Advice to Revolutionaries (part one)

 

Power is the problem. The reason why revolutions fail is simple: revolutionaries convince themselves that a change is made as soon as they seize power. And to be certain, a change has in fact taken place, but it is not the power structure that has changed, it is the revolutionary.

 

What the revolutionary does not understand is that government is an idea and power is a force. Governments exist in the minds of the governed. A government has no substance in and of itself–it is for lack of a better term, a form of currency. Just as there is no real value in a five dollar bill other than the belief that a piece of paper is worth five dollars. There was once a time when the five dollar bill was backed by something tangible, such as gold or silver, but those tangible things have long been abandoned. The only making a five dollar bill worth five dollars is the simple fact that it is believed that it is worth five dollars. The currency that is taken for granted is backed by the fact that faith gives it its worth. The very second people start believing that a bill, any bill, regardless of value, is worthless, then it becomes worthless and the economy crashes.

 

Governments are the same. The only power that any government has is the power that it has convinced people that it has. As soon as people stop believing that the government has any real power, then the power it has begins to drain away. The government crashes.

It true that the government has the tanks and the guns and the power to imprison and execute, but that power requires people to carry out those deeds, and when people begin to question those deeds, the tanks, guns, and prisons suddenly find themselves in the hands of people and not government.

 

Government does not really exist. It is a Santa Claus. We pretend that it exists because it gives our lives meaning, but in the end, it’s just a myth. There is no jolly fat man who gives us gifts; we give the gifts ourselves. There is no government that looks after our liberties; we look after those liberties ourselves. If we were to truly count on some jolly fat man in a red suit to give us presents, we would find ourselves void of a single gift. We are Santa Claus to each other. If we expect any government to give us liberty, then we will find ourselves without liberty. We extend the gift of liberty to ourselves.

 

Government seeks to rob us of the liberty that we are granted by god or nature or both. Why? Because government seeks power. Power is a force. Government is an imagining. It is an abstraction. But power is real. Government and power are not to be confused. That is the fundamental mistake of the revolutionary. He always confuses government with power, and by so doing, becomes the power he sought to overthrow.

 

The simple truth is this: revolutions never work. They always fall back upon the familiar and anything that is remotely revolutionary is sacrificed for that which is customary, ordinary, and comfortable. In the Russian Revolution, the Tsars became Commissars; the Chinese Emperor became the head of the Communist Party; the dictator Batista became the dictator Castro.

 

Someone will always offer the American Revolution as the exception to this rule. But upon examination, one finds that the American Revolution, as a revolution, failed. The American Revolutionary War was not a revolution, but a rebellion. It was a struggle for independence. And to that end, the rebellion was successful.

 

To be fair, the initial government, The Articles of Confederation, was a fairly revolutionary attempt at creating a brand new nation made up of long-standing, individual, independent states which had agreed to form a partnership with one another; but that government ultimately proved itself impractical and we don’t like to talk about it very much, other than as a preface for the development of the Constitution of the United States which liberated the American people from any revolutionary form of government, imposing upon it something more familiar: a consolidation of power in the hands of a centralized government that was largely patterned on the British model–The British House of Commons became the American House of Representatives, directly elected by free men (literally men) who owned property; the British House of Lords became the American Senate, originally not chosen by the people at all, but appointed by the legislatures of each state; and the British king became the American president, a king who has to convince people that he should remain king for a certain period of time, chosen by people who are appointed by the states.¹

The American Revolution can only claim to have produced something new in the same manner that a soap detergent can claim to be "new and improved"–there may be a new ingredient or two, but it is largely the same old box of detergent. But even if one wants to make the case that the American Revolution was in every way a de facto revolution, then the following statement applies: Revolutions never work!

 

 

It is the nature of revolutions to change names, but leave the same power structures in place. Why? Because power is constant. It is a force. It is a reality. The government is not.

 

The fallacy of every revolutionary is the simple belief that power in the wrong hands is a misuse of power. What the revolutionary never understands is that there is no "right hands" in which power can be placed–for indeed, the hands do not wield the power, but the power wields the hands. It comes down to this: A revolutionary who believes that he can seize control of a government and change the power structure of a society is as absurd and as foolish as a university student who believes that he can seize control of the Physics Department and change the law of gravity.

 

So the true revolutionary–the one who can actually truly be revolutionary–is the person who realizes that governments are not "things" to be overthrown, but concepts to be related to. Relate to the government differently and it becomes a different government. Ignore the state and it withers away.