Power and Impunity

Those acting with impunity are confident that their powers or god-like because they appear so in the human realm. But there are limits to everything in the human realm.

One of the first things we learned about the Internet is that anything sent via email could readily become public and anything created on a computer might be stolen/hacked and distributed.

Recent events suggest that many high-profile players had few concerns about the security of their private communications. Thirty years into the Internet, ignorance can be dismissed as a factor, and so that leaves impunity: there would be no consequences even if their private correspondence became public.

There is power, and then there is impunity. Power has limits; those acting with impunity are confident that their power has elevated them beyond the reach of any authority or adverse consequence, and so they’re free to act with complete impunity.

Which brings us to Smith’s Neofeudalism Principle #1: If the citizenry cannot replace a kleptocratic authoritarian government and/or limit the power of the financial Aristocracy at the ballot box, the nation is a democracy in name only.

A kleptocracy doesn’t just take money; it takes whatever it wants, and with that impunity, it dismantles the foundations of its own power: the legitimacy of the state and the pretense that anything resembling justice is possible is a kleptocracy. With democracy and justice neutered, the hollowness of the entire status quo is revealed.

The impunity of the present era exceeds that of absolute monarchs, who despite their claim to unfettered power still faced the limiting counterweights of a powerful nobility, a merchant class that paid the taxes, a clerisy with both spiritual and material influence and the potential for a revolt of the peasantry that with elite support could transmogrify into a full-blown civil war.

Those acting with impunity now have far more tools of control than the absolute monarchs of old ever had. They can obfuscate their above the law impunity with legal maneuvers, false claims the evidence is fabricated, twisting the narrative in their favor, and by letting those in their grip know that the cost of attempting to limit their lawlessness will be so costly that complicity in the destruction of democracy and justice is the only route available.

The irony here is that their impunity to consequence has its own consequence: the dismantling of the system that protects and empowers them. A state and status quo that has squandered their legitimacy to protect the powerful from consequence loses The Mandate of Heaven: the citizenry, Heaven and Earth all turn against this corrupt regime.

Revelations of impunity are not yet consequential because all the technocratic elite desires is their seat in the casino is left undisturbed so they can continue amassing wealth to their own accounts. Nothing else matters.

Unbeknownst to the speculators, their position atop the wealth-power pyramid is also at risk, for the kleptocracy’s destruction of democracy and justice is also dismantling the foundations of the casino they depend on to increase their wealth.

Those acting with impunity are confident that their powers or god-like because they appear so in the human realm. But there are limits to everything in the human realm. Since the way of the Tao is reversal, extremes of impunity--the ultimate manifestation of fate-tempting hubris--will reverse to extremes of consequence.

Jackson Brown’s 1974 song The Road and the Sky come to mind:

Can you see those dark clouds gathering up ahead?
They’re gonna wash this planet clean like the Bible said
Now you can hold on steady, try to be ready
But everybody’s gonna get wet
Don’t think it won’t happen just because it hasn’t happened yet.