The state is a monster that eats itself, along with individuals within its domain, its spheres of influence, and beyond. Citizens typically don’t perceive this due to the crafty rhetoric generated by the state’s intellectuals.
Sometimes the rhetorical machinery breaks down and we get to see the monster in all its gruesome majesty. This has happened in Israel due to its “plausibly genocidal” savagery in Gaza, coupled with its structurally flawed, adolescent dependence on the United States’ information warfare apparatus.
Much as Israel created a “Palestine Laboratory” for the workshopping of occupation technology, the Israeli state itself has become a vast research field for the study of political modernity. Someday dissertations on the topic will stack up faster than the bodies exhumed from an IDF created mass grave. But for now, we must do our part to bear witness and understand.
As the institution within a given geographical area that maintains a monopoly on the use of “legitimate,” proactive violence, the state can be provisionally viewed as a criminal organization that has been transubstantiated through the power of storytelling into something justifiable and respectable. Despite this legitimacy, the fact remains that the state is a predatory corporate agent.
The American philosopher Kendy Hess described the “corporate agent” as a material object comprised of its individual human members:
“The corporate agent exists when a group of people effectively subordinate themselves to the imperatives of a Rational Point of View (RPV) not possessed by any individual.”
When Daily Wire subscribers aren’t being upsold on genocidal Likudnik Zionism, they might enjoy Jordan Peterson explaining the Freudian view that the human psyche is a collection of sub personalities. If a human being can be conceived of as multiple personalities in one body, the corporate agent can be conceived of as one personality with multiple bodies.
That personality, or RPV, is committed to core beliefs, desires, and intentions (BDIs) in the same fashion as a press spokesperson is committed to a government policy. The RPV is the rational cognition of the state; a servant of state passions just as human reason is “the servant of the intuitions.”
Ideology is the RPV at work. It is the author of narrative for the BDIs. The state’s core desire is its survival and reproduction. This is impossible without taxation. To cite Richard Hanania‘s analysis of public choice theory:
“As Olson (1971:13–14) points out, no state has ever supported itself through voluntary dues or contributions. Compulsion in the form of taxation is necessary for the modern state to even exist.
As Cicero put it, “taxes are the sinews of the state.”
Taxes are thus a fundamental state desire. Murray Rothbard wrote in (an essay that evokes the state’s corporate agent, creature-like status with its very title) Anatomy of the State:
“The State has never been created by a ‘social contract’; it has always been born in conquest and exploitation.”
Such conquest and exploitation, or “Domestic Imperialism” as Libertarian Institute Managing Editor Keith Knight calls it, must be legitimized by the state’s philosophers and bards. They must tell compelling and convincing stories.
According to Hollywood story guru Blake Snyder, the best stories are “Primal, primal, primal!”
Snyder said that’s “because primal urges get our attention. Survival, hunger, sex, protection of loved ones, fear of death grab us. The best ideas and the best characters in the lead roles must have basic needs, wants, and desires. Basic, basic!”
War is more primal than interstate construction. And that’s why no one ever said “Interstate Highway Construction is the Health of the State.” No, Randolph Bourne famously said “War is the Health of the State.” The state’s incentives to tell a good war story are why Knight said, “The State is the Health of War.” (It is revealing, however, that America’s interstate highway system was marketed as crucial to national security. Americans drive around our spacious Mainland on the “Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.”)
While war makes for a great story, the wrong war with the wrong adversary can be catastrophic. To evoke Libertarian Institute director Scott Horton “War is the Health of the State, unless you really lose, then you’re dead.” For the state, war brings great risk and great reward.
On April 10, when Israeli War Cabinet Minister Benny Gantz said Israeli middle school children would one day fight in Gaza, the diabolical nature of the state was fully revealed, much like when the T-101 endoskeleton rises from the fire in the third act of The Terminator.
Here was a man who had effectively subordinated himself to the Israeli state’s RPV. Gantz hadn’t been seduced by the Zionist ideology the way Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir clearly had. Forget a final showdown with Iran, securing Greater Israel, or even settling the Gaza question once and for all. No, endless war against a relatively powerless foe is a dream come true for the state.
October 7 was a Godsend for the Israeli state. It reminded the Israeli people that they need it; why it is legitimate and respectable for the state to requisition their wealth and their children. Every time the air-raid sirens blare in Israel the state digs its claws deeper into the body of the Israeli people. Every lie about Hamas mass rapes, valorous IDF competence, and Hashem’s blessings reinforces the state’s apex status within the decaying society.
The Israelis are at the mercy of leaders who want to condemn them to endless violence in service of the creature from Palestine and leaders so high on the beast’s ideology they risk mass casualties and the eradication of Israel. Scholars must stay focused on this unprecedented, live streamed revelation of the monstrous creature that is the state.
