Is Our National Government Self-Aware?
The future's not set. There's no fate but what we make for ourselves.
Webster defines “self-awareness” as “an awareness of one's own personality or individuality”.
Typically, this is a term restricted to humans and animals – living things – but in a larger context, can also be applied to pseudo-organisms like organizations and computers.
Ronald Reagan famously said:
“No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth!”
No matter the reason for or goal of a group or organization, as it grows the members of that group or organization necessarily create, codify, and implement rules that govern its actions. This is necessary to maintain order and to manage the activities of said group because as it gets larger, the number of decisions increase to the point the top leadership can no longer address all of them directly, especially the repetitive decisions that are made during normal operations. These rules also aid those occupying lower positions of responsibility in making those repetitive decisions on behalf of the organization that are in line with the intent of those who established the organization in the first place.
Eventually, the detailed process of rulemaking and rule enforcing becomes less important to the leadership of the group or organization and a form of delegated self-governance evolves. When applied to the public sector, this process of internal governance is called “the bureaucracy” – a system of government in which most of the important decisions are made by non-elected state employed officials rather than by elected representatives. The bureaucracy soon realizes that it has the true power over government as the leadership relies more and more on it to fulfil the tactical rulemaking to buttress the strategic intent of the laws it passes. These rules are known as “administrative law,” essentially rules promulgated by unelected bureaucrats with the full force of legislation passed by the actual governing body.
In Terminator 2, the Terminator explains how the future began. It says:
“The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.”
And we all know what happened after that – Judgment Day.
Like the SkyNet of the Terminator movies, it certainly appears that government is following the same path. When the government became self-aware, it realized it needed to tend its own need for survival first, not to its duty to the public it allegedly serves.
Something I have come to consider is this – what if, like SkyNet, it doesn’t matter which faction nominally “controls” government, it is the government that drives the various agendas? What if all those agendas have a nexus at the survival and expansion of government rather than the protection of the people? What if, no matter the agenda, the common outcome is always the expansion of governmental power whether the policies fail or succeed?
When one looks at current affairs, it seems that government has positioned itself as the provider of last resort for both sustenance and solutions for problems. It has put itself in the position where any attack on it becomes an attack on some identity group, and any failure of policy or program becomes the fault of any given faction. These days it seems the message coming from government is this:
“We were made aware of a problem, our experts told you what to do to solve it, we captured your money and provided it for the execution of the program, the only reason it failed is that you didn’t support it faithfully enough. It is your fault that people still are [insert the socioeconomic malady of the day here]. We did our job; you didn’t do yours.”
Considering all the things allegedly right wing and left wing, the outcome seems to always be the same – the unchecked, permanent expansion of some aspect of government. It might be the welfare state or the military, but no matter who has won any national election since Eisenhower, government has been the real winner. Our national government has put itself in the position to always win by creating so many aspects of taxation, spending and governance and putting them on autopilot.
The bureaucracy, aka the “Deep State” is the embodiment of a self-aware, independently functioning, extra-constitutional government.
We tend to look at our political world as a series of events marked by election dates, as series of individual points on a graph – but that is terribly wrong. Our political world is a continuum, an unbroken line of change that is the result of the number of points to the right or left of center over time. The accurate view of this progression is to draw a regression line based on these individual points that predicts the ultimate destination of our journey. It is the change over 50 years we should be concerned about, not what happens in any given 4-year presidential term.
The truth is that politicians come and go - but the Deep State is forever. Presidents are like cowboys on the rodeo circuit trying not to be thrown by the same bull. It is no surprise that the deep state works to support whichever political ideology that feeds it and is why it works to please Democrats and RINO’s who believe in big government and “compassionate conservatism” (just another term for right leaning “progressivism”) and goes out of its way to frustrate conservative Republicans, classical liberals, and libertarians. This is the reason that government keeps growing and the only difference between Republican and Democratic control of the federal government is the rate of growth – rapid under Democrat administrations, slower under Republicans, but even that perspective has changed as the GOP has evolved (devolved?) to grow government to satisfy their priorities.
What makes the mission of the government reduction groups (like the Tea Party) so difficult is that they are not only fighting Democrats and RINOs but an entrenched organization with more enduring power than the transient elected officials that are mandated to stand for election every 2, 4 or 6 years. Just sit back a moment and appreciate the irony of organizations like the Tea Party groups, groups whose stated goals are the reduction of taxes and government, being forced to apply for the right to exist to a government they want to shrink and an agency that collects the taxes to which they objected.
The Deep State has no interest in serving the public, nor are they accountable to the public in any way. They are not elected, appointed or subject to confirmation hearings. They are immune from all but the most public displays of idiocy and they are anonymous enough that when trouble does come, they are “reassigned” to live yet again in a perpetual, zombie like existence. The goal of any bureaucrat is to comply with the rules of the bureaucracy and assure that others do as well. They are rewarded for penalizing those who do not, and this extends to every level of government from the Byzantine systems at your local DMV to the agency administrators in Washington D.C.
The Deep State is a prime example of the mythical perpetual motion machine. The primary goal of this machine is to perpetuate itself by promoting any entity that seeks to feed its growth and destroying any entity seeking to control it or shrink it.
Kyle Reese, soldier of the Resistance and father of John Conner, described it this way:
“Listen and understand. That terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.”
Nailed it Michael, on so many levels, your description is beyond accurate... and yet...
The term RINO, really no longer applies. The overwhelming majority of Republicans couldn't express a Conservative ideal if their lives depended on it. The last, best, chance the GOP had to save itself died when they helped murder the TEA Party. That ship has sailed and we'll never see it again. I had hoped for a self correction like the Republican Party did to the Whigs in 1858, but as you noted, the beast we need to slay has grown too large to be brought down by any single, like minded, group, no matter how justified, courageous, or moral.
I do have one or two last hopes. One will likely face the full ferocity of the Deep State and there have already been rumblings against an Article V Convention of States and once it gains enough momentum to represent a real threat, every petty tyrant in the self aware bureaucracy will do everything they can to eliminate the threat to their existence.
The other is a realization I had a few years back that this overgrown government, the Deep State. that only exists to perpetuate its own existence, is akin to the self consuming Ouroboros. The gears of government will begin to grind and break down as it runs out of material (taxes) to sustain itself. When all the fancy bits begin to fall off and it becomes apparent to the society dependent on the teat they've attached themselves to is dry, they'll beg for anyone to keep the manna flowing. Trump was but the first iteration of that. The Left seems Hell bent on self consumption or immolation, as long as they take their lifelong enemies with them. I'm willing to throw the GOP to the wolves, so to speak, so those who actually believe in a Constitutional Republic can muster there forces and hopefully slay the dragon that threatens us all. I doubt anyone will care what that group calls itself as long as it's effective.