Bastiat's insight grows more prophetic by the day. Watch what happens in any crisis. The reaction is predictable: people fracture into warring tribes, each certain it's fighting for survival. Neighbors become informants, families split over ideology, and communities turn against themselves. While citizens exhaust one another in moral crusades, something else advances quietly—the concentration of power. Bureaucracies expand, authority tightens, and the machinery of control grows ever more intricate.

This is no accident. A system built on coercion needs division like oxygen. It must invent internal enemies to justify its dominance, to keep people dependent on its "protection." When citizens are busy fighting one another—over politics, culture, race, or faith—they are not asking the fundamental question: why should anyone rule them at all?

Every orchestrated "emergency," every financial panic, or culture war, serves the same purpose: to make the expansion of centralized power appear both natural and necessary. Randolph Bourne was right—war is the health of the state—but in our time, war takes subtler forms: propaganda, inflation, surveillance, and fear.

The only antidote is self-ownership, voluntary exchange, and the refusal to play the game of masters and subjects.

The Architecture of Manufactured Crisis

The mechanism works because it attacks the foundation of voluntary cooperation. When the future becomes unpredictable, people retreat into tribes that promise certainty. The state doesn't need to impose order directly; it manufactures chaos until you beg for chains. Uncertainty becomes the pretext for control.

This is the logic of all monopolies: break the alternatives, then present yourself as the only solution. The state degrades money through inflation, creating desperation. It regulates commerce until only the well-connected can operate. It monopolizes justice until people accept its courts as inevitable, then points to the resulting disorder and demands more power to "fix" what it broke.

Every culture war, every financial panic, every "emergency" follows the same script. While you rage at your neighbor over flags, slogans, or party lines, the central bank drains your savings. While you argue about which scandal matters more, regulators quietly entrench the monopolies they serve. While you drown in outrage and distraction, public-private alliances construct the machinery of surveillance and control.