Sorry. Spiderman is busy right now. Please solve your own problems in the meantime.
(Picture nabbed from here)
Humans
are remarkable things. Born without fur, teeth, claws or stings, with
no toxins in their bodies, not too strong, not too fast, we are nothing
but walking easy meat for any predator on the planet. Pit yourself
unarmed against a lion or a panther if you don’t believe me. Take on a
bear or a wolf. You have no chance.
And yet humans are
successful. We don’t have fur to keep us warm so we steal other
animals’ fur, either whole or knitted. We have no teeth or claws but we
can work stone and wood and metal into something similar and we can
throw those things, or fire them from bows and guns. Now we can hit
targets on another continent. We are not fast or strong but we can
build machines that are, and ride in them or control them remotely. A
human alone would find it difficult to catch a rabbit but a human with
a gun (or previously, a bow, sling or atlatl) could bring down a cow.
Working together we can bring down a mastodon or catch a whale.
We
can fly faster than any bird. We can talk to someone on the other side
of the world in real time. We have holiday snaps of Mars and pictures
of most of the planets and moons in our solar system. We can save
millions with a vaccine or kill millions with one bomb. We can turn
desert into garden and salt water into fresh. We build and obliterate
cities on a whim. Not bad for a bald ape.
We do this because we have powerful brains. And yet, we somehow resent our success.
Gods
arise because humans can’t quite accept that they can do things for
themselves. Humans did not rise from the apes of Africa on their own. A
god did it. Humans did not win any war. God decided the winner. Choose
your god, from the pantheon available, and hand over credit for your
achievements. Your body, with its fantastic immune system and capacity
for repair, did not save you from disease. God did it. It was a miracle.
This
is not about religion. I don’t care whether there’s a God because if
there is, he has demonstrated quite effectively that he doesn’t care
about me. I have no bone to pick with the religious. It’s an example.
Nothing more.
What it demonstrates is the human inability to
believe our luck. Biologically, we are the least equipped species to
survive on this planet. We have no fur to keep us warm. In a fight, we
have piddling little teeth, no claws, no armoured skin, nothing. And
yet we rule this planet. Tigers and wolves get out of our way. They
know what we’re like. We are the bespectacled playground weed who finds
the big kids running away and can’t quite grasp why.
So we pass
the buck. We can’t have done this. Someone else must have. Someone
watches over us (I’m not getting into an argument over that, so forget
it). We continue this with our superheroes. Batman, Superman,
Spiderman, the Hulk, and lately V for vendetta and the Watchmen. We
don’t have to do anything. The Heroes will save us. So now we don’t do
anything. We wait for the Hero.
The Righteous have never
attempted to ban superhero films because they play right into the hands
of the Righteous. They leave us with the impression we don’t have to do
anything. Batman will sort it out. We don’t have to battle the creeping
oppression of government. V will deal with that. The Righteous delight
in this. It makes us complacent and pliable. We wait for our Hero to
sort things out.
We wait, and we wait, but the Hero does not
come. The Hero is not real and never was. Whenever there has been
change in the world, it was brought about by people. Gandhi, Luther,
Washington, Pankhurst, name your heroes and realise they were no such
thing. They were human. No climbing walls, no flying, no
shark-repellent Bat-spray, no trains filled with explosives and no
spangly costumes. Human. Just like you and me. Nothing unusual or
supernatural about them at all. No super powers, no super weapon… just
words.
Still we wait. When the Righteous shut down dissent with
their cries of ‘racist!’ we let them. The Hero will come. When they add
more cameras to the stacks, we let them. The Hero will come. When they
ban and control the things we enjoy, we let them. The Hero will come.
We have backed down to the Righteous on every point, every argument,
every ban and every new insane law and they have responded by becoming
bolder and more arrogant. And still we wait for someone else to deal
with them. There is no someone else. The Righteous know this. The only
ones they have to fear are us and we are under their control. Because
we allow it. We allow it because we think someone else will save us,
but nobody will. Slowly, people are realising this.
The
Righteous are frightened now. Their panic is evident. In their pretence
that all homeschooled children might be abused, in their attempts to
send those same children home to nag their smoking parents and thereby
invite a whack, in all their rapid and hysterical pronouncements, their
fear is evident. They fear loss of control, and in their fear they try
to impose more, but with no logic or reason. They are running now and
they are vulnerable. The cries of ‘racist-Nazi-bigot’ no longer work.
Instead, they are using implications of paedophilia and child abuse,
but their accusations are becoming shrill and less credible. The
Righteous are ready to fall. They can recover. If we let them.
For
years they have cowed us with words. When they stated that anyone
opposed to immigration was racist, who stood up and said ‘That’s
silly’? When they brought in the smoking ban, we talked but how many of
us flouted that ban? When they fined people for overfilled bins, we
complained but how many of us turned up at the council offices to
demand explanation? When they turned our children into litter-spies and
smoking-spies and odd-behaviour-spies, we were appalled but how many of
us responded with more than mumbled complaints?
I can’t claim
any moral superiority. Like you, I railed and shouted and did nothing.
When the PC lunatics decreed the word ‘black’ was offensive even when
applied to a blackboard or a telephone or a cat, I was incensed but did
nothing about it. It was a small thing, easily bypassed. They were all
such small things, weren’t they? Christmas turning into ‘winterval’,
nativity plays cancelled, parents not allowed to photograph their own
children at school, trainspotters arrested as terrorists, all tiny
details that could be easily forgotten. Little things, minor irritants,
another camera here or there, new rabid pseudoplods and Litter Hitlers
walking the streets, new powers to enter homes, and through it all the
mantra ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ calmed our fury.
I
stand outside the pub to smoke now, even though everyone, even the
staff, are often out there with me. I have not defied the ludicrous
Righteous rules. Like you, I have waited for someone else to show the
way. Someone with strength. A Hero.
There is no hero. There is no someone else. We stand alone.
There
was a bit of a fuss lately over the radical atheist posting of adverts
on buses. ‘There is probably no God, so just enjoy your life’, or
something like that. Whether there is a God or not is immaterial to
this argument. There is a more appropriate slogan for our times.
There are definitely no heroes, so if you want something done, do it yourself.
Demand
explanation and don’t accept platitudes. Keep asking the same question
until they have to admit they have no answer. Ignore deflection and
strawman arguments, favourites of the Righteous, and keep asking the
same question over and over and over and as loudly and publically as
possible. We don’t need violence to bring them down. They have
controlled us with words. We can fight back with the same weapon. They
will try to stop us speaking – they already have – because they fear
that weapon more than any other. Riots they have prepared for.
Persistent argument is what they fear most, because that will reveal
them for what they are.
Should we? Can we? Are we the leaders
we’ve been waiting for? Have we been, all along, the ones who can do
something? Should we prepare an underground army, a secret cabal of
anti-Righteous warriors?
No, because organised rebellion has
already been modelled in their predictions and ways of dealing with
that have been arranged. We don’t need weapons. They can fight weapons.
They cannot fight words once their manipulative ways are exposed. They
can fight an organised response, they can fight a one-man response, but
a mass of individual responses cannot be fought. There is no leader to
target. There are no platoons to take out. Each stands as individual
but there are millions of those individuals and silencing one makes no
difference to the rest.
I’m not a member of the Libertarian
party but I took part in sending a copy of ‘1984’ to all the MPs last
November. The response, what response there was, was aimed at the
Libertarian party. The organisation, not the individuals. These people
can cope with fighting organisations. They can’t conceive that
individuals can be mobilised with a common aim.
That is what I
suggest. They cut us down with small things, here and there. We can
fight back the same way. Small rebellions, here and there. Think up
something you can do to make life difficult for a Righteous, and do it.
Nothing violent or illegal, there’s no need. Small irritations are all
you need to do. Deflect, distort and disparage their arguments, the
same thing they’ve done to us for years.
Drop hints and start rumours.
Keep them busy with minutiae.
Don’t concern yourself with the
egotistical notion that they must know who hit them, because it’s more
effective if they don’t. It does not matter that they know who has
taken revenge, only that it is done, and if you remain unidentified
then you can strike again. Never crow about what you do, never admit to
having done anything at all. They can fight rioters. They can fight
organisations. They cannot fight shadows. Look at their responses to
anonymous posters on their own sites. It terrifies them, even though
they always respond as ‘anonymous’ when pitching their responses to
others. Stay below the radar, as they have done, and poke them once in
a while. If enough are doing this it becomes unbearable.
Don’t look for leaders and don’t wait for heroes. You are both.
H/T: By the brilliant Leg Iron on Old Holborn
