A nation is a geographical community owned by the state and administered by the government. The state is the soul of the government and it requires monopoly from the government – through a social contract (constitution), to sustain autonomy and sovereignty not just over the land but also on the human capital and other aspects of the citizens.
Whether the nature of the government is dictatorial or democratic, in the end, the government is nevertheless an omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent monopolist. If you were to act like your government, you would be arrested. Ceteris Paribus, the democratic government is a ‘diet coke‘ fascist which allows 51% of the populace (majoritarians) decide the destiny and fate of 49% (minority).
To continue ‘fooling most of the people some of the time’ THAN ‘fooling all the people all the time’, the government has to play a macro role in balancing the principles of delusion(s) without attacking the slaves (taxed citizens) directly. Following are the indirect ways that governments adopt to make people stay eleutherophobic, obedient, and submissive. If people are not oppressed, the oppressor will lose its market in politics, economy and elsewhere.
1) Control The Media = Control The Social Cognition
What people think does not matter much in politics. What they should think about – matters the most. To do this, you cannot directly communicate with the people. Media (mainstream entities) can play a huge role in destroying the basic schools of thought in the public sphere.
The government simply controls the enterprises of newsprint, spectrum and other technological aspects and governing laws that it can anytime twist, squeeze and grill to suit its own interests and agenda if the journalists are not to hail the vision of the government. This is how public discourses and opinions are constructed. In some cases, media personnel can be shot by the pro-government fringe groups.
Hitler would love to repeat the lies and make people believe that it is the only truth that matters. When the media is controlled, the government also retrieves a catch-22 benefit i.e expropriation of free speech. When freedom of expression is intimated, 50% of the job in destroying the nation from inside is done.
Sedition laws, defamatory laws, etc are just add-on to control the way the government wants ‘free speech’ to happen. With this, the government ends up designing and deciding the thoughts and ideological processes of its citizens. Pit people against each other, declare any critic as ‘anti-national’ or ‘urban Naxal‘ and ridicule/shame/shun anyone on TV discourse or on social media platforms if the speaker tries to make any coherent case.
In his book On War, Clausewitz referred to this concept of identifying and then focusing on select points as attacking the center of gravity. The centre of gravity is that key element if controlled or destroyed, would most hurt your opponent and is the critical factor in achieving your objective. In this case, when taking control of or destroying a country from within, the key is to attack and control the mind of the citizens—you must shape the way people view life and the values upon which their life is based. Shape the mind and you control their direction. Control their direction and you can lead them down a pathway to hell.
2) Control The Future = Manipulate The Textbooks And History
The education system is almost everything for the government. Systematic molestation of facts, information and knowledge system is vital for the government to design the timeline of its own survival and also controlling the future.
Irrational socialisation anyway takes place in the space of family, community, religious communities and neighbourhood. And to add the cherry on the cake twisting the textbooks, curriculum and syllabus at school and institutional level vouches for the continuation of government’s statism.
The more statolatrians or statists are produced by the government, the better for itself. The health of the government is abundantly dependent upon the production of submissive and uncritical citizens.
Teach them that civil disobedience is wrong and docile submission is right. Teach them that privacy and consent are the cultural enemies of our society. Teach them that any basis of a moral foundation, like the principles of libertarianism, is a weakness to be avoided in the name of security, and also redefine the concept of nationalism to support uncritical views at large. Teach them to lynch peaceful dissents, critics and urban naxals, in the interest and name of sensitivity—after all, we wouldn’t want to offend anyone with our New India’s thinking, would we?
3) Control The Philosophy = Misguide The Political Economy
Use new terms like “minimum government, maximum governance” to impress the tik-tok quotient level of the audience who anyway won’t get the heck you said.
Play with tax rates (by undermining the significance of the Laffer curve and inflate the expenditure to settle the political scores), do situational compassion with social capital of unprivileged communities and last but not least, print money out of thin air (apoplithorismosphobia).
It is a paradoxical situation if the government were to minimize statism and maximize freedom. What would the government gain from undoing the oppression anyway?
The government’s certainty is economically dependent on the foundations of philosophy that it shapes. Whenever and wherever possible place those sympathetic to your philosophy into the office at all levels—the higher, the better—so they can sway the direction of the country within every function of government, promising solutions, handouts and benefits for all.
In such a way you can tilt legislation toward incrementally increasing the control of and dependency on government—a government that you are shaping. Concurrently, if you can pack the courts with appointed judges who will not hold you accountable to the law and its constitution, you can act with virtual impunity. This is just one example. The rest are visible in (any) other constitutional, statutory, media, research, economic and educational bodies.