Thread: Joe Stack and the 2010 Austin Plane Crash

Originally Posted by Taosaur

Well, you might also see an individual with a persecution complex who blames all of his failures on others and probably chose the IRS as a scapegoat when the last straw was probably actually his divorce.

This is possible. However, if all of the incidents in his life that he wrote about were real, then he was negatively (and expensively) affected by the actions of our government more than any average person would hope to. I think it is at least fairly common for anyone who tries to change the status quo with this sort of bottom up everyman approach gets the feeling that the government is out to get them, and for the most part they are right. Our government does not like and does not respond well to individual citizens who don't have a lot of money making a lot of problems for them.

I think as a society we tend to try to write off anyone who has become fed up and does something drastic as having a complex because we don't like to admit that

A) The system sucks
and
B) We as individuals aren't doing anything about it and wouldn't even know where to begin if we wanted to.

I know that I personally haven't endured nearly as much as this man seems to have and yet I feel many of the same emotions that he does. My particular outlook on life bars me from any violent protest, which is why I currently don't really do anything at all to change things. I really just don't know what to do at all. If I were of a slightly different moral bent I could easily be driven to violence after trying as many different avenues as Mr. Stack did.

Originally Posted by Xaqaria

This is possible. However, if all of the incidents in his life that he wrote about were real, then he was negatively (and expensively) affected by the actions of our government more than any average person would hope to. I think it is at least fairly common for anyone who tries to change the status quo with this sort of bottom up everyman approach gets the feeling that the government is out to get them, and for the most part they are right. Our government does not like and does not respond well to individual citizens who don't have a lot of money making a lot of problems for them.

I think as a society we tend to try to write off anyone who has become fed up and does something drastic as having a complex because we don't like to admit that

A) The system sucks
and
B) We as individuals aren't doing anything about it and wouldn't even know where to begin if we wanted to.

I know that I personally haven't endured nearly as much as this man seems to have and yet I feel many of the same emotions that he does. My particular outlook on life bars me from any violent protest, which is why I currently don't really do anything at all to change things. I really just don't know what to do at all. If I were of a slightly different moral bent I could easily be driven to violence after trying as many different avenues as Mr. Stack did.

My impression on admittedly limited data is that he was blind to his own faults, high on anxiety, and went to great lengths attempting tax evasion (from the letter, it sounds like he and his friends tried to set up a pseudo-church).

Still, the gestalt of what you're saying has some truth to it. The system(s) certainly has the capacity to crush individuals, in part at the whim of bureaucrats. My own impression is that the private sector bureaucracy scores a lot more kills than the IRS or any government agency, and indeed business encroachment upon government is a greater threat in this country than vice-versa. We have corporations that approach the size of our government and dwarf many governments on this planet, and they suffer the same hangers-on, sycophants, and short-sighted promotion-seekers as any public sector bureaucracy, with the exception that NO ONE is there for the good of their fellow man, and few for the advancement of the professed mission of the organization beyond how it impacts their paycheck.

He brings up a point that I myself am quite fearful of. The idea that nothing will change without massive bloodshed. George Carlin was of the same opinion and I've always wondered if he was right.