There are various police state philosophies. The most insidious are those that promise a new man and a new world. These are utopian. The obscure movie “La Faille” (1975) is about a Secret Service with a head called “Mr. Director”. At the end of the movie, he gives his philosophy, which we can see applies today to some of those in government who in their own ways are promoting a new man and a new world and who are building a police state. Their claims are that they are doing good. Mr. Director says
“The world has become dark and cloudy. We’re the only ones to have kept clear minds. And a precise purpose. Governments are evasive. Only a police state is stable. We’re not making politics. We run the world. We work for peace. We’re beyond frontiers and ideologies. No one can stop this progress. Someday there will be no more secrets. Our Special Service will become a Public Service. Popular. People will come freely and willingly to be interrogated. Everyone will participate. No bad thought will be concealed. Our society will be transparent and logical.”
The promises sound familiar: stability, non-partisanship, peace, progress, a place for confession, transparency. Notice that the police state is de jure inside government but de facto above and beyond it. It is the ultimate force.
Earlier in the story, the man who is resisting the police says to the policeman who has him under arrest:
“It’s curious. You are very strange guys. You want to change everything, but at the same time you want everything to stay in order.”
Utopians want to shake everything up to reach a stable end point, a kind of kingdom of God on earth. The Special Service (or secret service) replaces the messiah. History comes to its end. The reich or whatever lasts 1,000 years.
The important feature of this philosophy is that the human personality as a creative entity is extinguished. Man in God’s image as a creator is extinguished. Ongoing creative personality means dynamism, uncontrollable by anyone, which never produces a static result. The attempt of Mr. Director to make everything logical (rational) suppresses freedom of the person, which at root is something irrational, that is, beyond logic and reason. Freedom exercised as a creative force cuts into the world from sources of power within people that are beyond reasoning powers. Order as a fetish has to suppress freedom because freedom creates both order and disorder.
This discussion is pertinent to secession, which seeks a new ordering of political associations. Those who steadfastly oppose secessions and support the order of previous borders and aggregations of people are basically anti-freedom.
2:34 pm on January 30, 2015
