One the characteristic aspects of life in a corrupt and tyrannical state is the problem of entrapment. It was the habit, for example, of the Jacobean and Elizabethan police state in England to use police spies as agent provocateurs to stir up dissent that would be targeted at some sort of intolerable government repression, and then to use that dissent as a means of increasing the repression against targeted groups. A group of elite Roman Catholics, for example, was entrapped into attempting to blow up Parliament in the early 17th century in what became known as the Guy Fawkes rebellion, leading to a great many people being put to death as well as encouraging a robust anti-Catholic feeling among the people of England that is still celebrated in the British Isles to this day. The behavior of the Jacobean state in so doing was not so different, for example, from notable FBI entrapment efforts to kidnap the tyrannical governor of Michigan in the present era.

I was led to think about this by one of the little annoyances that life provides with regards to traffic signaling. Near where I live, there is a traffic signal that is highly biased against the way I typically turn. When one is going eastbound at this particular intersection, one has a flashing yellow that allows one to turn left at leisure when one sees a break in the traffic. When one is traveling westbound and turning left, though, as I commonly do, the light not only is not a flashing yellow but a red one, but it does not even have the decency to turn green when there is space in the traffic as it once did, but rather requires a full light cycle of waiting before allowing a green turn arrow. It is almost as if the accursed traffic engineers who designed this intersection are daring the people going westbound and either trying to U-turn (which is common here) or turn into the neighborhood to break the rules and turn on red, thus inviting a ticket for a moving violation, because of the obvious idiocy of their design of the intersection.

It is this sort of problem that I think is quite common in our contemporary world. The design of many systems is so incompetent that it often appears as if the people responsible for these systems are specifically trying to entice or entrap people into breaking the systems so that there can be some sort of cause to punish people who are offended by such stupidity and incompetence. The goal in mind is compliance, and those for whom compliance is difficult or impossible in less than ideal circumstances are the ideal target of repressive efforts that seek to maintain control through fear-based tyrannical behavior. Those who are sensitive to the stupidity of the world and act out against it thus make themselves a target of the agents of repression within the corrupt state as being obviously revolutionary elements of some kind (though they may just as often be considered as counter-revolutionary elements, depending on the nature of the tyrannical government then in power and its taste for derogatory nomenclature).

What is left for us is to decide how we will deal with the inanities and stupidities of the world in which we inhabit. So long as we know that we are being targeted for sensitivity to what is incompetent and unjust in a world full of irritations and evils, we can respond intelligently to this by deciding how it is that we shall deal with it. If we are unaware of the fact that the poor design of much in this world is designed to express a hostility to people and to draw a hostile response from those whom the powers that be wish to repress and even eliminate, we may respond in ways that expose ourselves without attaining any sort of successful change. To the extent that we are aware that we are dealing with bait that seeks to entrap us, we can act in a more guarded and intelligent fashion to avoid exposing ourselves while recognizing the perilous state that we find ourselves in. And if we are indeed being hunted or targeted, it behooves us to be wise and not naive fools rushing towards self-destruction.