Question Everything

When people meet me, they tend to discover in no short order that I possess an innate distrust of authority. Because they don’t know me well, most don’t bother to find out why – the disconcerting is more easily dismissed than examined. And frankly, why would they care? I lose little sleep over the oddities of others – why would mine be any different?

I suppose my concern is that owing to cultural programming and social engineering we have been trained to dismiss that which challenges the assumptions we base our lives upon without consideration. This is a reactive response, the programmed perception supersedes the cognitive function and critical thought is trumped by effective training.

Those who present themselves as authorities tend to not like me much, for the most part. As I am unimpressed with their position, real or imagined, they are equally so to the position I take – a position of opposition. I feel everybody is pretty much the same whereas authority types and their apologists imagine everybody but them as the same. For authority to be effective (to authority) opposition can not be tolerated – that’s where tyranny comes in, though as applied to me, its usually just annoyance. I tend to ask questions which make people uncomfortable; questions authority is loathe to answer.

Because authority has been cultivated in our society (human society, not just American) to represent truth, justice and the path to rightness and order, the natural (easiest) tendency is to accept what those in authority present as truth while doubting, nay-saying or decrying those who question it.

Why? Well, because they tell you to, that’s why.

We’re trained that those who question authority are paranoid, lunatic, tin foil hat wearing conspiracy nuts. We are trained that those who question authority are not to be trusted – clearly their distrust indicates that they harbor some deep seated maladjustment, suspicious people should be regarded with suspicion. For the most part, we are trained well completely ignoring the fact that those who proffer this nonsense are the most secretive and distrusting of all humans.

(While much of my life is private, none of it is secret and I don’t employ spies to gather intelligence – I fucking read. I also don’t walk around wearing guns and mace and Tasers and clubs because I’m afraid of people. Authorities do that.)

Now, if authority tells you to trust it and not its detractors how is that any different from a detractor suggesting that you trust them and not authority? The credibility of the authority or detractor – it must be based upon something more than just an exhortation. Evidence is useful, precedent informative. “Because I said so” should not suffice, unless of course you are 5 years old.

Who has an unchallenged record as to public proclamations repeatedly proven untrue (lies) and who derives no benefit from the exclusion such behaviors manifest? While authority in all shapes and sizes has been proven to lie and lie and then lie some more, usually to the benefit of the authority (think of all the American illegal immigrants in Iraq stealing oil for Halliburton) those of us who challenge this make no money, friends or gain any other tangible benefits from our doubt expressed. Where is our fucking parade?

As those who are abused as children often grow to become abusers as adults, one would be wise then to consider what leads one to distrust authority. Could it be the result of abuse at an early age? Tell you my story:

I got into drug use early – I smoked a pack a day, drank nightly and consumed panoply of pharmaceuticals for nine months before I was born. After that, I increased the dosage. By high school I had alcoholic leanings (when I could stand) and smoked three packs a day (while oddly consuming no tobacco) and was like many of my fellow students, high. Stupid kids preparing for a life as stupid adults, a goal we appear to have achieved magnificently.

The constabulary in our little burg conducted an operation called Royal Flush – let me tell you how that worked. Some alcoholic, beer gutted sheriff’s deputies arrested a 19 year old girl, found her to be addicted to heroin, if I recall correctly. They caught her with enough drugs to threaten her with time in San Quentin. So these big tough cops nabbed her little sister, 17 years old, and told her that if she didn’t rat out her party friends, they would send her sad junkie sister to prison.

So this girl, surrounded by a bunch of skeevy middle age deputies (I dealt with these guys, they were skeevy, and that’s being nice) set about trying to help her sister by ratting out her friends and others she knew who used drugs. 18 at the time, I trusted her and sold this biker looking dude she was with some pot – at his behest, they approached me. Then he came to my house and smoked out with me and I sold him some more. Then I took the proceeds and hitchhiked to Canadia.

To make a long story interminable, the biker dude who had exhorted me to sell him drugs (he was initially looking for speed, which certainly fit within the false persona he had adopted) was a sheriff deputy and he and his cohorts kicked my parent’s door down to arrest me only to find I was out of the country. While they were disappointed, my folks were positively ecstatic, allow me to assure you.

I had to hitchhike back from Canadia to turn myself in, which I did. The judge who I surrendered to agreed with the public defender that a guy who hitchhikes a 1000 miles to turn himself in was not a flight risk – some brilliant jurisprudence – so I was released on my own recognizance. I faced jail time for selling pot to a cop, who entrapped me by forcing a little girl to rat out people she knew to help her sister.


The system lost the evidence, dropped the charges, then turned around and said they found it again and stuck me before a fucking pig of a judge (why, yes he was) and I heard the narc who busted me state in open court that he simulated taking a hit of pot. Having been there as I blew a supercharge into his lying mouth, I pointed this out to my public defender and he told me to forget it. Then they put me in jail.

When I got out I had to pay them a fine, $1,000.00, plus the money they paid me for the pot they effectively stole from me under color of law. If I presented myself falsely to another person and coerced them to sell me their property, then at gunpoint (or under threat of duress and perhaps some assrape) compelled the person I ‘purchased’ the property from to give me the money I paid them back, as well as kick in another 4 times the original amount, I would be guilty of extortion, fraud, breaking and entering and robbery to begin with before even getting to perjury.

I have never done anything of the kind to another person, would never – to lie about one’s intentions then take people’s freedom and money strikes me as repellant behavior, regardless of who does it. No one I had ever met or dealt with had done anything like that to me before, so as a stupid kid, I had no context. I was not naturally suspicious. Afterward, that changed considerably, but only of those who give me reason.

As a young druggy kind a guy, I realized early on that virtually everything the government and police and other authorities said regarding drugs (especially cannabis) was, where not an outright lie, a complete obfuscation of reality. If these outlawed drugs were as deadly as presented, why would we pay police officers to disguise themselves and seek them out with the full knowledge they will use them?

But the lies regarding the drug culture were nothing compared to watching a legal system use children to advance their agenda in courts where state sponsored attorneys dismiss lies by authorities. I remember hating the girl for what she had done, know many of the seedy types caught in her compulsory web of deceit wanted her dead, or worse. I know that while drugs are horribly harmful to bodies and minds, they are an individual taste which is not improved by the additional damage wrought by the state.

I saw, firsthand how much concern the authorities had for the lives of the people they used to justify their paychecks. They had no problem ruining a young girl’s life, basing a drug sting around the terror they could invoke in her with the full knowledge she could be killed or brutalized in the process.

Police narcs have guns and Tasers (now) and clubs and mace and radios and sap gloves (my police science teacher told of them – leather gloves with powdered lead sewn into the lining over the fingers for added kick when you punch – he told the class they were against the law, but that as sheriff deputies, like him, certain laws were impediments to enforcement and were disregarded out of necessity – convenience). Teenage girls, after working with the authorities don’t even have friends, so there is no one to protect them after authority is done with them. Kinda like soldiers, hundreds of thousands of whom live on the very streets they killed people in other countries supposedly to protect.

The authorities have no problem locking boys and girls into cells with hardened criminals when they arrest them for taking socially unsanctioned drugs. For what? Does sodomy make one a man? Why do policing agencies engage in such deadly subterfuge? If they are stupid enough to believe they can adjust human behavior through force of arms, they shouldn’t be allowed around sharp objects, as dull subjects everywhere can attest.

Morality? Please.

When do we all learn to distrust authority? When authority is revealed in a lie. Our first systemic lies are based around what? Commerce. We lie and are lied to, to generate commerce. What’s the Tooth Fairy bring? Floss? How’s about the Ishtar Bunny? Or Sandy Claws? These are make believe tales (lies), promoted systemically for the express purpose of generating cash flow – from the consumer to the corporation which distributes all the delightful pointless little gewgaw and flashing distraction with which we surround ourselves in lieu of human interaction.

Accept the lie, receive the reward. We learn early the benefits of believing the lie. Western culture is suffused with fictional imagery promoting the notion of benevolent angels, fairies and saints offering rewards to those sufficiently docile. As minor divinities, they are painfully aware of our behavior and when approving, deliver tangible bennies on specific holy days. These are lies promoted in homes and marketplaces and schools and churches as harmless joys of childhood.

The gift or boon is presented as a reward for good behavior, from a voyeuristic and benevolent third party. But a kid who is poor doesn’t collect for their good behavior (because Santa Parents have more pressing concerns, like food) and often, kids who are little shits, get all manner of goodies (because harried parents don’t want to put up with the grief of not gifting all the kids, nor the social stigma). The message is clear to kids who then grow up feeling entitled or that good is only what delivers the goods.

What happens when a child calls mom and dad on the whole Santa Claus racket, when they expose that they know it is all bullshit? The gifts from Santa stop coming. Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny? Call them on their fiction and lose the bennies of the lie. Our first exposure (for the most part) to systemic mendacity teaches us, trains us, that ignorance of reality pays dividends. Point it out and find your own ride home. Why do you think so many people claim to believe what they know they can’t really believe? They remember the disappointment they felt when they discovered those they trusted most lied to them, then punished them for pointing it out.

I (reluctantly) lied to my kids about such things, spent thousands of dollars on stuff, mostly that nobody needed, often didn’t even want and returned the next day for something equally pointless with more personal appeal. These are stories we promote as fact to the young and credulous only to be revealed as liars to those we nurture. Why? Because authority tells us we must. They lie for money so then we must lie for it as well to take the stink off their mendacity. Hell, everybody’s doin’ it!

Did operation Royal Flush achieve its objective? Cost me jail time and over a thousand bucks, I know they collected a lot with fines. But it didn’t stop anybody from using drugs, at least anyone I knew. Most just grew out of it and settled into sedentary lives dulled by alcohol, pharmaceuticals and TV. Some got religion, some became cops. Most of us forgot all those lies, convinced the good life would end if we doubted our social masters and stopped asking questions with answers which could only be uncomfortable.

All the bullshit we knew as children now is accepted through years of repetition and colossal disinterest on the part of the public mind at large. The majority operates from a position of certainty with no facts, where the reasoned mind demands facts with no certainty. Adults understand that one can not fight a war on drugs with troops fueled by booze and pharmaceuticals any more effectively than one can promote democracy by overturning popular weal and installing a dictator, both things authority hereabouts does often and particularly poorly. But then, they don’t refer to themselves as adults do they? They call themselves good old boys.

The summer of my drug bust a friend of mine died. We were at a party and he got into a fistfight with a long time antagonist. The police were outside busting kids for drinking and such while in the street less than 100 feet away a crowd watched his antagonist and another little punk beat him to death. I saw this from across the street, the police were between me and my dying friend. I got there well before they did but it was too late – he had been beaten to death – I watched him die in the street. The police did nothing – didn’t protect, didn’t serve. Well, they arrested the guys, later on.

I mention this because my bail for smoking out a cop and selling him a couple ounces of pot at his behest was $50,000.00. This was my first offense. The guy mainly responsible for my friend’s murder, who beat him to death by slamming his head into the pavement repeatedly and then kicking it like a football after he had been pulled off, a sick boy who had been in and out of the system a large portion of his life, well, his bail was $25,000.00.

So, if you wonder why I distrust authority – I come by it naturally.