In his novelette “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” author Philip K. Dick describes a man who wants an exciting life. So he goes to a memory implantation company so he will have the implanted memory of having been to Mars, being a secret agent, and being in love with a beautiful woman. It turns out, as viewers of the film “Total Recall” will remember (retail) that Quail (the character’s name in the book) has actually been to Mars, been a secret agent, loved a beautiful woman there, and was being kept hidden on Earth in a hum-drum job.
In the author’s original story, the agents watching over him very helpfully have a different set of memories implanted. They realise their error, trying to hide their colleague in a boring life when his innermost soul wants excitement and adventure, so they take the time to ask him about what he truly wants. Quail relates that he had a dream as a child of meeting diminutive space aliens who were planning an invasion of Earth. In the dream, Quail is very kind and nice to the visitors from another world, and they are so impressed by him that they promise not to invade Earth while Quail is still alive. This new memory is implanted. Behold, it is also a true memory, and the implantation fails. This part of the story was not told in the 1990 film. The Hollywood cretins were not even willing to mention Philip K. Dick in the credits of their most recent film, so I won’t make any further reference to it.
The title of the novelette came to mind recently in a discussion about whether Christians can be committed to socialism. They cannot. You cannot serve two masters. You cannot be true to the commandments of Moses, which Jesus explicitly reviewed in Matthew 19. In John 14, Jesus says, “If you love me, keep my commandments.” Among these important commandments, and perfectly consistent with the Ten Commandments given to Moses, Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 6, saying:
The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these. ~ Mark 12:29-31
You who worship the state are worshipping a false idol. You have made of the government an artefact of human hands. You have made the government a god you worship. You are a government supremacist. All socialists are necessarily and inevitably asking the government to do what they themselves should do, and to prevent others from doing what they should choose not to do.
I wish at this time to acknowledge my friend Bill Buppert for his coinage, government supremacist. It is an important thing to know that whether the authoritarian claims adherence to a fascist ideology or a communist ideology, they are the same sort of evil. Claiming that the government should be given the powers of God is wrong. It is mistaken, and where it is done deliberately, it is sinful. You can read more about Bill and hear his wisdom at Chasing Ghosts: an Irregular Warfare podcast.
“We Can Care About It for You, Wholesale”
It is a lie. You should know by now that it is a lie, and it always was a lie. The people in gooferment do not care. They lie about caring for the poor. This is especially and particularly true of Elizabeth Warren and her coterie of sanctimonious self-important political apparatchikisti. She does not care about minorities, but is eager to pretend to be one in order to advance her career. She does not care about the poor. She wants to take away the opportunities for advancement of people in the cryptocurrency economy because she hates innovation, despises humanity, and wants to enslave mankind. She is a bad person, personally bad in a lack of morality.
The politicians are grifters. They use their proximity to the spending of the gooferment to make investments. They have allowed themselves to make these investments and not to divest their economic interests while “serving the public” because they do not serve the public at all. Politicians are evil parasites. They use their positions to benefit personally, and to hurt you and your neighbours as much as possible. They want to disarm you so you cannot resist. None of them are very good, only a few of them are not as bad as some others.
God did not tell you to have the government pretend to love your neighbour. God told you to love your neighbour as you love yourself. And you aren’t doing so. So repent and sin no more.
I happen to have extensive experience of taking care of my neighbours when the government would not. I have seen the devastation that the gooferment inflicts when it pretends to care for the poor and the mentally ill. I have seen the illiteracy and the damage inflicted when the bureau rats pretend to teach and care for the young. I have seen the bad works, and I have prayed for ways to help, and behold God has sent resources.
There are many individual stories I could tell in this particular regard. I shall tell today only one. John Price was a friend of mine and a neighbour. We lived next door to each other in a very poor neighbourhood in Houston.
When I introduced myself the first week I was there, John asked for my help. He was just retired from the Confederate House where he was a bartender. He had recently turned 65 years old. It is significant to this story that you know John was a black man. I say was because the government killed him, slowly, painfully, and meticulously.
A woman that I once loved wanted to dine at the Confederate House in 1986, so we did. She grew up, after the fashion of people in Everett Washington, and wanted to know what it was like. At the time it was an extraordinarily fancy restaurant. The staff was very nearly exclusively black men and women dressed in white livery. Everything was very fine. There were paintings of Confederate war heroes and battle scenes and shadow boxes of uniforms and memorabilia on every wall. I am told that George W. Bush and his father were frequent customers there, along with many of the other upper crust of Houston society. The food was excellent. I never went back.
So in 1997 when I met John and he told me about his working there, I knew a bit about the place from that one visit. He told me that some of his favourite customers had remarked on his culinary skills as well as his knowledge of cocktail assembly. So he wanted to open a business catering to that same crowd. I helped him with menus and fliers and marketing materials. He was quite successful.
Two years later, John was limping. I asked after his injury. He said he had been to the charity hospital, Ben Taub, and they had prescribed him a foot cream to treat a fungal infection. He mentioned that the previous time he had gone, two months earlier, he had seen a completely different doctor, and been given a foot powder with the same diagnosis. But the wound on his foot wouldn’t heal. Then he was off to a catered event. At that event he was asked by his customers regarding his limp and gave the same answer. One of them gave him a business card and wrote the name and phone number of a private physician on it. His customer was gracious about paying the private doctor’s bill and said John shouldn’t worry about the cost of the visit.
John asked me about this matter, and I encouraged him to see the private doctor. I said that I felt he was getting poor results from the county hospital. They were giving him a different intern to see, and leaving him in the waiting room. I asked if they had drawn blood. They had not.
I’m not a doctor. But I know that a somewhat overweight elderly black man with a wound on his extremity that was slow to heal might have diabetes. The private doctor’s first order was a blood test, and this was performed in that doctor’s offices. It came back positive for diabetes. Moreover, the wound was infected.
Within a few months John had to undergo surgery to remove his foot. By then his leg was also infected. Later his lower leg was amputated. By then his lungs were infected. He died. It was very painful for him. His adult son invited me to the funeral. He said that I was the only neighbour who had ever cared about them.
This example is not an isolated incident. The people who are supposed to care do not care. Neither the bureau rats who handle the paperwork nor the doctors who attend the patients nor the others involved in the welfare state are willing to have compassion for the people they see. They treat them with contempt. They are surly and rude, mean spirited, and difficult. You have to pry the “benefits” of the welfare system from them.
Somebody Else’s Problem Probability Field
“An SEP,’ he said, ‘is something that we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem. That’s what SEP means. Somebody Else’s Problem. The brain just edits it out, it’s like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won’t see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye.”
~ Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe, and Everything, 1982
In his 1982 sequel to The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams describes a sort of probability field behind which problems disappear. He talks about it in some detail: “The Somebody Else's Problem field... relies on people's natural predisposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain. If Effrafax had painted the mountain pink and erected a cheap and simple Somebody Else’s Problem field on it, then people would have walked past the mountain, round it, even over it, and simply never have noticed that the thing was there.”
Which is a clever bit of language to describe a real aspect of human behaviour. In a 1976 issue of the journal Ekistics the matter of low income housing was described as falling under the aegis of multiple agencies, so each one dealt with it as being the problem of the others, and nothing was done. In other words, bureau rats are happy to do nothing, even when given responsibility for a problem, as long as they can instead pass the buck to someone else.
No doubt this “pass the buck” phrase reminds you of Harry Truman’s little desk sign that said, “The buck stops here.” But he too was lying. In fact, a vast array of government agencies had been built by his predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt, and by his predecessor, Republican in name only Herbert Hoover. At the start of the 20th Century a vile and disgusting militarist, Teddy Roosevelt, also a Republican in name only, and a virulently racist and war profiteering Democrat Woodrow Wilson seized many other powers. And none of these presidents were the true power in the District of Corruption.
But let’s get back to you. If you are a Christian socialist you are pretending that the government can care about problems for you, wholesale. And since they are caring about ever so many more problems, they can presumably get wholesale pricing on their solutions. But in fact, they are getting wholesale grift for the senior bureau rat parasites and for the prominent politician parasites. Meanwhile the people who are supposed to receive the care are suffering pain, contempt, amputation, and death.
Your Job
You cannot farm it out. You cannot have the government love your neighbour for you. Even if the government did so, which it is not willing to do and is not capable of doing, you would still have the responsibility. You have to love your neighbour. And if you try to make your neighbour disappear behind a “somebody else’s problem probability field” you are committing a dire sin.
Moreover, if you believe that you have to let the government do things because they take from every pay packet so much of your money that you and your spouse and your older children have to work very hard just to make ends meet, then you should fire them. You don’t have to consent to be governed by tyrants. You don’t have to consent to laws that do not serve you. You don’t have to pay parasites to abuse you and politicians to prey on your good will. Cut it out. Now.
Yes, I am aware that doing so would necessarily change the relationship you have with your employer. It is time. If you like your employer and want to continue working with them, talk to them about making arrangements to be an independent contractor. Don’t let them withhold payroll taxes. Don’t let them withhold income taxes. Don’t let them withhold unemployment compensation insurance. Make them stop, or find someone else with whom to work. These are in fact your responsibilities.
Stop supporting tyranny. It cannot function unless it has the support of hundreds of millions, or at least the 164 million or so who still gullibly participate as members of the work force. Tens of millions of people who are not on food stamps and are adults of working age are not in the work force. It was over 54 million in 2019. Isn’t it time for you to be responsible for yourself?
Remember what I wrote about in my essay on free market money. What do you really want? You want to be invisible, invincible, and invulnerable. You want to come and go like the wind. And you want it by this coming weekend.
Of course you do. Move and leave no forwarding address. Change your relationships with those who are involved in the tyranny of the state. Build a business that can run away, as I described in my essay on making technology anti-fragile for fun and profit.
I can help. I know a great deal about these matters. To quote from my favourite film, Grosse Pointe Blank, “I know the law. But I don’t want to be withholding.” You shouldn’t, either.
God loves you and wants you to have eternal salvation, wants your soul to live forever in heaven. Jesus and Mary lived and suffered in this world so you don’t have to pay the price they did. You do, however, have to believe, be baptised, and repent your sins. Jesus asks you to repent and sin no more. Jesus asks you to love God with your whole being and your neighbour as yourself.
If you are supporting the state, if you are a socialist or communist or freemason, you aren’t doing those things. You should stop and turn back. There’s still time.
That’s all I’ve got for today. Come back next time when I have something new. Or old.