I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.

the question posed in the title is blatantly rhetorical. rothbard had a disdain for rock music as a whole; it is nigh-impossible that he ever liked hardcore or metal, much less the technical varieties that could be categorized most simply as technical hardcore, technical metalcore, and technical metal. indeed, technical hardcore was in its infancy at the time of his untimely and tragic passing, as were technical metal and myself. however, the mystifying complexity and convoluted-yet-coherent structure of such music is so blindingly exquisite and intriguing, so well-constructed yet emotionally-gripping, that it functions like a psychedelic funhouse mirror to the inner recesses of the psychedelic funhouse mind, cluttered by the daily confusion and chaos of the modern world. perhaps this is music that could comfortably mentally coil in tandem with any epoch of history; complexity is nothing new.

metal such as meshuggah, metalcore such as aliases, hardcore such as botch, and the rest in related polymetric/polyrhythmic elements the technical or “math-” prefix tradition, cross boundaries never thought to be worth experimenting with (as most real innovators do); hence why they follow in the larger tradition of experimental rock, and experimental music as a whole. (here i continue and less pretentiously)

what is life but not a series of experiments? what is it about the mundane that makes you want to grab your ribs and use just the right torque to pull them to their complementary angles? the unexamined life is not worth living, but what if you have already examined the cardboard box you live in called bullshit society and found that corrugated paper sandwiched between other pieces of the same, mulchy, ugly, smelly, but uncorrugated whatever-fucking-paper-it’s-called is nothing of interest as it is? posterboard or some shit?

what do you like about your life? somehow i think that people that are easily fulfilled in the moment by the simplest mainstream attractions such as jay-z, starbucks, survivor, wack preppy douche parties less exciting than your own kickbacks with your friends, tanning beds, and coors lite are missing out on something.

why not try that 9% ABV imperial red ipa? why not just fucking sit inside and read something? why not go beat the hell out of people at a hardcore show? why not get your ass kicked yourself, as you surely will while engaging in such activities? why not skate hills that may kill you with a momentary flick of the ankle and an even-more-momentarily-subsequent crack of the skull, not without practice of course? why not blaze moles until you fall asleep on the couch while listening to the wisdom of roger garrison and the intriguing complexity of his theories behind capital-based macroeconomics? why not get drunk and wrestle some female friends? put simply, why not pull some hair? why not break shit and fuck on the floor? perhaps this sounds boring too?

what is it that you want out of life? sometimes i used to think that people are just stupid and deserve whatever boring fucking life they choose, because they are just born boring and meant to die even more boring, or some shit. perhaps, but perhaps they just never had any impetus to dive into the pitch-black of the unknown? better the devil you know, in most, if not all of our thinking… plenty of people i know used to shelter themselves, some still do, most not even as a matter of upbringing but out of fear of the unknown. what is wrong with the unknown? the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know, but on the bright side, at least your abilities to comprehend those things you realized you don’t know much of anything about get better and better. the unknown is scary, until you realize how much scarier everything you knew before was, if you realize how fucking warped everything is around us…

here’s something that really disgusts me about most people. democracy, the fucking savior-messiah-be-all-end-all that our totalitarian scumbag society worships more than anything, teaches people that they are allowed to dictate what others do with their lives. so of course, it comes as zero surprise that we live in a bland, boring, dumbed-down, borderline-cultureless society; we are all just slaves to the expectations and desires of each other, because we are brainwashed into thinking that it’s the only way society can function without becoming some absurd fantasy like lord of the dumbasses.* oh, middle-aged lady down the street thinks weed makes you go crazy? good thing she checked a box saying that some sadistic fuck in a fancy uniform should come throw you in a cage! of course that fuckin psychotic attitude permeates throughout society, and even more obviously, the repercussions of some fuckin random person hoping a bunch of armed thugs can “fix” society. of course there is a directly correlated social stigma against it, when everybody has a say in the hivemind, even, and usually especially, those without any direct knowledge have the most voice, because they are the most fucking annoying about it! just think of people who want to ban gay marriage and people who want to force it on everyone their government possibly can! just think of chickenhawks and rich socialists that send kids to war and further impoverish the poor! oh yeah, you guys are fucking perfecting humanity!

seriously, what the fuck differentiates the average kid my age from another? different haircut? different skin color? different t-shirt? who gives a shit about any of that? it’s no wonder that we live in a stagnant, brainless, unflavored culture, when whatever tiny spark of innovation comes along is diluted by idiots slurping down mass media faster than their fucking slop they think is healthy because it’s “vegan” or “gluten-free” or some shit. no wonder we have all become some homogeneous blob when everyone is hyperfocused on eliminating difference; to their own absurd specifications, of course. makes me nauseous to hear even the most sexyass girl sing some shitty pop song some shitty corporatist douchebag decided would be ripe for shitty popularity with shitty people. not that i dislike every fucking song on the radio or something, but you get my point… most music that’s cranked out by the industry is chomped down like the wack filler-crap cereal that it is. (oh yeah, that filet mignon with bt went great with those cheerios and 2% milk! just kidding, where are my cognac and american spirits, because i’m getting numb?)

who comes up with this kind of music, except the blandest people in our society? do you really think lil wayne would be enjoyable to hang out with? of course not; if he was even mildly amusing, it would be the money, not the drone being fed by the state’s cronies. the collectivist numbing of all of our senses follows directly from the shitty, sick-puppy, fucked-up pipe dream called democracy…

“democracy! democracy!” the perverted battle cry of every sick degenerate that wants (someone) to go kill people (for them) in order to institute their own perverse pet-project government. what makes our government different from whatever other shitiot rebels in whatever shitty country in the middle east? not much, they are just secular centrist totalitarians, instead of religious centrist totalitarians. and they have popular support as they are “official” or something. think i’m wrong? then why do we have *only* a combination of super-statist neocon shitbags and super-statist socialist fucktards running the place? because anything left unmantled with glory by the ruling (popular) neocons and socialists, and thus unmanaged by the state, is “unofficial” and thus somehow less trustworthy. meanwhile some company in west africa has kept ebola out of its bigass farm, away from all employees, right by the (suspected) origin of the disease, using 4 hazmat suits and a tent, but the u.s. government can’t keep it out of fucking texas? oh yeah, save us dear officials!

look. theft, murder, rape, fraud, and so on, are blatantly immoral. but the state does not exist to prevent those. i mean, maybe nominally at best, but how well does it actually do at it? the real function of the state is to act as a sick, twisted wealth-redistribution and ethics**-enforcement scheme, luring people in with false promises of helping them and keeping society stable. instead, we get a society raised by government, in shitty statists schools, watching shitty statist commercials, listening to shitty statist music, idolizing shitiot statist celebrities and politicians, watching shitty statist “news,” reading shitty statist trash on the internet, and most of all, listening to their shitty state.

no wonder everyone thinks that they have a right to boss others around. and no wonder everyone behaves like we are ants in the proverbial antheap. it’s embedded in our culture, from the way we dress, to the way we eat, to what we smoke and drink, to anything most people blindly do the same way as others, day after day. recall those brainwashing quotes we “learn” from the “great people” in our history? “we have nothing to fear but fear itself” deserves nothing more than my disgust. how about this: “we have all kinds of things to fear, one of them being evil socialist illiterates that will inflate the money supply during a crash, and prolong the depression, which will fucking starve you to death, like thousands of others.”

the further down the rabbit hole, the deeper you see the rot. i’ll explain this further.

there are three kinds of authority that i can think of. well, really two, but one has two different modes. the first kind of “authority” is like someone who is an authority on some topic. like, i could say that i am the leading authority in my preference in socks, or the professor of biology at my school was the authority on genetic mutation in wolf spiders. that’s not authority over someone, in fact, its meaning is more closely related to expert (as nobody has full knowledge, or certainty of the correctness of their knowledge over anyone else’s). the other kind of “authority” is someone who can tell you what to do. now, if the “authority” was granted voluntarily, like the authority you grant a movie theater when buying a ticket to kick you out for being loud and drunk, it seems pretty clear that there’s no problem there. but when someone says they’re going to report you to the “authorities,” well this authority wasn’t freely granted, it’s just imposed, like a king or a slavedriver.

the problem with our society today is that they conflate freely-granted authority with imposed authority. strangely, this is also the problem with leftist anarchists, who sickeningly claim to be against “all” hierarchy, then fight freely-granted authority like the employer-employee relationship while wanting to establish a massive system of imposed authority; the committee-style worker’s democracy is one such system i see a lot of leftist anarchists support that makes me sick to my stomach.

but i digress. why didn’t murray rothbard like metal? the good stuff, anyway? culture. culture, culture, culture. our statist society teaches people to be constantly on the lookout for the boundaries of acceptable tastes and interests (uncoincidentally, just like how economists are often taught to be on the lookout for market-failures). even rothbard, founder of modern notions of anarchocapitalism, was affected by the bland enculturation that pervades society, both propagated by statist attitudes and enforced by the state’s crony-corporate cultural-climate-creators.

i am not pretending like i am absolved of such mistakes… i just hope that we are slowly getting better at avoiding them. some ancaps forget the old-school tradition of “leading by example.” the old-as-fuck-right got it, it’s just a way of teaching people good new heuristics without violence. i mean why not? if it works, copy us, if it doesn’t, well do something else voluntary, and at that point i’ll be down to join your somehow voluntary collectivist gameshow anyway, because by the time we can try full capitalism, the state will be obviously be gone, albeit perhaps impermanently, anyway. then maybe we won’t have to put up with culture-shapers with guns that’s always listening, ostensibly operating at the whim of soccermom chickenhawk complaints, cracking down on dissent like trying to stomp out steaming shit sublimating up through the carpet mats.

seems only fair to argue that we live in a bland society because we live in a collectivist society. maybe that’s why rothbard didn’t like mathcore.

*i call it lord of the dumbasses because only fucking dumbasses wouldn’t work together while stranded on a fucking island

**ethics are whatever the general population thinks is right at the time. morals are static descriptions of right and wrong; be they religious morals, the NAP, Dexter’s “code,” or whatever else