Tag: post-freedom America

Where Will Freedom Take Root Next?

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Contrary to the beliefs of some people freedom is not the default condition of humanity.  In fact, depending on what model of human social grouping you believe in you might be inclined to believe that freedom is an unstable condition that appears very infrequently and disappears almost immediately.

After all, the great majority of people throughout recorded history have lived under regimes that barely understood what the concept of freedom even meant.  The agrarian societies of antiquity, Egypt, Mesopotamia and China were monarchies that incorporated a temple priesthood to reinforce the godhood of the emperor or king or pharaoh or whatever they called their head monkey.  And they had an army to put muscle behind it in case religion wasn’t enough to keep the peasants in line.

Only a few times a millennium an Athens or an America breaks out.  Interestingly, it seems to me that it only happens when a middle class appears.  Whether that is Athenian merchants or Roman small farmers and traders or English yeomen moving to North America it seems to be town people in the middle of nowhere discovering that they can band together to protect their own interests without the God-King.

But what inevitably happens is the aristocrats discover a way to re-establish the empire.  They rebuild the temple by calling it the bureaucracy.  And pretty soon Athens is run by the Four Hundred and Rome by the mega landowners and America by the Fortune Five Hundred and their animatronic Biden.  Even the end of empire doesn’t spell freedom.  When Rome fell you might think that would allow for freedom to reappear but if you look at the history of the dark ages any local freedom was at the whim of chieftains, nobles and bishops who mostly took their cut of what peasants produced and provided “protection,” such as it was, from even more rapacious forces such as the Northmen and Saracens.

So, freedom is fragile.  And it’s relative.  Fifty years back we had almost unlimited freedom.  Freedom of speech, mostly fair elections, the right to bear arms, freedom of association and freedom of religion.  And in addition, we had amazing prosperity and modern conveniences (telecommunication, rapid transit, air flight) that Caesar Augustus or any of the other ancient rulers would have assumed were only within the purview of gods.  If today we lost most of our freedom but were guaranteed the standard of living we had, most Americans would complain a little and then go back to sleep.  So, freedom from want is a freedom that most people don’t enumerate.

Another one is the freedom to raise a family that will be there after you’re gone.  That’s one of the freedoms we see disappearing in the United States.  And to my mind that may be the deal breaker for a lot of people.  After all, what’s the use of living comfortably if it’s at the expense of having a family?  That’s the swap that a lot of Millennials have made.  They’ll get an Obama phone, an EBT card, a universal basic income, free porn and Section 8 housing and mindlessly squander what’s left of their lives and disappear from the Earth.

But for the people who want to leave descendants, what is the deal that is available?  If the Left has its way, the only way to be part of the elect is to drink the Kool-Aid and join the club.  You won’t be one of the Elite but you can work for them.  What was the priestly caste three thousand years ago is what we call the managerial class today.  You can be a bureaucrat at the IRS or the Social Security Administration.  You’ll donate to the Democrats, buy a tote-bag from PBS and put a rainbow bumper sticker on your electric car.  If you’re a little more talented you’ll be a middle manager at a Fortune Fifty company and send your child (hopefully a daughter) to Bryn Mawr or Smith College where she’ll be groomed to be a transgender studies professor.

If you’re hoping for your children to be normal people who will have children of their own then it becomes a lot less certain.  And that’s the subject of this post.  Where will you be able to go to try to give your descendants at least a part of the freedoms and prosperity that you were given by your parents in America?

And in terms of them getting everything we were given the answer is there isn’t such a place.  That world is gone for good.  What you will be looking for is the best deal that’s available.  So, in terms of prosperity, maybe that is still America.  There is still a good deal of money sloshing around this place.  The Elites need their lawns cut and their companies to be managed.  There is money to be made if you’re not too picky about what you have to say and do.  And if you’re in the right trade you might even be able to raise your kids the way you want, for the most part.  So that’s something.  You’ll have to keep a low profile on social media and be careful not to offend anyone really important.  But a lot of what passes for the good life is still to be had in abundance if you know how to work around the system.

But are there other places just as good or better?  I think there will be.  Because I think there will be other places that may not be as prosperous as the United States but they may be more culturally attractive than America.  Eastern Europe seems like an interesting place.  They haven’t allowed the woke West to proselytize their children into joining the LGBTQ cult so far.  Hungary has even shown their willingness to reject unlimited migration and even legislate to encourage their young people to raise families.  A place like that should probably be looked at as an alternative if America sinks into global feudalism.  Even some of the third world may turn out to be freer than America in the future.  I hesitate to talk about Russia and China because those societies are hard to penetrate as an outsider.  But it’s far from impossible to imagine that sometime in the future one or both of those places might provide opportunities for ex-pat Americans.

So, I don’t expect to see another United States appear in my lifetime or even in the lifetime of my great-great grandchildren.  But what I think makes sense is to instill in my descendants the understanding of what to look for in a home.  Look for stability, a little bit of prosperity and some kind of value system that embraces the idea of a middle class.  With those things you can hope to thrive.  Who knows you could get lucky and end up in the next “Land of the Free.”

In the Long Run

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We are living in a reductionist endgame scenario that some bright boys must have thought up for us.  After the collapse of the Soviet Union the brain trusts that advise Wall Street and the US government decided that they already controlled enough of the military and monetary power on the planet to take over everything.  And by everything, I mean total control of the human population of this planet.

They bought out the Chinese by turning their country into almost the entire manufacturing base for the United States.  And they control everything else by distributing or withholding credit needed for the other countries to survive in the 21st century environment.  Sure, places like Afghanistan and Iraq acted up a little twenty years ago.  But once their infrastructure was taken out by the US Air Force the resistance they could muster was very limited.  And we then made a point of inviting people from these countries to immigrate to the United States and Europe just to show their brethren back home that it was better to join us than fight us.  And the biggest success of the endgame scenario was their reducing much of rust belt America into a dead zone with no jobs and no hope.  They knew that if they could break the middle class, they’d be able to steamroll the rest of the world without much of a fight.

Lately Eastern Europe; Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and especially Russia have resisted the culture war that goes along with the globalist endgame.  Shockingly these places have refused to embrace the mandatory LGBTQ indoctrination.  It should be fairly interesting to see if these places along with China hold the line on refusing this nihilistic behavior.  I find it a fairly hopeful sign that there are still some places even in Western culture that haven’t been cowed by the globalists into sacrificing their families and children in order to qualify for first class berths on the Titanic.  Maybe these clear-eyed places will be able to show the rest of the West that the emperor has no clothes.

But let’s assume that they fail.  Let’s even assume that China eventually bends the knee to Washington and joins the globalist bandwagon.  The logical endpoint is a world where climate policy eliminates fossil fuels, curtails human reproduction to a one child per family quota and government institutes almost total control of political speech over everyone on this planet.

It’s not that hard to imagine what this kind of system would look like.  The rudiments of it are already on display right now all around you.  The Green New Deal and tech companies are already instituting large chunks of it and the rest will be rolled out once the pesky MAGA people are rounded up and put through an indoctrination camp or two.  And with everybody on board around the world the people in charge are probably thinking there won’t be any barbarians to invade and muck things up in a century or two.

But they’re wrong.  What they don’t understand is that humans aren’t uniform.  You can corral 99% of them and through fear and routine get them to toe the line.  But somewhere out there is a Napoleon or a Caesar.  Someone with dreams grandiose enough that he’ll knock over the apple cart because he doesn’t like apples.  Now this is cold comfort.  None of this will guarantee that the global American empire will implode in time to warm my heart.  In fact, I sort of doubt it will happen in my lifetime.  But at least I don’t have to despair for the whole of humanity.  I’ve always hated reading dystopian stories like 1984 and Brave New World.  The anthill uniformity of these societies is so anti-human that it repels me viscerally.  And that’s what I resent so much about things like the nonsensical energy policy like battery powered cars recharged from a grid powered by fossil fuels.  The patent illogic insults my intelligence.  It’s like watching a scene out of Idiocracy.  It’s just that annoying.

I like to think that in a century or so, someone will rise up and take control of one of the provinces and provide such a better deal to a few of the provincial governors that they declare him emperor (or let’s say first citizen) and after sacking Martha’s Vineyard and the Napa Valley he’ll shut down the Federal Reserve and send the Deep State home without jobs.  I don’t know if this makes sense to any of you but I felt like expressing my hope for the future.  Whatever the outcome of any particular political struggle I just want to convince myself that I don’t believe in a world where Joe Biden is the template for the future.

What’s a Twentieth Century American to Do? – Part 2 – Are There Alternatives to the U.S.?

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In the first part of this series of posts I identified two separate questions associated with whether The United States was still the freest place in the world to live.  The first question was to answer whether the U.S. still the freest country to live in.  The second question is contingent on the first answer being yes.  If it is the freest place then the second question is how do you live in this new America in a way that maximizes your actual freedom here.  Because without a plan it is unlikely that it will feel very free.

This post is meant to answer that first question.  I looked around at some of the other places in the world and asked whether they were more or less free than the U.S.  And I think I’ll have to say that there are other places that would feel freer than here.  I’ll try to explain how I came up with this answer.

One of the first thing I decided was that if the standard of living of the country in question was close to first world conditions, then I would not fault the “freedom” quotient on that account.  For instance, I would rate most countries in Europe as an acceptable economy to compare to the U.S.  whereas some place like Haiti or North Korea would be unacceptable.  Looked at this way, places like Argentina and Chile and even Costa Rica might be acceptable places to live because the infrastructure exists to enjoy a decent life.

The next question is whether a country enjoys freedom of speech.  And it is understood that this is relative to what currently exists in the United States.  Though we technically have complete freedom of speech in the United States that is far from a true statement when you take into account the effects of woke practices on employment and the “hate speech” laws that although technically unconstitutional are unchallenged in multiple jurisdictions throughout Blue America.  Looked at from that point of view there are plenty of places that have the same or more freedom of speech as the United States.  Certainly, there are many places in Europe where the woke thought police are even more rabid than in this country but places like the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary, for instance, are not among them.  And these countries are not in the clutches of the LGBTQ mafia.  And they are all opposed to illegal immigration.  And finally, the Czech Republic even has gun rights that come close to what we have in the United States.

So, my cursory survey of other countries that might provide a freer environment than the U.S. seems to say that there may in fact be choices.  And it is understood that none of these places are as prosperous as the United States or possess all the advantages that this country possesses.  But what they do have is a less leftist outlook and a lack of woke public policy.  And since this is just a cursory examination, my next step is to look at these Eastern European countries to see whether the reality matches the appearance.

And if anyone out there has information on these three places and other candidate countries, please leave information in the comments.

What’s a Twentieth Century American to Do? – Part 1

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A few days ago, I was having a political discussion with someone on our side of the cultural divide.  I said something like, “If none of the red state leaders does anything to resist the unconstitutional changes being made then we might as well leave and go somewhere else.”  His answer was that maybe we might leave out of protest or anger but we wouldn’t be going someplace where we would have more freedom than we have, even in this diminished America.  And that got me thinking, “Is that true?”

Our complaint with what is going on is that we are being cheated out of the freedoms that were the defining qualities of this country.  If we cannot have those freedoms here, where can we have them?  If the answer is nowhere else then leaving would just be a matter of protest.  So, this needs to be determined in order to know what is the reasonable course of action.

Knowing the fellow that I was talking to; I think he was specifically talking about the 2nd amendment.  But I thought about all the things that are considered freedom in America.  And that is a complicated calculation because some of the most cherished freedoms, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, the right to bear arms; are exactly the things that are under assault by the Left.  But there are other advantages in this country that we might want to consider freedom.  I remember during the Second World War the US government sponsored Norman Rockwell to produce public service ads that highlighted some of the American virtues that we all benefitted from, such as, the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear.  As diminished as some of those things have become it is definitely important to look at what trade offs would exist if an American were thinking of leaving here.  After all, as unequal as some of the enforcement of laws has been in the last few years it bears remembering just how non-existent justice tends to be in most of the world outside of the first world.  Imagine demanding your rights from the police in Mexico or the Philippines.

So that is the first part of what this post, or these posts are about.  But contingent on the answer to whether there is a freer place to go, there is a second question.  If there is no better place to go then the next important topic is how can we maximize our freedom while living in this post-freedom America.  And surely, I’ve talked about this a million times already but I want to look at it from a different perspective.  It’s a new idea I’ve had.  I have started calling it the “American Archipelago.”  The concept is that we can look at all of our separate lives spread across the length and breadth of this continent as islands of freedom in a sea of darkness that is Woke America.  We can walk in freedom on our own tiny preserve and we can visit each other in real life or in digital space and step from island to island and travel over this sea of darkness without being drowned in it.  All we have to do is perfect our seamanship to avoid being drowned.  I like the metaphor and plan to use it in a story I’m thinking about.

But for now, I’ll think a little bit about the answer to the question.  Is post-freedom America still the freest place on Earth?