Who can you trust during those times when you are vulnerable or when a crisis vurges on a major tragic upheaval? For most people, there is no good answer to this question. For most people, trust beyond perhaps their immediate nuclear family is difficult, they just aren’t sure who really is on their side without an ulterior motive.
A trust community is a larger body of people who are reasonably confident that through shared identity and participation they can trust one another. For practical reasons, they tend to live within reasonable driving distance of each other. We may not know everyone in a trust community personally, but we know that if they have been confirmed as members of the community by people who do know them that they have the kind of character, integrity, and values that make them trustworthy.
Our concept of a Trust Community comes from Protocol Six of The 17 Protocols of Upadaria.
A Trust Community
WE PRACTICE THE WAYS OF A TRUST COMMUNITY CENTERED ON YESHUA, THE CHRIST
Through intentionally building trust communities, Believers can connect with others for mutual profit, support, empowerment, liberation, and fulfillment of purpose.
– From The 17 Protocols of Upadaria, Protocol Six
The entire concept of what we call “the Upadarian Revolution” is unilateral change from within our own lives, relationships, and associations that never seeks to impose itself through politics or force on other people. This is important in the concept of a trust community, because while these communities use the language of a distinct village, town, or city, they aren’t political entities and their members consist only of those who freely desire to participate in them.
A trust community is a larger than neighborhood scale collection of people who use trust as their basis of connection and freewill participation. A trust community is capable of providing for most all the basic needs of its participants and of assuring the safety and sanctity of their liberty, their well-being, and their wealth and property from all hazards. To be part of a trust community you share an identity with others and the basis of that identity are the ideals, principles, and practices you all agree are the common standards and norms of behavior, of relationships, and of your association.
This may sound rather theoretical, but the implementation of trust community is practical and to be intentional about creating such communities is a very peaceful, revolutionary act. It removes much of your social, cultural, and economic life from the influence and control of a corrupt ruling class who are presiding over a dying civilization and its abusive structures.
Our ideal larger scale trust community is a Shire, a term from old England that basically became equivalent to a county but that invokes the idea of an area which is self-contained, self-sufficient, and self-governing but which is an interdependent part of a larger commonwealth. Another way we present this is through a concept we call a distributed private city, a city-like organizational structure that has various facilities and participants spread all throughout an area that has many physical cities.
At the smallest level, the trust community is like an intentional community that just has parts of itself, as well as its individual participants, spread throughout a local area. They may not all live within the same plot of land, but they have structures and associations they regularly participate in that essentially give them the self-reliance of an intentional community.
One of our key breakthrough ideas, and one we often repeat, is that trust community requires something equivalent to a shared national identity. And by this we do not mean race or ancestry, nations are far more than collections of people whose common trait is race or ancestry. In their purest form, nations are ideals and values that are freely adopted as the basis of a shared identity.
A trust community without something equivalent to a shared nationality either begins to become disjointed as people argue over basic assumptions and norms or it stays together through a strong-armed, top-down system of control. If that something that connects everyone isn’t fairly cohesive in terms of ideals and values, then only some use of manipulation, control, or coercion will keep it together. A trust community has no manipulation, control, or coercion, what keeps it together is trust and that trust organically flows from shared ideals, principles, and practices.
We use the term “organic cohesiveness” to describe the cohesiveness of a trust community and even a spiritual nation. In our approach, the broader trust community is based on freedom ideas and standards but the heart of the community consists of a core of people who share our spiritual nationality as their own nationality. What makes this cohesiveness organic, as opposed to artificial, is that it comes through strictly voluntary freewill participation in a commonly shared identity based on shared ideals and values.
Trust communities are based on nested shared identities, so they can be diverse and pluralistic in their broader application and close-knit and unanimous in their more narrow application. It isn’t either-or. Christians can connect over an entire area and behave together like a spiritual city-state. People who love freedom, Freedomists, can form area and county level freewill participatory associations called Freedom Shires which focus on upholding the rights, persons, and property of themsleves and their fellow citizens.
A Upadarian trust community is a Shire which includes constituent communities called Cantons, Villages, and Manors. These are all groupings of people who at some level adopt the shared Upo, Ecclesian, Freedomist, or Upadarian identities. Thinking in these terms of a massive shift away from the atomized life and from assumed identities that may not reflect your innermost beliefs, values, and convictions.
When someone is using trust community and connected to others, they see themselves as virtual or spiritual citizens of a distributed city-state that has its own social, cultural, economic, and civic structures and associations that are not controlled by the present civilization’s ruling class.
Building economic structures where trade and commerce are governed by the ideals and values you believe in cannot just be an individual thing. You need virtual and physical spaces to conduct business and norms and standards everyone agrees to follow with integrity. A trust community creates these things and, through something like a subscription or membership, funds the kinds of spaces needed for this activity.
What we are proposing with a trust community is that we have to be quite intentional about our larger scale activities with people who are within driving distance of each other and who share the same ideals and values. Our platform helps people make these area-level connections and formalize them through prescribed frameworks and blueprints, including decision-making processes and even physical facilities.
If we want to be part of a society and nation we can proudly say are centered on Yeshua, we should be intentional about connecting and associating with people of like convictions to create our own internal social, cultural, economic, and civic structures, resources, and services that aren’t controlled by anyone but us. Our concept of trust community applies broadly to any body of people whose organic cohesiveness is such that it distinguishes them from a society whose values they cannot cosign or support and certainly don’t want to be governed by.
It is a practical and existential necessity to build trust communities when the society in which you live operates and is governed by values which, if you were to follow them, would violate your own beliefs, values, and convictions.
Through a practical application of trust community it is not our intention to reform or change society, it is our intention to sow the seeds of a new spiritual nation as the vanguard people of a new civilization. Our peaceful and spiritual revolution is all about unilateral change from within ourselves, our relationships, and our associations.
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