It strikes me that several recent government policies have been concerned with resisting a decline in our “way of life”. Security, the economy and our personal welfare are all held by governments as something that is already good and must be protected from immigration, terrorism and violent crime. This view tends to see the world as a place that has no room for improvement and as decline which must be prevented. We are then victims of outside sinister forces. We are almost presented with the choice:

1) To surrender to external forces and see our way of life change.

2) To fight change and maintain the status quo.

The paradoxical (and ironic) problem with resisting change is that to resist, we must already accept change to a way of life!

I will give you an example: fundamentalist terrorists wish to undermine the open society and impose a totalitarian government – all aspects of people’s lives are centrally controlled. The way we are fighting this is to centralize power and rip up the open society! Recent instances: surveillance, long detention without trial, supporting extraordinary rendition, alienation of minority communities and curtailing individual freedoms. All these activities as the characteristics of what we are supposedly resisting.

Surly the best way to resist this trend is to strive for the opposite society is to do the opposite? We should increase transparency of government and police, increase personal freedoms, involve minority communities in government, and encourage personal responsibility over reliance on a father figure government. We can fight terror best by ignoring it. Terrorism is a propaganda tool to force political change. A propaganda tool is defeated if it is ignored. The impact of terrorism can also be reduced by designing infrastructure to be distributed and redundant.

Anti Citizen One