Maintaining the facade: a general strategy for relatively nonviolent balkanization

Quick rehash: The basic goal of this blueprint is to outline how to direct the libidos of the various influential groups like a controlled burn. This has three basic parts: inflaming desired levels and areas of libido, suppressing undesired expressions of libido, and pre-arranging the desired course of the burn. These battles are not won in the streets or the woods, but rather at the dinner table. And this is what is to be expected in a culture/civil war. To defeat a woman, you must think like a woman.

In the most general sense, the best strategy is to pay lip service to the union while mutually reneging from all commitments. This allows Ego preservation while allowing the Id to develop new ways of doing things. For example, if the state of Michigan were controlled at the legislative level by secret secessionists they would promise to pay federal taxes but always fail to deliver. Then the federal government could retaliate by failing to deliver services promised for those taxes. A good example would be funding for highways, because this is the traditional carrot/stick used by the federal government to keep states in line.

Nobody wants to be the first to secede because that is a direct challenge to the Ego and would provoke immediate suppression. Instead, a state on the verge of secession ought to gradually renege on more and more of its responsibilities and blame this on the incompetence of private contractors. This externalizes blame from all parties onto shell road maintenance corporations whose names can be changed every other year. Nobody needs to get hurt because the corporate abstraction is sacrificed to appease the outraged. Then it just becomes “a thing” that “everybody knows” that Michigan never pays its taxes, like California.

In the meantime, the state has to cobble together the habit of maintaining roads locally, and the pretense of the union is maintained. Do that for a few years and it just becomes a ritual, and if necessary the gap in services could be made up by diverting the funds. This must all be done under the pretense of maintaining the old status quo. So Alpha males can get together in emergency committees and bang on the table for emphasis (“Commitments must be kept!”). But because the elites on both sides secretly crave freedom from each other’s company, no one will feel the driving need to follow through.

I’ll repeat what they say in the corporate world: you may be forgiven for being wrong, but you’ll never be forgiven for being right. The reason I bring up that aphorism is because the reason a prophet is never accepted in his hometown, and the reason secession is always resisted by TPTB, is that the worst possibility is that the state is operating by different rules SUCCESSFULLY. This causes Ego death in the people invested in the old rules. It’s a slap in the face and a punch in the gut to not only be told “you’re wrong” but then have this demonstrated by a superior method achieving its predicted results. The typical result is therefore outrage, which is exactly what a relatively peaceful strategy aims to avoid.

So the winning strategy is to slowly make inroads persuading the Id (which, I’m predicting, wants to be convinced of balkanization) while paying a stream of assurances to the Ego. And, if the Id is convinced it will be easier to adopt the new way of thinking than to fight it, the outrage will be followed by a period of energy-conserving depression as it adapts its cognitive structures. Eventually, a spark will cause one of the states to take a chance and secede for real. This will provoke an outraged backlash from the federal government, and immediate attempts to suppress it. This impulsive state will probably get fucked in the ass.

But the others will take the opportunity to jump ship immediately afterward, and the federal government likely won’t have the resources to take them all down. At this time, the informal road maintenance structures will become codified as the new formal structures.

There are a lot of variables in this artificially tidy little plan, so it would be good to give the whole thing the actuarial treatment. That is, if anybody with real social influence were to take this plan and run with parts of it.

One more of these posts coming.