Welcome to the Land of Chaos.

Frank Davis has wished for an army of smokers to overturn the smoking ban. It will be overturned and those who imposed it will be held to account, but not by anything anyone would recognise as an army.

No generals. No structure. No command centre. No defined tactics. No defined leadership. No artillery, no air support, no ground support, no tanks. Just random individuals doing random things.

The Normans tried to invade Wales. They decided it was just too much bother and settled for setting up some fortresses to keep the buggers under control. Why could they not fight the Welsh at that time? All the Welsh had were lots of disorganised tribes living in poverty and although there was a King, nobody really took much notice of him. Actually, that’s why they couldn’t be subjugated.

It’s the same reason the Romans decided to build a wall to keep the Picts in Scotland.

The Romans were a highly organised military. The Normans, not quite as rigid as the Romans but pretty well organised. They expected to fight enemies who operated the same way because to them, it was the best and only way to fight.

The Welsh would watch those fortresses on the border. They would wait until there were no reinforcements in range, then attack, kill everyone, burn the place and disappear back into the hills. They made no attempt to gain ground, to take control of the fortress, to push the boundary. Wreck it and go home.

This just didn’t fit the military mind. Surely the enemy want the same thing as us? Surely they want to take over and control the land? Nope. They are just wrecking your control and going back to their lives.

The Picts did the same. The Celts in what is now northern Germany were betrayed by a couple of Romans (I’m not getting into a lecture here) and they were a bit miffed about it. Led by Vortigern, they marched all the way to Rome, smashed it up, stayed for a year and then went home. They didn’t want Rome. They just wanted to show they were seriously pissed off.

The Romans didn’t get it. They didn’t understand the Picts either. The Normans didn’t understand the Welsh. There are many other examples of the organised machine coming up against something that will not fit their worldview and just not understanding how that can possibly be. The EU is a modern example.

For those who consider themselves Righteous, there is only one true way. Their way. They cannot begin to conceive of the merest hint of a possibility that others might disagree. When they meet disagreement as they always do, they invoke an organised enemy. Something that resists them must surely operate on the same principles and use the same tactics.

Where am I going with this? It’s hard to say, it’s a random babble fuelled this evening by Clan MacGregor, and that’s kind of the point.

This is where the antismoking machine breaks down. The antidrinking  and antifat machines also.

Smokers do not want anyone at all to become smokers. We are not out to convert you. We just want to be left alone. If you want to join us, you can and you’d be welcome. If you don’t want to join us, we don’t mind at all. We do not only associate with others of our kind, we’ll be friends with anyone. We have absolutely no interest in how many smokers and non-smokers there are. We just don’t care. We have no interest in taking over.

The same is true of drinkers and fat people. They don’t want to take over. Fat people have never had any interest at all in making anyone else fat. All they want, like the rest of us, is to be left alone.

That’s all the Picts and the Welsh wanted. It’s all those pre-German Celts wanted. Just a bit of fair play. Just to be left alone to live.

This is an impossibility in the Righteous mind. If you know the Truth then others must know it too, by force if necessary. There can be no action without organisation. If there is a resistance, someone must be running it. It must be funded somehow. It must have committees and think tanks and an internal structure and a command base and lots of drones and…

They can’t fight chaos, as Snowolf points out, so they invent an enemy. They invent the generals. They imagine the funding. They invoke Big Tobacco or Big Booze or Big Food, all of which are ridiculous because all those industries are made up of businesses that are in constant competition with each other.

The Righteous will never see this. They see the tobacco industry as one industry. It’s not. It’s lots of businesses fighting for market share. The same goes for booze and fast food and even for basic chemicals such as sugar and salt. None of them are organising any serious resistance, in fact most of them welcome stringent measures they can absorb, and which will wipe out any new startup competitors.

The Righteous are boxing with shadows. They pretend we are all under the sway of companies with whom we have never had any contact at all beyond maybe buying their products. They think we have generals and majors and captains and sergeants and corporals.

They cannot comprehend chaos. They cannot conceive of hundreds, even thousands of individuals acting in concert but yet as individuals while taking no orders and not electing a committee to tell them how to group-think.

This is why the Coliseum lies in ruins while the landscape here is peppered with undamaged Pictish carved stones. the Picts worked on a small scale. One carved stone can last for thousands of years whereas a strictly organised  building can – and must – fall apart.

Organisation is not inherently bad. Even primitive early tribes always used some kind of structure – hell, even baboons have a social structure, as do ants and bees. It’s when you get individuals trying to impose their idea of order onto the mass, without the agreement of the mass, that things get nasty. As they are getting very nasty now.

The Righteous could never understand chaos. So they make sure it’s not reported. In days past, that would have worked.

Nowadays we have the ultimate tool of chaos. The Internet.

No leaders, no committees, no organisation and yet thousands can be mobilised in an instant.

They don’t need to be furtively indoctrinated. They have already, independently, come to the same conclusion.

And they will bring chaos.

And you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair.