It is among the great mysteries of the world how year after year, decade after decade, century after century, and millennium after millennium, the vast majority of humans continue to have faith in the efficacy and benevolence of the State in general, and the mountebanks and apparatchiks infesting it in particular.

The State is an utterly parasitical institution with an almost perfect historical track record of deceit, oppression, impoverishment, displacement and genocide.

In the 20th century alone, States have murdered some 250 million people, most of them their own tax cattle (a.k.a. "citizens") and destroyed the lives of countless more with wars, pogroms and other atrocities far too numerous to list here.

And yet despite this self-evident and indisputable truth, we still have vast herds not just lining up and voting for their continued oppression and enslavement in the periodic charades called elections, but actually cheer and lionize whichever sleazy mountebank that promises to enrich them at the expense of, or at least gore the ox of, the "other side".

I am seriously starting to wonder if there is some genetic, hard-wired difference between those of us that can see this and those that cannot. Almost like a cognitive sub-species that retains the ability to interbreed.

Given its permanence despite the almost incomprehensible destruction it has wrought, this unshakable faith in the State and the apparently endless cycle of initial euphoria over promised "change" by one charlatan after another, followed inevitably by disappointment and disillusionment until the cycle starts anew, appears to be a permanent part of the human psyche.

This paradigm has been the undoing of every society in history, almost without exception, and the writing is nearly indistinguishable from the wall for our own.

We need a new paradigm.