Interesting. Too many simplistic metaphors, and simplistic concepts and terms, all based on limited ethnographic evidence and and a narrow interpretation of only writers who are already controversial in their over-simplifications. E.G., Elites are not the same as rulers. Rulers are not the same as leaders. A leader can be someone who is only followed by those who want to, and who see his/her skill in findimng what needs to be found, or thinking what needs to be thought, etc. States are a recent invention in human history (earliest are post 8000 BC, and then only emerged in a few areas), and so cannot be used to generalise. But still an interesting piece. Well done.
Anarchy means only no rule, no rulers; In other words -- freedom
“Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a ‘Great Leap Forward’ that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children.
In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.”
Anarchy as defined by most anarchists, usually means no Rulers. Not the absence of Rules, but the absence of rules imposed coercively by minorities. Existence itself is structured with rules and principles and freedom is only possible within existence, within rules and principles. There is a principle that a meaningful sentence cannot be composed of preopsitions only, unless the context makes it clear. Even if an unusual anarchist declares there should be No Rules, that is a Rule.
The "Elite" wrote the constitution and on top of that it was never ratified by the "people" either. People the "Elite" didn't agree with or didn't like their opinions were excluded . It too was foisted upon the country. There was no referendum. So, IMO it is a fraudulent document. And I don't give two hoots who are offended by that. statement.
One solution is an annual lottery for elected politicians and senior civil servants. A pool is created for each category, with 10% selected by a random drawing for public hanging. It might help focus the ruling class’s attention on who and why they serve. Try it for a few years, and if there is no noticeable improvement, extend it a few more years. It will help them be more empathetic toward the victims of their wars that maim and kill our sons and daughters, as well as our life work they suck up in taxes they use to ensure their continued tenure in power.
This Hobbesian idea that men can’t live among themselves without a single, overpowering authority at the center of all things, pulling all the strings, and beseeched for the blessings of its edicts, has to go. In all of recorded history not a single government organized on that principle has ended in anything but disaster and the wholesale destruction of individual rights. Its variation—the American experiment—included the seeds of its own destruction and is currently imploding. That experiment was an improvement on kings, emperors, and dictators but it was just a variation on the toxic theme of centralized power. In America’s case the power was nominally shared by a triumvirate of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, but an immoral premise—rulers and top-down authority, however it’s divided—cannot be implemented morally. Thanks to decades of “education” by a parasite class with an interest in their somnolence, most Americans not only can’t imagine an alternative but can’t conceive of their own power to say “No.” But there’s nothing inevitable about an out-of-control, war-mongering, self-perpetuating, unaccountable military-industrial complex that launders stolen money into politicians’ offshore accounts. It’s self-evidently not a moral system under which human beings should live.
No one rules if no one obeys. The power didn’t lie with the handful who produced unconstitutional covid fatwas. It lay with the millions who obeyed them. James Madison’s prescription for resistance was “a refusal to cooperate with officers of the union.” That’s all it would have taken to stop the covid tyranny in its tracks: Even a sizable minority willing to say “No” was all that was required. “No, I will not close my business over a cold virus.” “No, I will not stay home cowering under the table and drinking Purell.” “No, I will not follow the ‘advice’ of people who are obviously either drunk on power or morally bankrupt or both.” The first reaction of any psychologically free human to “stay-at-home” orders over a cold virus was to immediately put on his coat and go outside. The correct answer to covid was, “Don’t tell me what to do.”
People were afraid of being arrested if they disobeyed the fatwas? The Founders opposed a standing army for a reason, and it was because such an army in the end is always used against the people it’s alleged to defend. The police—a standing domestic army—are a very recent invention historically and at least in the US they’re legally free from any duty to protect any given citizen. They’re revenue collectors for politicians and they suck at crime solving. What, then, is the point of them? Without those two bludgeons hanging above our heads—the police and the military—who would have stayed home as bidden in 2020? For how long would the politicians’ ability to enforce their unconstitutional edicts have lasted? Would they even have bothered issuing something they knew would be ignored, or could be ignored, when the mind-numbing irrationality of it became apparent? Which businesses would have dared to tell people that the scary germs would know they were walking the wrong way down an aisle, or would have forced muzzles onto people who just wanted a gallon of milk? Resisting the sociopathic irrationality by doing anything but leaving the store risked arrest and a beat-down, and the tyranny gripped harder. Without those two clubs in their hands the insane people in public office would have had no enforcement arm and the whole idea of sitting at home until the already-in-production-in-2019 poison injections arrived wouldn’t even have left the gate. What period of human history represents the greatest advancements in freedom and individual rights? The period leading to the American founding. That predates the police, a mid-19th century invention. It predates the US military as an organization. The most effective fighters in the world in the days of the founding were the volunteers who defeated the British Empire. Over 90% of America’s history has been spent involved in a war somewhere, and the standing army made it possible. In the absence of a standing army we also wouldn’t have this hand-wringing nonsense that “secession will cause a bloody civil war,” either. It wouldn’t. It couldn’t. The ease with which states could leave or withdraw their sanction would be a check on the federal government. Do you think there’d be a Federal Reserve that could devalue the currency by 97% in 110 years, or a 36% income tax if states could refuse to cooperate or withdraw without the threat of military force being used against them?
As for the US Constitution, it is not and was never intended to be the “sovereign law for millions in perpetuity.” The states are not subordinate to the union. They are free to come and go as they like. The Declaration of Independence refers to “free and independent states” that “have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right to do.” The states pre-existed the union and none of them gave up their sovereignty by joining it. The indivisibility of the union is an invention, a myth, and a fiction, and certainly not the intention of the Founders or the understanding of the states that joined it. It’s a political reality only in the sense that the emperor’s new clothes are a political reality.
And within the states? The people were meant to be the sovereigns. Not “the people” as a collective. “The people” as individuals. Sovereign individuals rule themselves. They interact with others voluntarily, without introducing force into the equation. They aren’t infantilized wards of the state with ignorance so ingrained that they’re stumped by the question of who were the two sides in the American Civil War. Sovereigns don’t view each other as the means to each other’s ends and they don’t make politicians their proxies for acts prohibited to themselves. For humans to live as humans they have to be politically free, which means free from each other. That requires a bare minimum of laws protecting their rights (especially property rights), a commitment to the principles of voluntaryism, a prohibition on the initiation of force by everyone, and getting over the obsession with meddling in what other people do with their lives. It especially means removing the government’s leverage in the form of armies and the police. People thus free retain the right and the power to restrain and disobey the unconstitutional edicts of their agents. In delegating—not ceding—delegating certain limited powers to the states or the federal government, the people retain and exercise their sovereignty in order to restrain those same agents.
Lysander Spooner knew better than to wait until an unconstitutional law was adjudicated unconstitutional. “To say that an unconstitutional law must be obeyed until it is repealed," he wrote, "is saying that an unconstitutional law is just as obligatory as a constitutional one…There would therefore be no difference at all between a constitutional and an unconstitutional law, in respect to their binding force; and that would be equivalent to abolishing the Constitution, and giving to the government unlimited power.” Not to point out the obvious, but that’s why your presumptive rulers argue for obedience, unanimously support a standing army, and won’t restrain and reform the police, whatever they say in public. Spooner was speaking at a time (1850) when the first police force in America, New York City’s, was just six years old, a time before politicians had that club to wield. That’s why in today’s context his prescription sounds so hopelessly impossible to implement. So, yeah: Defund the police. Defang their political masters by shrinking the cops’ role by about 95%. Abolish standing armies. Eliminate the CIA and FBI completely. In that scenario, Spooner’s nullification through disobedience and his ideal of fully restrained state and federal governments would be a step closer to reality. It would be apparent that there are alternatives to ruling and being ruled. No psychologically healthy human being seeks to do either.
Chris - thank you for such an inspiring and insightful essay.
You hit the mark over and over again.
The greatest weakness in "we the people" is the total lack of organization - and this is a key failure of many conservative and freedom loving people who are very independent minded.
Whereas the globalists that are attacking humanity, quite apart from the fact their families and core institutions go back hundreds and thousands of years, during the 20th century in particular they literally organized. raft of what I like to call neo-monarchies, which includes the communist parties and, the global institutions under the United Nations umbrella, which includes the regional institutions - think ASEAN, the African Union etc., and the private global institutions, like the World Economic Forum and its cartel of multinationals, and then of course there are the billionaires foundations, NGOs, and Think Tanks!
It's a swamp of intersecting, global institutions of organized centralized pyramids of power that fund themselves through the public and the private sectors.
And that's what we are fighting.
And trying to beat that by railing on social media or choosing the left or the right candidates of the same uniparty is not going to get the job done.
Appreciate the sharing of this essay and gaining exposure to the proposed models. I'm going to stick with my hypothesis that what we are dealing with are not foxes and lion's but parasites that have taken on human form. I certainly do not wish to eliminate them but I am very excited by the prospect that they exposed themselves and we now know they exist. I admit it will be very difficult to study them as they have made it very clear that informed consent is not an option.
Of course, without a (seriously-taken) constitution, a democratic republic also can go the other way and devolve to ochlocracy (mob rule), which in some ways is even worse than oligarchy or tyranny. Or perhaps a hybrid of all three.
Wonderful article, illuminates a lot of dark corners. But... The elites currently in control have powerful weapons at their disposal, including mass surveillance systems, militarised police, the legacy media, and the education and health systems. It is very difficult to see how an effective new elite might emerge and survive as a unified force. Nevertheless that is surely what we need. The problems with current dominant narrative are obvious. The solutions are another matter. But the first step must be strategic action to develop a new group of 'global leaders' to challenge the WEF system.
Interesting. Too many simplistic metaphors, and simplistic concepts and terms, all based on limited ethnographic evidence and and a narrow interpretation of only writers who are already controversial in their over-simplifications. E.G., Elites are not the same as rulers. Rulers are not the same as leaders. A leader can be someone who is only followed by those who want to, and who see his/her skill in findimng what needs to be found, or thinking what needs to be thought, etc. States are a recent invention in human history (earliest are post 8000 BC, and then only emerged in a few areas), and so cannot be used to generalise. But still an interesting piece. Well done.
Anarchy means only no rule, no rulers; In other words -- freedom
“Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a ‘Great Leap Forward’ that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children.
In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.”
~ Robert Higgs
Anarchy as defined by most anarchists, usually means no Rulers. Not the absence of Rules, but the absence of rules imposed coercively by minorities. Existence itself is structured with rules and principles and freedom is only possible within existence, within rules and principles. There is a principle that a meaningful sentence cannot be composed of preopsitions only, unless the context makes it clear. Even if an unusual anarchist declares there should be No Rules, that is a Rule.
The same illusion happened here in South Africa.
The "Elite" wrote the constitution and on top of that it was never ratified by the "people" either. People the "Elite" didn't agree with or didn't like their opinions were excluded . It too was foisted upon the country. There was no referendum. So, IMO it is a fraudulent document. And I don't give two hoots who are offended by that. statement.
One solution is an annual lottery for elected politicians and senior civil servants. A pool is created for each category, with 10% selected by a random drawing for public hanging. It might help focus the ruling class’s attention on who and why they serve. Try it for a few years, and if there is no noticeable improvement, extend it a few more years. It will help them be more empathetic toward the victims of their wars that maim and kill our sons and daughters, as well as our life work they suck up in taxes they use to ensure their continued tenure in power.
This Hobbesian idea that men can’t live among themselves without a single, overpowering authority at the center of all things, pulling all the strings, and beseeched for the blessings of its edicts, has to go. In all of recorded history not a single government organized on that principle has ended in anything but disaster and the wholesale destruction of individual rights. Its variation—the American experiment—included the seeds of its own destruction and is currently imploding. That experiment was an improvement on kings, emperors, and dictators but it was just a variation on the toxic theme of centralized power. In America’s case the power was nominally shared by a triumvirate of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, but an immoral premise—rulers and top-down authority, however it’s divided—cannot be implemented morally. Thanks to decades of “education” by a parasite class with an interest in their somnolence, most Americans not only can’t imagine an alternative but can’t conceive of their own power to say “No.” But there’s nothing inevitable about an out-of-control, war-mongering, self-perpetuating, unaccountable military-industrial complex that launders stolen money into politicians’ offshore accounts. It’s self-evidently not a moral system under which human beings should live.
No one rules if no one obeys. The power didn’t lie with the handful who produced unconstitutional covid fatwas. It lay with the millions who obeyed them. James Madison’s prescription for resistance was “a refusal to cooperate with officers of the union.” That’s all it would have taken to stop the covid tyranny in its tracks: Even a sizable minority willing to say “No” was all that was required. “No, I will not close my business over a cold virus.” “No, I will not stay home cowering under the table and drinking Purell.” “No, I will not follow the ‘advice’ of people who are obviously either drunk on power or morally bankrupt or both.” The first reaction of any psychologically free human to “stay-at-home” orders over a cold virus was to immediately put on his coat and go outside. The correct answer to covid was, “Don’t tell me what to do.”
People were afraid of being arrested if they disobeyed the fatwas? The Founders opposed a standing army for a reason, and it was because such an army in the end is always used against the people it’s alleged to defend. The police—a standing domestic army—are a very recent invention historically and at least in the US they’re legally free from any duty to protect any given citizen. They’re revenue collectors for politicians and they suck at crime solving. What, then, is the point of them? Without those two bludgeons hanging above our heads—the police and the military—who would have stayed home as bidden in 2020? For how long would the politicians’ ability to enforce their unconstitutional edicts have lasted? Would they even have bothered issuing something they knew would be ignored, or could be ignored, when the mind-numbing irrationality of it became apparent? Which businesses would have dared to tell people that the scary germs would know they were walking the wrong way down an aisle, or would have forced muzzles onto people who just wanted a gallon of milk? Resisting the sociopathic irrationality by doing anything but leaving the store risked arrest and a beat-down, and the tyranny gripped harder. Without those two clubs in their hands the insane people in public office would have had no enforcement arm and the whole idea of sitting at home until the already-in-production-in-2019 poison injections arrived wouldn’t even have left the gate. What period of human history represents the greatest advancements in freedom and individual rights? The period leading to the American founding. That predates the police, a mid-19th century invention. It predates the US military as an organization. The most effective fighters in the world in the days of the founding were the volunteers who defeated the British Empire. Over 90% of America’s history has been spent involved in a war somewhere, and the standing army made it possible. In the absence of a standing army we also wouldn’t have this hand-wringing nonsense that “secession will cause a bloody civil war,” either. It wouldn’t. It couldn’t. The ease with which states could leave or withdraw their sanction would be a check on the federal government. Do you think there’d be a Federal Reserve that could devalue the currency by 97% in 110 years, or a 36% income tax if states could refuse to cooperate or withdraw without the threat of military force being used against them?
As for the US Constitution, it is not and was never intended to be the “sovereign law for millions in perpetuity.” The states are not subordinate to the union. They are free to come and go as they like. The Declaration of Independence refers to “free and independent states” that “have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right to do.” The states pre-existed the union and none of them gave up their sovereignty by joining it. The indivisibility of the union is an invention, a myth, and a fiction, and certainly not the intention of the Founders or the understanding of the states that joined it. It’s a political reality only in the sense that the emperor’s new clothes are a political reality.
And within the states? The people were meant to be the sovereigns. Not “the people” as a collective. “The people” as individuals. Sovereign individuals rule themselves. They interact with others voluntarily, without introducing force into the equation. They aren’t infantilized wards of the state with ignorance so ingrained that they’re stumped by the question of who were the two sides in the American Civil War. Sovereigns don’t view each other as the means to each other’s ends and they don’t make politicians their proxies for acts prohibited to themselves. For humans to live as humans they have to be politically free, which means free from each other. That requires a bare minimum of laws protecting their rights (especially property rights), a commitment to the principles of voluntaryism, a prohibition on the initiation of force by everyone, and getting over the obsession with meddling in what other people do with their lives. It especially means removing the government’s leverage in the form of armies and the police. People thus free retain the right and the power to restrain and disobey the unconstitutional edicts of their agents. In delegating—not ceding—delegating certain limited powers to the states or the federal government, the people retain and exercise their sovereignty in order to restrain those same agents.
Lysander Spooner knew better than to wait until an unconstitutional law was adjudicated unconstitutional. “To say that an unconstitutional law must be obeyed until it is repealed," he wrote, "is saying that an unconstitutional law is just as obligatory as a constitutional one…There would therefore be no difference at all between a constitutional and an unconstitutional law, in respect to their binding force; and that would be equivalent to abolishing the Constitution, and giving to the government unlimited power.” Not to point out the obvious, but that’s why your presumptive rulers argue for obedience, unanimously support a standing army, and won’t restrain and reform the police, whatever they say in public. Spooner was speaking at a time (1850) when the first police force in America, New York City’s, was just six years old, a time before politicians had that club to wield. That’s why in today’s context his prescription sounds so hopelessly impossible to implement. So, yeah: Defund the police. Defang their political masters by shrinking the cops’ role by about 95%. Abolish standing armies. Eliminate the CIA and FBI completely. In that scenario, Spooner’s nullification through disobedience and his ideal of fully restrained state and federal governments would be a step closer to reality. It would be apparent that there are alternatives to ruling and being ruled. No psychologically healthy human being seeks to do either.
Chris - thank you for such an inspiring and insightful essay.
You hit the mark over and over again.
The greatest weakness in "we the people" is the total lack of organization - and this is a key failure of many conservative and freedom loving people who are very independent minded.
Whereas the globalists that are attacking humanity, quite apart from the fact their families and core institutions go back hundreds and thousands of years, during the 20th century in particular they literally organized. raft of what I like to call neo-monarchies, which includes the communist parties and, the global institutions under the United Nations umbrella, which includes the regional institutions - think ASEAN, the African Union etc., and the private global institutions, like the World Economic Forum and its cartel of multinationals, and then of course there are the billionaires foundations, NGOs, and Think Tanks!
It's a swamp of intersecting, global institutions of organized centralized pyramids of power that fund themselves through the public and the private sectors.
And that's what we are fighting.
And trying to beat that by railing on social media or choosing the left or the right candidates of the same uniparty is not going to get the job done.
Thanks for the inspiration.
Ivan
Indeed, "The People’ Will Not Save Us". Nor do I sense that Machiavelli, Mosca, Pareto, or Michels (discussed in the above article) offer us any hope.
I have written a somewhat lengthy response that I will not duplicate here. It's in my Substack, for anyone interested, "Who Will Save Us?".
Appreciate the sharing of this essay and gaining exposure to the proposed models. I'm going to stick with my hypothesis that what we are dealing with are not foxes and lion's but parasites that have taken on human form. I certainly do not wish to eliminate them but I am very excited by the prospect that they exposed themselves and we now know they exist. I admit it will be very difficult to study them as they have made it very clear that informed consent is not an option.
Of course, without a (seriously-taken) constitution, a democratic republic also can go the other way and devolve to ochlocracy (mob rule), which in some ways is even worse than oligarchy or tyranny. Or perhaps a hybrid of all three.
Wonderful article, illuminates a lot of dark corners. But... The elites currently in control have powerful weapons at their disposal, including mass surveillance systems, militarised police, the legacy media, and the education and health systems. It is very difficult to see how an effective new elite might emerge and survive as a unified force. Nevertheless that is surely what we need. The problems with current dominant narrative are obvious. The solutions are another matter. But the first step must be strategic action to develop a new group of 'global leaders' to challenge the WEF system.
Eventually the current elites will run out of talent. It might indeed get a lot worse before it gets better. Already the gerontocracy is failing.