Hello students, welcome back. Education is power, and therefore, you are powerful. But there are more effective ways of achieving power than going to school, like say, going to war.
You can do it in your community by demonizing an adversary, say, the homeless, and exaggerating this threat, thereby rallying your family and neighbors under the weight of fear. The fear is, of course, that someone is threatening your way of life. The reality, all too often, is that the basis and function of fear has little to do with real threat.
Communities are small, however, and their power is limited. Take it to the city level, and the sky opens. All sorts of things appear to threaten your way of life, like vandalism, burglary, vagrancy, violent crime, demographic shifts, economic fluctuations, water shortage and the energy problem. All of these can be marketed in your campaign for power, especially those that evoke an immediate fear, like crime.
Now, if you exaggerate this crime and convince enough people that danger lurks everywhere and must be combated with an iron fist, they might just concede to you a larger, better-equipped police force. This will serve to bring you greater revenues, enhancing your power.
Then, the trick is to let simmer the sense of insecurity, which legitimates the existence of more police, while showing the public how effective the force is simply by making more arrests and crackdowns.
Treat the symptoms of societal breakdown, for they will feed you, perpetually.
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Here your power is still limited, so you may want to go national. While before you had only domestic threats, now you can extend your threats across political borders. Beyond the horizon lies evil galore that can be transformed, with a little effort, into unprecedented support for your own power game.
This omnipresent evil is the secret ingredient of the modern nation state, which debatably is the apex of political power to this age.
Our togetherness as nationals is not so much about us being similar, but about them being different - and evil.
America became a strong state thanks in part to the British becoming evil. In Mexico, as well as most other Latin American countries, the Spanish were evil. For Japan, it was the white man. For China, it was the Japanese. India had the same evil enemy we had nearly two centuries earlier. All of these evils helped weak governments rally up strong political support, which allowed the governments and states to consolidate and expand their power.
Ostensibly, this type of political development has always been propelled by a sense of fear and injustice. Often these feelings were well justified, but they were most often exaggerated and rarely did they resolve themselves through state building.
When you have finally achieved this power of state leader, you will be confronted with two main problems.
First, you will find that without a constant and immediate external threat, your people will forget about their nationality, and therefore care less about you as their leader.
Second, you will face great competition from others who want to be in your shoes.
The quick solution to this is to create a war, doing precisely what you did with the criminals at the city level, but with greater severity.
Take a lesson from Ariel Sharon in Israel or any George Bush: War is the cure to all your unpopularity. War is the milk for the bones of the state. War is the blinder on the eyes of your critics. War is the justification for anything you want to do. War is a break from the past and a bold new jump into providence, prosperity, power and peace for those who rest in it.
All you need is someone to play the bad guy.
OK, students, if you want power, here's my advice: Stop studying and start making some enemies. Success is just a war away!
by Mike Wolff
Daily Lobo Columnist
Comments and questions can be sent to Mike Wolff at mudrat@unm.edu.
