Editor Paul Collier

I wish I could smack this guy in the mouth and tell him to stop looking at the glittering prize.  I am talking to the guy who made a meme 8 years ago attacking the DNC flagbearer of the time, the then-President Barack Hussein Obama.  That guy was me.

If I could go back in time even further, to, say, 16-year old self, I’d tell 16-year old self to read scriptures, over and over and over and over, read histories, prehistories, world histories, over and over and over, read major world religions and their major texts, over and over and over and over.  Read major world philosophies, even if mostly surveyed collections, over and over and over and over.

Tell them it will take 10-15 years to get to the point where you can begin to get close to the palimpsest of where you are and the real circumstance of your potential for existential fulfilment within the reality of power you found yourself born and ‘raised’ into.

I would never have even bothered with politics at all if I had done all this from the ages of 16 to 30.

Instead, I am 53 and still far away from achieving what I wish I had achieved in those years (and certainly could have if I had attached significant need to accomplishing the task).

I am maybe 3 or almost 4 years into working to get a disciplined understanding of these sources of understanding, and have maybe 5-8 more years ahead, God willing, to get to the point where I can synthesize these various sources of understanding.  But I am already fundamentally altered by this experiment.

My ‘political’ orthodoxy is outside the frames of the major orthodoxies of current year.

Pragmatically, within the reality of power that I find myself born into, I am an Americanist (my term), one who holds to the fundamental necessity of a coercive enterprise governance system to have standards of limitations on the ‘right’ of power advantaged agents to impede the rights of others.

We Americans, we who were born such or became such, already ostensibly have such a model in our Constitution, specifically grounded in the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence.

Within that parameter, a whole host of variable expressions of political governance can emerge, and a wide range of options on taxation, foreign policy, etc. can complete for consensually earned validation in an actual Democratic process intended to elect representatives in a Republican model of legislative, executive, and judicial governance.

The Bill of Rights Standards should be applied in the market, the state, and the social squares, with the totality of rights in conflict considered when coming to what should be rolling conclusions, not binding ones, in areas in which the issues are never going to be clear.

This position is pragmatic because it is not one that I ultimately believe is ‘necessary’ or ‘the only way’ for humans to experience something approaching an open opportunity for consensual exchange with their neighbors, the world that I presume would most afford me the best opportunity to approach living a life of my choosing.

Perhaps, for instance, we could create a more perfect Bill of Rights, with more perfect language that leaves less semantic loopholes for the powers that be to exploit.  Perhaps.

But the Bill of Rights, I support, is a construct, an ideal, an assumed American privilege that is understood at deeply profound ‘unconscious’ levels of being for almost all Americans, regardless of born here or moved here, regardless of race or religion, regardless of economic status, regardless of sexual preference, that we have “RIGHTS” that the government cannot fundamentally violate, even if the majority of people want it to, even if it has all the power to do it with or without our consent.

Perhaps, if and when America re-stabilized, we can talk about tweaking our Constitution to more ‘perfectly’ assure the least of us is not coerced by the most of us to submit or be cut off from access to consensual value exchange with your neighbors (up to and including complete cessation of self altogether, death).  Until then, what we have is what we have, as far as forming a resistance to the factions of today.

The broadest coalition in America today is sleeping, unaware of itself, I theorize, and that coalition is a Bill of Rights centered coalition, committed to settling ‘differences’ that exist between the grey space of competing rights in ways that allow for the continued consideration of such unsure issues.  This coalition is Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, and more, and, I theorize, represents perhaps 70 percent of this country.

This coalition will never form around the DNC or the GOP, or even the Libertarians.  It cannot form around a charismatic billionaire with money to burn.  It has to emerge, I believe, from the grassroots up, as local parties with local names united only broadly with other Bill-of-Rights focused parties.  At the local level, there is tremendous opportunity to change the circumstance of your neighbors just by enforcing the Bill of Rights standards in all aspects of living, within the parameters I described above.

This is, as I’ve said, a pragmatic position, but as close as I get to a political position.  Ultimately, unless and until we experience the conditions that allow for the pragmatic necessity of consensual exchange, we will never be fundamentally consensual value exchange centered.  Where the reality of power necessitates consensual exchange, that’s mostly where consensual exchange occurs.

I ultimately advocate for free associations to build their own communities, focused on creating opportunities for community sustainability and thriving that does not rely on exchanges with large-scale, coerce-governed structures, be it governments or corporations.  There are a  number of possible paths to get to the types of communities I am describing, but they all mostly involve

1. creating physical space where humans find self-serving thriving necessity to share with their neighbors while still occupying space that is secured in their holding,
2. developing and exploiting technologies that enable small scale production to produce large-scale quality and cost,
3. creating physical space that offers defensive advantage to the inhabitants,0
4. facilitating self-and-associative defensive training and tools access opportunities,
5. creating a unity standard of limitations of power (such as a bill of rights) that is consensually agreed to by all willing participants.

Within these parameters, there are a variety of community types that could experimentally be created, to rise and fall on the on-the-ground opportunities and impediments the standards lived out actually create.

I believe this is already happening, the building of communities to escape the new normal (or at least the threat of the new normal, which is still not yet a done deal).

Whether these communities will be built with my parameters in mind or not, well, I am pressing x to doubt, as the kids say, on that one.  In magic bunny land, a place where I have all the resources I need to do whatever I want, I am already building a small town for about 2,000 people that live on an area of roughly 100 acres and inviting people to take part in my experiment, free of charge.

Outside of magic bunny land, if you’re not already thinking about the potential pragmatic usefulness of perhaps becoming a part of one of these groups (many of which already exist, and many more that are sure to emerge), you might already be behind the 8-ball, unless you truly are one of the few that will actually experience greater ‘freedom’ in the new normal, such as that would actually turn out to be.

History is littered with the rise and fall of Kings and Emperors, of Philosophies and Religions, all of which eventually serve the interest of the few over the many. Where Kings restrain their power is where they perceive the cost of exerting their power will be of little reward or too high a risk.  Suddenly, Kings become Presidents and Constitutions are formed, where the reality of power is significantly enough diffused, at the physiological level, providing for self-defense and sustainability without need of reliance on the products and services offered by the few for the many.

America was born from her physiological reality, peopled remotely by necessarily self-sustaining people living in extended family structures that were connected profoundly, by necessity, to their neighbors.  The Constitution is the realization by the few, the ones who created the moral cover that allowed them to not face the naked restriction on the power they actually held, of the limitations of their abilities to coercively press their will on the people throughout the counties of the 13 colonies.

Thank God for that.

Whatever the reason, we are the fortunate beneficiaries of the type of space this Constitution created, even still, and if we, as a people, across our divides, can claim our unearned but fortuitous heritage, our Bills of Rights as the ultimate authority in the land, then the tyrants of the left, the right, and the center will all be rendered impotent before the power of the true people of the land.

The true people of these lands are ALL Americans, black, white, red, yellow, gay, straight, transgendered, atheist, Muslim, Christian, Spaghetitarian, Dallas Cowboys fan, etc, etc, who hold the Bill of Rights standards as their rights and also the fundamental rights of others.  We are legion and we cross all lines.  We are America.

Even for those who are not legal citizens, if you come to appreciate and accept our Bill of Rights standards, you too can become an American, for America is ultimately an ideal that restrains power only so long as the people have the power to assume their authority when the state or the market seeks to violate these standards.

We are not a race or a gender, we are humans and humans alone, committed to the bills of rights of our neighbors as much as for ourselves, for if their rights fall, soon ours do as well.

It’s time for those who can to help those who will build these communities where the Bill of Rights makes good neighbors of Muslims and Christians, of Democrats and Republicans, and even people like me, who’d like to see the whole coercive governance model end altogether.  This is the next step in our fight against tyranny, this and for those willing to engage in the political, to create local parties loosely affiliate with national Bill of Rights associations, aimed fundamentally at Bill of Rights auditing of the powers of the localities and creating remedies where violations are discovered.

The two would work well together in giving two very differently oriented types of folks to work against the tyranny we now find ourselves under,  with further tyranny to come.  Successful communities can help fund local parties and local parties can provide refugee pipelines to people who want to join in the community experiments already being built.

Ultimately, the solution is not, in my view, political, it is more physiological.  Create the space that necessitates liberty, like America inadvertently was when the Bill of Rights was formed.  Create the necessity for consensuality through the reality of physiological power rather than seeking political and ideological ‘solutions’ to ‘injustices’ that most everyone in current year is turning to for hope.

My current survey of human thought (philosophy, religion, etc) and interaction (history) has led me to the conclusion that liberty is not won with ideas, but rather ideas form to justify acceptance of a diminishment of power as a result of physiological reality.

All of everything we do within the structures fundamentally reliant on assets controlled by the few is intended to produce the capacity to be more lethal than our neighbors while providing a high standard of living for the few that control the many.  The systems are designed to limit competition for the thrones.

The more we rely on their assets, the more controlling they will become.  The less we rely on their assets, the more concepts like liberty will be allowed to gain mainstream access.  Liberty as a public construct is a cope, and the copers are the ones with the most power who find it difficult to face the reality of their own limited power.

Where pop culture is pro liberty,  the few recognize their limitations of power.  Where pop culture rejects liberty, the few imagine they can now increase their power, limiting even more competition than before.

America is dependent on the very, very, very, very, few for assets that meet basic physiological needs.  So long as that physiological reality exists, no amount of votes or protests will move the needle towards liberty and away from control.

Create opportunities for physiological self-and-associate sustainability and the powers that be will suddenly find liberty Jesus and regroup for their next attempt at consolidating power and eliminating competition once and for all.  Fail to do so, and there is no stopping what tyrannies are sure to come that America has not seen since the Civil War.

Eight years ago, I pinned my hope on the GOP.  Since then, I’ve learned the reality of power, and it lies in real physiological opportunities, not parties.  It lies in local and individual sustainability and thriving, not dependence on the assets of the most powerful few, and it’s what we would do well to focus more and more of our own assets on developing, physiological realities of power for liberty to be necessary, even for the most powerful in the land.