I don't want to believe...

...that our representatives are involved in some great conspiracy to create an environment in which we are all monitored from birth to death; in which our identities are only what the state declares them to be; in which we cannot "reinvent" ourselves when necessary as we go through our "seven ages" and perhaps regret or just resile from what we used to be, used to do; in which, if the state somehow thinks there's something suspicious about us, our innocent friends and family will be monitored just because they know us; in which hundreds of thousands of state functionaries will be able to access data about us; in which we may be stopped in the street and forced to prove who we are and justify our presence and be subjected to searches of our belongings.

I just don't. Want. To believe it.

I mean I know policemen; know MPs; I know councillors; I know council staff, and they don't appear, the ones I know anyway, to want all this. And they seem genuine when they tell me not to be paranoid; that none of this is on the agenda.

I just. Want. To believe them.

But the alternative is that they are collectively completely incompetent and blind to the fact that that appears to all the world to be what they are creating. And I'm scared. To believe that.

I don't want to believe that Leviathan is consciously controlled by particular maniacal individuals. I want to believe that most of the ideas start with a spark of ingenuity. A way to get the right benefits to the right recipients here. A convenient way for us to do business there. Maybe even an idea to save money, prevent waste, make sure no doctor ever gives us something we're allergic to.

But if our representatives do not understand Leviathan, and certainly cannot control it, then they must destroy it. Look for different ways. And oh, how many different ways there are! We are at the point where our government, the structures they have to create to maintain all the functions they think we find desirable, are bloated, inhuman in scale. And worse, that there are no alternatives. They must have pretty under-developed imaginations. And over-developed egos.

And I look around at the political alternatives, the parties who vie for our support, and I find not one, at least in the mainstream, who really accept this reality. For they all want to control it. They all want the power. They will tell us they want to downsize some of it with one speech and then propose something else as monstrous with the next.  And even if they don't want to control it, if they don't make it their first priority to destroy it, it will not be destroyed.

What a sad vision of humanity such people must have. What pessimism about our ability to do the right things, for ourselves, without being told, or dragged, or pushed at the point of a gun. There can be no prescription for bringing about the "greatest happiness" because each of us has our own idea of our own "greatest happiness". As humans, rather than Borg, we are individuals and no one size fits all. Ever. That's what makes us humans. There can be no database that takes all these variables into account, so they will end up suppressing those variables.

I don't want to believe (this is the end).