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Notes -
Is it though?
Sounds a lot like hubris to me. All men must serve, even a King. There are no rights nor privileges without responsibilities.
That's the "obvious rejoinder". But I don't claim the statement is true, only that those who seek dominance despite their dominance producing not great works but misery believe it; I'm comparing them to Satan after all.
Except for the part where "To serve in Hell" is a choice one makes.
When the evil people who seek dominance achieve it in the place you must serve, your service is now a choice they made. You have other choices; you can rebel and die. You can attempt to withdraw from the society they control entirely and most likely die (even if they don't send anyone to kill you). But no good ones.
As @ControlsFreak observes down-thread
If you would prefer to "serve in Hell" rather than "rebel" or "withdraw" that is wholly on you. Once again, are you not the captain of your soul?
If I rebel I die. Perhaps slowly, perhaps quickly, depend on how I do it. If I withdraw -- that is, I refuse to participate in the society they control -- I die miserably, slowly, and alone. As you yourself pointed out, all men must serve. Few get a choice in who they serve.
If you don't rebel you die. Death is one of the few absolute certainties in life. You're also wrong about not having a choice, we all have a choice in who we serve.
So... when are we all Leroy Jenkinsing into the White House?
That's not how it will go.
There's still varieties of rebellion available. Some of those require more patience, some less. They vary in the likely degree of horror involved, and the slow ways tend to be the least horrible.
The goal for Reds ought to be an explicit, effective rejection of federal authority, and the dismantling of Progressive institutions. You don't need to trespass on the White House lawn to do that. Abott is working on it with his actions on the border. The avant-garde of the gun culture is working on it by coordinating contempt for federal firearms law. Ordinary people are doing it when they stop trusting the media and academia, when they cultivate a memory of actual history and deep skepticism of the dominant narrative. All of this establishes a trajectory toward the present system suffering a crisis of legitimacy, which at least potentially might allow something better without huge piles of skulls.
On the other hand, mass bloodshed still has a non-trivial chance of occurring. The largest barriers preventing it are probably the innate virtue of Americans, the lack of desire to seriously hurt members of the outgroup, the memes available for how to inflict harm, and the technology available to lower the barrier of entry to enacting those memes. Of these factors, the innate virtue and lack of desire seem clearly in decline, and the technology is rapidly advancing. What we have is an overhang, a large and growing mass of potential social energy, held in place primarily by memetic inertia. That inertia will not hold forever, and when it gives, a lot of people will probably experience abrupt and significant changes of material circumstance.
People dissatisfied with the current system tend to want to strive to alter it. Many of them fear a stable victory by their enemies, perceive implacable hostility from across the tribal divide, and feel the urge to fight. They feel that if something is not done, horrors will result. It seems to me that they have things almost exactly backward. The problem facing us is not how to prevent a stable dominance by our enemies, but rather how to prevent the destruction of all stability for the foreseeable future.
What you are living through, right now, is the Belle Epoque. It is not going to last forever, so you should enjoy it while you can.
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