To control the unbelievers.

Something strange happened to me while I was watching Escape from New York. When Kurt landed on the World Trade Center, I was struck by the thought that I was fighting against a spiritual force that is controlling people by making things vanish. I spent half an hour thinking about it, and here's the result.

Believers are controlled by their belief. To control unbelievers, you have to give them a belief. There are only two ways of doing this:

• either you give them something unexpected, in which case they will believe in defending it,
• or you take something unexpectedly away from them, in which case they will believe in making amends.
  

Examples of the former are the American and the French Revolution, but also the practice of selling licences, which is the method used in Germany to achieve the desired result: While early Americans and the French under Napoléon were motivated by defending their newly won liberties, the Germans are wed to the institutions of the state by artificially costly education involved in acquiring writs permitting commerce in a craft or artificially costly land by way of building permits and so on, which forces Germans to invest heavily and the only way to preserve the value of the investment is to defend the institutions of the state. In any case the end result resembles the society that Plato described in The Laws: a society of rights owners, defending the institutions that grant them.

By the way, lest someone thinks this would be particularly democratic and stable or something: both Napoléon and Hitler were able to use it for their ends.

In America liberty became taken for granted at some point and seized to motivate Americans. And since Americans pride themselves on it, they never went down the road of licence selling, that is as far as the general population is concerned. So, since World War I, where it was the Lusitania, in World War II Pearl Harbor, in the Korean War the monopoly on nuclear weapons, since World War I Americans have been motivated by a sudden loss that required a response from them.

And the latest example of this is the life we've lost due to the Coronavirus restrictions, only that this time the American method to control the unbelievers reigns worldwide.

In John Carpenter there is the truth.