Government, meaning “mind control,” govern coming from the Latin gubernare meaning “to steer” as in a ship, and mentis meaning “of the mind”-- together, “steering of the mind” or perhaps “mind steering”-- is that group of people who control the apparatus of the state. The state, meaning “static” or non-dynamic, is that institution in society that maintains a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within a given ethnic, multi-ethnic, or national territory, keeping the society from changing. So then, government is that group of people who control the mind or use mind control through that institution that maintains a legitimate use of violence within a given territory to keep a society from evolving. As a monopolist on the legitimate use of force, government is inherently a monopolist also of the illegitimate use of force, because in order to maintain a monopoly on legitimate use of violence one must be willing to use illegitimate violence against others who would use legitimate violence.
Government has a natural right to rule, but it is not a good and proper right. It is the right to do bad, which Stoics and Christians may attribute to the freedom of the will, the freedom to sin or do vicious things (but which psycho-physical parallelists like Spinoza understood to still be pre-destined) that result in Hell. The right of governments to rule is the right to do evil, which is a natural right to engage entropy upon one’s fellows knowing it is bad for them (unwanted), though one which diminishes as society approaches the Source, that which is the Greatest Good, itself a syntropic process of Return. This natural right, arising from the sempiternal presence of entropy, is consistent with the actual power that a government holds, the right of ruling being the fact of domination and the slowing of evolution. But as domination is repulsive to society, society diminishes government as it diminishes domination. As such, the natural right of government to rule is not an absolute or perpetual right, as society avoids and thereby annihilates the rule of government, which is consistent with its domination.
The right of governments to do evil is not consistent with an entirely entropic process, nor is it consistent with the idea that there may be an absolute evil. Just as there is not an absolute nothing, there is no absolute evil, an existent which entirely lacks goodness. Governments, and the ruling classes they serve-- priests, landlords, bankers, and bosses--, are driven by the same natural will of self-preservation as is any other creature, and from this ultimately good foundation springs forth their short-sighted will to dominate others. It is the short-sightedness, and not the will for self-preservation itself, that must be identified as the evil element, and, as such, this evil rests upon a foundation of goodness, which is itself derived from the Source, however profane and depraved its vessel has become in its forgetfulness. The entropy it causes others is for the preservation of its own being, which results from syntropy, its goodness. There is no absolute evil, nor entirely entropic states of being, no matter how evil or entropic.
Government, as with any organism or association, however criminal, has the natural right to maintain its interests and those of its constituents in the ruling class to the extent that it can maintain its being against the interests of those with him it finds itself opposed. However, this does not make it free from natural consequence, the natural corollary to natural rights being natural responsibilities or natural duties. One has a natural right to cut an apple, but has the natural responsibility to ensure that, in doing so, one does not cut one’s finger. Nobody has a natural right to evade natural consequence (though a subsidy may provide an artificial right to do so, itself stemming from an actually-existing natural right). The natural consequence of government is revolution, the expression of the natural rights of civil society, which teleologically supercede the natural rights of government to hinder evolutionary progress, civil society maintaining always the natural potential to actualize its natural right to lawfully abolish government, a right consistent with a maturity of its character.
Modern governments are established upon a social contract theory that gives license as established upon the tacit consent of the governed. The idea is that the society tacitly consents by not rising up against and changing or abolishing government. This is ultimately also the logic of the rapist who assumes consent from a silent victim. Governments of the Anglosphere have their lawful origin, we are told by Blackstone, in their acceptance under the courts of common law, which granted government the right to rule. The problem with Blackstone’s logic is that he assumes the right of individuals to extend to others rights that they do not themselves have. No judge or jury has a natural right to govern others by which to extend such a right to others, however much they have a natural right to lie otherwise. That is, since no judge or jury has a right to govern others, it cannot provide license to govern to others. I cannot provide license to do something that I do not have the right to do, and neither can a court lawfully extend to government something which it does not itself have a right to do. As such, governments have no rational justification for their existence, this lack being consistent with their efforts to maintain themselves through the irrational means of compulsion, lack and compulsion being non-being and entropy, a fair pairing.
The alternative to government is civil society, and in particular, and more practically, civil association. The difference between government and civil association is that government is compelled upon society through an assumed tacit agreement maintained through coercion, whereas civil association is voluntarily subscribed to with informed and explicit consent, being maintained by the sustained mutual benefit of the participants. Civil associations, if unimpeded, can assemble courts of law and enforce the common law, maintaining the powers of nullification and precedence, and they can be highly-organized, well-structured, and regimented. There is nothing that a civil association, unimpeded, cannot do that a government can, except that it cannot infringe upon others’ natural right to use legitimate force to maintain itself, cannot be the imposition that government is. That is the fundamental and sufficient distinction between civil association and government.
Government has a natural right to exist, but so does civil society, and these conflicting rights are akin to the right of short-sightedness and expediency and that of long-sightedness and integrity. Government’s origins have an affinity with the esoteric, or secret truths of religion, as opposed to the exoteric, or public exposition of religion, and, as such, was, like esoteric religion, a means of managing an ignorant multitude that had not yet come to its senses. On its own, this is understandable, as the ignorance of the multitude is truly a hindrance to progress, but it has run its course. The problem is that modern social science has shown that this approach only makes matters worse in the long-term, especially when applied through the state, which creates a static society that cannot evolve and that then stagnates and starts to decay. The Enlightenment brought about the understanding that spreading knowledge more widely could alchemize the ignorant individual, making a good person better. From this resulted more democratic and republic organizations, culminating in the republics of today. While this process did not reach perfection, it did reach toward it, and it is a process that can continue if indeed the Enlightenment can be made to go on, and particularly if modernist social science, which tried to continue the project already, can be used as a launching point. Knowledge is, indeed, power, and as the wisdom of civil society grows so too does its power, a power which can result in the lawful abolition of government.
The natural right of government to exist is not consistent with a right to perpetually exist. Because it is a right to do evil, which itself stems from a process of entropy which reaches toward an absolute nothing that does not and cannot exist, it must be distinguished from, and counterposed to, the right to be just, which results from a syntropic process reaching back to the Source, the Absolute Something. These are consistent with the natural facts of dying and living. Government, already in its process of dying, has the right to die, and civil society, in its process of living, has the right to live. The natural consequence of dying is death, and that of living is life. In its death throws, government may impede upon and cut short others’ natural right to live, however. The injured bear rampages and causes harm to the otherwise uninjured, and in this the bear has a natural right in conflict with the natural right of the uninjured, which the bear has terminated. But the uninjured has a natural right consistent with their power to use all that is within their means to defend their existence. So long as this natural right remains a right of defense and not of aggression, it remains a right consistent with a sociologically long-sighted Return, a right it would do society well to embrace. The rampage is an act of short-sightedness, an expediency in a time of defeat.
Governments appear to be founded upon justice, but this is not the essence of government, being instead an emerging element of civil society. Afterall, law precedes government, and government infringes law with legality. The essence of government is sustained aggression, resulting in the sufficient definition of government as those who steer a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. As such, any justice applied by government is coincidental and accidental, and not an essential or definitional aspect of government, any justice also being applicable by civil society through the legitimate use of violence except where government intervenes to maintain its own monopoly on such things. As civil society may do those things that government otherwise does, but without aggressing upon others, it is aggression that is the essence of government, resulting in the sufficient definition of government as a monopoly on legitimate violence.
When an ecological system becomes stagnant, a disturbance can assist it to engage a new stage of evolution by allowing the forces of adaptation to repurpose niches. Humans are the stewards of the land and the husbands of the animals, this being understood as religious tradition and tribal purpose among many peoples, humans having long been the dominant species, and since the Holocene at least having impacted their environment more than any other ecosystem engineer. As such, humans, whose conscience is a direct connection to the Source, are accountable only to God, the All, One.
We learn both from religious and philosophical texts about the treatments that depraved humans who have forgotten their purpose, of stewardship, husbandry, and mutual benevolence, must face as a consequence of shirking their responsibilities that come with their freedoms. Noah, one of many men in such tales, and a good steward tasked with preserving the animals, along with his family, was saved by God from a flood that covered the whole of the Earth known to Noah, consistent perhaps with one of many scientific hypotheses of such flooding in the archaeological and anthropological record. Also in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, Sodom and Gomorrah were smitten owing to their own depravity, while in the Greek pagan tradition Plato tells of the destruction of an Atlantis that had similarly lost its way.
If we put aside the superstition, and consider the anthropology of the religion and the philosophy, we may derive from this a very real moral lesson that when the society fails-- that is, when government is unmet by revolution from civil society-- God, who is Nature, steps in to establish an ecological disturbance. The preternatural form this takes, personified in supernatural myths, is not certain, but many such mechanisms (asteroids, volcanoes, solar cycles, etc.) have been proposed as sources of worldwide catastrophes capable of causing trophic collapses resulting in punctuated equilibriums with new niche specialization and, as a result, adaptation and natural selection culminating the evolution of new ecological communities. This being the case, the supernatural tales told by Plato and Moses be in fact be legends of preternatural occurences that punctuated the static points of evolution.
Government has a right to its fruits, and God has a way of providing fruits even in the desert. The fruits of government being the consequences of expediency, revolution appears certain. However, the recent strategies of postmodern governments have been so corrupting as to make revolution of the sinfullly and viciously ignorant multitude unlikely, suggesting perhaps that God has some culling to do in order to allow for a new stage of evolution to take place. It’s important to understand that, while the activities of governments may culminate in such an event that this is not to be understood as governments causing such an event, so much as God-- Nature-- causing it concomitantly, a catastrophe being an Act of God and a result of God’s moral discernment, not by imposition upon God by those against whom God acts. When civil society fails to channel the Source through its conscience into long-term, mutually-benevolent decisions, and by extension starts to fail the plants and animals under its care, by not lawfully abolishing government, it appears as if government is a victor who cannot be beaten, but really, society at-large has failed to do what it was tasked with doing, and, if it is lucky, it will reap the consequences of the trophic collapse that its lax conservation will cause, or else, if perennial wisdom is correct, will face the wrath of another Act of God.