Status, Evolution, and Human Nature

As we move into a new year, I’d like to post something that I feel has fundamental importance. I hope you can take the time to read it carefully. Status is generally defined as a person’s condition, position, or standing relative to that of others. Please read that definition again and consider this: Status automatically creates division and conflict. Status forces us to think in terms of position, hierarchy, and dominance, and …

HumanNature

As we move into a new year, I’d like to post something that I feel has fundamental importance. I hope you can take the time to read it carefully.

Status

Status is generally defined as a person’s condition, position, or standing relative to that of others.

Please read that definition again and consider this:

Status automatically creates division and conflict.

Status forces us to think in terms of position, hierarchy, and dominance, and can’t possibly do otherwise; it is built solely upon our standing relative to others.

In other words, status is a poison. It causes us to think of others as adversaries and to compulsively compare positions.

To be very blunt about it, status is a primate model of seeing other beings. But it’s even worse than that: Not only does status poison our inter-relationships, it poisons our self-image. After all, it requires us to think of ourselves as above or below every other person.

Here are the two central problems with status:

  1. Status is plainly irrational. We are massively complex beings, at the same time better and worse than the next person in a dozen ways.
  2. Status forces us to see each other as adversarial. Status seeds hate, malice, and war.

Evolution

Status stands before us as an evolutionary hurdle. If humanity is to rise as a species, it absolutely must transcend status. Until we do, humans will continue to think primate thoughts, and human history will remain centered on conflict.

Status is a continuous, pervasive, and internalized culture of man versus man. And most human minds do hold this as a central concept. How many people like to see themselves as richer, prettier, taller, or more powerful than others? By so thinking, they build the foundations of envy, abuse, and violence.

Our present world is dominated by status-based structures. Whether kingdom, democracy, theocracy, or whatever, status-based structures set one man or group of men above all others. These people of a “higher” position-relative-to-others collect the production of the “lower” people, issue edicts they are forced to obey, and punish those who do not.

In other words, the ruling systems of the present world are incarnations of status… they are “status made flesh,” to paraphrase a famous scripture. This is a primary reason why the world is perpetually at war. The very model on which our society is built sets man against man and group against group, automatically and unavoidably.

Human Nature

Status is not “us.” It may be something we’ve been trained in for dozens of generations; it may be something that has influenced us all our lives; but it is not “us.” It is, rather, a dirty and old habit.

Individual humans tend to transcend status fairly well when they exert effort on it. They usually learn, for example, to drop the concept among people they love. And therein lies the proof that it is not truly “us.” We are better than status.

The truth is that humans can and do demonstrate non-oppositional thinking and living. And in this we see that human nature has been sold short.

Humans, even while immersed in the poisonous and persistent mindscape of status, still demonstrate love and charity.

That fact speaks extremely well of us. Human nature is better than we thought it was.

It’s time to start stripping status from our minds and lives.

Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com

Our Future Has Been Commandeered

FutureCommandeered

We should be living in the time of humanity’s greatest flower. But we’re not. Instead, we’re stuck in a condition of permanent war, rising xenophobia, endless fear, perpetual distraction, and suffocating conformity. Worse, we’re living inside of a surveillance state that is morphing into something truly, truly evil.

I’m here to tell you that nearly all of this is artificial. We have more than enough technology to be living among the stars, to fill every hungry mouth on the planet, and to meet nearly every human need.

We already know how to do all those things… and this fact is demonstrably true.

And yet we sit immersed in fear, confusion, privation, and even hate. And why? Mainly because the elites of our civilization have demanded that we sacrifice our wills to theirs, and because most of us have silently complied.

We have space-age knowledge, yet we remain firmly under the domination of bronze-age rulership. And since these rulers would be wiped away by the spread of space-age technologies, they have carefully contained them.

“Thou Mayest Not Go There”

As I write this, we are at the end of the year 2015. Back in 1968 – almost two generations ago – men traveled to the moon. The next year, they landed there. This was well before microwaves, cell phones, and the Internet. It was even before personal calculators. But right there, space travel was stopped in its tracks. In fact, it was first pulled back and then stopped. No human has left Earth’s gravity since 1972.

Have we more technology than we did in 1968 – 47 years ago – or have we less?

Obviously we have far more and far better, but space technology has been commandeered and space has been locked shut. Our future has simply been cut off. Does any reasonable person believe that it would be harder to go to space now than it was before Kevlar and fiber optics and computers that didn’t fill an entire room?

And let’s be honest about this: That future was eliminated by the lords of our world because it would ruin their game. Letting the cows out of the barn would severely undercut their interests.

Many of you should be reading my posts as you sail among the stars, or at least among planets, moons, and asteroid belts. We have the technology… and we’ve have had it since the late 1960s. That’s not even debatable.

Requiem for the Internet

Before the Internet, nearly all information was forced to move through well controlled conduits. Exceptions to that rule were mainly print newsletters. But then came the Internet, which allowed anyone to speak to everyone; it allowed information to move from individual to individual with no gatekeeper. That was a very large and very significant change.

To be honest about it, we got the Internet mainly because the elites screwed up. They could have bottled it up, but they simply failed. (They are not smarter than we are.) Sure, other people would have written an Internet-type of communications protocol soon enough, but that kind of slow rollout would have given the bosses time to limit the technology and keep some bottlenecks in place.

Now, after a couple of decades, the Internet has been substantially retaken by the elites. Already, nearly everything is being funneled into Google and Facebook, both of whom have whored themselves out to the rulers. (See this, for example.) It will probably be a matter of a few years until unapproved content starts to be pushed out. Matt Drudge, for example, claimed recently that a Supreme Court justice told him so personally.

Putting information back into controlled channels is massively in the interest of the rulers, and there is no one to oppose them. Their populations are among the most compliant in all of human history.

On top of that, the Internet is already a surveillance system, with the aforesaid Google and Facebook being major components of it. Since Snowden, that’s not debatable either.

Worse, that surveillance system (that is, the Internet) is quickly being turned into the most effective manipulation system in all of human history. In other words, the Internet has been more than commandeered; it has been weaponized and turned against its users.

I could go on, but I won’t: More facts won’t change more minds. Opposition to these truths is psychological, not intellectual.

It’s All About Will

We can have our future back, but only if we stop laying our minds and wills at the feet of rulers… rulers whom most of us acknowledge to be liars and thieves, by the way.

So long as we reflexively obey the people who stole our future, they will never, ever give it back. And why should they? That future isn’t in their interests, and so long as everyone obeys them, why should they change?

In the end, it comes down to the issue of will: Do we believe that we have a right to live and act according to our own minds? Or do we simply evade such considerations?

The usual unexamined slogans (“We have to work through our democratic institutions.”) merely lock us into place as will-less cogs in a hierarchy that hasn’t changed in any of our lifetimes. Truthfully, it’s just obscured slavery: “Pay attention to the flashing lights and keep doing as we say.”

There are answers to all our problems, and we are more than capable of reclaiming our future. But that will never happen if we keep surrendering our wills to the same elites who took it from us.

Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com

We Don’t Really Know What’s Happening

ReallyKnow

And, believe it or not, this is rather good news. I’ll explain.

We all like to know what’s happening in the world, and for good reason… understanding our surroundings is essential to survival. We instinctively seek information… we need information. There is, however, a problem that we face:

No matter how much “news” you consume, you won’t really know what’s going on in the world.

We can’t know, because ‘the news’ is half illusion, provided by government-dependent corporations that are paid to keep you watching and to keep you joined to the status quo.

Granted, they are quite good at providing pictures from disaster areas, but when it comes to explaining why the disaster happened, they mislead almost every time. Yes, some truth makes its way through the news machine, but most of it is wrapped in layers of manipulation. If, for example, you watch the news feeds all day, you’ll find a good deal of truth, but you’ll find it amongst a pile of half-truths. Do you really have enough time to analyze them all?

One Piece of Truth

The truth about public reporting comes out from time to time, but usually well after the fact. So, here’s one piece of truth that’s worth remembering:

For those who don’t recall the 1970s, Daniel Ellsberg was a man who worked as an analyst at the RAND Corp., moved from there to the Pentagon, spent two years in Vietnam working for the State Department, and then went back to RAND. He is the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971. These were the documents that revealed that three US presidential administrations had been plainly, knowingly, and openly lying to the public.

Here’s what Ellsberg thought the New York Times was good for:

… to see what the rubes and the yokels are thinking about and what they think is going on and what they think the policy is….

Later, in 1998, he said this in an interview:

The public is lied to every day by the president, by his spokespeople, by his officers. If you can’t handle the thought that the president lies to the public for all kinds of reasons, you couldn’t stay in the government at that level….

And here’s what Michael Deaver, a top aide to President Ronald Reagan, said about the press:

The media I’ve had a lot to do with is lazy. We fed them and they ate it every day.

That’s the truth about news, my friends. The newspapers are where the yokels get informed, presidents flatly lie, and legislatures are massively corrupt. The TV stations recycle opinions from the leading newspapers. And Internet news sites primarily recycle TV and newspaper stories.

Yes, some truth does slide through, but it looks almost the same as the other stuff. The only places we get anything close to refined truth is on a few Internet sites… and many of them have a particular axe to grind.

And the Internet news sites that really dig through the pile (like Mike Krieger’s) are in jeopardy. The Internet is being funneled into Google, Facebook, and a few other friends of the state. If things continue as they’ve been going, the independents will be cut off soon enough, under the guise of copyright or some such.

Sad to say, we shouldn’t accept the news as true. In my personal experience, I’ve been close enough to a few news stories to know the truth, and the networks got it wrong every time.

More Truth

This is what William Colby, former director of the CIA, is quoted as saying in Derailing Democracy: The America the Media Don’t Want You to See:

The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media.

Now, since people have disputed that quotation, let’s back it up: Please consider Operation Mockingbird.

Beginning in 1948, a CIA agent named Frank Wisner started gathering journalists and broadcasters… and started using them to ‘inform’ the public. The operation soon got so elaborate that other agents called it “Wisner’s Wurlitzer.” (Wurlitzer being the brand of organ that was played in churches.) In other words, Wisner played the media like a musical instrument.

While the real situation is more complex than this short description, rest assured that every major news organization in every major country is manipulated by intelligence groups. Where do you think they get all those “unnamed sources”?

If you were an intel operator, wouldn’t you do precisely that? You’d be considered derelict not to. So, you can rely upon this fact. And see here for a minor example.

And So…

I could continue listing facts, but there’s no real point. The crucial thing is to accept the truth:

The news is worked over before it reaches us.

We do know some facts, of course, and a generation from now we may learn nearly the whole truth about some of these events, but only if we wait and then go out of our way to find it.

The good news in all of this comes when we accept the facts and stop running our brains on bad information. Yes, it would be nice to know what’s really going on, but we don’t, and there isn’t much we can do about it. So, it’s time to stop treating the news seriously.

So long as the guv-megacorp-intel structure remains, it will enforce our ignorance. That’s what such organizations do, by their very nature. To expect differently is like expecting a dog to sprout wings and fly.

But once we accept that fact, we stop being spun around by the talking heads and their handlers.

After that, we can find truth in books and in other serious publications.

So, I suggest that you start ignoring the news. Rather, use all that time and energy to start building the kind of world you’d like to live in.

Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com

Golden Disobedience

GoldenDisobedience

This week, we’d like to post a fun article by our friend, Sandy Sandfort. Sandy is a wealth of interesting stories, and he has a new website in the works. If you’d like to be notified when it goes live, send a note to: sandy@privilegedcommunications.net.

Inertia is a human frailty. Too often, we go along to get along. We conform. Because of this, those who claim authority can get most of us to do their bidding if it comes with a plausible justification and is only incremental. We get nickel-and-dimed to death, the death of a thousand cuts.

Back on April 5, 1933, His Majesty, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), had a pen and a telephone. So he issued Executive Order 6102, which made it a federal crime for Americans to own or trade gold anywhere in the world. There were some minor exceptions for some jewelry, industrial uses, collectors’ coins, and dental gold, but the vast majority of the gold had to be turned in.

My father instantly understood what was going on and he didn’t like it. “They’re going to devalue the dollar!” he predicted.

Roosevelt didn’t give much time to comply either. The deadline was May 1. And if Americans did not comply, they faced criminal prosecution under the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917. Scofflaws were looking at a fine of up to $10,000 (1933 dollars, about a third of a million dollars today) and up to ten years in prison.

My parents made the conscious decision to become outlaws.

At every possible opportunity for the next three weeks (and substantially longer), my parents followed Gresham’s law (“Bad money drives out good.”), not federal law. They spent paper and collected gold. My father was a dentist, so he could own some dental gold, but that wasn’t enough. He wanted to covert as much paper into gold as possible. So he gave his patients discounts for payment in gold. “Sam,” a neighbor who was a banker, also helped collect gold for himself and my parents. They would repay his help later when they periodically ‘laundered’ gold for him and themselves.

Even after the deadline, gold still kept coming in. Mostly it was from people who didn’t have the time or the inclination to turn in their gold to the government. However, many feared prosecution and were happy to deal with my parents instead of FDR. Plus they got a better deal.

So where did they launder their tidy little nest egg? Why, “South of the Border, Down Mexico Way,” of course. Mexico had no Executive Order 6102.

My mother was born in the mountains above Albuquerque, New Mexico, and spoke fluent Spanish. She and my father loved traveling though the backwaters of Mexico. At first, they traveled alone, and later, after my brother and I came along, the whole family (including the dog) would go exploring in the land of mañana. (Somewhere there is a picture of me, age one, sitting on a portable potty, experiencing my first-ever bout with “Montezuma’s revenge.”)

My parents carried whatever gold they intended to sell, stashed in the car or on their person. The usual routine was to go to the section of town where casas de cambio were found. (Think of it as the “Street of the Money Changers.”) My mother – all 5’1” of her – would go down the street and show a gold double eagle to every money changer at every kiosk and storefront. In Spanish, she would ask, “How much will you pay for these?” When she found the best price, she would give my father the high sign. He would join her and they would conclude the deal. Sometimes the gold was theirs, sometimes, Sam’s. Sometimes they got pesos and sometimes dollars, depending on what they needed at the time.

So, the ‘illicit’ gold paid for a fun trip and got converted to ‘clean’ funds for themselves and Sam. What’s the crime in that?

And the Beat Goes On…

My family never showed much respect for government laws, per se. No victim, no crime, even if the government disagreed. The general ethical belief of the Sandfort family was pretty much in harmony with the Golden Rule. It had worked for cultures and religions for thousands of years and it worked for us. That was our law. Man-made laws either adhere to the Golden Rule (don’t murder people, duh) and so are unnecessary, or they violate it, such as “The War on (Some) Drugs,” so they were nominally complied with, ignored, or circumvented.

So, when wartime laws said that a seller had to follow certain rationing rules to sell his own products, many buyers and sellers simply conspired to make their own decisions. When my parents needed and could afford a new car for business, the local Chevy dealer was happy to ‘cook the books,’ take their money, and give them a new sedan.

Later, when my family traveled in that car and others, my mother would prepare food for us to eat as we drove. We stopped only for gas… and the agricultural inspection station at the California state line. Of course, we had items that we were required by law to declare, but if you hide them in your backpack or under the car seat and lie, you can save a lot of time and keep from having to throw away perfectly good food.

And then there was the time we smuggled a live Mexican iguana in a cigar box, but don’t get me started…

Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com

The Right Time Will Never Come

righttime

Lots of good people are frustrated with the world, and I understand that only too well. They are, furthermore, eager for the world to improve, and I respect that a great deal.

Their problem arises, however, right on the heels of these desires, when they ask the question, “What should I do?” And that’s where the wheels fall off.

All the Popular Answers Are Wrong

The world is full of people who are glad to tell you what to do. They have carefully thought out arguments as to why their plan is the right one and why everyone else’s is wrong. They’ll encourage you to commit to them, and they’ll try to surround you with people who have already chosen their plan. If you join, you’ll get lots of pats on the back and assurances that you’re a good person.

But all those ways are wrong. They offer you fast, cheap self-esteem. They offer you a fast track to feeling useful, important, and wanted. And all you have to do is join their very pleasant crowd.

Let me make this very clear: There is no blueprint for freedom. There will be no great plan to follow. People who say they have such a thing, while they may be well-meaning, bright, and even respectable, are moving in the wrong direction. (And I truly don’t mean to criticize here; we’ve all made our mistakes.) Here’s the core of the issue:

If we want a world that is safe for individuals, we’ll have to create it as individuals, not as groups.

Groups beget after their own kind, and individuals beget after their own kind.

I’m not the first person to decide this, by the way; here’s what Albert Schweitzer had to say on the subject many years ago:

The unnatural way of spreading ideas must be opposed by the natural one, which goes from man to man and relies solely on the truth of the thoughts and the hearer’s receptiveness for new truth.

The Easiest Thing to Do

Following someone else’s plan is the easy way. It saves us from responsibility. It allows us to deflect the blame, at least a little, if later we’re found to be wrong. This easy way, however, is a wrong way.

There’s a great line from Steven Stills’s song, “The Southern Cross,” that goes like this:

And we never failed to fail;
it was the easiest thing to do.

It will always be the easiest thing to go downward into servitude. That is the current condition of the world, with its dominance-obsessed and status-worshiping inertia. You can go downward quickly by handing your will to the status quo, or you can go slowly by standing still. But until you act, solely upon your own judgment, you’re not going to go upward.

Are You Saying…?

Yes, I’m saying that you have to make your own decision, all alone, and that you have to raise the courage to start acting upon it by yourself, with no leader telling you the best choice, with no famous author guiding you, and with no authority sanctifying the path for you.

You’ll have to choose, all by yourself. And you’ll have to face all the fears that hold you back from stepping out… you’ll have to push past them… you’ll have to make your own legs start walking.

That, my friends, is the price of progress… and we each have to pay it, or not pay it, alone.

We Should Act Without a Plan?

Emphatically yes. The central issue here is not following a plan, but dragging ourselves out of stasis and taking some kind of initiative.

Unless you’re making some kind of wild, violent choice, almost any choice you make is a good one. Your central necessity is to unfreeze yourself and start moving. Once you’re in motion, it’s easy to correct your course. But if you never move, you’ll just keep sliding down the majority’s path, regardless of how much you complain.

In our time, most of the good people in the world remain motionless. We complain about our local fiefdom’s abuses, of course, but that’s about all. That’s the seduction of “democracy,” you see: It magically turns complaints into progress.

Except that the magic of democracy never really shows up. Still, it’s the easiest thing to do. And so we complain and we wait, but we do not act.

But again: There’s never going to be a perfect plan and there’s never going to be a right time. If you wait for them, you’ll wait forever.

So, pick a spot and start. You probably already have choices in mind: Bitcoin, home school, 3D printing, intentional communities, temporary autonomous zones, agorism, becoming a perpetual traveler, or something else. Get moving. Your central necessity is to face the fear and to act anyway.

And if you’d like to know my favorite choice, here it is: Sit at a bus stop and talk to people. You can do that at almost any time and any place.

Who Happens to Whom?

In other words, “Who acts, and who is acted upon?”

As an old coworker of mine used to say, “He who hesitates is lost.” If you wait, you’ll be acted upon. And then you’ll have to re-form your plan, and you’ll hesitate again. And then you’ll be acted upon again… over and over, until you’re too old to do much of anything.

The ‘right time’ never comes. Either we let the world happen to us, or we transcend our fears and we happen to the world.

So, I propose a simple motto for people who actually give a damn:

The world doesn’t happen to us. We happen to the world.

Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com