An absolutely brilliant, articulate in depth analysis of our current dilemma. I resonate with your wisdom.
From my own experience, we rarely accept that we have freedom of choice, every hour, every minute and every second. For me this is the basis for reclaiming my sovereignty.
I will soon be entering my 9th decade. My awakening began gradually in the 1970's and my searching and seeking has continued ever since. At that time I was in academia in the area of information, so I have witnessed the movement from print to digital. Even at that time it was becoming clear to me, not only in academia, but in my children's schooling that independent thinking was only paid lip service, if it was acknowledged at all.
I witnessed the increasing control of medicine and medical education, by the pharmaceutical companies, along with the government going hand to hand with them in offering research grants. (By the way I am in Canada.)
In the 1980's I developed a health condition, but vowed not to go the allopathic route. Not an easy choice, but with determination I have faced and overcome that condition as well as a number of other challenges since, all outside traditional medicine.
Growing up on a small traditional farm, I learned what real food was, but it was not until my awakening that I realized how important that early life was. I began to research pure, live food as nature intended and now share my knowledge with those who are interested.
As T.S. Eliot so poignantly said: "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."
I am going back into the kitchen now to finish making my Ratatouille from the organic vegetables I bought at my local farmer's market.
Thank you for your share. As a herbal practitioner (also from Canada!), I'd like to offer the following nomenclature: I call allopathic medicine 'modern', 'chemical', 'reductionistic', 'pharmaceutical' or 'conventional'. What I call 'traditional' medicine is what gets passed down with tradition, from generation to generation, in this case in the kitchen, not in academic settings. Essentially, herbal medicine and its derivatives like homeopathy. Body manipulations can and have also been passed down from generation to generation, etc.
At 57, after I weaned myself from pharmaceutical asthma meds at 30, I just about only heal myself with medicines I have or could have made in my kitchen - apart from a few cheap and easily accessible products like MMS and DMSO or colloidal silver (am thinking of acquiring a machine to make that!).
Darika Joyce Friesen— Thank you for this comment. I too opted not to go the allopathic route, one of the best decisions I've made. In my experience, too, this requires careful attention to and discernment about one's food.
About lip service. Yes, lip service to independent thinking, along with lip service to free speech and lip service to freedom— there's far, far more lip service out there than I had ever recognized until after the onset of the covid lockdowns. I thought I knew, yeah, there's lip service out there, but I had not realized, in my world, it was something like 99% of the people just giving lip service. Interesting times!
I completely agree with you about the lip service and the food. I am also astounded, including those who consider themselves to be awake, as to how much parroting they do, without digging deeper to discover the facts.
Hello friend! As someone who fully reclaimed my state citizenship a while ago I do urge you to NEVER, EVER refer to yourself as a Sovereign Citizen. A careful reading of our Founding Documents, and The Declaration of Independence especially, is absolutely critical to have a deep understanding of BEFORE reading the Constitution for the United States of America Republic. It is a vastly superior and critical document. It must be read carefully. Not carelessly. Pay particular attention to the preamble and the last paragraph, though it is critical to read the Kings offenses and apply. Think critically. DO We, the People have the Representation laid out? Or are they the “kings men” so to speak. ( not literally!). You are of the SOVEREIGN Body Politic. WE, THE PEOPLE. “Sovereign Citizen” has no basis in law. The term is a CIA psyop trap. Started to circulate in the early 2000’s. It is to denigrate those who study (obsessively in most cases) Law. We figure it out. Then become obsessed by what we find. The truth. It cannot be unlearned, unknown or unread or unrealized once realized. You cannot go back to sleep. It’s impossible. It becomes a Humans fight for Natural Freedom. We are States men and women. Born, not birthed in Admiralty, on the LAND. Among WE, THE PEOPLE. In this fight and journey, understand that WORDS matter most of all. Get a law dictionary. Every word you know has a different meaning in Legalese. English but NOT. That’s the biggest trap.
Darika, to have carried this awareness across nine decades is itself a kind of sovereignty — proof that the conditioning can be resisted. Choice really is there in every moment, but the terrain of choice has shifted. The farm you remember has been replaced by platforms that monetize attention; the university you left has been rewired into credential factories that double as data-harvesters. Surveillance capitalism isn’t just external coercion — it’s an architecture designed to shape the field of choices we even perceive.
That’s why your emphasis on craft, food, and wisdom matters. They’re “unmonetizable” habits — stubbornly real in a system optimized for simulation. In that sense, making Ratatouille from organic vegetables isn’t just nourishment. It’s an act of rebellion.
Once again Stylman and Fitts have effectively raised awareness of the dire downward trajectory of our freedoms, privacy, economic stability and self sufficiency while offering viable sensible solutions to address and push back against these heinous manipulative forces.
In addition to the writings of Tucker and Sloane and the the values of the founding fathers I believe the essays of Emerson especially “On Self-Reliance” would offer an excellent foundation to build on what the title suggests.
On a personal note I am involved in the building and cultivating an organic garden with friends who also subscribe to this page and it has been a fulfilling enterprise on all levels and I encourage all your readers to get involved for health as well as the economic benefits.
Home 'ownership' has always been Orwellian doublethink. Increasingly, it's come to mean you get to own your own home after decades if not a lifetime of paying the bank at usurious or loan shark rates of interest on the inflated value of 'real' estate (material property subject to fiat fictions of the rentier class, recalling earlier association with the king (rex) granting rights to land under feudal rule). Of course, once you pay off this glorified rent or 'mortgage' ('death contract' its root meaning), other perpetual predators like insurance racketeers and different tiers of government imposing property taxes remain knocking at the door, while (regulated) repairs and renovations keep prisoners on the treadmill of property value and banksters wait in the wings to repossess your home whenever engineered crisis (e.g., 2007-8 crash) creates opportunity for foreclosure, just to run the scam again.
Immediate postwar global empire of the U$ enabled relative redistribution of wealth for middle class management of historically unprecedented control of worldwide resources (ca. 50%) by a nation-state - before such 'advances' in ruling class control of the general population's labor power like automation, and now AI, made this middle class largely obsolete. But even then, more affordable home ownership was part of the Amerikan dream machine of consumer capitalism, a 'golden era' (ca. 1945-73) in a land flowing with an abundance of 'goods' or commodities, in contrast to the communist cold war enemy, to ensure that what people owned owned them, tying them to the social system of capital rule by lesser stakes of self-interest in its maintenance.
This overall and particularly racially restricted social welfare compromise between capital and labor became unsustainable, less from mechanical economic forces like falling rates of profit, more from resurgence of revolutionary potentials of 'the 60s' (more than a decade) threatening what the 1975 Rockefeller Trilateral Commission called a 'crisis of democracy', as people's power in direct action and participatory democracy had led to breakdown of representative government's ruses of rule over passive subjects. Class war was declared in such notable playbooks as the 1971 Powell Memo/Manifesto to roll back what gains had been made by and for people after generations of struggle beyond the 60s. (Pejorative use of the term 'boomers' became one propaganda tactic to erase memory of the period in caricatures of spoiled brats dazed and confused by sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll, since covering for cutbacks in wages and benefits coupled with 'cost-of-living' discipline for austerity (e.g., 70s' inflation, comparable to today's) by being blamed as a population drain on the economy.)
Reference to plunder capitalism (Fitts) is a redundant qualification, misdirecting us from the essentially exploitative nature of the social system under which most of humanity now lives. From the get-go of European enclosure of the commons and conquest and colonization of the 'new world' by doctrine of discovery, capitalism has been plundering public land and labor, natural and human resources, for private wealth. It's rationalized ruthlessness of class rule resting on private property and profit acquired by untold institutionalized violence, having evolved after millennia of so-called civilization from ancient (and still contemporary) chattel slavery to feudal serfdom to modern wage slavery, whereby owners of the means of (re)production commodify our labor and lives as their property and rob the many of the real value we produce for the profit of the few. Capitalist wealth is theft, and murder, organized crime against humanity under rule of law.
There's never been such a thing as financial sovereignty for the masses of people inevitably dispossessed by capitalist accumulation, necessarily leading to concentration and centralization of wealth under monopoly control. Those public voices who cry foul now at this late stage of its death march likely belong to what remains of its beneficiaries who still believe such mythology as the free market even as capital's dictatorial imperialism "across every domain of human experience" affects them more adversely. Jeffrey Tucker, the bow tie guy touting tradition that never was like old time religion, shamelessly betrayed anything having to do with liberty by singing happy days are here again in cringeworthy cheerleading of Trump's re-election, as if Swamp Thang, even after his proudest achievement of Operation Warp(ed) Speed first go-round, would do anything else than extend, and accelerate, globalist techno-totalitarian takeover as he has this second round. Like MAGA Man, but on a lesser scale, Tucker is a tool of ruling class ideology pushing populist pabulum.
Conscientiousness is an updated version of founding fathers' fables of a protestant work ethic, preachments of thrift and industry from such ruling class classics as Franklin's poor Richard's almanac. The "trait" that builds wealth is not hard work but having others work hard for you, as these propertied elites who contived a constitution from a coup, usurping the Articles of Confederation to centralize control of commerce, currency, and continental expansion, so well knew. If there's ever been something like "stable personality patterns" under the systemic insecurity, abuse, and trauma of capitalism, it's been relative to the human alienation by which its lies of progress have advanced to today's final solutions of transhuman nihilism.
"Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing." (Oscar Wilde) The values which will save us are much older than any of the 'civilized' claims to virtue built upon class rule. They recall 'primitive' ways of life by which most of human evolution, at least 95%, practiced egalitarian principles of mutual aid and communal care for "all out relations", as the Lakota Sioux still put it, cooperation in sharing resources rather than competition and combat for inflicting scarcity and survival-of-the-fittest, dog-eat-dog relations. If such values are to amount to more than spiritualized sedatives and idealist ideology, we will need social revolution at the roots of who we've become in the longest war of class rule by the few over the many, so that history may become truly human.
Ha. I've heard before long most, as much as 90%, of online traffic will consist of bots. Maybe that's predictive programming from AI! But whether it's a bot or not (that is, if a person has gotten through the process of having their human identity confirmed by a machine), I'll probably still keep countering, in one way or another, that our political freedom consists of more than choosing fake binaries of left versus right constructed by ruling elites. On the other hand, I may not be online before long if the control freaks push through their digital ID. Guess I'll 'choose' then to go the way of the dinosaur or dodo, and good riddance to progress.
It seems to me that when a human being recognizes the the Creator is the sovereign authority in his or her life that person is much less vulnerable to the beast Fitts or Tucker is talking about. Beautiful essay.
YES!! Exactly. However, you are a HUMAN. Not a “being” like a human, a monster, as defined in Ballantines law 1948 edition. Ancient law. The phrase human being is found not once in the Bible. Only Human, Man, Woman, people and citizen. With a lowercase c. The rest are statutory and NOT human. Person(a), a business, partnership or trust, a MASK. Male, female(denote animals not humans). iIndividual(business). Intercourse, (BUSINESS between two contracted parties). It goes on and on. Words matter. Use law dictionaries. Law dictionaries make the craziness make sense. It calms you.
I believe your experience of reality boils down to your choice between Internalism vs Externalism.
An Internalist relies on internal voices, voices under his control. All he needs to do to avoid or escape external control is to listen to himself while ignoring the stimulus of the outside world. He is able to build, create and manifest his reality because he controls himself and does not allow others to control him. He learns by doing, and improves automatically along the way. His assets are self reliance, creativity, problem solving and knowledge learned from experience. He has a positive attitude about himself, regardless of whatever he is told about what is happening in the world.
An Externalist relies on the external world to tell him how to feel, what to do next and what to think. Externalism requires no learning, training or memory. It needs no assets because the assets are all external, available digitally from someone else, so that creativity and learning never happen.
When you hear someone say "Why are bad things always happening to me? Just when I think I'm ahead, something comes along and sets me back," you are hearing an externalist. When someone says "You're just lucky, that explains why you're (fill in the blank)," it's another externalist.
Once, I was accused of "Toxic Positivity" by an externalist, which explains their failures and my success completely. To become and stay positive takes courage, determination and discipline, things externalists lack. I responded to this accusation by telling them that I once taught sales, and that positivity was a big part of the training and that by considering it "toxic" they were preventing good things from happening to them and that by expecting failure, they had set themselves up for failure, with no chance of success. This fell on deaf ears.
Here's what I suggest:
1. Stop listening to or reading things that are negative or make you afraid. Don't say "I could never do that," unless you plan on never doing that. Instead, say to yourself "If he can do it, so can I. You'll be shocked at what you can accomplish with the right attitude;
2. Get busy doing something creative - it can be as simple as doing the dishes or as complex as learning to play the piano. This will keep your mind occupied doing creative things and you will be unable to hear negativity so it won't affect you;
3. Whatever it is you choose to do, stick to it and don't give up. Stay positive;
4. Take responsibility for your failures and take credit for your miracles. Don't blame others or minimize your successes.
5. Be selfish and do the right thing because you know that it will come back to you in spades. Others will say you're generous and helpful, but you will know that you are selfishly improving yourself by helping others.
Brilliant - again! Thanks for sharing Tucker's main points, it helps me articulate more clearly many life orientation choices as well as more recent, intuitive, choices. One of which is related to investing time, energy and focus in face-to-face relationships and community oriented activities, refusing to live in social media "communities".
The Beartaria Times social media app is the place to find thousands of people striving to live out every point in Jeffrey Tucker’s book. Thousands that are already living out the modern rebellion and bringing back old world values in their families and communities. For real. They’ve got an annual festival and local meetups throughout the year as well. Family friendly. No BS. No politics. No drama. Only positive, uplifting posts sharing the accomplishments of homesteading, craftsmanship and way more. The social media app you’ve always wanted with the people you wish were your neighbors. Join us! (No, I am not affiliated.)
They extended their control around the world with Fiat. They want to control the world from their castles in Switzerland or God knows where. When we threw out Fiat, we throw out all extended control structures. All ownership will be local. If you can’t walk on the land, you can’t own it.
This hits the nail on the head! We're not victims. We are unconscious participants! We, at the bottom of the pyramid of power are responsible for holding it up. When the masses awaken to this truth, take responsibility, act in unison and walk away, the "structure" will come tumbling down. It takes more strength to do that than to continue to support it.
Josh, As I said in a larger circulation 'Stack's comments, you have become the Philosopher (perhaps Philosopher King someday...lol) of our age. This is a truly marvelous piece, both by itself and as a TL;DR to Jeffrey's already short (he wrote it in one day) book that is marvelous but still too long for many.
You may be getting ahead of an actual movement as (you know I have been urging this forever) you move from describing/analyzing the problem to conversing about what to do about it all. Truly very cool.
Thanks for going down this path -- we all are profiting way beyond any reasonable expectations.
We have to stop believing the sales pitch and start understanding the real impacts. For example, Elon Musk says “The goal of Grok Imagine is to give you superhuman imagination powers,” while it harvests and diverts your imagination, robbing you of the opportunity to make change in the real world. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1956840717591929001
An absolutely brilliant, articulate in depth analysis of our current dilemma. I resonate with your wisdom.
From my own experience, we rarely accept that we have freedom of choice, every hour, every minute and every second. For me this is the basis for reclaiming my sovereignty.
I will soon be entering my 9th decade. My awakening began gradually in the 1970's and my searching and seeking has continued ever since. At that time I was in academia in the area of information, so I have witnessed the movement from print to digital. Even at that time it was becoming clear to me, not only in academia, but in my children's schooling that independent thinking was only paid lip service, if it was acknowledged at all.
I witnessed the increasing control of medicine and medical education, by the pharmaceutical companies, along with the government going hand to hand with them in offering research grants. (By the way I am in Canada.)
In the 1980's I developed a health condition, but vowed not to go the allopathic route. Not an easy choice, but with determination I have faced and overcome that condition as well as a number of other challenges since, all outside traditional medicine.
Growing up on a small traditional farm, I learned what real food was, but it was not until my awakening that I realized how important that early life was. I began to research pure, live food as nature intended and now share my knowledge with those who are interested.
As T.S. Eliot so poignantly said: "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."
I am going back into the kitchen now to finish making my Ratatouille from the organic vegetables I bought at my local farmer's market.
Namaste to all!
Thank you for your share. As a herbal practitioner (also from Canada!), I'd like to offer the following nomenclature: I call allopathic medicine 'modern', 'chemical', 'reductionistic', 'pharmaceutical' or 'conventional'. What I call 'traditional' medicine is what gets passed down with tradition, from generation to generation, in this case in the kitchen, not in academic settings. Essentially, herbal medicine and its derivatives like homeopathy. Body manipulations can and have also been passed down from generation to generation, etc.
At 57, after I weaned myself from pharmaceutical asthma meds at 30, I just about only heal myself with medicines I have or could have made in my kitchen - apart from a few cheap and easily accessible products like MMS and DMSO or colloidal silver (am thinking of acquiring a machine to make that!).
Herbal medicine was one of the competencies I chose to gain when I red pilled myself twenty years ago. So empowering, rewarding and endless....
Thank you for the better terminology to use instead of allopathic. I will begin to incorporate these into my writings.
It is inspiring to hear from others who are moving forward on the path of light.
Darika Joyce Friesen— Thank you for this comment. I too opted not to go the allopathic route, one of the best decisions I've made. In my experience, too, this requires careful attention to and discernment about one's food.
About lip service. Yes, lip service to independent thinking, along with lip service to free speech and lip service to freedom— there's far, far more lip service out there than I had ever recognized until after the onset of the covid lockdowns. I thought I knew, yeah, there's lip service out there, but I had not realized, in my world, it was something like 99% of the people just giving lip service. Interesting times!
I completely agree with you about the lip service and the food. I am also astounded, including those who consider themselves to be awake, as to how much parroting they do, without digging deeper to discover the facts.
Hello friend! As someone who fully reclaimed my state citizenship a while ago I do urge you to NEVER, EVER refer to yourself as a Sovereign Citizen. A careful reading of our Founding Documents, and The Declaration of Independence especially, is absolutely critical to have a deep understanding of BEFORE reading the Constitution for the United States of America Republic. It is a vastly superior and critical document. It must be read carefully. Not carelessly. Pay particular attention to the preamble and the last paragraph, though it is critical to read the Kings offenses and apply. Think critically. DO We, the People have the Representation laid out? Or are they the “kings men” so to speak. ( not literally!). You are of the SOVEREIGN Body Politic. WE, THE PEOPLE. “Sovereign Citizen” has no basis in law. The term is a CIA psyop trap. Started to circulate in the early 2000’s. It is to denigrate those who study (obsessively in most cases) Law. We figure it out. Then become obsessed by what we find. The truth. It cannot be unlearned, unknown or unread or unrealized once realized. You cannot go back to sleep. It’s impossible. It becomes a Humans fight for Natural Freedom. We are States men and women. Born, not birthed in Admiralty, on the LAND. Among WE, THE PEOPLE. In this fight and journey, understand that WORDS matter most of all. Get a law dictionary. Every word you know has a different meaning in Legalese. English but NOT. That’s the biggest trap.
Darika, to have carried this awareness across nine decades is itself a kind of sovereignty — proof that the conditioning can be resisted. Choice really is there in every moment, but the terrain of choice has shifted. The farm you remember has been replaced by platforms that monetize attention; the university you left has been rewired into credential factories that double as data-harvesters. Surveillance capitalism isn’t just external coercion — it’s an architecture designed to shape the field of choices we even perceive.
That’s why your emphasis on craft, food, and wisdom matters. They’re “unmonetizable” habits — stubbornly real in a system optimized for simulation. In that sense, making Ratatouille from organic vegetables isn’t just nourishment. It’s an act of rebellion.
I tried to capture this paradox — that surveillance capitalism is both corrosive and, paradoxically, the only kind of surveillance compatible with prosperity — here, in case of interest. https://dominiccaldwell.substack.com/p/surveillance-capitalism-is-our-only
The destruction of housing affordability is on purpose. To make way for 5 minute cities, digital prison and depopulation.
Absolutely! It is by design and well on its way.
We are erecting 25 storey dwellings in the heart of our cities.
The size of the apartments are between 500-700sqft, with no backyards, no outdoor parking and rooftop amenity areas.
Right in line with Agenda30.
Concentration camps.
Crix - I agree.
They aim to tell people: “Buy? You don’t need to. Ever!”
Similar thing recently when I complained to a bank teller there was no cash: “No-one uses cash anymore! You don’t need it!”
(Yes I DO. We ALL do.)
First tested on whom? They warned us but they had no access to media. 5G prison 2.0 I’m sure you never heard of. Even worse.
3.0 needs no test subjects.
Obviously.
Once again Stylman and Fitts have effectively raised awareness of the dire downward trajectory of our freedoms, privacy, economic stability and self sufficiency while offering viable sensible solutions to address and push back against these heinous manipulative forces.
In addition to the writings of Tucker and Sloane and the the values of the founding fathers I believe the essays of Emerson especially “On Self-Reliance” would offer an excellent foundation to build on what the title suggests.
On a personal note I am involved in the building and cultivating an organic garden with friends who also subscribe to this page and it has been a fulfilling enterprise on all levels and I encourage all your readers to get involved for health as well as the economic benefits.
It’s win win!!!
Mr. Tambourineman, you sound like a fun person with your head in a good place. Is your spouse lucky too?
I will continue to raise cows and sheep and complete our off-grid self-sufficient retirement home in the deep woods.
Well done John.
Lovely.
We grow veg & salad & fruit & nuts but we’re a bit old to be raising livestock unfortunately.
Really self-sufficient is the way to go.
(Though they’ll try to ban us growing food & raising cattle - no doubt using BS about health regs.)
Home 'ownership' has always been Orwellian doublethink. Increasingly, it's come to mean you get to own your own home after decades if not a lifetime of paying the bank at usurious or loan shark rates of interest on the inflated value of 'real' estate (material property subject to fiat fictions of the rentier class, recalling earlier association with the king (rex) granting rights to land under feudal rule). Of course, once you pay off this glorified rent or 'mortgage' ('death contract' its root meaning), other perpetual predators like insurance racketeers and different tiers of government imposing property taxes remain knocking at the door, while (regulated) repairs and renovations keep prisoners on the treadmill of property value and banksters wait in the wings to repossess your home whenever engineered crisis (e.g., 2007-8 crash) creates opportunity for foreclosure, just to run the scam again.
Immediate postwar global empire of the U$ enabled relative redistribution of wealth for middle class management of historically unprecedented control of worldwide resources (ca. 50%) by a nation-state - before such 'advances' in ruling class control of the general population's labor power like automation, and now AI, made this middle class largely obsolete. But even then, more affordable home ownership was part of the Amerikan dream machine of consumer capitalism, a 'golden era' (ca. 1945-73) in a land flowing with an abundance of 'goods' or commodities, in contrast to the communist cold war enemy, to ensure that what people owned owned them, tying them to the social system of capital rule by lesser stakes of self-interest in its maintenance.
This overall and particularly racially restricted social welfare compromise between capital and labor became unsustainable, less from mechanical economic forces like falling rates of profit, more from resurgence of revolutionary potentials of 'the 60s' (more than a decade) threatening what the 1975 Rockefeller Trilateral Commission called a 'crisis of democracy', as people's power in direct action and participatory democracy had led to breakdown of representative government's ruses of rule over passive subjects. Class war was declared in such notable playbooks as the 1971 Powell Memo/Manifesto to roll back what gains had been made by and for people after generations of struggle beyond the 60s. (Pejorative use of the term 'boomers' became one propaganda tactic to erase memory of the period in caricatures of spoiled brats dazed and confused by sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll, since covering for cutbacks in wages and benefits coupled with 'cost-of-living' discipline for austerity (e.g., 70s' inflation, comparable to today's) by being blamed as a population drain on the economy.)
Reference to plunder capitalism (Fitts) is a redundant qualification, misdirecting us from the essentially exploitative nature of the social system under which most of humanity now lives. From the get-go of European enclosure of the commons and conquest and colonization of the 'new world' by doctrine of discovery, capitalism has been plundering public land and labor, natural and human resources, for private wealth. It's rationalized ruthlessness of class rule resting on private property and profit acquired by untold institutionalized violence, having evolved after millennia of so-called civilization from ancient (and still contemporary) chattel slavery to feudal serfdom to modern wage slavery, whereby owners of the means of (re)production commodify our labor and lives as their property and rob the many of the real value we produce for the profit of the few. Capitalist wealth is theft, and murder, organized crime against humanity under rule of law.
There's never been such a thing as financial sovereignty for the masses of people inevitably dispossessed by capitalist accumulation, necessarily leading to concentration and centralization of wealth under monopoly control. Those public voices who cry foul now at this late stage of its death march likely belong to what remains of its beneficiaries who still believe such mythology as the free market even as capital's dictatorial imperialism "across every domain of human experience" affects them more adversely. Jeffrey Tucker, the bow tie guy touting tradition that never was like old time religion, shamelessly betrayed anything having to do with liberty by singing happy days are here again in cringeworthy cheerleading of Trump's re-election, as if Swamp Thang, even after his proudest achievement of Operation Warp(ed) Speed first go-round, would do anything else than extend, and accelerate, globalist techno-totalitarian takeover as he has this second round. Like MAGA Man, but on a lesser scale, Tucker is a tool of ruling class ideology pushing populist pabulum.
Conscientiousness is an updated version of founding fathers' fables of a protestant work ethic, preachments of thrift and industry from such ruling class classics as Franklin's poor Richard's almanac. The "trait" that builds wealth is not hard work but having others work hard for you, as these propertied elites who contived a constitution from a coup, usurping the Articles of Confederation to centralize control of commerce, currency, and continental expansion, so well knew. If there's ever been something like "stable personality patterns" under the systemic insecurity, abuse, and trauma of capitalism, it's been relative to the human alienation by which its lies of progress have advanced to today's final solutions of transhuman nihilism.
"Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing." (Oscar Wilde) The values which will save us are much older than any of the 'civilized' claims to virtue built upon class rule. They recall 'primitive' ways of life by which most of human evolution, at least 95%, practiced egalitarian principles of mutual aid and communal care for "all out relations", as the Lakota Sioux still put it, cooperation in sharing resources rather than competition and combat for inflicting scarcity and survival-of-the-fittest, dog-eat-dog relations. If such values are to amount to more than spiritualized sedatives and idealist ideology, we will need social revolution at the roots of who we've become in the longest war of class rule by the few over the many, so that history may become truly human.
Nice piece, Niko. I get what you're saying and can dig it.
I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can't stand the scene
And I'm neither left or right
I'm just staying home tonight
Getting lost in that hopeless little screen
But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags
That time cannot decay
I'm junk but I'm still holding up
This little wild bouquet
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
---Leonard Cohen, Democracy
"Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died
Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long-stem rose
Everybody knows"
Wrote the man who walked up the hill, allegedly, to get his cocaine from the doctors doing MK Ultra experiments from McGill University.
good one!! poet too!? no surprise:)
niko quoted Leonard Cohen so I figured I would too :-)
Why bother responding to a bot?
Ha. I've heard before long most, as much as 90%, of online traffic will consist of bots. Maybe that's predictive programming from AI! But whether it's a bot or not (that is, if a person has gotten through the process of having their human identity confirmed by a machine), I'll probably still keep countering, in one way or another, that our political freedom consists of more than choosing fake binaries of left versus right constructed by ruling elites. On the other hand, I may not be online before long if the control freaks push through their digital ID. Guess I'll 'choose' then to go the way of the dinosaur or dodo, and good riddance to progress.
It seems to me that when a human being recognizes the the Creator is the sovereign authority in his or her life that person is much less vulnerable to the beast Fitts or Tucker is talking about. Beautiful essay.
YES!! Exactly. However, you are a HUMAN. Not a “being” like a human, a monster, as defined in Ballantines law 1948 edition. Ancient law. The phrase human being is found not once in the Bible. Only Human, Man, Woman, people and citizen. With a lowercase c. The rest are statutory and NOT human. Person(a), a business, partnership or trust, a MASK. Male, female(denote animals not humans). iIndividual(business). Intercourse, (BUSINESS between two contracted parties). It goes on and on. Words matter. Use law dictionaries. Law dictionaries make the craziness make sense. It calms you.
For the last century plus, American politics was organized on a single axis: “is it progress, or regress?”
What’s happened in the last few years is the emergence of a new axis: “is it real, or fake?”
Don't forget about gayness!
I believe your experience of reality boils down to your choice between Internalism vs Externalism.
An Internalist relies on internal voices, voices under his control. All he needs to do to avoid or escape external control is to listen to himself while ignoring the stimulus of the outside world. He is able to build, create and manifest his reality because he controls himself and does not allow others to control him. He learns by doing, and improves automatically along the way. His assets are self reliance, creativity, problem solving and knowledge learned from experience. He has a positive attitude about himself, regardless of whatever he is told about what is happening in the world.
An Externalist relies on the external world to tell him how to feel, what to do next and what to think. Externalism requires no learning, training or memory. It needs no assets because the assets are all external, available digitally from someone else, so that creativity and learning never happen.
When you hear someone say "Why are bad things always happening to me? Just when I think I'm ahead, something comes along and sets me back," you are hearing an externalist. When someone says "You're just lucky, that explains why you're (fill in the blank)," it's another externalist.
Once, I was accused of "Toxic Positivity" by an externalist, which explains their failures and my success completely. To become and stay positive takes courage, determination and discipline, things externalists lack. I responded to this accusation by telling them that I once taught sales, and that positivity was a big part of the training and that by considering it "toxic" they were preventing good things from happening to them and that by expecting failure, they had set themselves up for failure, with no chance of success. This fell on deaf ears.
Here's what I suggest:
1. Stop listening to or reading things that are negative or make you afraid. Don't say "I could never do that," unless you plan on never doing that. Instead, say to yourself "If he can do it, so can I. You'll be shocked at what you can accomplish with the right attitude;
2. Get busy doing something creative - it can be as simple as doing the dishes or as complex as learning to play the piano. This will keep your mind occupied doing creative things and you will be unable to hear negativity so it won't affect you;
3. Whatever it is you choose to do, stick to it and don't give up. Stay positive;
4. Take responsibility for your failures and take credit for your miracles. Don't blame others or minimize your successes.
5. Be selfish and do the right thing because you know that it will come back to you in spades. Others will say you're generous and helpful, but you will know that you are selfishly improving yourself by helping others.
Great article and happy to see more and more awakening.
It’s fantastic!
Brilliant - again! Thanks for sharing Tucker's main points, it helps me articulate more clearly many life orientation choices as well as more recent, intuitive, choices. One of which is related to investing time, energy and focus in face-to-face relationships and community oriented activities, refusing to live in social media "communities".
The Beartaria Times social media app is the place to find thousands of people striving to live out every point in Jeffrey Tucker’s book. Thousands that are already living out the modern rebellion and bringing back old world values in their families and communities. For real. They’ve got an annual festival and local meetups throughout the year as well. Family friendly. No BS. No politics. No drama. Only positive, uplifting posts sharing the accomplishments of homesteading, craftsmanship and way more. The social media app you’ve always wanted with the people you wish were your neighbors. Join us! (No, I am not affiliated.)
They extended their control around the world with Fiat. They want to control the world from their castles in Switzerland or God knows where. When we threw out Fiat, we throw out all extended control structures. All ownership will be local. If you can’t walk on the land, you can’t own it.
You can’t *really* own land!
I own some land. It’ll be here long after I’m gone.
I can see the land laughing at me then:
“Oh you owned me did you?” 😅
This hits the nail on the head! We're not victims. We are unconscious participants! We, at the bottom of the pyramid of power are responsible for holding it up. When the masses awaken to this truth, take responsibility, act in unison and walk away, the "structure" will come tumbling down. It takes more strength to do that than to continue to support it.
Josh, As I said in a larger circulation 'Stack's comments, you have become the Philosopher (perhaps Philosopher King someday...lol) of our age. This is a truly marvelous piece, both by itself and as a TL;DR to Jeffrey's already short (he wrote it in one day) book that is marvelous but still too long for many.
You may be getting ahead of an actual movement as (you know I have been urging this forever) you move from describing/analyzing the problem to conversing about what to do about it all. Truly very cool.
Thanks for going down this path -- we all are profiting way beyond any reasonable expectations.
Truth knows no peer.
Absolutely masterful.
We have to stop believing the sales pitch and start understanding the real impacts. For example, Elon Musk says “The goal of Grok Imagine is to give you superhuman imagination powers,” while it harvests and diverts your imagination, robbing you of the opportunity to make change in the real world. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1956840717591929001