Free-Man's Perspective

I recently did a wide-ranging podcast with Gabriel Custodiet of The Watchman Privacy Podcast. 

I thought we covered a lot of interesting subjects, including some that I seldom write upon. 

Listen Here

I’ve advised people to get and stay out of debt for a long time, but even so, I didn’t fully understand the affects of debt until the Covid time hit us. As the mayhem spread, I struggled to understand the level of compliance with what would have been, at any other time, criminal medical advice: To take an untested vaccine, and one that didn’t even fit the definition of a vaccine. (Until the definition was rewritten, of course.)

Certainly compliance was driven by massive applications of fear. And, certainly, it was accompanied by exceptional levels of guilt, as in “You’ll be responsible for killing Grandma!” Still, there was more to it, and that extra piece, I soon enough realized, was debt. Continue reading “Debt And Compliance”

The New Religions

There were clear differences in life before 1,200 BC and life after, and probably the biggest had to do with the religions people looked to.

Religions, of course, address the largest questions: How did the world get here? How did we get here? How should we behave? What happens after we die? and others. Continue reading “Earned Knowledge, L4, P2”

Keeping civilization alive has fallen to us. A lot of us grew up believing that Democracy would deliver the best of all possible worlds, but that pleasant promise has become very obviously false. Rulership is not equipped to supply honest and humane living; what they are equipped to supply is ever-more rulership, aka, enforcement.

And so there’s no one to cultivate civilization but us, and we must do this. As briefly as possible, I’ll describe our situation, then move on to what we must do. Continue reading “Keeping Civilization Alive”

Starting Over

As we said in Lesson #3, in the years surrounding 1,200 BC, every major ruling group in the Near East was wiped out. Egypt was the only exception, and just barely at that.

For most people this was a significant change, but not a horrific one. People who lived in cities had to flee; a certain number of farmers and traders had to flee as well, but it was almost entirely rulers and soldiers who died. Still, the ripping away of rulership, in a very short period of time, was difficult for people. Continue reading “Earned Knowledge, L4, P1”

Again I am ringing my alarm bells. This message is for everyone, but especially for anyone involved with computer programming… at all.

This Is Serious.

Please pay attention.

Pass this along. Continue reading “A Crucial Message On CBDCs”

Everything “normal” in the Western system trains you to be a placeholder: You are expected to attend the schools to which you’re assigned and complete the necessary programs. By doing that, you can attain a nice slot in the big machine. Then you’ll function in that general capacity, probably for many years. This is called success. Continue reading “Being A Placeholder Isn’t Enough”

The period that followed this collapse (also called “the great catastrophe”) was a period of reorganization… of reset. It is usually called “the Dark Age of the Greeks,” and it ran for about four hundred years… until 800 BC or so. In most places there were no rulers at all, and people simply organized themselves in families.

And so, here’s the map we mentioned earlier, displaying these events: Continue reading “Earned Knowledge, L3, P4”

Humanity is informed as never before; nothing in the historical record compares. This, unfortunately, is not a particularly good thing.

The provision of information, if it is to bless mankind, must have quality control built into it… it must have a feedback mechanism with teeth. Barring that, it can spiral out of control, as, indeed, it has.

Consider that almost everyone in the modern world is flooded with information. Even the poorest people walk around with phones beeping at them a dozen times per day, delivering little packets of it. And for active people the info-delivery is far greater. Even the delivery devices themselves, smart phones, have become status symbols. Continue reading “Information Is Broken”

Late Mesopotamia

As we’ll see in other rigid, stratified civilizations, Sumer began to fall apart after about 1,900 BC, and was taken over by nearby rulers by 1,750 BC. The Sumerian people had remained where they were, and lived as they had lived, through many changes of rulership. This time, however, the “reason to obey” promoted by the rulers changed, and the farmers didn’t take to the change. Continue reading “Earned Knowledge, L3, P3”