International Guy: Statism has become a brand-new religion.
A growing variety of individuals are interested in utilizing the State’s power to inform others how to live. They are likewise voting themselves freebies at the cost of others.
It’s clear that those who want to be left alone won’t be. Is it possible to find freedom in an unfree place?
Doug Casey: Back in 1973, my old pal Harry Browne composed an actually great book called How I Found Flexibility in an Unfree World, where he handled precisely that concern.
Keep in mind, that was almost 50 years ago now– a life time.
The book was prompt, although the world was much freer then than it is now. We now have significantly more financial and travel controls, nevertheless– numerous brand-new charges for saying, or perhaps appearing to think, the “incorrect” things. You’re now monitored in a lot more ways.
Harry’s book is dazzling and really more important to check out now than it was then. His responses to how you find flexibility in an unfree world are useful and relevant.
However the reality is that you can run however you can’t conceal.
That’s since the world has actually been infected by a virus. I do not mean the absurd COVID infection. I suggest the virus of statism and collectivism.
There’s actually nowhere you can go to be safe from it– just some places that are better than others.
For example, the so-called 5 Eyes nations– the US, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. They were when the significant bastions of Western Civilization, the only civilization– ever– that held personal freedom as a suitable. But now they’re the very ones leading the path downhill.
It’s a genuine issue for freedom lovers. We’re a smaller and smaller sized minority. The majority of people, however, prefer a strong leader assuring the impression of safety and security. Absolutely nothing has changed given that the days of Rome. It degenerated from a yeoman republic to a multicultural empire with onerous taxes in order to spend for bread and circuses to keep the capite censi under control.
In the latter days of the empire, a number of its citizens tried to get away, to live among the barbarians– even while the barbarians were taking over the empire itself. Practically the same thing is happening now in the West in general and the United States in specific.
The very best thing you can do to protect yourself– a minimum of while it’s still possible– is to prosper enough to insulate yourself from the State. Rich enough so that even if they take a lot from you– and they will– you still have enough. Enough to soak up the hit, keep moving, and live life as you ‘d like.
Let me go off on a little a tangent here, and look at things from the perspective of class. That’s maybe suitable in a world where neo-Marxism is being promoted all over. I see classes according to how they align relative to the three most important, a lot of basic verbs in any language– be, do, and have.
If you’re lower class– which is to say have a lower class mindset– you simply accept what you’re provided. The lower classes are specified by mental demoralization, lethargy, and despondence. At best, they just think of having things– cars, homes, food, mates– but don’t even prosper at that effectively due to the fact that of their worths. I question, however, that any person now reading this fits into that category. Historically, they’re without a doubt the biggest group, and their numbers are now growing rapidly.
I significantly wonder if the United States even has much of an upper class anymore. Being upper class is everything about values, mostly being something. Money, power, and status do not make someone upper class– they’re effects of upper-class worths unless you win the lotto or have excellent athletic, entertainment, or sometimes even service capability. Then you can masquerade for a while. But those things tend to corrupt. It’s easy to descend and end up being effete, entitled. Useless and stagnant.
The reality is, the majority of us are middle class. Historically, the middle class is what America is everything about; it made America special. The work ethic, aiming, and enhancing, doing. The middle class is being destroyed by inflation and taxes, that make it difficult to conserve and develop capital, and regulations, which make it hard to produce, to do. I hesitate that ground between the millstones of taxes and inflation– as Lenin stated– big numbers of the middle class are coming down into the ranks of the lower– the proletariat.
The 3 classes are natural enough. But since the invention of mass democracy, because it was become an around the world nonreligious religious beliefs around the time of World War One, there’s occurred another class– the political class. Anybody can join it. They were constantly there however no place near as hugely crucial or virulent. I can’t think about a single verb to specify them– all the possibilities are uncomplimentary, though. They dislike the middle class, however, since its members are, by definition, efficient and independent.
Anyhow, these are simply a few ideas. Maybe I’ll expand on them in the future.
To return to the initial concern, what you ought to do is become rich so you can insulate yourself to the best degree that you can from the ongoing crisis. It will ultimately pass, and you can reposition yourself– if you’ve preserved some capital.
Money is far from everything, naturally. It’s just a tool. But tools are handy …
International Guy: Western Civilization appears to be going downhill economically, politically, and culturally at a fast pace. The trajectory looks grim.
However, much of the rest of the world outside of the West has their own problems. What can freedom-loving individuals do not only endure however prosper in the years ahead?
Doug Casey: As Soon As again, I’ve stated this for several years, and it’s truer now than it’s ever been.
The monetary and economic problems in the world are serious and speeding up. However as we go deeper into the Greater Anxiety, your greatest threats aren’t financial or economic. They’re political.
The only way to solve that issue from an useful perspective is to diversify politically the method you would diversify economically.
That implies you need to have a crib in a second or 3rd country– along with organizations and monetary assets in others besides your home country. That’s the only thing that you can do at this point. You can vote if it makes you feel great. However, as Stalin stated, it’s not who votes that counts– it’s who counts the votes. Becoming a political activist is degrading and pointless.
The political classes all over are using the present COVID hysteria to cement themselves in location, and really few of the sheeple are resisting. To the contrary, they invite it, because they think extreme actions make them safe. A degenerating society worths security above all.
It’s true everywhere, however, even in progressively primitive places like South Africa– in reality, practically all of Africa. India completely locked down as did the majority of South America. These locations do not have sufficient capital saved to allow an enforced trip of several years. And that’s what we may be looking at.
It’s happening almost all over the world. Individuals that are being hurt the most, needless to say, are the people living hand to mouth. They’re going to be harmed even worse as all these governments destroy their nationwide currencies– due to the fact that poor individuals can just save the regional national currency.
When their pitiful paper currency cost savings are wiped out, then they’re really in problem. Will they get violent, or simply roll up into a ball and die? Excellent concern.
In the 21st century, East Asia, China, Vietnam, Korea are the very best places to be. This is also true of Russia and Eastern Europe, notwithstanding the fact that China is going to have a financial collapse and may effectively wind up divided into 5 or six smaller sized nations.
We’re looking at around the world chaos in the making. I was constantly half joking when answering the concern, “How bad do you believe the Greater Anxiety will be?” and I ‘d state, “Even even worse than I believe it’s going to be.” Now, it’s no joke.
International Guy: Practically every government and nation in the world is going in the wrong instructions from an individual flexibility viewpoint.
Exist any alternatives for like-minded individuals to come together if there is no perfect country or location?
Doug Casey: Everybody should check out Neal Stephenson’s book, The Diamond Age.
The concepts that he established, essentially of nation-states falling apart and being replaced with phyles, was extremely prescient.
People are social animals; we like to socialize with other people.
This is especially true with people that resemble us. To put it simply, individuals that think in the very same things, that have the very same values, and have the exact same outlook on the world.
It’s actually insane to attempt to put diverse, diverse people together into the exact same political entity. That’s because, undoubtedly, any and all of the groups because synthetic political entity are going to attempt to get control of the device of the State to benefit themselves and punish the others. Politics constantly leads to a war of all against all.
I believe Stephenson’s book was quite correct. Individuals will increasingly discover that their genuine countrymen are individuals with whom they share worths and ideas– or whatever occurs to be important to them. Not a national passport. That’s simply government ID, like a motorist’s license.
Within that context, here in the United States, Libertarians tried to create a neighborhood, I think called the Free State Motion, focusing around Keene, New Hampshire. I haven’t been there. So, I do not understand if it remains in any way effective or not, or whether the Libertarians are considered as some kind of an odd spiritual cult by the residents. I don’t believe it’s had any genuine effect on anything.
Worse, the thing could backfire.
It may assist in one-stop-shopping to discover possible enemies of the State.
Naturally, I attempted to put something together in an obscure however really pleasant part of Argentina, La Estancia de Cafayate.
It’s been an artistic success, and it’s a great place to live. We’ve got a lot of great individuals living there– really satisfying, mellow, easy-to-get-along-with business. But we attracted our share of antisocial and dogmatic nutcases. Even if someone is a political Libertarian does not always indicate he has any other virtues. And he may be emotionally out of balance in the bargain.
Psychology and character are the real issues. Shangri-la does not exist. And it will not up until the vast majority of humans are more like Harry Browne, Ron Paul, or Lao-Tzu, and less like AOC, Pelosi, or Obama. I think my finest suggestion at this moment is to look at a town, whether you remain in the US or in other places, one that has a frontier culture, where individuals are independent-minded.
I think most of the people reading this now are what we ‘d call gamma rats.
They’re not like alpha rats, which want to manager everybody else around, taking the best mates and finest territory. And batter the beta rats, who are the huge majority of the population.
The gamma rats likewise tend to get the best belongings etc, but they do not beat up the beta rats nor let themselves be battered by the alpha rats. The trouble is that, in laboratory experiments, researchers found that gamma rats are only a very small portion of the population. Amongst people, we’re a similarly little part of the population.
International Man: Let’s talk about some possible intense areas.
What function do you believe the development of innovation will play in empowering the person?
Doug Casey: From Day One, innovation has actually been the friend of the average guy, and hugely advantageous. Except the result comes in two stages. The first is typically just good for the judgment political class and bad for the average man.
Let’s go to Stanley Kubrick’s motion picture, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Remember the scene where the hominids gathered around the watering hole, and the one hominid comes up with the concept of using a bone as a weapon to beat up the other group?
That was early innovation. The first person that gets technology uses it to control. But then after a while, it’s monkey see, monkey do. The technology spreads from the inventor or the first utilizer to the population in general, and things adjust.
It’s been that method for numerous thousands of years.
It held true with gunpowder. The very first people that got gunpowder ran the State; they used it to keep the peasants at bay. But when it got into the hands of the peasants, they were able to use guns to get armored knights, which they could not do before. The tables were turned.
That same was true with composing, and then the printing press. In the beginning, they were hoarded by the political classes and priesthoods, who used them to preserve their power. The very same with the computer system. In the old days of ENIAC and the IBM 360, only a government or a huge corporation might manage them, and they could utilize them to keep an eye on all the little people. Now, everyone has a massively effective laptop computer or mobile phone. Hackers can counterattack.
I enter into that theme in some detail in Assassin, the third book in the High Ground septet.
In other words, technology ultimately turns the tables to the advantage of the average man, despite the fact that it’s constantly used to suppress the typical guy in the start.
It was technology that liberated the masses to overturn whatever the existing political class might have been at the time. It has nothing to do with democracy, which is just a sop to make the peasants believe they’re in charge. If voting made any distinction, they wouldn’t let you do it.
It’s a pattern that’s going to continue. However it can be years, or perhaps years, before a brand-new innovation finally enters the hands of the typical man. Then the political class wishes to regulate it.
The powers-that-be deal with all technologies as harmful. Like weapons, they wish to keep these things out of the hands of the typical man, generally to keep the peasants from protecting themselves.
However the cat always leaves the bag in the long run. It’s a factor for long-term optimism. That said, there’s constantly an opportunity of a real Dark Age if the old order collapses seriously enough.
International Man: Most people are familiar with big, central tech companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, and so on
. But we have actually also seen the development of decentralized innovations that empower the person, such as encryption and the 3D printing of guns. One key example of this is bitcoin, which is a decentralized kind of cash.
What pledge do you think decentralized innovations have for wresting power out of the hands of the State, and what are the implications?
Doug Casey: The error that individuals make with things like Facebook– a giant, amoral, and duplicitous corporation– is thinking that just because billions of individuals use it, it needs to be safe. “Oh, it must be sort of decentralized and democratic since it lets everyone communicate with one another.”
Giant media corporations like Facebook and Google threaten because they can in fact form individuals’s view of reality itself. Much more than newspapers or perhaps TV could. The average person’s understanding of the world, what’s occurring, and what other individuals think is no longer an item of speaking to his next-door neighbors or perhaps keeping an eye out the window. Their viewpoints and emotions are now formed by taking a look at their little screens. That makes them really easy to manipulate.
The scenario will become worse with Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality– someone will configure and manage what goes into these things. Perhaps discreetly, or perhaps really overtly. The situation is significantly aggravated by the COVID hysteria in many ways.
The option to the risk, however, is not to regulate them. That would be completely detrimental. Guideline simply indicates giving even more power to the State– which is innately greatly more dangerous than any corporation. A minimum of corporations need to supply a beneficial service to remain in organization …
What we truly require is not simply one Facebook where everybody goes, and can for that reason be quickly kept track of. What we need is 10,000 Facebooks, so the power devolves to everybody and any person.
The problem will fix itself in the long run, however. Huge corporations end up being inefficient. Apart from that, they undergo the second Law of Thermodynamics as anything else. It is among the few laws I think in.
That holds true, politically speaking also. The world would have been better off if Bismarck had not united about three hundred minor principalities and kingdoms in Germany in 1871. The world and the Germans would have been much better off in every possible method if they ‘d remained three hundred relatively small, not powerful principalities.
Exact same in Italy, with Garibaldi. Today they ‘d be better off if there were still ratings of little duchies and counties. The very same with India, which would be better off if their numerous kingdoms hadn’t been by force united by the British. It holds true all over.
I hope, and in fact anticipate, that locations like Germany, Italy, and certainly India will when again devolve into smaller units. The way the Soviet Union broke up into fifteen, and Yugoslavia separated into 6, and Czechoslovakia divided into two. The US, which has actually evolved into a multicultural domestic empire, ought to– and likely will– split up too.
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It will help you understand what is unfolding right prior to our eyes and what you ought to do so you don’t get captured in the crosshairs.