Is Big Brother the Inevitable Price of Civiliaztion

Think about this. If you lived in a shack and only owned a pot to p155 in, you wouldn't care too much weather your shack was secure, unless you were home at the time.. If someone broke into your shack if you weren't home, they would have nothing to steal anyway. So the only thing you would really need to secure would be your own personal security. So if we lived in anarchy, there would be very little to secure except your person and you would need to be armed and continually vigilant. Many people in the states can walk around with firearms for this purpose, to secure their own personal safety and it makes sense in anarchy but less sense in civilized society. The problem is civilized society and police on the streets and law and order do not prevent the ongoing reality that lots of people who live in civilization are anarchistic and dangerous, unwilling to play by any rules.

The fact that civilization cannot stamp out some forms of human behavior, like the criminal mind, means that the more a civilization acquires the less of a shack it is and the more of an advanced and valuable infrastructure it becomes, that needs to be guarded with maximum security. Just the same as people who live in gated communities or the wealthy who have even tighter security to protect their possessions.

The problem is living inside a secure bubble, limits your freedom..obviously. And with limited freedom comes limited avenues of opportunity. So the trajectory seems to be this.

1. You start with anarchy, no infrastructure and roaming bands of tribes, with small communities that attack each other or join together in order to make the tribe more powerful and more secure..A place in continual anarchy would be Afghanistan, they never moved past the tribal structure into a cohesive society..it's also why the country can never be properly conquered, because there is no unified society to conquer (of course they are currently trying to train an Afghan army ...including women..to gradually turn they country into a civilization).. Even though its fictional nonsense we can see this play out in the TV show the Walking Dead. So eventually communities emerge from anarchy, it's inevitable.

2. The more communities band together and join forces the more one community will become dominant and easily steam roller over the others..Leading to a unified society. This is how the Roman Empire operated, either join us or be crushed into submitting.

3. An empire can amass power and wealth but the more it gains the more it worries about potential threats. Even threats from within it's borders. Because it only takes one well organised small group to seriously damage infrastructure and throw the empire into complete meltdown. This leads to the inevitable police state.

4. The police state leads to a gradual shut down on freedoms and liberty. We have seen this before in places like Stalin's USSR and East Germany. When a state is in shut down mode, it can only survive by repatriating all of its industries because it becomes too paranoid to even import foreign goods or tech, just in case everything is tainted or bugged..A few years back there was a worry that Chinese made computer parts contained "chips" that were not supposed to be there...This is one example. Another example is the threat posed by sending contraband or toxins through the postal service, leading to delays in the system and general paranoia and suspicion and invasions of privacy..This internet and phone spying is just another example along with the TSA etc.


5. So what we are looking at is the gradual and inevitable closing off and isolation and shutting down of western civilization. It's all been done before as I said. But it imploded and failed before because the freedoms the west enjoyed were too tempting to the people stuck behind the Iron curtain. But now we have a world wide society, with only a few countries who are not playing ball..including Iran and North Korea (which in itself is its own cut off police state). If the whole world shuts down and all industry is nationalized then there will be no escaping it..and as you can see now Google..Facebook ..Yahoo are supposedly private corporations, with their feet planted firmly in every country yet evidently they are working so closely with the US government that they are as good as one and the same thing, they are as good as nationalized companies in many respects. Then when you recognize all the world will be implicated in this spying program, because it's the only logical conclusion if your using American owned web giants to access the internet, no matter where you live...Yet no country so far is really making any noise about any of this. This scale of infringing on civil liberties would have rocked governments to the core even 15 years ago...but no more.

6. Things can only get more "secure" from here on. Quite interesting really. It's inevitable. It always has been. The only way to get out of it is to opt out and live in the jungle or somewhere away from any infrastructure or technology.

7. If we follow it through to the logical next step it will be microchip implants. After than the state would control every one all the time. You would be living in an open prison..babies would be considered too dangerous incase they had subversive genetics..so everyone would need to be genetically modified to eliminate criminality..It's all logical to me. We are already well down the rabbit hole and I have a good idea whats at the bottom of it.

Its only gotten like this because the average person has been dumbed down to the point they need to be told how they should live.
I wonder what society would be like if we removed the television?

reply to post by VoidHawk


I wonder too. It's obviously had a missive impact on humanity, i n terms of brainwashing us all to modify our behavior and likes and dislikes...we would need to look at cultures that don't access TV. I mean being free is a security risk, but being secure is not living, just existing.

reply to post by TheBlackHat


it was a bad move climbing down from the trees...
maybe, we should follow the footsteps of whales, and live in the ocean....

We have already witnessed human desire to be " a part of the group". Nazi Germany is a good example. I know that N word gets thrown around a lot but it is true. They didn't even have TV. Ask any parent about these jackasses invading the school departments and their idiotic tendencies.

I cant count how many time in high school my son was asked his opinion. Only to be tongue lashed when he gave his honest quite often, conservative view. Or the several times I went to the school for parent teacher meetings. My son might have been failing in a class one class. Only to find out a month later the teacher was let go or retired for a 60-85% student failure rate.

No, Big Brother is not the inevitable price of civilization. Big Brother is the inevitable direction of a psychopathic government, which is what we have, possibly the opposite of civilization. This is why I think it was bound to happen:

1. It is crazy easy in comparison to visiting the peasants and counting their cows.
2. Psychopaths want to know every detail about their victims because it makes it easier to control them (also they are curious about what it is like to be human)
3. The Defense IT Industry is a monster that loves these kind of contracts. They make billions doing this. Right or wrong, they don't care
4. They want to control not only the serfs, but also the nobles. I see it as J.Edgar's blackmail file cabinet on steroids
5. It is the beginning of condemning people for thought crimes - what they looked at, wrote about and thought about - skipping what they actually DID because that is the price of 'security'.
6. Because they can.

But our resisting and I hope overcoming it is also inevitable. I hope.

reply to post by TheBlackHat


That's an interesting way of looking at things, and I can definitely follow the train of thought here and find a lot of logic in it. But there are a few things that make me think differently.

There have always been criminals. You can replace the desire for material things with the desire for land, resources, power, food or even sex. There has always been violence, and there have always been tribal wars for as long as there have been humans.

The man in a shack with only a pot to pi55 in still needs food, water, land, and if someone from another shack nearby has a family and decides that he needs more, he's going to be encroaching on that first mans hunting patch.

Criminality is not a symptom of civilization, it's a symptom of Humanity. So, even if everyone was equal and everyone had enough for themselves, there would always be someone who wants to control others, wants more than others, wants to be dominant over others. This is most often seen in the preacher instructing others on how to live, or the prison guard who gets violent with inmates, or the government that decides to invent laws to allow breaches into the lives of citizens

I don't think Big Brother is an inevitable conclusion, I think this has only happened because there are some who want control and power over others. In times gone by they would be the ones raising armies to invade another land, or creating armies to overthrow their government. There are just some who NEED control over others to justify their own existence on this planet.

I have my own theories about it, but they're based on the research of others who have looked into the mentality of some soldiers, those who grow to enjoy sadistic behavior. There have been several experiments that have shown that "absolute power corrupts absolutely" for a large percentage of Humans. If you put these people in control of others, they become maniacs, and their sadistic nature grows. I believe the same is true of government and agencies that overstep their bounds.

It might be corporate greed, it might be corruption, it might just be about the raw power, but I believe there are a lot of people who find themselves in these positions and become a danger to society because of it.

I think they would still be a part of Humanity whether we had all the trappings of a modern existence or not. They seem to have existed throughout our time on this planet, and I don't think this part of Human nature will ever be completely gone.

The thing we need to do, as a civilized society, is recognize when it's happening, or when it's possible, and put things in place to prevent it - and this is why we are supposed to have democratic and legal systems to stop them. Unfortunately, our own laziness and lack of appreciation for our own history has lead to the legal avenues being blocked and corrupted too, like Obama's special privilege to block any investigation under grounds of "national security".

It's all simply abuse of power, and it's the laziness of the people that allows it to happen. This is why we are all supposed to remain vigilant as a people. We have failed in our job as the citizenry just as much as Obama has failed in his to maintain the limits set by the people.

reply to post by Rocker2013


I like your post. Your perhaps right. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, it's a well known truth isn't it. There fore you end up a secondary psychopath rather than a primary psychopath, but regardless a psychopath either way. In other words the people cant win. The apparatus of power needs to be looked at and reworked in that case and the fact we have governments that are made up of upper and lower houses and checks and balances etc, were obviously designed so that one man/woman couldn't let power go to their head.

The problem that the checks and balances have been circumvented has come about for two reasons. Psychopaths/sociopaths will find a way to bend the rules in their favor and as we saw after 9/11 Bush was able to basically throw out the rule book and call all the shots. The reason the people in his own government, who should have stopped him, didn't, was due to the emotional tidal wave that engulfed normally rational and responsibly minded people. This is the real problem here, events such as 9/11 weather it was genuinely a terrorist attack or a deliberate false flag the event was used to justify bringing in powerful new legislation's. People were not thinking straight and how can you ensure the same thing wont happen again? All that is needed since 9/11 is the possibility of another event for the legislators to step aside and allow the president to be in full control or at least virtually full control. When it comes to draconian new laws nobody bats an eye lid and just signs off on them...and it's a very slippery slope and we're way down near the bottom of it now at any rate. the public and political response, worldwide, to this revelation of epic and unprecedented spying on the population has been low key to say the least.

Note that Benghazi dropped off the radar due to all this.

My bet is the Clintons (and their shadowy benefactors) are behind the sudden scandals. This first gets some revenge on Obama for not playing ball with Hillary this term, and second gets the Benghazi scandal (and Hillary's involvement) out of the press.

The goal of course being Hillary 2016...

And she will win because "OMG, we can elect the first female President!"

Now I want to vomit.

Ed Snwoden is a man of his convictions, unlike John McCain / Lyndsey Graham and the rest of the progressive movement!

Thank you Edward, your country is forever in your debt!

The scumbag media shills are nothing more than putrid slaves to the slavemaster Obama and his minions!

How the # could this man be called anything but a hero? If Dubya was in office and this came out, Ed would be a rock star and scumbags like John Stewart would be singing his praises!

Obama and the likes of Pelosi / McCain / Graham / Finestein / Boehner / Holder / both Clinton's are all progressives and as such will go down in history as the evil that once almost overthrew the greatest country on earth!

How many lawyers have gotten sleazy drug kingpin dealers off for the 4th amendment right argument yet all of us are being abused of our 4th cause of the "potential" possibility we might pose a threat? Total dirtbag scum go free while we are told we have no need for a 4th if we have nothing to hide? He didn't want to profile muslims and as a result the Boston Bros got away with it, whilst they were collecting data and loading up on hollow point bullets.....why cause they were looking at vets, anti-abortion, constitution supporters, etc. What happens to your local police when the Federal Gov takes over? The local cops will be a thing of the past if this keeps up. They will no longer need them if they continue down this path of spying.

Well, I think the OP got a few things wrong.

Living in even the simplest shack under the simplest conditions, you are still going to have belongings and supplies you have to keep secure. Other people ARE petty enough to steal firewood, any food they can find, blankets. Anything that has any intrinsic value. Example - You'd need things like axes to chop wood. This would be the kind of thing that someone would grab simply for it's basic utility. You come back to your shack and you have no wood for your fire and no axe to chop more.

Items that people need in order to survive will always have some value.

Anyway. I think Big Brother is the inevitable result of government. All it takes is time and decay. The relatively short human lifespan contributes greatly. No matter how careful you are to guard your freedom, it's going to be difficult to perpetually educate the next generation in such a way that they understand why it should stay that way.

People believe change is progress even if it's bad change. You can't reason with that.