The Omnipotent Fallacy

I am quite argumentative; much to the dismay of both my peers and those around me. I will always engage someone if I feel that they are stating something wrongly, either technically or ethically. Due to this, I have found myself in many debates ranging from civilized discussions to downright mudslinging. In many of these arguments I find that the main elements for my opponent’s views are that they believe that the law, government and morality are omnipotent. And that very point will be the topic of this article.

So what is omnipotence? Most dictionaries define it as the adjective of having unlimited power. Now you must be thinking that that is quite a stupid thing to think, that the government could have unlimited power, in fact you’re opposing it in some form right now by reading this blog. The sad thing is that many do believe that the government is omnipotent. The average citizen and man on the street truly believes that the state is a concept that cannot be opposed, and that the laws they create are immediately justified. This is what causes and compounds many of the problems in our world. Dictators are allowed to rise to power and assert their will on the masses which know of nothing better; to them, the state is god, or at least something similar.

But can we as a people really be blamed? Well, yes and no. True, we have the freedom to throw down the shackles of regulated thought but only few manage to do so without guidance. Sadly, history has taught us that the majority will follow what they are taught to follow, as libertarians we wish to teach the ability to think for yourself but our nation is not libertarian, and neither is the world. Generations of propaganda, teaching and coercion has hammered into the populace what is called ‘State Worship’.

State worship is basically the mentality that the government is more than just a group of people, with all the vices and mistakes associated with people, sitting around a table in a glorified club house, who have strange delusions that they own everyone. To a degree, they do own us; but only because we allow them to. If we stopped thinking of the government as the omnipotent phrase ‘government’ and more of as just people who we have elected to protect our interests, we would all be much better for it.

But of course, that’s not what the ‘omnipotent’ men in ties want us to believe. So they have branded our minds with the belief that whatever the government says must be true and that government authority is the highest power, a power which cannot and must not be disputed.

Another part of this is laws and morality. Morality is a wider, more philosophical, concept so I will leave that for now. When a ‘normal’ person thinks of laws, they think of something that must not be broken, a set of words that must be followed to the character, not straying from it in the slightest. As one of my many debating opponents foolishly stated, “Laws are laws; breaking one law warrants the same punishment as another, no matter what the law.”

So according to this belief, a person who steals a loaf of bread to feed his starving family will receive the same punishment as a person who has raped twenty children. Honestly, it’s disgusting to even comprehend this person’s thinking but further investigation will reveal that this is how many people think. Like this person, they all believe a law is a law, an omnipotent concept that cannot be disputed or unjustified.

But a brief look at history will reveal that if laws were never disputed and just blindly followed like how this person wishes it to be so, then there would be no progress and no freedom at all. We do not even have to look back too far as the fall of Apartheid is an excellent example of how breaking the law lead to change.

With change comes progress and with progress comes a better life, eventually. But, many still see laws as omnipotent. But if they were truly omnipotent, everyone would follow them and they would not be possible to break. Trial would be pointless and opposition would be non-existent. But this is not so. Ergo, the logical explanation is that laws are not omnipotent.

So how do we fix the problem of state worship? That’s a tricky question, one which few would be able to give a good answer to. The difficulty is that the government is much more powerful in its influence and has a greater foundation within its roots than those that actually should be the ones to rule and teach. You find that those that deserve never receive but those that do not, flourish.

The government is capable of reaching more and manipulating more than those who do not wish ill. But even though it may seem futile, it is our voluntary obligation to teach people the truth. The truth being that their government does not know everything and does not have the power they believe it to have. Only when we break the roots of state worship may we create a better society. To break these roots, we must adopt many of the tactics of our enemies.

Our opponents target the children in schools whose young naivety makes an easy prey to manipulate and mould into the next generation of voters. We must strike the seeds before they are able to take root and plant our own seeds; seeds that will aid these children in making their own decisions when they are capable of doing so.

As people, we must not allow the brutal indoctrination of children to become state worshipers and must instead use the same tactics to allow the children to become individuals - Individuals with their own guided concept of ethics, politics and their place in the world.

Nicholas Woode-Smith is the Managing Editor and a Co-Founder of the Rational Standard.