AKA: The antidote to Despair and Hopelessness is Hopeful, Creative Action.
This was a response to some despair that's floating around:
https://www.smallestminority.org/2021/07/despair-and-utter-hopelessness/
======================
In 2004, yours truly fled from behind enemy lines in the Dark & Oppressive State of NJ to America, settling into suburban Philadelphia. I sometimes fear I didn’t flee far enough. In the intervening years, the cancer has advanced, no crisis has gone to waste, and those enemy lines have rolled up again to my doorstep.
Nonetheless: We’re not dead yet.
They’ll have to literally come to try and kill us for that to happen.
Those of you who remember my blog also remember me warning that we were heading into an era where “all bets are off”.
Ding! We’re there. “All bets are off”. (Shrugs, noting that the sky is still up there, not having fallen.)
We conclude that the mechanisms of governance are tainted and stacked, and that we won’t be voting our way out of this. We also understand that in many places, an asymmetrical environment has been created, wherein the Regime backed Blue adversaries operates nearly at impunity, while anyone Red aligned or otherwise in Opposition operates at considerable legal, social and economic risk.
What, then is to be done? That is the question on everyone’s mind.
The antidote to Despair and Hopelessness is Hopeful, Creative Action. This calls for self leadership, a clear understanding of the scope of one’s rightful action, intelligence, situational awareness, an actionable, creative plan, backed up with good old American gumption.
This call to meaningful, creative action is not a call to violence or stupidity. Precipitous, ill considered action such as the Capitol Incursion of 2021/1/6 played right into the adversary’s hands, who skillfully spun the matter into a public relations coup.
As to specifics, I cannot guide you. I will share, however, some principles:
First: Be decent, honorable and just. Take nothing that is not yours, trade fairly, yield nothing that is yours except that which you give freely or shrewdly.
Next: Understand what is yours, starting with yourself. Comprehend the scope of your own just actions, and your just relationship to your fellow men. Colleague-in-liberty John Lockeson literally wrote a whole book on this subject: The Transcendent Ethics of Liberty. (https://www.amazon.com/Transcendent-Ethics-Liberty-concise-universal-ebook/dp/B08JFX6L87/) Know what your rightful scope of action is, its limits, and what debts you legitimately owe.
Next: Calibrate your boundaries. We can’t care for the whole world, but we can keep our own corner of it in good order.
Next: Form yourself into a whole, complete, moral, balanced and formidable human being capable of selecting and implementing your own agenda in the world. Foster this in yourself, and your children. Select your friends and associates accordingly. Become a power to be both reckoned with, and a pillar to be looked up to. Treat your fellow men with decency and honor, trade with them fairly, and accept no abuse or false claims from anyone.
Next: Always act so as to reserve maximum degrees of independent action. In practical terms, this entails understanding one’s goals, and husbanding the resources necessary to pursue them on your own. Identify allies and adversaries, accumulate a wealth of skills, tools, and supplies necessary for independent living, avoid unnecessary debts and entanglements, and minimize the contours of your “contact surface”, so as to insulate yourself from the adversary’s ability to observe or impede your progress and parasitically feed on you. It may also mean taking more dramatic action, such as seeking new employment or a new place to call home. Live and pursue whatever your values and priorities are in peace.
Ultimately, it is this capacity for independent action, no matter how big or small that daunts our adversaries, and they so thoroughly hate us for it. So: cultivate a lot of that capacity, as much as you can. Accept the hate as an accolade and measure of your puissance. They hate that we can decline their offer of enmeshed social and economic co-dependence, they hate that we the unwilling might not contribute fealty and treasure to their schemes, as they seek to bind their fortunes to our productivity. This explains why they revile the maverick billionaires who build and fly rockets, not for the fact of their wealth, but for their refusal to place that wealth at their disposal.
If you cannot be a splendorous billionaire Prince, then at least be a raggedy one, lord over little but yourself rather than be a thrall to others.
They hate that we do not capitulate and submit.
So don’t.
Above all, act. Act on your own moral authority, for your own enlightened self interest. Do not do the adversary’s work for them by canceling yourself. Be judicious, wise and discrete, but do not censor yourself. Consciously select your values and priorities, and pursue them will all due vigor, manifesting them with skillful and intelligent worldly action.
Paralysis is a natural reaction to fear and uncertainty, and the only time it is adaptive is momentarily, so as to avoid detection while making a plan. One of the tricks one of my gun fighting teachers taught me is that the best way to break paralysis is to take the smallest voluntary action: wiggle a toe, move a finger, blink an eye, and thus bootstrap that small voluntary action to shake off the paralysis.
Take that one small paralysis breaking action today. Make a list. Make a friend. Discretely interview a new potential ally. Hoard some food. Stuff some cash into a pillowcase. Buy some gold and silver and Bitcoin. Inventory your tools. Whatever it is, get on with it.
Perhaps, you might gently call bullshit on someone today. And perhaps, you might make a habit of that, one day after the other. Living freely is a habit, so its best to get on acquiring it now, if you haven’t already.
And remember: With my own eyes this summer, I’ve seen people still flying Gadsden flags in the deepest Blue Bastions, from the lakes of Massachusetts to the hills of NJ, even though their owners know that they’re surrounded and no one is coming to rescue them. They may be surrounded, but those flags tell each other that they are not alone.
We’re Americans. This is who we are. This is what we do.
Because ultimately: Hudson was wrong. (https://smallestminority.blogspot.com/2004/04/hudson-was-wrong-if-youre-just-coming.html)
No comments:
Post a Comment