I’m currently reading Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens”, and he goes on a great deal about “imagined orders”. A modern state is an “imagined order” backed by years of precedent and tacitly endorsed by a large number of people (most of whom almost certainly understand only a tiny fragment of whatever it is that they’re endorsing).
I could have a fleeting respect for SovCits if they pointed out that the state is simply a (semi-)consensual legal fiction that has validity only because we choose to believe in it. That’s certainly true. But it misses the point that this legal fiction owns a great many handcuffs and guns and is supported by people willing to wield both. If you wish to replace the prevailing legal fiction with one of your own choosing, you must either find more people willing to back your imagined order, or more guns, or both.
The particular idiocy of SovCits isn’t even that they think they can replace the established imagined order by one of their own invention, one that is uniquely beneficial to them, and which is endorsed only by them and a few of their brain-wormed friends. It’s that they think they can do so by chanting what are in effect incantations, magical strings of nonsense syllables that they believe will cause the servants of the existing order to suddenly change their beliefs and embrace the SovCit’s personal fantasy world. And not only are they trying to work magic, but it’s sympathetic magic. SovCit hocus-pocus mimics the magical incantations that underpin the modern state, rather in the same way that the cargo cults of Melanesia built fake runways and airplanes to try to summon back their sometime US occupiers with their cornucopia of Free Stuff.
There are magical incantations that can overturn imagined orders, but they tend to sound like “¡Viva la revolucion!” or “A bas les aristos!” or even “We the people …” They work by convincing a critical mass of people to reject the current imagined order and embrace a new one. Numbly reciting SovCit cod legalese and declaring that the courtroom flag is the wrong shape is going to do diddly-squat to win anyone over to your cause, and you’re stupid to even try it.
SovCits are Law of Attraction revolutionaries. They don’t want to do the work. They believe that if they clap their hands and say that they believe in fairies, it will change something. Well, guess what, dumbass? Tinkerbell is still dead, and you’re going to jail.
