by Brandon Smith, Alt Market:
Over a decade ago, critics of the liberty movement would often argue that it was not enough to simply point out all the problems plaguing our economy — we needed to also offer solutions. Of course, a common Alinsky tactic is to demand your opponents solve all the world’s ailments before they can earn the right to complain. “If you can’t give us a solution, then stop going on and on about the problem,” they would squawk incessantly like parrots.
I don’t agree that our right to analyze the instabilities of our financial system is predicated on our ability to fix the issue outright. In fact, that sounds rather insane. How can we fix the problem if we don’t educate the public on the problem first? However, I do think that the only people who have the drive and the knowledge to ultimately come up with a solution are those in the liberty movement. Who else is going to try? Who else is even qualified?
I have seen many ideas come and go over the years. The thing about fixing what is broken is that while you might get most people to agree on the problem, getting a majority of them to agree on a solution is a nightmare. Once enough people agree on a solution, you then have to find a way to motivate them to act on it. The masses often want desperately to help themselves, they just don’t like it when a lot of effort or sacrifice is required.
This is why we only tend to see organized activism and a push toward self-sufficiency AFTER a crisis has already struck. Most human beings require obvious incentive before they become motivated. They need immediate gratification. The people that can see the long game, who can see the incentives years or generations down the road, we call “leaders.” The hope is that one day every individual can be educated to the point that they can self-lead; that each individual will become an innovator and problem solver in their own right.
One solution to fight back against subversive globalism that I have promoted for most of my career as an analyst is decentralization. And, I still hold to this day that it is the only practical way to ensure that free people are protected from the threats created by international banks and globalist institutions bent on shaping the world to their will. This solution, though, requires individual action as well as group action.
Globalists desire a world system that forces everyone to participate, either through fear or necessity. This system is designed to promote dependency (slavery) while also promoting a feeling of isolation and helplessness. It is meant to erase self-reliance as a model for living, while also squashing any potential for voluntary organization. To go to war with such a system, we have to achieve the opposite goals.
Liberty activists have to lead by example, first by educating the public on the concept of the non-aggression principle — the principle that force is not an acceptable method of compelling a group of people to organize in the way you wish. Force is not incentive, it is criminal. Force is only an acceptable reaction when someone else is trying to harm or enslave you and those around you. This concept is paramount to the long-term survival of any society. It should be codified and taught to each new generation.
Next, liberty activists need to organize locally into voluntary groups based on mutual aid. Modern civilization has been directed over many decades to assume that participation in the system is mandatory and that the survival of the system is paramount over the rights or prosperity of the individual. But a system that is hostile to individual liberty does not deserve to exist. It should not be allowed to survive.
People have to walk away and build something else.
Voluntarism is the key to changing decades if not centuries of misallocated human labor and time. Imagine a world in which every person is a “free agent,” and they join groups (or partnerships) based on shared goals or shared beliefs rather than being born into servitude — fuel to keep a global machine that does not care about them running. They join these groups based on their interests, abilities, merit and how they might help a particular project progress. Then they are free to leave the group whenever they wish or when the project is done.
In other words, voluntarism is a kind of return to a tribal system, but one in which some tribes exist temporarily based on what they plan to achieve. The GOAL becomes the focus, instead of the endless perpetuation of a group that has outlived its usefulness. The more legitimate achievements for the betterment of humanity a tribe attains successfully, the longer it would stay relevant.
The incentive to better one’s self would be considerable in a voluntary society, for you are competing against every other individual that is also improving their own skill sets and knowledge for a spot in each project or tribe. Individual excellence would become the core virtue of such a civilization.
Voluntarism is perhaps a lofty vision, but one that can be pursued in steps. One of the first steps is self-sufficiency and production.
Decentralization requires each person and group to become production capable. There was a time not more than a century ago when the majority of Americans learned skill sets through family or apprenticeship that gave them the ability to produce necessary goods and services. This idea has all but disappeared today. The principle of self-reliance is treated almost as a joke in popular media now. And many municipalities actually punish individual attempts at growing one’s own food, collecting water or even started a small business. Production is discouraged through overt taxation and bureaucracy. Nevertheless, these things have to be done if we are to break from the existing system.
Learning a trade skill is something anyone can do to improve their chances at survival. Organizing into trade groups that barter their skills and goods is the next step.
Tribalism is commonly presented in the mainstream as a barbaric and outdated mode of living, which is why I highly recommend it. If the mainstream is constantly chopping away at an idea with an ideological hatchet, then is must be a threat to the powers that be. The more centralized civilization becomes, the less varied its ideas are, the less self-sufficient it is and the more easily controlled it is. This is the point, of course. Globalists use any means at their disposal to enforce centralization not because they think it will serve to better mankind, but because it gives them more dominance over mankind.
Tribes may have their differences or even come to conflict if they do not respect the nonaggression principle. But any war that erupts between two tribes is never going to match the horror of the centralized military industrial complex with its never-ending conflagrations on a global scale. By the same token, tribalism prevents the possibility of a single world system that claims to “end all war” while enslaving the populace through dependency and force. “One ring to rule them all” is not the answer. It never was.
It is my belief that the human endeavor to improve life and improve how we interact with the Earth itself must be worked toward by decentralized efforts, otherwise the chances of civilization being led down a destructive path by a small group of psychopathic people is high.
Today, most innovation is bottlenecked through control mechanisms that only benefit the elites. They promote their puppets to government and in exchange government provides them special protections. Most science revolves around their goals alone, not the betterment of humanity. Most social discourse is designed to divide people in anger and cultism rather than provide greater understanding. Geopolitically, they preach about the erasure of national borders and the unification of society, while at the same time using trickery and subversion to trigger wars all over the world. They have a monopoly on the direction of human progress, but not a monopoly on human thought…not yet.
Our job is to dismantle their monopolies by starting our own competing systems that serve our interests far better. In this way we create redundancy that shields us from economic collapse, engineered or otherwise. In fact, if we become more independent as producers and organize our own local economies, we might even welcome the collapse of the globalist system as a useless parasitic husk, rather than fear its collapse as a sign of the “Apocalypse.” Also, we would be better positioned to stop globalists from using their “order from chaos” model. They can only create chaos for us if we are dependent on the system they are deliberately crashing.
Globalist efforts to co-opt decentralization movements are rampant, which tells me that the model is indeed a threat to them. The cryptocurrency scam is one such example; it was originally sold to the liberty movement as a “decentralizing” currency system that would provide anonymity in trade and an alternative that would crush central banks. Instead, we find that crypto provides the exact OPPOSITE of anonymity as a perfect tracking mechanism through the blockchain and that international bankers LOVE blockchain tech as they invest heavily in the arena.
