Evil is completely dependent on the good it attempts to destroy. When good discovered fire, invented the wheel, and started planting seeds, evil invented government. Evil produces nothing, it only commands, coerces, enslaves, destroys, and murders. Gigantic tombs loom over Egypt's desert, built by slaves millennia ago, monuments to rulers' vanity. A single farmer working the Nile's alluvial soil produced more than any pharaoh, yet the former had to send a portion of his crop to the latter.

Nothing has changed since then. How do the production and lives of the good become the property of evil? Force, fear, and fraud are the usual answers, but they can't be the entire answer. Rulers and their military and police forces are always vastly outnumbered by the ruled. Revolts have brought down countless governments. Yet, why have most people down through the ages not revolted but endured the force, fear, and fraud? The trick is to get the ruled to assign their right in their own lives to the rulers, acting as the purported agent of a collective.

If the mass of people accept the proposition that there is a cause or causes greater than themselves, the rest is easy. So, find a greater cause—God, country, fighting evil enemies domestic or foreign, fighting a deadly germ, safety, the common good, the public interest, global warming, global cooling, climate change—the list is endless. The people will fight wars, pay taxes, comply with every absurd law and regulation, mask up, lockdown, take deadly vaccines, embrace misery, and line up for the concentration camps. Who am I, they might ask, to question, to object, to fight, to revolt?

They've already answered that question. They've surrendered their lives and souls; they are nobodies. Figuratively and perhaps literally, these corpses will join the stack in the ditch or the ashes in the crematorium. The rulers expertly play their emotions, but what stirs their greatest passion is the occasional odd man or woman out—the ones who refuse to assign their lives to the collective. The nothings burn the somethings at the stake; self-loathing finds its expression in destruction and death. By a wide margin no person or institution has caused more destruction and death than governments.