A State of Exception

Government's ability to transcend the rule of law in the name of the public good.

A state of exception is a concept introduced in the 1920s by the German philosopher and jurist Carl Schmitt, similar to a state of emergency (martial law) but based in the sovereign's ability to transcend the rule of law in the name of the public good. -Wiki

The concept of a forever state of emergency is one that has been refined over the 20th century. A state of exception may be just one area of public good within a government or it can define an entire governing structure. There are examples of both in modern history.

In Giorgio Agamben’s book on the concept of a State of Exception, Agamben discusses how the “state of exception” can become extended over long periods of time to control populations. His examples include how the United States detained and treated prisoners captured during the "war on terror", and how Hitler used a state of exemption to maintain control over the German government and it peoples beginning early in the 1930s.

During much of his 81 years of life, Georgio Agamben was considered the darling of the left in Europe. His scholarly works were well received and he was blessed with great accolades.

Then came the year 2020 and COVID-19. This is when Agamben turned his ideas about the state of exemption onto the COVIDcrisis and with that, became the enemy of both academia and the state. He had begun writing a blog, which was “removed” by the heavy hand of authorities, so he then morphed this block of writing into the following book, published in 2021.

Agaben argues that a state of exemption can be either grounded upon independent sources of law or featured as external to the set of laws governing a country. An example of an independent source of law might be a UN treaty or agreement, such as Agenda 2030 or a World Health Organization edict, for example via the International Health Regulations (IHRs). These could and (previously) even have absolutely come to usurp the rule of law of a constitutional republic grounded in democratic principles.

The administrative state suspending law and then making up their rules and regulations during COVID would be an example of a state of exemption, which operated outside of the set of laws governing the country.

‘The dominant powers of today have decided to pitilessly abandon the paradigm of bourgeois democracy – with its rights, its parliaments, and its constitutions – and replace it with new apparatuses whose contours we can barely glimpse.’

Agamben writes that, throughout the western world, the biosecurity state has become the preferred method for control of citizens and populations via imposition of a state of exception.

We can use the term ‘biosecurity’ to describe the government apparatus that consists of this new religion of health, conjoined with the state power and its state of exception—an apparatus that is probably the most efficient of its kind that Western history has ever known.

Experience has in fact shown that, once a threat to health is in place, people are willing to accept limitations on their freedom that they would never theretofore have considered enduring—not even during the two world wars, nor under totalitarian dictatorships. -Agamben, Giorgio. Where Are We Now? (p. 5 - Kindle).

Agamben optimistically argues that the legitimate power derived from national sovereignty is dying. That the grasping for totalitarian control via the state of exemption (“technological-sanitationist despotism”) cannot be sustained. Because people eventually see through the facade.

The dissemination of the sanitation terror needed an acquiescent and undivided media to produce a consensus, something that will prove difficult to preserve. The medical religion, like every religion, has its heretics and dissenters, and respected voices coming from many different directions have contested the actuality and gravity of the epidemic—neither of which can be sustained indefinitely through the daily diffusion of numbers that lack scientific consistency. The first to realise this were probably the dominant powers, who would never have resorted to such extreme and inhuman apparatuses had they not been scared by the reality of their own erosion.

-Agamben, Giorgio. Where Are We Now? (pp. 6-7), Kindle Edition.

The biosecurity state’s use of censorship and digitized isolationism, that is control of the digitized public square, is a new phenomena. New strategies, such as lock-downs, social distancing, and masking have been used to extend the state of exemption. Keeping people isolated and on the sanitized net, rather than talking with each other, was planned to exert control and keep people compliant.

Thus, new forms of resistance will be necessary to combat these new totalitarian tactics. The use of fifth generation warfare techniques to combat the imperial state of exemption is one such tool. The question is, will this soon turn into a non-kinetic civil war, as the administrative state refuses to let go of their new found powers? A war that must be fought to maintain our freedoms?

Agamben believes that something better will rise from the ashes of these failed states as people become aware what has been done to them.

…the powers that seek to run the world must always resort to war, whether that be a real war or a carefully constructed one. And, since in the state of peace life tends to elude any historical dimension, it should not surprise us that governments now endlessly reiterate that the war against the virus marks the start of a new historical era in which nothing will ever be the same again. And among those who willingly blindfold themselves in order not to see the unfreedom into which they have deteriorated, many accept this claim because they are convinced, not without a degree of self-aggrandisement, that they are entering into a new era after almost seventy years of peaceful (ahistorical) life. Even though, as is already more than evident, this will be an era of servitude and sacrifices in which everything that makes life worth living will have to be subjected to mortifications and restrictions, they accept subjugation with pleasure, since they foolishly believe that they have found for their lives a meaning that they had, without noticing it, lost during the peace.

It is possible, however, that the war against the virus—which seemed an ideal apparatus that governments could administer and direct according to their own needs much more easily than they could a real war—will, like every other war, end up getting out of hand. And perhaps only then, if it is not too late, men will look again for that ungovernable peace that they have so rashly abandoned. -Agamben, Giorgio. Where Are We Now? (p. 89). ERIS. Kindle Edition.

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During the past century, governments have learned to use the state of exemption to acclimatize people that a state of emergency is a normal condition for life. The biosecurity state has become normalized. Other epidemics, even pandemics during the 20th century were not declared as a state of emergency whereby entire nations, even the world was to be locked down for extended periods of time. This is a new form of totalitarianism. And yes, locking down entire populations, vaccine passports, social distancing, mandates, masking, etc. are tools of the totalitarians.

‘The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power – pure power.’

‘Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.’

George Orwell, 1984

We have now become accustomed to living under a state of emergency, a state of exception - one in which the administrative state via a generalized executive order has a permanent role in the control of people and their lives. We are not a free society if we must live in a permanent state of emergency.

‘What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself; who gives your arguments a fair hearing and simply persists in his lunacy?’

‘Reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else.’

George Orwell, 1984

Our nation is sacrificing freedom to bureaucrats posing as false gods on an altar of scientism and security as the leviathan continues to assemble an ever more all-encompassing security state. In this case, bio-security, energy security, environmental (climate) security, security derived from technology-centric weapons of war and the religion of robo-transhumanism. These constantly refreshed, existential war/fear-based problem- counter problem - technological resolution loops (Hegelian dialectic) combined with the internet as an information filter and funneled is a highly effective method of control. In an era in which there are such strong disincentives for kinetic warfare, the continuous “state of exception” has become a substitute. As anticipated by Orwell in his magnum opus of totalitarianism (1984), these loops implant and reinforce a heightened sense of constant fear into the majority of the populace. Not available to Orwell as he prophetically imagined our future, the internet has now become the perfect tool of choice for the leviathan to implant the resulting synthetic chronic fear and insecurity into the general population as a control method.

‘The very word ‘war’, therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist… War is Peace.’

George Orwell, 1984

But we the people have tools to fight back. The only way to win at fifth generation warfare is not to play, to not fall for their lies and fear mongering. It is to do our own due-diligence and support online communities that are disseminating multiple points of view on news stories. To be a creator, to share information with friends and family, to write and to read, is a power that still is making a difference. It may be one of our best defenses against the chronic re-writing of history and algorithmic internet revisionism which has become endemic.

‘The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.’

George Orwell, 1984

We must be ready to fight back against any new “states of exemption”. We the people, must say no more.

‘The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.’

George Orwell, 1984