Phil Elmore: Individual Authoring Services

Willing Cogs in the Cube
Those Instrumental Are Also Responsible

There is a 1997 science fiction movie called Cube in which several strangers wake to find themselves imprisoned in a square room. Hatches on all six surfaces lead to other, similar rooms. The maze in which they find themselves is deadly, for some of the rooms contain lethal, automated traps. A low-budget film, Cube takes advantage of a simple set whose walls change color through lighting, creating the illusion of an endless series of connected, identical chambers.

Caution: Spoilers Ahead

As the film nears its conclusion we learn the secret of the Cube, at least in part: It is an abattoir created by the faceless, endlessly complex autonomic functions of bureaucracy, a mechanism rolling slowly and inexorably onward thanks to the inertia of ignorance and the evasion of responsibility. Its component parts were designed and fabricated by countless individuals, each of whom knew nothing about the completed whole. Focused on their own square inches of the bloodthirsty elephant that would result, none of these blind men and women questioned their directions, nor did they think through to the end the purpose of their efforts.

Who created the Cube? No one -- and everyone. Who was responsible? No one -- and everyone. Who ordered its creation? No one knows, or no one remembers -- and even if those behind it have since died, it no longer matters. What is the purpose of the Cube? To exist. Why are people being dropped into the Cube and left to die horribly? Because the Cube exists. No other reasons are necessary or given. The Cube is a self-fulfilling prophecy in metal and plastic, the personification of the dangers of apathy.

As April 15th approaches, Americans everywhere break out in cold sweat at the thought of Internal Revenue Service scrutiny in their lives and their incomes. The IRS is the single most monstrous organization active in the United States today. It is an invasive, complex, and irrational bureaucracy whose functionaries are empowered to ruin lives and cripple hope. It is our Cube, and into its interlocking dungeons we are thrown each year, hoping against hope that a wrong step on Line 27a will not trigger sprays of acid or gouts of flame.

We are told, year after year, that we should refrain from mailing helpful items with our tax returns, such as road kill, baggies filled with human blood, or obscene words scrawled in unidentified substances. We are told that it is not fair to vent, at IRS employees' expense, the resentment we feel over the confiscation of our earnings. IRS employees, after all, are just that -- employees. They are not, we are told, responsible for taxes or the codes behind them.

If not them, who?

There can be no Cube without component parts. Remove the cogs, and the machinery stops turning. Those in the employ of the IRS are willing cogs in the mechanism of oppression, terror, and tyranny. They are instrumental in the administration of its evils. They are therefore responsible for the destruction wrought in its name and at its whims.

This concept does not apply only to science fiction movies and IRS deadlines. It is timeless and pervasive, universal and unavoidable. If you enable, if you contribute, if you facilitate -- then you also direct, command, and control. Any enterprise, idea, or establishment on which you expend time, money, or labor is one to which you are party. You have granted it your tacit or explicit approval. You have accepted responsibility.

If you are a cog, you are the Cube.