the illusion that some man-made monstrosity must be allowed to tax their labor, regulate their activities, indoctrinate their children, intimidate them with threats of force, and send them off to war whenever defense industry CEOs think business is slow.

They often choose to fight and die for their government’s honor — even when those in power do the most dishonorable things. They will romanticize instances of past political corruption as whimsical tales from a bygone era — even as new episodes of government corruption rapidly unfold.

They will look at the technological transformations around them and illogically conclude that only the clunky, corroded cogs of government’s inefficient and outdated machinery can handle the immense complexities of an ever-changing world. In other words, vast majorities in search of some modicum of mental peace do their damnedest to ignore the government’s ongoing output of harmful injuries, so that they might limp through life under pleasant delusions.

In many ways, living within the walls of government is a lot like serving a life sentence in the penitentiary: at some point, people become so used to the bars on their cells and so dependent on the directions of their jailers that, when push comes to shove, they would gladly choose to stay locked up in chains. Those who love government’s coercive grip over their lives are forever “institutionalized.”

All rulers — whether in the mold of communist dictator Xi Jinping or Bill Clinton’s “I feel your pain” fake-but-folksy politician — wield power as Machiavelli’s “prince” by seeking to “institutionalize” the people under their charge. As such, all forms of government pursue two identical policies: first, they invent threats for their citizens to fear, and second, they establish a monopoly over available solutions.

An adept government will never solve a problem unless it has a new problem prepackaged and ready to mass-produce for the public. That’s why Joe Biden didn’t mind bungling America’s exit from Afghanistan when he and other Obama administration alumni were already working on the next forever-war in Ukraine for the upcoming spring.

That’s why the CDC and other government scientists owned and operated by the pharmaceutical industry never batted an eye when their miracle elixir COVID “vaccines” proved to be neither safe nor effective — because there is always some new exotic disease ready to be released from a Chinese bio-lab tucked away in an abandoned California factory that will require billions in taxpayer funds, too.

Any government worth its salt has an endless supply of boogeymen and a limited supply of expensive solutions that coincidentally require total citizen compliance.

At the United Nations, dopey diplomats speak in flowery clichés about the value of international cooperation. In the real world, though, governments succeed in corralling their peoples into pens only if everyone is afraid. North Korea’s dictator must make his people afraid of Americans. America’s dictator must make his people afraid of Russians.

The European Union’s dictators must make their hodgepodge of nations all afraid of nationalists. The ruling atheists must make their postmodern peoples all hostile to Israel.

And the whole smorgasbord of manipulative, malicious governments must keep the world’s peasants perpetually petrified of COVID…and “hate speech”…and Donald Trump…and, most importantly, “global warming”!

SF Source American Thinker Nov 2023