Shakespeare on Open-eyed Conspiracy

While you here do snoring lie, Open-eyed conspiracy His time doth take. If of life you keep a care, Shake off slumber, and beware: Awake, awake!”“While you here do snoring lie,
Open-eyed conspiracy
His time doth take.
If of life you keep a care,
Shake off slumber, and beware:
Awake, awake!”

(Tempest, act 2, sc. 2)

Comment.  It is universal knowledge that, in the 1600, the Vatican Inquisition condemned Galileo for stating that the earth goes around the sun rather than vice versa. Which, if only earth and sun had been involved, may have been debatable. In the realm of relative motion in space, who can positively say who runs around whom?

The problem worsened in Pisa where, by improving the design of a telescope, Galileo discovered that Jupiter had satellites. This was contrary to all reasonable biblical tenets and the theological intelligentsia was understandably in a quandary. Then inspiration struck the bishop of Pisa. He issued a pastoral, that is, a circular letter to be distributed in the parishes. The pastoral said that it was sinful to look through a telescope because it showed objects that didn’t exist.

A similar inspiration must have led the US High Defense authority to black-out the web-site of “The Guardian” across the Army. The Guardian, of course, is the newspaper that published Edward Snowden’s account of the worldwide spying by the US government.

And it has been equally declared sinful (that is, illegal) to download on an Army computer information that was once secret but now public.

Clearly, there are two governments at work in the US of A and the same structure is progressively extended worldwide. One is the official government, that relies on the intoxication of fanaticism, deceit and dissimulation to carry out its objectives – namely, the accumulation of  wealth and power into an ever restricted circle of beneficiaries.

This builds on a logical assumption –  the more restricted the circle, the greater will be the circle’s interest to defend the system. The other, the unofficial government (the majority) is ruled by a generalized principle of humanity.

To ensure that the majority remains disorganized while preserving the bonds of allegiance to the official government, the latter creates ever larger structures to deceive the credulity and affect the senses of mankind.

And… just in case, the ingenious system of knowing everything about everybody enables the official government to kill in utero any movement, idea (or person, physically) that may pose a threat to the structure.

Better to quell the stream before it swells into a torrent. Never mind that the burgeoning use of secrecy confesses the restricted circle’s own fears. Who knows? The dark cloud of contempt and resentment, gathering outside the official government, may burst into thunder. It is ever uncertain at what point the enmity of the largest class of citizens will be absolved from the duty of allegiance to an entity which is said to comprise both.

Consequently, only complete control of everything and everyone will provide the final solution of security. This, in the end, is the meaning of the National Security Organization’s universal control scheme for which language still lacks descriptive adjectives.

And only lingering superstition maintains extant, in some, the belief that the official government gives a damn about the security of anybody but itself.

Whether the other majority unofficial government will “shake off slumber and beware” – or, for that matter, awake to events before it is too late, not even a Nobel Prize in Sociology could say.

In the play. The spirit Ariel sings a tune with warning lyrics in the ear of the sleeping Gonzalo.

 

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