It’s ANARCHY in the Lifeboats
by Monica Hughes, PhD. Originally published on her Substack.
It’s no surprise to me that the anti-covid tyranny Substackers seem to be heavily populated with libertarianish and anarchist writers.
I think most people who read this newsletter are sympathetic to view that medical tyranny is just a subset of tyranny, so today I’m going to ruminate to my own demise and wade into my political and philosophical worldview (such as it is). It will be interesting to see what sort of pushback I get in the comments.
I’m an anarchist.
Gasp!
Yes.
It’s not a new development. My politics have been unconventional and libertarianish for roughly two decades. I say -ish because I used to be a minarchist.
I’m an anarchist. Gasp! Yes.
It’s not a new development. My politics have been unconventional and libertarianish for roughly two decades. I say -ish because I used to be a minarchist.
In 2013, an article entitled Burn the Fucking System to the Ground was published on Popehat. Here’s an excerpt, in which the first paragraph described something pretty close to my worldview from age 29 onward:
Twenty years ago I was a libertarian. I thought the system could be reformed. I thought that some parts of it “worked”… whatever that means. I thought that the goals were noble, even if not often achieved.
The older I get, the more I see, the more I read, the more clear it becomes to me that the entire game is rigged. The leftists and the rightists each see half of the fraud. The lefties correctly note that a poor kid caught with cocaine goes to jail, while a Bush can write it off as a youthful mistake (they somehow overlook the fact that their man Barrack hasn’t granted clemency to any one of the people doing federal time for the same felonies he committed). The righties note that government subsidized windmills kill protected eagles with impunity while Joe Sixpack would be deep in the crap if he even picked up a dead eagle from the side of the road. The lefties note that no one was prosecuted over the financial meltdown. The righties note that the Obama administration rewrote bankruptcy law on the fly to loot value from GM stockholders and hand it to the unions. The lefties note that Republicans tweak export rules to give big corporations subsidies. Every now and then both sides join together to note that, hey! the government is spying on every one of us…or that, hey! the government stole a bunch of people’s houses and gave them to Pfizer, because a privately owned for-profit corporation is apparently what the Constitution means by “public use”.
We’re nearly 10 years on from the writing of this article, so I do believe the following has become clearer to more people on both “sides” of the political spectrum at this time:
The system is not fixable because it is not broken. It is working, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, to give the insiders their royal prerogatives, and to shove the regulations, the laws, and the debt up the asses of everyone else.
Shove the death up the asses of everyone else? I could have sworn that’s what he meant to write.
Maybe both?
Oh.
At some point in the near future, I plan to write about the personal experiences that led to my “radicalization.”
For now, understand that professing to be an anarchist may not mean what you think it means. It means I’m asking to be left alone, without any form of systemic coercion, to live how I please, so long as I do not use force against others.
Professing to be an anarchist may not mean what you think it means. It means I’m asking to be left alone, without any form of systemic coercion, to live how I please, so long as I do not use force against others.
I think this is a small and reasonable request, but apparently it is not because the world is filled with moral busybodies who want to tell us all what to do using the force of the state and, to add insult to injury, steal our earnings to do it.
Apparently being opposed to this is “radical.”
Massive consolidations of power into highly centralized systems (i.e., government as we’ve come to understand it) are inimical to human evolution and the social biology that shaped us for 99% or more of our time here on earth.
And that is, naturally, why the state—an extremely unnatural development in terms of human social evolution—kills more people than individuals acting privately ever could.
The state—an extremely unnatural development in terms of human social evolution—kills more people than individuals acting privately ever could.
Every damned time.
WWI: up to 22 million dead, approximately 1.29% of Earth’s population of 1.7 billion
WWII: up to 85 million dead, approximately 3.7% of Earth’s population of 2.3 billion
Stalin and Mao’s purges and famines added up to 100 million dead on top of that, another 3–4% of the global population.
You get the idea.
These are just the big examples. I’m not even including the 10+ million noncombatants killed by Hitler or the 20 million dead from US military interventions over the last 70 years.
If you want me to take the legitimacy of government seriously, get back to me when a private murderer or even a collection of them called a gang gets around to killing off 2–4% of your town, state, or country.
If you want me to take the legitimacy of government seriously, get back to me when a private murderer or even a collection of them called a gang gets around to killing off 2–4% of your town, state, or country.
Because right now the murder rate in the US stands at around 0.0049% and was double that at 0.00941% in 1991.
In other words, at the current homicide rate, about 16,000 people die per year at the hand of another person in the US. According to some estimates, the covid vaccines killed 10 times that amount. Due to their highly coercive nature, that means that many of these deaths by vaccine are government-sponsored killings. Ergo, the US government has killed at least 10x as many people in the past year as private citizens.
Actually, it kills a lot more than that. Probably 20% of the 600,000 people that die of cancer every year in the US could have been saved by treatments like Coley’s toxins and other immunotherapies and modalities not available in the US. Even more could be saved if they weren’t forced to go through standard of care before enrolling in clinical trials, etc.
So, back-of-the-envelope math tells us the US government is actively or passively killing more than 250,000 people per year, or, roughly 15 times as many people killed in ordinary homicides.
Back-of-the-envelope math tells us the US government is actively or passively killing more than 250,000 people per year, or, roughly 15 times as many people killed in ordinary homicides.
And you get to pay for it! What a deal. Some of you are still righteously defending that servitude and telling us not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
To illustrate what those numbers mean for a smaller country, let’s take New Zealand. The homicide rate in New Zealand is about 1/4 that of the US, so there will be about 50 homicides in the entire country in a year.
There’s reason to believe that covid vaccines killed about 2,000 people in 2021 alone, making the few bureaucrats and politicians in the New Zealand government responsible for that decision objectively 40 times worse at killing New Zealanders than New Zealanders themselves.
We’re not at the level of Mao or Stalin yet, to be sure. But don’t worry. Give it a few more years of spikeshots, lockdown-induced business closures and starvation, and manufactured supply-chain crises of fuel, fertilizer, food, and other life-giving goods, and we may yet get there.
(And we haven’t even gotten to Klaus Anal Schwab’s orchestrated cyberpolygon attacks yet. Yay.)
But Monica, wouldn’t warlords take over?
But Monica, what’s going to replace the government?
Damned if I know. None of us do.
I do, however, have some ideas about how normal, sane people can foster the kind of peaceful, orderly society that we envision.
It boils down to a simple principle: increase your power over your own life and deprive the state of the same, to the greatest extent possible.
It boils down to a simple principle: increase your power over your own life and deprive the state of the same, to the greatest extent possible.
Here are some ideas, and I’d love to hear yours in the comments:
Take control of your money. Do it now. It’s not going to be safe sitting in the bank for long for multiple reasons (inflation, seizure, etc.). If you don’t want to learn about or don’t trust cryptocurrency, there’s precious metals or hoarding commodities for trade.
Pursue good health. Healthcare may be too difficult or expensive to access in the future.
Increase your privacy and security by learning Linux or getting a de-googled phone (I’m personally not there yet, but I want to be).
Pursue self-sufficiency with skills and tools.
Cultivate strong value-reciprocating relationships and useful connections. One of the things that’s so great about Substack is that it feels like the earlier days on Facebook over 10 years ago, where it was actually fun discovering and interacting with new, like-minded people, or those who offered fresh insight.
(But it’s important to do this in real life as well.)
Stay ahead of the crowd in terms of spotting dangerous trends.
The Canadian trucker protest was a useful exercise in that it forced the naked fascist face of the Trudeau regime right out into the open. This was important to wake more normies up, and it did.
The Canadian trucker protest was a useful exercise in that it forced the naked fascist face of the Trudeau regime right out into the open.
It was also very important and cathartic for the truckers and their supporters to really experience that solidarity in person and connect with likeminded people. It was needed psychological fuel after two years of punishing social isolation.
The downside is that many of the protestors lost access to their funds and bank accounts. That, too, helps open more eyes about the predations of the state. One of the goals of governments may be to impoverish citizens so that they are powerless and dependent.
One of the goals of governments may be to impoverish citizens so that they are powerless and dependent.
To that end, there are some lessons to be learned. Instead of collecting donations via GoFundMe, GiveSendGo, etc., what would have happened if the donators and recipients had simply bypassed fiat currency, using a completely anonymous self-empowerment technology like Monero instead?
No one would have even known it was happening. There would have been nothing the state could do about it.
To engage in a thought exercise in collectivism, let’s consider a hypothetical.
“What if” everyone had been able to bypass fiat currency 13 years ago on the heels of the financial crisis?
Would we even be experiencing what we are experiencing today?
Even in the absence of adoption en masse, this type of self-empowerment works, and the development and dissemination of this type of technology is a race against time between the forces of good and evil as we accelerate toward a globally integrated police state.
CPJ at A New Earth gives a good summary of what is at the root of our current problems:
However, the response to protests as well as the massive fiscal easing we have seen in the last two years in order to pay people to do nothing very clearly play in to the already overdue systemic collapse of fiat currency banking which is an event the ramifications of which will leave no one untouched.
Since the banking crisis of 2008-9, states have engaged in policies of mortgaging the future to apply a sticking plaster in the present. This has no credibility whatsoever and this fact has been perfectly evident to anyone who did not choose to ignore it. As fiscal overhangs spiral out of control, tectonic forces have been building up under the surface…
…In the 19th century, astonishing as it may seem, the vast majority of exchanges still involved some form of informal barter (this is, in fact, still true today, we simply do not recognize these exchanges because they leave no accounting trace; but 150 years ago they concerned everyday commodities like bread, not just things like household labor).
The economic benefits of monetization require hard money. Otherwise alternatives will be found. Today, a parallel monetary system – with its roots in reflections on 2008-9 – is already waiting in the wings in the form of cryptocurrency. In order to mitigate its appeal, governments would need to increase trust in their own currencies. Instead, they are doing the opposite: they seek to constrain crypto, whilst also being largely aware that they have no chance of succeeding because they will just drive investment and innovation offshore and descend into impoverished autarchy. Shotgun money is not hard money and will not be accepted and used as if it is. The writing is on the wall as regards an imminent functional collapse of state fiat currencies and there is every chance that maximalist implementations of CBDCs make this problem even worse as the credit risk of commercial banks is undermined and conditional money is of limited appeal (it does not meet the economic definition of money at all). At the very least it is wise to maintain a viable Plan B in reserve. Gresham’s law is a bitch.
The fundamental crisis faced by the modern state is that the bureaucratic logic of its very operation locks it into a trajectory of self-impoverishment and collapse. The more apparent this becomes, the more desperate we will be for novel ideas and the more grateful for the work which has already been done to prepare the ground. The new world order is certain. But its beneficiaries are not, because the conditions of wealth creation and financial hegemony are still what they always were – freedom, innovation and well functioning markets.
Tackling this topic with quite a bit of hilarity, start at 3:15 and go for at least 2 minutes.
The ship is NOT sinking! The upper deck is completely dry! A 25% incline is necessary for growth and forward movement! It’s ANARCHY in the lifeboats!