Published by the Society Ordo Templi Orientis in America
April 8, Anno LXXV, 1978 e.v.
Sol in 18° 2' 24" Aries
Second printing, 1980 e.v.
THELEMIC POLITICAL MORALITY
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
To be a citizen of a capitalistic society means to be the bossman or bosslady of all those who are paid for their work with tax money. This includes all types of public servants - soldiers, policemen and any public officials. It includes from the humblest street-sweeper to the President of the republic.
Your attitude, therefore, towards all those people (as long as they are perforrning the services for which they were hired) must be of a chief towards his or her subordinates.
It is wrong to kowtow to the President of the republic as if he were a symbol of public authority: it is the President who must respect you. When performing his functions, he is your employee.
The army is your employee. lt was collectively contracted to uphold your security, not to undermine it.
The police are your employees. They are paid to defend your privacy and your peace of mind, not to disturb either.
Any public official is your employee. He or she is being paid with your money to serve scrupulously and attentively the interests of you.
To understand this fact, and to behave accordingly, is essential to the good functioning of a true capitalistic democracy.
Don't think it will be easy to behave thus. Because of the psychological conditioning of the slave religions, the attitude of all those employees of yours towards you tends to be exactly the opposite.
By adopting a Thelemic attitude, that is, the attitude of a citizen of a free country, you will provoke the hatred and the spite of the bad soldiers, bad policemen, bad public officials and bad presidents. Nevertheless, you must persist. Do not becorne angry or impatient; but insist, calmly and firmly, in your rights. The Order will help you in all planes in which you have consciousness and volition.
Consider that bad soldiers and bad policemen are consequences, not causes. Also bad presidents. Every nation always has the government it deserves. Tendencies towards dishonesty and disorder will invariably appear whenever the laws by which a society rules itself are bad.
When is a law bad? First, when it runs counter some fundamental aspect of human nature; second, when it is impossible to enforce.
Please notice that Liber OZ declares fully the basic rights of any human being. Any law, of any nation, that offends one of those basic rights is a harmful and sickly statute. Attempts to enforce such laws invariably result in corruption of the enforcers and oppression of the citizens.
The Master Therion said once that free men, faced by an unjust law, have only two alternatives: insurrection or emigration. There is, however, a third alternative: to change the law. The dangers of insurrection consist in that basic modifications in mass behavior must occur slowly: it is necessary to impress section by section of the collective mind. Revolutions are always followed by abuses and even by madness.
One thing that every citizen of a free country must under- stand above all eise is that he - or she - is the owner of the country. Presidents, public officials, security and law enforcement organizations and any other "authorities" are not really authorities at all. The authority, in their Aggregate, are the citizens, of which all those others are nothing but the servants - and frequently bad servants.
The individual citizen is not obligated towards the country: it is the country that is obligated towards the citizen. Therefore if the laws of the country offend the basic and legitimate rights of the citizen, such as they are expressed in Liber OZ, it is the laws that must be changed, not the citizen who must be punished!
Each citizen must consider himself or herself the guardian or tutor of the nation at all times. lt is not the government of a free country that has the right to feel paternalistic towards the citizens: it is the citizens who have the right to feel paternalistic or maternalistic towards the government.
Ponder, for instance, the way the police often functions: it kills citizens, under the pretext that they are criminals. But while it has not been proved, before a court of law constituted according to the will of the citizens, that one arnong these citizens offended the basic rights of the human being, as these are defined in Liber OZ, thus losing the basic right of enjoying those other ones, that citizen remains one of the owners of the nation, and a policeman who raises his hand against him or her is guilty of insurrection.
The average citizen has full right, if he or she so will, to kill a thief or a murderer. But a policeman is not an average citizen: because of his peculiar position as an employee of the citizenry, he must consider the life of any person as sacred as long as this person has not been deprived of rights by a tribunal of fellow-citizens; and should sacrifice his own life, if need be, to preserve the life even of a suspect. In what concerns his fellow-citizens, the contractual obligations of a policeman or a soldier dernand that he should die, if necessary; and never kill.
The policeman or the soldier is doubly obligated towards a common citizen, no matter how poor or low in status: first because a civilian is a fellow-citizen; and second, because a civilian is a boss.
In the Thelemic concept of political morality, therefore, it is absolutely needful that citizens stop letting themselves be impressed or intimidated by politicians, soldiers, public officials, policemen and such other frequently overpaid employees. lt is not we who must respect those people. It is they who must respect us.
In what concerns the participation of citizens, with risk to their bodily integrity, in activities decreed by governments - for instance wars - it must be clearly understood that the common civilian has not the slightest obligation to let himself or herself die for the "fatherland" - this archaic emotional hook through which all rulers have, throughout the centuries, taken advantage of the good faith and the good will of their bosses - that is, the "ruled". Blind oaths of fidelity to a flag, or to any community, are immoral. Every human being has, at any time, the right of decision over his or her most precious gift: his or her own life. A professional soldier must fight, or surrender his position if he dare not fight; but the common citizen is under no obligation to enlist unless he or she approves, of full consciousness, the acts of hostility his or her government proposes against other human beings. Nor has any government any right to punish those citizens who refuse, either for moral reasons or out of cowardice, to participate in a war. lt is well that the draft should reach all - how can any citizen know beforehand that he or she would not be willing to fight for the country? All citizens, thus, should become members of the reserve forces of their nation; but always with the understanding that they will not be compelled by any government to fight against their will.
For this very same reason, it is vital to stop any governmental bodies from falsifying national history in order to pervert through propaganda the emotional balance of their current bosses - the adult citizenry - and their future bosses, that is, the sons and daughters of the citizenry. The "fatherland" must never be presented as an abstraction, ethical or philosophical: it must be revealed as the socio-economic reality it actually is, its roots deep in an invariably disreputable past - were not all nations of the earth come from the Aeon of Osiris! We would think utmost folly on the part of a patient undergoing analysis to try to deceive himself or herself as to the origin of his or her inhibitions and complexes. Indeed, we know that the psychoanalyst's function is to stop a client's self-deception as to his or her motivations. Nevertheless, it is still customary to allow in the study of the "history of our country", that demagogues and false scholars sweep the dirt of which we are made underneath the carpet of our prejudices, like slovenly householders pretending to clean their premises!
How can we be certain of our true national aspirations if we lack an ample and objective view of our cultural roots, dark as these may be? Are we ashamed of our past? This is the doom of any human who aspires to progress and evolution, and it will not be by hiding from us our historical sores that demagogues will avoid their repetition.
We should therefore repeal, with the greatest indignation, any attempt at presenting to us the history of our nation "expurgated" of crimes, outrages and false ambitions: we must demand that our children be allowed to learn the errors of their ancestors, and the motives behind these errors. As a sage well said, those who do not remember the mistakes of the past are condemned to repeat the same mistakes in the future.
Before closing this short tract we should mention the subject of the punishment of crimes against the nation. When a citizen kills another, this is a dealing between two individuals: it does not deserve the attention of the community except in terms of prophylaxis or economic compensation. To jail an assassin is a double waste: the assassin has already subtracted a citizen from the common effort; as if this were not enough, the community subtracts another citizen from this effort, and pays for his or her support with public money, thus putting an onus on all because of the mistake of one. Assassins should be made responsible for the dependants of those they subtracted from the social stream. Should they prove incapable of handling the added burden, they should be kept under observation, but in activity; and should they repeat their gesture, thus burdening common welfare even further, then they should be permanently eliminated, as disturbers of the public weal.
An assassin, as we have said, harms an individual, and only indirectly harms the nation; but the public servant of whatever echelon who accepts bribes or subtracts money from the public till does direct harm to the nation as a whole. A dishonest politician or a corrupt public official are much more harmful to the "fatherland" than an assassin, a thief or a robber who is a common citizen. lt is due to the venality of such dishonest employees that pollution and inflation infest a country, and - worse! - the attitude that the government is the boss of the people, rather than its bonded servant, has been perpetuated throughout the centuries.
When a Persian king decided to invade ancient Grecce, he commanded his engineers to build a bridge over the sea; the bridge fell at the first storm, and the king had the engineers publicly executed. The bridge built by the next batch of engineers survived the crossing of his entire army. Those who remember the wise moves of the past are able to emulate those moves, both in the present and in the future.
Love is the law, love under will.