Foot binding and central authority: Ancient traditions that just didn’t work out

Sometimes I toodle over to The Survival Podcast to listen to Jack Spirko. Mostly he’s into permaculture or investment, or interviews a sponsor, and I move on. But sometimes there’s a ‘cast that sounds interesting, you know, and it usually is. But different people can mean different things by the same words, so intros can be misleading.

For example this one, where he’s talking with some guy named Jeffrey Tucker.

Jeffery joins me today to discuss, bitcoin, digital cities, the bright future of liberty, freedom as a do it yourself project. Few people I have met are as articulate as Mr. Tucker when it comes to explaining why government should never be trusted with money, the way I heard him put it during one speech was,

“The government should not be trusted with money,…….ever,……., under any circumstances,………at all,………ever,……..as in never.”

‘Freedom as a DIY project’ is a subject very dear to my heart, so no way I wasn’t going to listen to that. (And an aside here: Bear, thanks for that link to the Doing Freedom mirror, because I loved that site, RIP.)

And then I spent an hour listening to a couple of guys rant about how great Bitcoin is. And they talked about coding and monopolies and giant business models and then…the end. Maybe there was something in there about actually doing freedom, but if so I missed it. Tucker seems to be involved in something called Liberty.me, but don’t bother going to that site to learn more because…well, maybe you can learn more but it’ll only be after you sign up for a subscription; there’s no description of what the hell it is on the homepage at all. For all I know they’ll try to sell you Amway stuff, so don’t come complaining to me if you do it.

And I don’t really mind that hour I’ll never get back, because listening was my choice and anyway I was doing other stuff too. But I got to thinking, as my mind wandered, that people always think in terms of systems and establishments. They want a big top-down revolution that will Bring Down The Man and impose freedom like a fluffy warm blanket they can spread over everybody.

But if you’re just some guy who wants to live free, you’ll never get that by waiting for somebody to show you the plan, or sign that petition, or vote for that new bastard, or invest in that Freedom Collective. The point of doing freedom is to actually do freedom, not to sign up for a group so that freedom can be done to you, or even for you. Not that I knock mutual support, as you know, but it does seem to me that centralized government has been sufficiently tried.

I want to live long enough to see a million freedom projects bloom. I want to see people drop the bullshit and just find ways to live free. Money-makers that provide services for individual freedom-lovers, like that TOR router* are the sort of things I’d love to see entrepreneurs put their efforts into. Things that help people find their own kind of freedom.

This sounds like I’m ragging on Spirko and Tucker, and I’m really not. I like Spirko’s show and the TSP Forum. Spirko is completely into individual empowerment so far as I can tell, and I don’t know enough about Tucker to rate an opinion. I’m just picking on them because this is where that podcast got my thoughts running.

But it’s like this: If you offer to sell me a knife, I’ll listen to your pitch with interest because I like knives. If you offer to come over to my place and cut my meat for me, I’ll tell you to get stuffed. Because I already know how to do that.

The whole problem with human governance is that somebody gets one idea as to how things should go, and then tries to get everybody to do things that way. This effort generally ends up involving gulags. I think we’ve seen enough of that. Ancient traditions like foot-binding and centralized authority probably seemed like good ideas at the time, but they haven’t proven all that beneficial in the long term. The central-government model in all its many variations regards misery, war and genocide as necessary tools. Deaths by the million, that sort of thing. Oh, it’s always the other guy who starts it. But we end up encouraged to join in. And when encouragement doesn’t work, there’s always conscription. For freedom, you know.

I’d like to try a new model, where I’m a sovereign individual and you’re a sovereign individual, and if we can work together on something it’s beautiful but if we don’t want to that’s all right too. And neither of us gets to chain or kill the other for disagreeing. I don’t know what happened in human history to make that seem like such a hippy-dippy idea, but whatever it was we need to get over it**.

I’ve been actively working on a plan for personal freedom since the mid-aughts, and so far it’s working okay for me. But then I always was a lazy bastard, and I don’t have a single clue how to get freedom for you. That’s your job. All I can do is show you what I’ve been doing and report on how it’s going. And you should be glad of that, because I’d be a terrible Dear Leader. If I ever ended up President-for-life, next thing you know we’d be at war with those loudmouthed bastards in Nugentistan.

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* _{Which unfortunately hit the market just in time for all the revelations about TOR’s weaknesses, but that wasn’t the developers’ fault and maybe it’s still better than nothing, I don’t really know. And maybe it’s not the best possible example, but it’s the one that popped into my head.}

**_{I’m mentally rolling my eyes at what some conservative will say at this point. Yes, I know it’s not that simple and I’m not suggesting Paradise would ensue but look at it this way: If the very worst happens and you and I end up murdering one another over some dispute, that’s two deaths instead of two million. Which makes it a tragedy instead of a statistic.}