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We’ll Either Rise As A Collective Or Perish As Individuals: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

We’ll Either Rise As A Collective Or Perish As Individuals: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article:

Everyone who’s freaking out about wokeness and identity politics can relax. Liberals are 100 percent certain to get bored with that schtick and forget all about it without having helped a single member of any minority or marginalized group. Ask the immigrants and the kids in cages.

Anyone to the left of Ted Cruz is a communist. Anyone who opposes US imperialism loves and supports the governments it targets. Anyone who defends Palestinians hates Jews. Move the Overton window far enough toward your side of the debate and you can spin even the slightest hint of disagreement with you as dangerous extremism.

People who spend their time freaking out about communism are hilarious. Even if you believe communism is always necessarily evil, if you live in the western empire you’re so far from experiencing communism it makes more sense to spend your time fretting about shark attacks or being struck by lightning. If you’re reading this odds are you live in an English-speaking nation. If you live in an English-speaking nation your government is so very, very, very far from espousing communism that it would make more sense for you to spend your time worrying about being eaten by lions.

Even if you believe everything the TV tells you about communism, the simple economic realities of your nation and the mountains of violent force keeping it in place mean that of all the many, many existential threats you can worry about, communism should rank near dead last.

Reverse Batman: A working class ninja spends his nights beating up kleptocratic billionaires whose thievery has created the socioeconomic injustice that’s destroying his city.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Young People Turn To Collectivism Because Of These Psychological Disparities

Young People Turn To Collectivism Because Of These Psychological Disparities

Are Americans changing with the times, are the times changing with Americans, or, has nothing really changed at all in the past century?

Before we dive into this discussion it’s important to understand one thing above all else – There is nothing new under the sun. Every “new” political movement or cultural upheaval has happened a thousand times or more in the past. Every “new” form of governance is just a rehashed version of a system that came before it. Every “new” economic structure is one of a handful of preexisting and ever repeating trade methodologies. Every “new” revolution and rebellion is a fight for the same basic goals against the same persistent foes that have always existed since the dawn of civilization. All of human history can be condensed down to a few fundamental and irreconcilable differences, desires, values and ambitions.

This cycle of events is a kind of historical furnace where people and nations are forged. Most go through life without any inkling of the whirlwind; they think the things happening to them are unique and unprecedented. Maybe if human beings lived longer lives they would realize how common such conflicts are and view the repetition with less panic.

The so called “disenfranchised” feel overwhelmed by the tides and completely devoid of any influence over the future. Then there are those that have the ability to see the story unfold. There are those that try to control it and use it to their advantage. There are those that are trying desperately to escape it, even at the cost of reason and sanity. And, there are those that take truly individual action and make history rather than simply being caught up in it.

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Conservatives Must Now Draw A Line In The Sand And Stop The “Great Reset”

Conservatives Must Now Draw A Line In The Sand And Stop The “Great Reset”

There are many millions of Americans today in the post-election environment that feel uneasy about the fate of the country given the rise of a Biden presidency. And though I understand why this tension exists, I want to offer a possible “silver lining”; a different way of looking at the situation:

With Biden in the White House, there is no longer any ambiguity about what conservatives (and some of the more courageous moderates) need to do and need to accomplish. Now we know where we stand, and now the stakes are clear.

With Trump in office, a lot of liberty minded people became a little too comfortable, to the point that they were inactive. They actually believed the system could be repaired and corruption ended from within, and without much effort on our part beyond our votes. Trump made many conservatives lazy.

Then there was the Q-anon-sense floating around on the web which also misled some freedom activists into thinking that people much higher placed or “smarter” than us were fighting the good fight behind the scenes and that the globalists would be swept up in a grand 4D chess maneuver. This was a fantasy; it was never going to happen. Finally, everyone knows this and we can get on with the business of fighting the real battles ahead.

I think we are reaching a stage in the conflict between freedom advocates and collectivist tyrants when many illusions are going to melt away, and all we will be left with is cold hard reality. Now is the time when we find out who is going to stand their ground and fight for what they believe in, and who is going to cower and submit just to save their own skin. Now is the time when we find out who has balls.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Be Outwardly Collectivist And Inwardly Individualist

Be Outwardly Collectivist And Inwardly Individualist

Individualism could theoretically work as a political system, in a hypothetical world where nobody is ever helpless and the planet has infinite resources and the ecosystem is infinitely robust. But we do not live in such a world.

No, we live in a world where every single person is born helpless and somebody needs to take good care of them to help turn them into physically and psychologically healthy adults, where people get sick and become disabled, where most of us go through a prolonged period of steadily increasing weakness and convalescence before death. A world with a fragile ecosystem and finite resources.

Individualism has no real answers for the mass-scale implementation of its value system in such a world. The only way to believe it does is with a lot of compartmentalizing away from reality and refusing to look at the tremendous suffering that is brought on by saying people who need help must either get it from family members who are hopefully kind or rely on the charity of strangers who are hopefully feeling charitable. Refusing to look at the reality that ecocide will continue as long as it remains profitable and no collectivist measures are put in place to prevent it from being so.

The only thing that can help humanity, as our situation appears from behind this pair of eyes, is what I call enlightened collectivism.

But this doesn’t mean that individualism has nothing to offer.

Individualists tend to have a more lucid than average understanding of the concept of self-sovereignty, which will be an essential component of any healthy world if one exists in humanity’s future. When it comes to what happens up to the border of your own skin, collectivism should hold no power.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Rugged Individualism Cannot Save Us. Only Enlightened Collectivism Can.

Rugged Individualism Cannot Save Us. Only Enlightened Collectivism Can.

Individualism cannot save humanity from the crises it faces. It’s not the right tool.

There is a widespread belief that if we just eliminated all collectivist impulses within our society, we could eliminate all our problems. That the government which causes so much bloodshed and oppression wouldn’t be harmful if we can shrink it down to a minor role, or even to nonexistence, and the corporate powers which attach themselves to governments would thereby lose power over individuals. Let individuals take care of themselves however they see fit, with no collectivist power interfering in their affairs, and the world will sort itself out in a harmonious way.

This will never happen.

The most common argument for why this will never happen is that the world is full of awful people, and if you place the will of the individual over the will of the collective, the awful people will be able to do a lot more awful things. The people who are sociopathic enough to destroy the environment and exploit others for profit will be able to exert more influence over the total wellbeing of the world than those who aren’t, and there’ll be no safety nets in place protecting those who are born into under-privileged situations. Individuals like mothers who aren’t as capable of earning money would frequently find themselves dependent on the kindness of a man who may or may not be kind. Such a society would claim to be just, since it makes the same demands of everybody, but due to real circumstances could only ever be gravely unjust.

This argument is of course true, but it’s not the primary reason that individualism cannot save us.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Language: The Indispensable Fundamental Actuator of False Orthodoxy

Language: The Indispensable Fundamental Actuator of False Orthodoxy

In Ayn Rand’s penultimate magnum opus, “The Fountainhead”, there was a minor antagonist by the name of Ellsworth Toohey whose raison d’etre was to undermine Rand’s ideal man and protagonist, Howard Roark.

Although Toohey considered his parasitical power as having a major stifling effect on capitalistic society, in reality, all his cumulative efforts ended up as a mere minor footnote in the long march of Man; as evidenced in the story’s denouement and ensuing towering city skylines.

Of course, much of Rand’s life consisted of excoriating the parasitical aspect of the Collectivists and their government, as both defined by dependency; in stark contrast to the rugged self-reliance of the men who moved the world.

In The Fountainhead, a discussion took place whereby Toohey said he wanted to make the “ideological soil” infertile to the point where young heads would explode prior to expressing any individuality (or similar to that).  Then, later, near the end, Toohey asked Roark what Roark thought of him, and the egoistic, self-reliant architect replied: “But I don’t think of you.”

In reality, is it possible today to ignore the Collective? Or, has it propagated sufficiently to where it can be ignored no longer?

Acceptance of reality requires honesty.  And the author Ayn Rand identified reason as the means for Man’s thriving existence on this blue marble. Therefore, if we are to examine reality with honesty, then we must by all means factor logic and time as follows:

If (this), then (that)

Stated another way, either the decisions we make now will improve our reality in the days ahead –  or, we will be worse off than we are at present.

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The Real Difference Between Left & Right

 

QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong; You have worked with politicians worldwide and both sides. What is your opinion of the politics that has emerged post-Great Depression?

LM

ANSWER: The major difference between the socialism supported by the Democrats/Labour in Western Society is that to them the individual has no value, it is the collective society, which they then elevate themselves to rule. Conservatives believe in the individual has rights and value and that the state is to serve the people. In the eyes of socialism, it is not the individual but the collective society which is the value and they are qualified to rule from above. The socialist always seeks to control others and in so doing, the individual is always sacrificed for the collective state. It is not what your country can do for you personally, it is the teaching that you as the individual are to be sacrificed for the greater good of the whole which is controlled by the politicians – i.e. former the Soviet Union.

Nevertheless, the socialist always pretend that they are on your side. They have flipping everything upside down. Your personal well being is only possible by surrendering your individuality to the state. It is what they have done with Death Insurance. The insurance companies could not sell Death Insurance, so the reversed it and called it Life Insurance. Like fire insurance protects against fire, life insurance does not protect you from living forever. They reversed the label to make you feel proud how much Death Insurance you own. Socialist did the exact same thing. They get people to surrender their individuality to the state and always blame the rich when your quality of life declines.

Keep in mind that career politicians even on the right also support the government against the individual. Thomas Paine in Common Sense took the position.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fine-Tuning the Surveillance State

Fine-Tuning the Surveillance State

We have been watching the shift of society and all of its components to collectivist thought and action in preparation for the step into a full-blown totalitarian state. Already the Constitution and our rights enumerated within it have been relegated to impotency and practically abrogated. The key to this has not been the use of force, but the molding of thought and behavior over the decades within the schools, within the fostered predictive programming of pop culture and television, and within the lying, Marxist, mainstream media.

Currently there are 22 states that have made a crime of what is referred to as “disturbing the school,” and this has led to thousands of arrests of students for such things as interrupting a teacher, or even belching in class. Schools have an increased police presence; however, as we have seen with the school shootings this year, they certainly aren’t there to protect the students.

Police are in schools to enforce conformity and submissive behavior: they’re managing the “troupe” of juveniles, driving the herd.

Collective, community thought is the mantra. Advertisements on the radio for high-school sports list all of the acceptable skills that sports convey: leadership, teamwork, cooperation, etc. Gone is personal development, let alone “fun,” the latter being archaic and non-utilitarian. In the past 3 to 4 decades, this collective “consciousness” has become the norm. Creative thought is discouraged unless it is directed…directed by authorities or “approved” controllers/managers. Such thought is supplemented by the actions of those authorities, mislabeled as “government” when the appropriate term is rule.

An article ran out of News 4, posted on NBC Washington on 5/17/18 entitled Potential Spy Devices Which Track Cellphones, Intercept Calls Found All Over D.C., Md., Va. It is worth reading, as it details the Stingray technology (carried in a briefcase) that capture cellular telephones by tricking them into believing the devices are cell phone towers. This means the phones are tracked, and the government is taking information on them surreptitiously.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Message from Planet Japan: The good times never last forever

Message from Planet Japan: The good times never last forever

After having traveled to more than 120 countries in my life, the only person I know who’s been to more places than I have is Jim Rogers.

Jim is a legend– a phenomenal investor, author, and all-around great guy.

(His book Adventure Capitalist is a must-read, chronicling his multi-year driving voyage across the world.)

Some time ago while we were having drinks, Jim remarked that he occasionally tells people, “If you can only travel to one foreign country in your life, go to India.”

In Jim’s view, India presents the greatest diversity of experiences– mega-cities, Himalayan villages, coastal paradises, and a deeply rich culture.

My answer is different: Japan.

To me, Japan isn’t even a country. Japan is its own planet… completely different than anywhere else in ways that are incomprehensible to most westerners.

(Watch my friend Derek Sivers explain it to a TED audience here.)

On one hand, this is a culture that strives to attain beauty and mastery in even mundane tasks like raking the yard or pouring tea.

Everything they do is expected to be conducted to the highest possible standard and precision.

They start the indoctrination from birth; Japanese schools typically do not employ janitors and instead train children to clean up after themselves.

Later in life, the Japanese salaryman is expected to practically work himself to death (or suicide) for his company.

Obedience and collectivism are core cultural values, and the tenets of Bushido are still prevalent to this day.

One of the most remarkable examples of Japanese culture was the aftermath of the devastating 2011 earthquake (and subsequent tsunami) in the Fukushima prefecture.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What We Can Do…

What We Can Do…

Until enough people’s minds are changed about coercion and collectivism, resistance is futile. The debate will continue to be about how much should be stolen from whom and for what purpose – rather than about whether anything should be stolen by anyone for any purpose.

As things are, many people believe it is ok to steal from others – provided the stealing is done on their behalf by other people (these are called “tax collectors”) and the stolen goods are called by pleasant but intellectually dishonest, morally evasive names (examples include Social Security, welfare, foreign aid, grants and so on).

Using this technique of doublethink, people are able to do things to other people – or urge they be done to other people, on their behalf – without feeling ashamed or guilty, as they would if they were to do these things themselves, personally.

This “surgical excision” of the psychologically normal human revulsion for other-than-defensive violence and for the use of violence to take things from others is the keystone of the coercive collectivist system. Dislodge it and the whole edifice collapses.

It is that simple – and that hard.

Simple, because the moral principle is already established.

Excluding psychological defectives – the relatively small population in every society that does not feel ashamed or guilty about the use of violence (these people are called “criminals”) most people do feel ashamed and guilty when they steal or resort to violence.

And hence, most people do not steal or resort to violence.

It is a broadly accepted moral principle that theft and violence are wrong things; that those who steal and threaten to harm others in order to get what they want are not good people. This is half the battle, already won.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A System Problem for Democracy

A System Problem for Democracy


In 1956 William H. Whyte published a book entitled The Organization Man. Basing his findings on a large number of interviews with CEOs of major American corporations, Whyte concluded that, within the context of modern organizational structure, American “rugged individualism” had given way to a “collectivist ethic.” Economic success and individual recognition was now pursued within an institutional structure – that is, by “serving the organization.”

Whyte’s book was widely read and praised, yet his thesis was not as novel as it seemed. “Rugged individualism,” to the extent that it existed, was (and is) the exception for human behavior and not the rule. We have evolved to be group-oriented animals and not lone wolves. This means that the vast majority of us (and certainly not just Americans) live our lives according to established cultural conventions. These operate on many levels – not just national patriotism or the customs of family life.

What Whyte ran across was the sub-culture of the workplace as followed by those who set themselves upon a “career path” within a specific organization. The stereotypical examples are those, to quote Whyte, “who have left home spiritually as well as physically, to take the vows of organization life. [They adopt an ethic that] rationalizes the organization’s demand for fealty and gives those who offer it wholeheartedly a sense of dedication.”

Today, some private sector organizations have moved away from the most extreme demands of such conformity, but some other career lines have not, two examples being the military and career party politics. For insight in this we can turn to the sociologist C. Wright Mills, whose famous book The Power Elite was published the same year as Whyte’s The Organization Man.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Even Advanced Technology Cannot Explain Human Action or Predict Markets

Even Advanced Technology Cannot Explain Human Action or Predict Markets

The logic of the human mind will prevail over paternalist dictates and the hubris of the social engineers.

For more than a century, the world has been caught in the grip of social engineers and political paternalists who are determined to either radically remake society along collectivist lines or to modify the existing society with regulatory and redistributionist policies that are in accordance with “social justice.” Both are based on false conceptions of man and society.

One of the leading voices who challenged twentieth-century social engineers and statists in the twentieth century was the Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises. In such important works as Socialism (1922), Liberalism: The Classical Tradition (1927), Critique of Interventionism (1929), Planning for Freedom (1952), and in his monumental treatise, Human Action (1949; 1966), Mises demonstrated the economic unworkability and unintended negative consequences that result from attempts to impose central planning on society, as well as the social quagmire brought about by introducing piecemeal regulations and interventions into the market economy.

But it was in his often-neglected work, Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution, that Ludwig von Mises systematically challenged the underlying philosophical premises behind many of the socialist and interventionist presumptions of the last one hundred years. This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Theory and History in 1957, so it seems worthwhile to appreciate Mises’s arguments and their continuing relevance for our own time.

The Elusive Search for Meaning and The Rise of Modern Science

The world is a confusing and uncertain place. We all live in communities with values, traditions, customs, and routines for daily life. We have grown up in them and tend to take certain aspects for granted. Our communities provide us with degrees of orienting certainty and predictability in our everyday affairs. Yet they still fail to answer a variety of “big questions.”

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Social Destruction by the Abuse of Money

In Britain, the top 1% of earners pay over a quarter of all income tax collected, and while super-rich British residents perhaps don’t have the tax breaks the Macklowes enjoy, the bulk of the burden falls on lawyers, bankers, company executives and owners of successful private enterprises. And it should, say the collectivists….

One of the juicier stories doing the rounds in New York society is the Macklowe divorce. Harry, the husband, kept a French mistress for two years before seeking a divorce from his wife of 58 years. So far, this is a run-of-the-mill marital split. But what made it the subject of gossip is the extraordinary lifestyle of the Macklowes, the mud being slung, and the expectations of the wronged 79-year old wife, seeking a billion or so to see out her remaining days.

They say hell hath no fury, and all that. Here is one of New York’s richest couples, washing their laundry in public, and it emerges that Harry has not paid tax since 1983. Harry’s lawyer bluntly stated in court that “people in real estate don’t pay taxes”. It echoes Leona Hemsley’s infamous quote that emerged at her trial thirty years ago, when the Queen of Mean said “We don’t pay taxes, only little people pay taxes.”

This still surprises many of us little people, but we must believe a top New York lawyer when he makes a statement in a court of law. The source of immense personal wealth in cities like New York is often from property development, and if this is a tax-free activity, it makes a mockery of the state redistributing money from the haves to the have-nots.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Catalan Independence: Why The Collective Hates It When People Walk Away

Catalan Independence: Why The Collective Hates It When People Walk Away

I have written many times in the past about the singular conflict at the core of most human crises and disasters, a conflict that sabotages human endeavor and retards critical thought. This conflict not only stems from social interaction, it also exists within the psyche of the average individual. It is an inherent contradiction of the human experience that at times can fuel great accomplishment, but usually leads to great tragedy. I am of course talking about the conflict between our inborn need for self determination versus our inborn desire to hand over responsibility to a community through group effort — sovereignty versus collectivism.

In my view, the source of the problem is that most people wrongly assume that “collectivism” is somehow the same as community. This is entirely false, and those who make this claim are poorly educated on what collectivism actually means. It is important to make a distinction here; the grouping of people is not necessarily or automatically collectivism unless that group seeks to subjugate the individuality of its participants. Collectivism cannot exist where individual freedom is valued. People can still group together voluntarily for mutual benefit and retain respect for the independence of members (i.e. community, rather than collectivism).

This distinction matters because there is a contingent of political and financial elites that would like us to believe that there is no middle ground between the pursuits of society and the liberties of individuals. That is to say, we are supposed to assume that all our productive energies and our safety and security belong to society. Either that, or we are extremely selfish and self serving “individualists” that are incapable of “seeing the bigger picture.” The mainstream discussion almost always revolves around these two extremes.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Ludwig Von Miss on Collectivist Fallacies and Interventionist Follies

For more than a century the world has been caught in the grip of social engineers and political paternalists determined to either radically remake society from top to bottom in collectivist directions, or to use various government regulatory and redistributive policies to try to modify existing society into desired “social justice” forms and shapes. Both are based on false conceptions of man and society.

One of the leading voices challenging the social engineers and the interventionist-welfare statists in the twentieth century was the Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises. In such important works as Socialism (1922), Liberalism: The Classical Tradition (1927), Critique of Interventionism(1929), Planning for Freedom (1952), and in his monumental treatise, Human Action (1949; 1966), Mises demonstrated the economic unworkability and negative unintended consequences resulting from attempts to impose systems of socialist central planning on society, as well as the social quagmire brought about by introducing piecemeal regulations and interventions into the market economy.

But it was in his often-neglected work, Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution, that Ludwig von Mises systematically challenged the underlying philosophical premises behind many of the socialist and interventionist presumptions of the last one hundred years. This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Theory and History in 1957, and it seems, therefore, worthwhile to appreciate Mises’s arguments and their continuing relevance for our own time.

The Illusive Search for Meaning and Purpose in Life

The world is a confusing and uncertain place. While we may live in communities and societies the values, traditions, customs and routines of daily life of which we have grown up in and tend to take for granted, and which provide us with degrees of orienting certainty and predictability in our everyday affairs, they still fail to answer a variety of “big questions.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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