Epigovernment: The Tumor

"In this series which Dredd Blog began in December of 2012, an  attempt is made to set forth a hypothesis which explains some of the inexplicable conduct of 'government.'

The hypothesis is that there is an Epigovernment which operates above the level of the visible offices of federal government.

That Epigovernment exerts various degrees of control and/or influence upon the direction and policy of the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of what is traditionally considered to be "the government".

The graphic to the upper left (click to enlarge) shows an example diagram of the concept of Epigovernment, while the one below it (click to enlarge) shows a Worldwide Military Command structure ostensibly under the control of The Commander In Chief, who in the normal concept of governmental structure, controls the military as the chief or top commander." (Epigovernment: The New Model - 5).

In today's post I want to argue that the Epigovernment is a tumor.

Before going on though, let's look at what the word "tumor" means in this post's context:

tu·mor ... noun

1. a swollen part; swelling; protuberance.

2. an uncontrolled, abnormal, circumscribed growth of cells in any animal or plant tissue; neoplasm.

3. Archaic.

a. inflated pride; haughtiness.
b. pompous language; bombast.

Origin: 1535–45; Latin: a swelling, swollen state ...

(Dictionary). An uncontrolled abnormal growth, a tumor, relating to government dynamics is what this series on Epigovernment is all about.

The mystery in this story is that utterly "normal" appearing cultural foundations can be a place where abnormal tumor things can begin to take place.

First notice the cultural foundation:

Whitman was an Eagle Scout and a former marine, studied architectural engineering at the University of Texas, and briefly worked as a bank teller and volunteered as a scoutmaster for Austin’s Boy Scout Troop 5. As a child, he’d scored 138 on the Stanford-Binet IQ test, placing in the 99th percentile.

(Hypothesis: The Cultural Amygdala). Ok, we begin with a very smart, very normal kid, in a very normal culture, but then:

... [Whitman, the very smart, very normal kid] killed a receptionist with the butt of his rifle. Two families of tourists came up the stairwell; he shot at them at point-blank range. Then he began to fire indiscriminately from the deck at people below. The first woman he shot was pregnant. As her boyfriend knelt to help her, Whitman shot him as well. He shot pedestrians in the street and an ambulance driver who came to rescue them.

The evening before, Whitman had sat at his typewriter and composed a suicide note:

I don’t really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I can’t recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts.

By the time the police shot him dead, Whitman had killed 13 people and wounded 32 more. The story of his rampage dominated national headlines the next day. And when police went to investigate his home for clues, the story became even stranger: in the early hours of the morning on the day of the shooting, he had murdered his mother and stabbed his wife to death in her sleep.

It was after much thought that I decided to kill my wife, Kathy, tonight … I love her dearly, and she has been as fine a wife to me as any man could ever hope to have. I cannot rationa[l]ly pinpoint any specific reason for doing this …

Along with the shock of the murders ... from the University of Texas Tower, everyone wanted answers.

For that matter, so did Whitman. He requested in his suicide note that an autopsy be performed to determine if something had changed in his brain — because he suspected it had.

I talked with a Doctor once for about two hours and tried to convey to him my fears that I felt [overcome by] overwhelming violent impulses. After one session I never saw the Doctor again, and since then I have been fighting my mental turmoil alone, and seemingly to no avail.

Whitman’s body was taken to the morgue, his skull was put under the bone saw, and the medical examiner lifted the brain from its vault. He discovered that Whitman’s brain harbored a tumor the diameter of a nickel. This tumor, called a glioblastoma, had blossomed from beneath a structure called the thalamus, impinged on the hypothalamus, and compressed a third region called the amygdala.

(ibid). This normal individual was involuntarily converted into a murdering monster by his amygdala that was being disrupted by a tumor.

This is a microcosm for depicting how Epigovernment takes over normal behavior of government and causes it to malfunction (On The Origin of The Bully Religion - 2).

Then the dynamics of that government may exhibit some of the same abnormal behavioral patterns as an individual with a brain tumor, even to the point that their own governing behavior becomes "out of character" because it does not make sense even to themselves:

I don’t really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I can’t recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts.
...
I talked with a Doctor once for about two hours and tried to convey to him my fears that I felt [overcome by] overwhelming violent impulses. After one session I never saw the Doctor again, and since then I have been fighting my mental turmoil alone, and seemingly to no avail.

(ibid). Dredd Blog now calls the source of that influence which develops "uncontrolled abnormal growth" (tumor) the Epigovernment (cf. Epigovernment: The New Model - 9 and MOMCOM: The Private Parts).