Total War: Exposing The Vicious Nature of the State/Government

These past few weeks I’ve been playing the most anarchist game ever made, one that reveals the absolute truth of exactly how the State/government functions, why it functions that way, the true motives of those in power, and the impact this has on the societies over which it rules. Honestly, it is quite shocking just how revealing it is of the tyranny and violence at the heart of modern politics and statism (“state-ism”). What game am I talking about?

Total War: Medieval II.

Total War: Medieval II is a strategy game that puts you in charge of a Medieval European kingdom and while there are technically goals for your kingdom to pursue there is nothing forcing you to do so. You could theoretically do nothing but sit in your tiny space and do nothing but tax your people and build cities. But the game will not allow that to happen. Other kingdoms, hungry for empire, will invade you and try and take your territory and subject your people to foreign rule. Very quickly you learn that you have to have a powerful army, not just to fight off your enemies, but to subdue them completely by conquering them. If you do not they will not leave you alone. Their attacks will only increase until one of them, having conquered more territory than you, and therefore having amassed a larger tax base from which to extract greater wealth to fund an ever growing military and conscripted soldiers to fill it, will invade you and destroy you.

Your only option if you want to survive, not to mention “win,” is to do it to them before they do it to you.

And this is where the genius of the game really comes in for anyone who loves liberty and human freedom. In the course of normal games play, just the most logical things you have to do in order to “win,” the game exposes all of the ways in which the government truly functions. The game debunks the propaganda upon which statist wars are founded and shows you the real reasons they are waged. The game unmasks the real reason that taxes are taken from the public and their true purpose. Likewise, the game shows exactly how governments meet the demands of the public for liberty and turns those demands for liberty into a means for the accretion of control over society. While the public thinks it is becoming more free what actually happens is the exact opposite. At the same time the game reveals the true purpose and function of fiat currency in making unending war and the mass accumulation of power by the political elites possible without restraint.

The game also exposes the real way and reasons that governments use power and why power in statist governments always ends up centralized into the hands of a few political elites. Additionally, the game shows how the state corrupts religion, subverting it from its true mission and turning it into a tool of power. Finally, the game shows exactly what happens when a people who can’t be bought off get a little too loud and a little too active in demanding actual independence and freedom. The State/government is a violent parasitical organization that exists to extort wealth from the public through taxation to the benefit of the political elites at the cost of the public, and war is one of the major ways that it justifies its existence. War and the fear of it is the life blood of the State and the prime enslaver of man and Total War: Medieval II proves it.

War and Taxation

The first principle of war propaganda is that the country is always fighting self-defense. You see, governments want wars. As we will discuss momentarily, war is one of the essential functions that justifies the existence of the state and one of its main means by which it expands its control over society. But war is also massively unpopular. Generally speaking, no one wants to see their child sent home in pine box or several Ziploc bags. So you have to convince them, but no one wants to be the person responsible for those deaths because if you’re responsible then you lose the support of the public. Therefore you need a monster to slay, one so evil that you can rally everyone against it, or an existential threat so dire that the society believes that it will destroy them. Once engaged in the violence becomes cyclical with one round of violence being justified by a previous aggression and in turn being the justification for the next round of violence.

The threat in Medieval II is the one that is most often used by governments in real life: the threat of invasion. In the game, everyone around you is portrayed as a threat out to undermine you, weaken you, and destroy you. While you can make alliances in the game none of them are trustworthy because at any time they can, and will, stab you in the back where you are the weakest. Therefore you need a massive army to protect your borders from the constant threat of violent invasion. And that massive army needs an organization, a government, to regulate and direct it. But neither the administrative state nor the military it manages come cheap. They need to be funded. And this is where taxation comes in. In order to be protected as a citizen you have to contribute to the funding of those organizations which ensure your safety and you do this by paying taxes. This is how it works, right?

Wrong.

As Medieval II shows, the purpose of taxation isn’t voluntary and the purpose of the state and its military forces aren’t to protect you. The necessary monster in provided by the threat of other nations, all of which who (as the propaganda goes) exist to destroy you. This, of course, means war! As soon as your military conquers another city the first thing it does is start extracting taxes from them. You start off my sacking the city and looting it for its maximum value. Then once you assume power you plant a permanent military force within it to ensure that it is always obedient, meaning it doesn’t revolt and always “pays” its taxes. Of course none of these people want you there, but they don’t have a choice in the matter. If they don’t pay taxes then you will attack them and may even choose to exterminate them, wiping them out almost entirely and destroying much of their city. This of course isn’t cheap and you can’t really afford to pay for everything with the taxes you get from this one city. So you need to go out and conquer another and then another in order to expand your tax base and your economic control over valuable resources. This of course brings you up against an unending series of other threats that are looking to do the same.

A really interesting thing about this process in Medieval II is the way it shows that the way that you treat a conquered foreign power is functionally no different than the way that you treat your own people. Whatever the rhetoric you can imagine your monarchs using to rally their people the reality is that you treat them exactly the same. You station military forces within those cities in order to extort the maximum amount of wealth possible from them through having the highest taxes possible. This way you can simply take what you want and they can never effectively revolt because they will always be overwhelmed. In other words, your existence within society as the government domestically is the same as it is in foreign conquered territory – you are a military occupier extracting wealth from the people and resources from the the land through military force, destroying anyone that stands up to you.

In Medieval II the government is not the ally of the people; the government is always their enemy. It is not an organic representative of the people, it is a parasitical occupying force engorging itself upon people within the country in the exact same manner as it does to those outside of it. The only difference is that in one place it has had decades and centuries of propaganda to establish itself as being “legitimate” while those it has invaded and conquered have not yet been so indoctrinated.

This fundamental link between taxation of warmongering is something (at least some) historians have understood for decades. In his momentous work, War And The Rise Of The State: The Military Foundations of Modern Politics (hereafter simplified as War) Dr. Bruce D. Porter, then a professor of political science at BYU, showed the explicit historical connection between taxation and warfare and warfare and the increase in the power of the State. He wrote:

The Power of the Money Printing Press

Of course there always comes a time where no matter how powerful your force is there is some group, some where that dares to stand up to you. They protest. They riot. And if not ameliorated then they revolt. The higher your taxes the more likely this is to occur. After all, people work to put food on their tables and make their lives better, not to fatten the hog of some distance Prince or President. Even when stupidly outnumbers, sometimes people fight back. And while you can (always will in game) destroy their resistance, slaughter every rebel, burn their city to the ground, and start over from scratch, that process is long and expensive. It is easier and better to simply lower their taxes. But then you can’t fund your military. How are all those soldiers going to eat, train, and conquer Jerusalem if you have taxes too low to fund your extensive “self-defense” programs and you’re not able to borrow enough to get what you need either?

This is where fiat currency comes in. Or, as the game has it, the add_money cheat code.

One of the biggest limitations on the ability of the government to do anything is its ability to pay for those things. Even the most fanatical and tyrannical regimes have to pay their soldiers and state employees or they won’t work. Even fanatics have to eat. Game wise, this is your biggest limitation as well. Armies are expensive and even as the largest and richest nation in the game you’ll find yourself constantly falling into massive levels of debt if you try to sustain them. Caught between the rock of being broke and the hard place of the public being unable and unwilling to sustain the tax levels you to need to fund your leviathan, something has to give. Either you have to abandon conquest and expand slowly, lengthening the game out to extensive lengths or you cheat.

How do you cheat? Simple.

You inflate the money supply.

In the game this is done through the simple cheat code “add_money” followed by however much money you want. And while the real world inflationary effects that come with printing ever larger amounts of paper money are never explored in the game, another major effect is explored extensively. Let off the chain of money your empire building can increase without end. You can afford to spend ever increasingly large amounts on money on your burgeoning military forces with the ever expanding beaurcacy needed to maintain it while also pouring torrential amounts of money into creating the kind of infrastructure (whether it be a city council chambers, a local tavern, or even brothels) that will help the masses stay docile. As Orwell wrote, as long as you can provide the masses with enough beer, movies, and sports you can numb them into accepting just about anything. (1984, pgs. 91-91) In this way you can manufacture the consent of those under your power.

You use promises of welfare aid, “public” works, “free” healthcare, “free” education, voting rights, and generally to take care of their every need. As Dr. Porter explains in War, pgs. 179-181, all of these services create buy-in from the public for the state. It makes them feel like they are getting something and therefore both owe something to those from whom their gifts/privileges came and generates within them the desire to protect those things which they have been given. Welfare services, whether in the form of public works – whether they be roads, mines, public buildings, etc., or the various forms of monetary and medical aid given to the poor – generate loyalty within the public towards both the concept of the nation and obedience to those who run it, the politicians in power. At the same time these service generate a sense of community identity that allows for the government to forge them into the very highly disciplined military units it needs to wage its wars.

The problem with all this is the exorbitant cost. Now you’re not only paying for the incomprehensible costs of maintaining a standing military force, you are also providing incomprehensible government programs in the name of the public, all of which cost an equally incomprehensible amount of money. When it finally comes time to pay the piper and you run out of your conjured fiat money, as you always will, what do you do? You simply call more up out of thin air. The end results of all this is an endless war carried out by a massive administrative state because its most powerful of chains, that of money, have been removed and now it can (and will) do whatever it wants.

Below, Dr. Porter explains this cycle using taxation as his main guide, but it is easy to apply his analysis even further as money printing allows for the state to escape the limitations placed on it by taxation. So if this cycle happens with taxation, imagine the increased pass at which it proceeds under a fiat currency system.

The Methods and Purposes of Power

Without their most powerful leash removed, the dogs of war are able to roar free and carry out the work of their political masters without limitation. And that work is not just to the “foreigner” and stranger outside the national boundaries.

In Medieval II this becomes most obvious when any city attempts to break away, or secede, from your empire. You need their tax monies. You need to maintain control of the natural resources within the territory they claim. You cannot have an enemy at your back, within your boundaries, a very dagger pointed at your throat. There is only one solution to the problem. You park a massive occupying military force inside the cities that are rioting and threatening rebellion. You fill the city with soldiers and allow brute force alone to maintain your rule. And if they step out of line? If they still attempt to gain independence? Then you crush them as quickly and brutally as possible.

In the real world, secession, the right of individuals and communities to voluntarily withdraw from all legal/political organizations (governments, nations, etc.) without being subject to violent force designed to compel them to remain subject to such states, is a basic human right. As Jefferson wrote long ago:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. 

^{Emphasis my own.}

Governments exist to protect the inviolate rights of man and when any government violates a person’s rights then it is the right of that person to secede from that government, to alter his allegiance to it or abolish it entirely, and form any new governments he thinks will best meet the needs of protecting his rights.

Yet, the governments of the world, including the United States, deny this basic human liberty.

Why?

For the same reasons you do so in the game – to control the tax monies, natural and human resources, and maintain military power for your government and to deny those things to a potential future opponent. You become the obvious target for the same war machine that you previously had pointed at your “foreign” enemies, suggesting the ugly truth that most do all they can to ignore. You are just as occupied and oppressed by your statist government as they are. Perhaps more so because you’ve most likely been miseducated and indoctrinated in public schools into the cult of obedience to the state, meaning not just your land alone has been occupied by the statist political powers (“state-ists”), but your very mind has been occupied as well.

While examples could be endlessly enunciated demonstrating all the many ways that those in power see you as cattle to be milked, bilked, and sacrificed as necessary, this alone should suffice. You have no liberty. Your most basic freedom, the freedom to consent to being governed or to withdraw that consent and be free of the rule of those to whom you do not consent – the right of secession, is roundly and completely ignored. Instead you are subjected to abject and absolute tyranny. If you try to leave they will imprison you. If you try and resist imprisonment they will kill you. They will destroy you and everything you love.

The Corruption of Religion

One of the most influential factions in Medieval II are the Papal States, headed by the Pope of the Catholic Church. If you make him angry he may excommunicate you, causing your influence over your Catholic subjects to revolt and an increase in rebellions within your territory to occur. He may also actually invade your territory and try and annex your lands. And you can never fully get rid of him. Even after you conquer the Papal States, the Pope will simply move to another Catholic city and continue to cause you problems. But there is a solution.

You put your own guy in power.

One of the most important units in the game are not the soldiers, but the priests. In territories where you rule your priests will “spread the good word” of your benevolent rule, eliminating heretics and convincing people to submit to your loving rule. Mechanically, this means that territories with your priests in them are less likely to revolt. This is because they have been indoctrinated into believing that you have a right to rule over them. At the same time the more priests you have, the more guys you eventually have in the College of Cardinals. This in turn means that eventually the guy who is elected Pope will always be from your nation because the majority of the people who could be Pope will be from your nation. Of course this is a complete corruption of the purpose and power of religion, but it is one that reflects the real world and the ways in which states try to turn religions from organizations that challenge worldly power and into organizations for disseminating loyalty to the state as a commandment from God or the Gods.

Dr. Carl Jung, one of the most celebrated psychologists in modern history, wrote about why the government wants to co-opt religion:

In order to free the fiction of the sovereign State – in other words, the whims of those who manipulate it – from every wholesome restriction, all sociopolitical movements tending in this direction invariably try to cut the ground from under the religions. For, in order to turn the individual into a function of the State, his dependence on anything beside the State must be taken from him. But religion means dependence on and submission to the irrational facts of experience. These do not refer directly to social and physical conditions; they concern far more the individual’s psychic attitude.

…But it is possible to have an attitude to the external conditions of life only when there is a point of reference outside them. The religions give, or claim to give, such a standpoint, thereby enabling the individual to exercise his judgment and his power of decision. They build up a reserve, as it were, against the obvious and inevitable force of circumstances to which everyone is exposed who lives only in the outer world and has no other ground under his feet except the pavement. If statistical reality is the only reality, then it is the sole authority. There is then only one condition, and since no contrary condition exists, judgment and decision are not only superfluous but impossible. Then the individual is bound to be a function of statistics and hence a function of the State or whatever the abstract principle of order may be called.

The religions, however, teach another authority opposed to that of the “world.” The doctrine of the individual’s dependence on God makes just as high a claim upon him as the world does.

^{The Undiscovered Self, Pgs. 13-14 17}

The State is a fiction. It doesn’t have an objective existence separate from our conception of it. It is the idea by which those in power accumulate and maintain their power. As O’Brien put it in 1984, “The object of power is power.” (Pg. 332) The point of power is to use to, not to be restrained from using it. Therefore those in power want to use their power in every possible instance. In order to do this those in power must either diminish or destroy any organization or aspect of society that would challenge it as the supreme adjudicator of law and morality. The most powerful of these other forces is the influence of religion.

Religion provides a point of intellectual and moral reference outside of the reality we experience everyday, outside of the realm of scientific statistics which the State claims as the intellectual basis and justifications for all its actions. Because this the religious experience provides its believers with a frame of reference outside of the mundane ideas and demands of the world, options to see and think in ways other than those available to those dominated solely by statistical analysis and scientific arguments. It is religion’s very “irrationality” – meaning that it is not subject to scientific analysis and classification – that gives religious people the power to think in ways outside and beyond the control of those in power. Somethings, no matter how “scientific” are morally wrong and therefore must never be done and somethings, no matter how “unscientific” are morally just, commanded by God/the Gods, and therefore must be done. This, by its very nature as being an alternative to the justifications of the State, challenges the authority of the State because it is inevitable that there come a time when religious commandments and State demands contradict one another.

When God commands, “Thou shall not steal,” and those in power demand the ability to take as much money as they want from whoever they want without their consent and to beat, cage, or even kill those who refuse this demand – i.e. the power to rob the masses through taxes- who does the faithful obey, God or the State? If he or she is truly faithful to the sovereignty of God then the answer of course is God. This means the disciple of God must oppose the State’s claim to extort monies from the public by force because it is theft . This the State cannot allow because it limits the State, its monetary base, and, as we have discussed thus far, therefore its power. As long as God is real the State cannot have total power. But, thus far, no governments, not even the most religious have been able to eliminate the religious desire in humanity. Therefore the State must either subvert/replace it:

The State has taken the place of God; that is why, seen from this angle, the socialist dictatorships are religions and State slavery is a form of worship. But the religious function cannot be dislocated and falsified in this way without giving rise to secret doubts, which are immediately repressed so as to avoid conflict with the prevailing trend towards mass-mindedness. The result, as always in such cases, is overcompensation in the form of fanaticism, which in its turn is used as a weapon for stamping out the least flicker of opposition. Free opinion is stifled and moral decision ruthlessly suppressed, on the plea that the end justifies the means, even the vilest. The policy of the State is exalted to a creed, the leader or party boss becomes a demigod beyond good and evil, and his votaries are honored as heroes, martyrs, apostles, missionaries. There is only one truth and beside it no other. It is sacrosanct and above criticism. Anyone who thinks differently is a heretic, who, as we know from history, is threatened with all manner of unpleasant things. Only the party boss, who holds the political power in his hands, can interpret the State doctrine authentically, and he does so just as suits him.

^{The Undiscovered Self, Pg. 17}

This is why, whether you are religious or not, you should champion religious freedom and defend religious belief and living according to those beliefs from government regulation. Because the alternative to the religions of the world is not atheism. As Dr. Jung says, the religious impulse cannot be eliminated, only corrupted. An atheistic society doesn’t create a society free of religious devotion. It creates a society of secular materialism that worships the State as God, in deed if not word. Already the secular auto–da–fés have begun and the hunt is on for any apostate or heretic that dares deviate from accepted political norms, a hunt that has no problem destroying the innocent and eating its own. The worship of politicians as Secular Messiahs already exists, especially around the political cults of Presidents and other holders of national leadership. The political parties – Left and Right – already act like religious organizations, different sects of the same faith battling over ideological orthodoxy. The Cult of the State exists in every nation on the planet. Their propaganda machines, their media and school missionaries, are already undermining religion as a whole in order to eliminate the State’s chief rival.

What Can Be Done

Faced with all this it may be feel impossible to do anything. How do you counter such a powerful force of mass-mindedness and control? Even here Medieval II shows us the way.

You quit.

In the game, if you just stop playing, if you refuse to exert power if you refuse to compromise and take part in the operations of the game and the State, then the people revolt, overthrow your armies, and destroy your empire. It starts of slowly at first, but in the end you and your nation disappear entirely as secessionist movements sweep you out of cities, regions, and nations. It starts small but in time comes to encompass all.

This is what we must do, too.

We must exit the system. We really have no choice. Not if we want to maintain our own morality, our own individuality, our own liberty. We do not just have a responsibility to rebel against governments which violate our rights, but, as Jefferson put it, we have a duty to do. In the words of the great William Lloyd Garrison:

Such is man, in every clime—above all compacts, greater than all institutions, sacred against every outrage, priceless, immortal! By this sure test, every institution, every party, every form of government, every kind of religion, is to be tried. God never made a human being either for destruction or degradation. It is plain, therefore, that whatever cannot flourish except at the sacrifice of that being, ought not to exist. Show me the party that can obtain supremacy only by trampling upon human individuality and personal sovereignty, and you will thereby pronounce sentence of death upon it. Show me the government which can be maintained only by destroying the rights of a portion of the people, and you will indicate the duty of openly revolting against it.

The State exists solely through violence and our devotion to these governments despite their brutality and oppression, over everything good and moral is as Garrison put it in 1854, “the latest and the most terrible form of idolatry.” But it need not be that way. We need not be members of the Cult of the State. Nor must we isolated ourselves from the world around us. Let the revolution begin here and now, in your heart and mind. Secession starts at home, with individuals and families. It grows in communities through personal networks. Only through individuality can we overcome mass mindedness, statist indoctrination, and the constant bombardments of propaganda we are constantly exposed to every day. Find what you can do, large or small, and start today to cut ties with the State and its powers. Refuse to obey its unjust laws. Refuse to give it authority in your thoughts, speech, or actions. Do not live in fear. Live free. Show people the jubilation of liberation! As you do so others will be drawn to you, want to know why you have such joy, and you will be ready to explain to them the causes for your happiness. Through education, through joy, through love – this is how we overthrow the State and replace its evil with nothing. This is how we gain freedom for ourselves and our children.

Who knew you could learn so much from a video game?