The Demise of the Social Contract: Advocating a Return to Our Roots

When the Social Contract is no longer followed by both parties, it most be discarded completely

Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash

We are living in the most disgusting time in history. I know every generation says that. But hindsight and our annals of history prove, without a doubt, that this is a fact. We are living in the time of beasts and monsters.

Don’t take my word for it. Just look at the genocidal maniacs ruling us. Not localised, regional genocide; the genocide of mad kings and tyrannical rulers. No, fully state-sponsored, ‘democratic’ genocide, pushed by the entire Western World.

The Western World positions itself as a bastion and defender of global human rights governed by the 'will of the people,' all the while banning the people from protesting against the killing of innocents, the waving of flags and for freedom of speech. The gaslighting is next level in its sadism.

Just the other week, Anthony Blinken, another routine American warmonger, said “far too many Palestinians” are being killed by Israel. Of course, he doesn’t tell Israel that they are openly genocidal and the comment is only the softest of advice. The death toll is over 20,000. Like Vlad the Impaler, who's legend was to impale his victims on stakes by the hundreds, then dip his bread into their blood until satiated, even Blinken is getting a little bit full now.

Only monsters bomb hospitals and starve kids.

Only monsters turn off electricity and withhold water to over 2 million people.

Only monsters sniper patients through hospital windows.

Only monsters keep a whole civilian population in a densely populated strip of land without escape, and kill them like fish in a barrel, which is nothing new for the Israeli state.

One thing that has become blatantly evident as we watch the genocide unfolding from the safety of our homes, is that the tide of public opinion has finally turned. Technology ethnically cleanses at lightning speed: it also sends the images of the bodies of that genocide around the world at the same lightning speed.

What is also blatantly evident is that though millions upon millions of us raise with one voice the calls for ceasefire and peace, that voice is utterly ignored by our democratically elected leaders.

In short, we are utterly powerless to stop our leaders from continuing the complete destruction of Gaza and its brutal ethnic cleansing.

How can it be that millions of us march every week, protest, picket, sit-in, disrupt, discuss, debate and educate, yet are unable to make our ostensibly democratic leaders take the action that the majority of us want and call for the end of a genocide?

The reason why is actually very simple, yet we never think about it. We are so indoctrinated and brainwashed by the systems and institutions of our countries that we don't for a second sit down and just think about the fundamental of existential questions: who are we, where are we, and how did we get here?

Who are we?

The beginning of human history is simple.

There was a planet called Earth and we human beings lived upon it. We travelled where we wanted and provided for ourselves from the earth what we needed whenever we needed it. We all got the fresh air we needed, hunted and foraged for food, sheltered where we could, survived and lived. There was no such thing as private land ownership and claiming swathes of land which did not provide anything useful past our survival needs. And the whole of the earth flourished under our feet.

Human beings as a majority are not rapacious creatures. However, a minority of homo sapiens proved that they were. As such, these people simply went to a portion of land and its accompanying resources and claimed it to be theirs. They kept hold of this land through violence and the threat of it; if you came to close to their lands, they'd hit you or get a family member to. This system developed into tribalism; lands declared to belong to what amounted to extended families. Monarchy is simply an even more recent evolution of the system. All had two fundamental elements in common:

1. Each declared land to be theirs - and attempted to claim more

2. All used violence and the threat of violence for their claims

The rapaciousness of these minorities ironically led to constant wars for territory, preventing a single entity dominating the entire Earth. Consequently, states were created, their borders flexible throughout history, as the rapacious fought the rapacious.

The other element of their psychology was a distinct lack of empathy. The golden rule of 'treat others as you would like others to treat you' simply did not feature in their psyches.

As such, not only did they take the land, but they ordered people on ‘their’ land to pay for the privilege of being on it, and provide these rulers with the toils of their labour, also known as taxation.

This meant that what was originally needed for basic survival now became a greater burden. Rather than providing just for their own survival and that of their families, what an individual now needed to survive was: what they needed for their own survival in addition to whatever the monarch wanted, which was usually far greater than what the individual themselves needed. Should they have refused of course, violence would have been used to enforce.

Thus, toiling for someone else, whilst only a portion of the benefit of that toil being for oneself became the norm. Stating this in another way, though the earth’s resources remained the same, it became harder for an individual to live upon it because of the external burden of having to pay someone else by force.

This is no different to the present situation. The “cost of living crisis” means that people who were surviving on the same resources they had prior, are finding those exact same resources are not enough because the people who have taken land and its resources are increasing their rates. Most simply put is that they require more of our toil and work to satisfy their greed, leaving less of our resources in the pot for ourselves for even basic survival. Failure to succumb to this ends again in force, which is another word for violence. For example, if you fail to pay your bills on time, your belongings can be taken by force, as can your home. If you cannot afford your taxes, you can be arrested by force, placed in jail and subject to the court system. The fear of all of this has us succumbing to our own misery.

Such a draconian system held the risk that it would rile people and it often did. At these points, some rulers adopted forced systems of governance such as tyranny and totalitarianism. However, these are very inefficient models, extremely costly, risky to the leadership and thus are always temporary. The fact is in these circumstances, the violence of the rulers could not meet the resistance of the mass population and thus concessions had to be thought up. One of these was the era we are currently in, the era of democracy.

Democracy

Democracy is not new. It existed even in the ancient Greek and Roman times, though even then it was faux. It only allowed certain people to vote while preventing the vast majority from taking part. The game was rigged from the beginning. With so few allowed to participate and benefit, corruption ran wild and the extreme avarice of the minority simply continued. To gain power over others they would use every tool in their arsenal to influence the elections: blackmail, nepotism, bribery, everything unworthy of a free and fair election. People bought power and power bought people – and secret handshakes and deals dictated everything.

In those days such practice was called corruption. These days it is called lobbying.

The democracy of today is like democracy of the past: fake. The system still heavily relies on power and influence, the lexicon has simply changed. The only people who can ever run for power are those who have power, lobbying and influence behind them, that is those with the most money. As such, only the most easily corruptible of human beings can ever stand for office. If you cannot be ‘lobbied’, you cannot be leader.

The game is rigged in such a way that normal, non-avaricious human-beings are in fact prohibited from running. There is also the fact that the limits of who can run democratically have severely reduced diversity of thought. For example, in the US only two viable parties really exist and as only the corruptible can run, these two parties by definition will not be significantly different. If you only have a choice of two and they are are identical in their fundamental doctrine, extreme avarice, which in today’s lexicon translates into ‘neoliberalism,’ then democracy is no more than a farce.

Status Quo

The way all these power structures work is based on two things:

1. The first is what we discussed before; the threat of violence and violence towards those who do not conform.

2. The second is the attempt to prevent the need for violence without giving up significant amounts of power. During the time of European monarchy, this was created by the establishment of the aristocracy, the equivalent today being the middle class.

The idea of the aristocracy was to create a barrier between those paying for the Monarch and the Monarch himself. This had two main purposes. The first was that it reduced the number of people who would revolt against the Monarch by buying their loyalty and ensuring they have comfortable lives. The second was that it created a class to control this peasant class, diverting any direct hostility towards the aristocracy rather than the Monarch, while still collecting tax for the Monarch via the aristocratic middle man. The devil was no longer the King, but his aristocratic minions who came by every month for their fees.

The whole status quo was thus created and it exists in exactly the same way today. If the leadership of the day keeps the middle classes happy enough, they will not revolt and they will be able to continue to subjugate the new peasants, that is the working class. The middle classes are their landlords, employers and direct exploiters, while siphoning off some of the payment of their labour to pay the state's employee tax requirements.

It is only when the middle classes become unhappy in some way, and that always means a diminishing in their comfort, that the leadership will make some concessions. Revolting working classes are only a problem to the ruler because they directly annoy the middle classes and it is the middle classes who largely control the ballot. Without the complaints of the middle classes, the working classes are usually simply ignored and it takes a huge amount of effort for them to receive any amount of concessions, in the form of systematic and prolonged campaigns.

In short, in human history, there is no difference between then and now. Just as the past, we still have a state who uses force and its threat to subjugate its own citizens in various ways. The middle classes are kept generally happy and in comfort, and scant regard is paid to the workers whose toil and labour is used to prop up the top. In practical terms, this makes both revolt and revolution difficult. In psychological terms, it creates apathy to leadership. As long as the status quo keeps ticking along and never changes, why hope for anything different?

The Social Contract

Every system of non-forced governance on Earth exists on the premise of what is known as the social contract. The social contact is fundamentally this: if the population receive a benefit from a leader, they will agree to give up some of their rights to allow that leader to rule. This includes their right to roam the earth freely, hunt, forage and find shelter freely. The leader gets the right to rule via a set of laws they enact.

However, if those laws do not serve the people, the people have the right to withdraw consent and simply not follow those laws. The factuality reality is, if the majority of people do not want to follow a law and do not follow the law en masse, that law cannot work.

The other factuality is due to the size of state populations, even with force behind state leadership, there is simply not enough manpower to subjugate a whole population; though the leadership will always initially try.

As such, should a population simply decide not to follow the laws, the social contract is broken and those laws simply cannot be enforced: they are non-laws. However, here is where the problem lies:

We are so brainwashed by our state institutions and the phoney democracies ruling us that we have forgotten that they only do so with our consent. We forget that we can withdraw that consent.

We have forgotten the basic, objective fact that was addressed at the very beginning: the earth was free for all of us: it belonged equally for us to eat, travel and survive on. Stealing of the land is theft of what belonged equally to all of us.

We have forgotten that the earth was one land and it is only these rulers of all evolutions that scribble on maps and create states. We have forgotten that it is only these artificial lines drawn on maps, fortified with walls, backed by the threat of force that prevents us living as free human beings.

The other factual reality we have forgotten is that a contract can only exist between two parties. A contract means that both parties must follow the terms of the agreement. The social contract agreement of our modern democracies is simply this: if as an individual you wish to lead, then you must enact laws which are beneficial to all the population and all those laws must be obeyed by everyone indiscriminately for the betterment of all.

However, what is increasingly happening in Western democratic states is that leaders simply refuse to follow their end of the bargain. Not only do they not obey the same laws as everyone else, they enact laws which are not for the benefit of the population but which serve to allow them to continue to breach the terms of the social contract whilst simultaneously preventing their populations from being able to complain about it or gain any recourse or penalties. As such, democratic leaders find themselves being tried for corruption and breaking their own enacted laws. There has also thus been a huge and growing attack in all Western democracies on the right to protest (i.e. to complain), the right to bring the government to court (such as attacks on judicial review by the UK government) and on the impartiality of the courts; the system ostensibly in place to govern the running of the social contract.

These leaders act with seeming impunity. And they do this because of the simple fact that the people have forgotten they only rule by consent and that a social contract is in place. A such it is worth repeating once again:

We are so brainwashed by our state institutions and the phoney democracies ruling us that we have forgotten that they only do so with our consent. We forget that we can withdraw that consent.

It is indisputable that if you had a contract which existed in any other scenario, should that contract had been breached by the other party, you would not fulfil your part. For example, you would not pay for a washing machine that did not arrive. You would not pay for a broken car. If you pay a plumber to fix the toilet and it still leaks three weeks later, you would take the person to court for breach of contract and a refund.

However, our democratic leaders are actively trying to prevent us exercising our right to enforce the social contract, making it a one-sided contract. All the burden is upon us, and all the benefit is for them. Should we not obey, we will be met with police and civil legal action. Should they not obey, tough. Nothing can be done and they will arrest us for complaining. It is unjust and inequitable if there is no recourse for a contract to be enforced or for the defaulting party to be penalised.

It is clear that the social contract is not working. It has been violated by our leaders beyond belief and are we are the suckers holding it up while the ones at the top act criminally and continue to exploit us.

The only way out of this continued contractual breach in the short term is to discard the contract and to remove those who have breached it. However, it also requires a huge rethink. As we have seen, this social contract has been so easily breached, ignored and exploited in numerous democratic states. It is clear evidence of the fact that our current version of democracy is so easily corruptible that it cannot ever be trusted to uphold a social contract again.

We need a complete destruction of a system that is so malleable and so corruptible.

We need a revolution.