Are our only two choices to be either a drone in the global hive that our tech masters are quickly creating or a Hobbesian natural man whose life will be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short?” The Founding Fathers tried to thread that needle by building a state that guaranteed certain “inalienable rights.” As we have lived to see, these guarantees have been abrogated by the elitist class that runs our government and all the corporations that control the livelihoods and material resources that we depend on for existence.
But what we shouldn’t forget is that those things existed for a very long time in this country. There is nothing theoretical about living free in a law-based society. What has changed is the thinking of the elites who control so many levers of power. They have over time decided that they are the rightful rulers of this country and by extension all of Western civilization and that they have a better understanding of what we should be allowed to be.
They’re not interested in inalienable rights. After all they don’t believe in God so they can’t believe that there are rights given to us by God. Without God we are all just animals that happen to exist here on this spinning rock somewhere in the meaningless depths of a universe that increasingly seems to make no sense. So, if they find that they have control of us then in their minds they are gods and we have little to say about it.
Thomas Jefferson said, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” And I think he was right. Human social arrangements cannot be made static. They change over time as the customs and character of the people change too. We are not the British colonists. This is not the world that they lived in. But we are human beings. We have very similar minds and bodies to theirs. Our world is very different but people living together, men and women still want and need the same things. We want to enjoy life and we want to keep what we work for and we want our families to enjoy these same things after us.
So, what it comes down to is this. We’ve let the people in charge take back the things that were agreed to be ours. We’ve been cheated. But if we want to get them back, we’re going to have to do more than complain. So, the choices available to us are:
- Fold
- Flee
- Fight
Those are the choices. Fold means give in. Join the hive and become a drone. It’s not much of a life but at least you don’t have to do much thinking. They’ll find a small cell for you to inhabit until the winter comes and they push you out of the nest into the snow.
Flee means leave. Find a better place either in a red state that has maintained some independence from the hive. Florida looks promising. Maybe Idaho. Or maybe find a foreign land that will take you in and hasn’t been absorbed by the hive. Are there good places in the world? Yes. Will they take us. Maybe not. But it’s worth exploring.
Fight means taking the country back. How that can be done is anyone’s guess. The oligarchs have control of power that is virtually infinite. The resources of the federal government. The reserve currency of the whole world with an almost limitless ability to print money. The largest and most potent military that has ever been. Even thermonuclear weapons if the reason for using them ever appeared. They have almost complete compliance from every corporation and entity with any power, from the media outlets to the universities to the manufacturers and commercial giants. And finally, the information resources of the Silicon Valley billionaires. They know so much about us that they think they can predict our every action.
The idea of fighting all that seems like a bad joke. But by the same token we have at least eighty million living human beings on our side. If a constituency that large can be organized it will have resources and capabilities that could accomplish a lot. Even in the complete absence of violence or even protest a force that large could change things very significantly. But what we currently lack is organization, leadership and a plan. And of those three things what is most lacking is leadership. Someone strong and smart has to step forward and take control of organizing. Who knows, the decision might be that what we need to do is flee. Maybe we can organize a program to allow us to emigrate together to some place that we could call our own. Perhaps several of the red states could become our reservation. But we’ll need to get organized to accomplish any of this.
And getting back to the original thesis of this post, it is possible to live in a free society. But it’s not possible to keep it if you’re not willing to defend it.