The Secret - and government
Who isn’t fed up with misgovernment? Who doesn’t feel that government has become way too intrusive in our lives? Who doesn’t feel that our liberties are imperiled by the government’s presumption of competence and its presumption of a right to interfere in more and more areas of private life?
Liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, are equally responsible, although in different areas of life. Wars and spending to prepare for wars — known euphemistically as “defense” spending — historically produce concentration of power and growth of government bureaucracies and the parasites that fatten on them. Subsidies each ostensibly designed to solve a social problem, but each worth money to a particular organized faction of society, also produce concentration of power and growth of government bureaucracies and the parasites that fatten on them. But to understand this is not necessarily to know how to overcome these processes.
If we apply the law of attraction — The Secret — to our individual and collective relations with the government, where do we wind up?
If we concentrate upon corruption, parasites, swollen bureaucracies, government intrusion into areas of life where it is unwanted, running out of control — what do you suppose we will get more of? But then, what can we do?
Let us visualize our society once again living within constitutional restraints, once again living without subsidies, once again supporting small armies with small taxes. There’s a positive vision for you.
Let us visualize society recognizing and solving social problems through increased individual consciousness and increased individual concern, made effective in voluntary association, rather than shucking these problems off to government agencies that are supposedly going to “solve” them but are in fact going to live off them.
To hold a vision of the desired result, of course, is not the same thing as getting from here to there. But after all, it is the essence of The Secret to visualize the desired result; the way that result shows up is not under our control, and doesn’t need to be.