Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

"I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in search of the savages of Canada, because the maladies to which I am condemned render a European surgeon necessary to me; because war is going on in those regions; and because the example of our actions has made the savages nearly as bad as ourselves."
—Voltaire to Rousseau after reading "The Social Contract."

Jean-Jacques Rousseau did not want to free the human race.   He wanted everyone in chains.  Karl Marx, similarly, following in the footsteps of Hegel and others who followed in those of Rousseau, did not want free people to enjoy their lives, he wanted everyone enslaved.  If you wish monuments to the effectiveness of the pursuit of this enslavement by their followers, you have to only look around you.

The concept of a social contract is a lie.  There is no contract, no agreement, no words telling us to what we have supposedly agreed, nowhere to place our signatures.  Anyone who speaks of a social contract is a liar who wants to hurt you, and you should treat them accordingly.

Similarly, the ideologies and documents based on the false concept of an unworded social contract which allegedly binds people to certain types of conduct, are also false.  The constitution of the United States, for example, gives you no place to sign, offers you no redress if it is violated in your case, and is clearly a compact among the several states to which you have no standing to make reference in any of the courts imagined in that document.   If you need further review of how that constitution is a fraud, please refer to the writings of Lysander Spooner or Bill Buppert, or both.   Put very simply, the free country of the Declaration of Independence was usurped by Hamilton and Washington, and the constitution created a plantation that enslaves the entire human population of the country.  In all, that is not unusual, nearly everywhere in the world is the same way.

Cui Bono?
Why is the world a set of plantations that enslave billions?  It is that way because those who benefit from that situation are able to profit from it.  They profit by lending money to politicians and bureau-rats and calling it "national debt." They profit by having those same politicians and bureau-rats pay "interest" on the "national debt " out of monies taken from the taxpayers.  If you are a taxpayer, they will make your life a living hell if you do not pay your taxes.  If you are not a taxpayer, so much the better. 

You thought you lived in a republic or in a democracy?  Those are mistaken ideas.  You have no idea who counts the votes, whether they count them, and what they do before reporting those vote totals.  If you have read about the Hursti Hack, you know that the new voting machines are worse than the older ones.  Nor are you presented with any choices to make meaningful change.  All the people whose names get on the ballot have been pre-approved, and any of them who persist in making changes are destroyed politically because all their secrets are shared.  You didn't think the FBI, CIA, and NSA had access to every email, every phone call, and could turn on the microphones and cameras in any cell phone at will because they want to lose their jobs when the people decide they've been spied on long enough, did you?  Of course not.

There are many sets of people who want to run the lives of other people.  Somewhere around two percent of the population of the world has ambition, and many of those persons have sociopathic or psychopathic tendencies—they view other people as objects to be manipulated or destroyed as they see fit.  Around ten to twelve percent of persons worldwide are willing to help whoever has power, including by torturing, murdering, bombing, raping, taxing, or pillaging their closest family members.  Which leaves something in excess of 80% of the human race in the hands of madmen and monsters.  Most of the people you encounter have no desire to run, nor to ruin, the lives of others.  You'd think you would be able to free yourself.

And perhaps you have.  Many people who live on Earth are actually free.  They have ambition to live, to be free, and to harm no other persons.  They live without fame, without recognition, and they seem to be like everyone around them.  But, as with John Galt in the book Atlas Shrugged, they are not really what they seem.  You will find them everywhere, if you know how to look for them.

Some 123 million people who were qualified to vote in November 2016 did not do so.  They did not vote for many reasons—not being interested in the outcome, not believing their vote would be counted, not liking any of the choices presented, or having much better things to do with their time.  More people who were qualified to vote did not choose to vote than the number who did vote.  Similar facts are true of people the IRS thinks should be filing taxes, which has only gone up since the hearings in the late 1990s revealed that there were, then, 66 million such Americans.  Estimates vary as high as 125 million today.  As well, a great many Americans, as many as a third of the population, did not respond to the decennial census in 2010.

Changes Are Coming
It is easy enough to say that changes are coming.  Of course, all life is change.  You are changing right now.  Within a decade from now, the materials making up the cells in your body will be completely replaced.   Everything you are is transitory.  Even your soul is becoming more mature, more aware, more capable.  Stasis is an illusion.

What would be necessary to completely break the power of those who seek to rule over others?  Edmund Burke once wrote that when bad men combine, the good must associate, or they will fall, one by one, a pitiful sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.  Why pitiful? Because unable to succeed.  Why contemptible? Because if the struggle is disorganised and ineffective, it does not serve to make people free, and it being crushed is used as an example by those in power that there is no way to escape.  But resistance is not, in fact, futile.  Rather, it is fertile.

Decentralisation has come.  What does that mean?  David Nolan, before his death, gave a speech at the Illinois state convention of the Libertarian Party.  In that speech, he pointed out that cities were created by those who ruled Egypt, Babylon, and other empires, for the purpose of bringing the records together in one place, and concentrating those who could read them, and write out copies of them, under the thumb of the emperor or high priest or whomever thought himself in charge.  Which records?  The tax records, the property records, and so forth.  Everything having to do with power.

The Internet has changed all that.  Essentially all information is now available online, and millions of copies of various records exist in offline copies.  Information that is supposedly top secret has been disclosed, thanks to the excellent efforts of heroes like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and many others who put their humanity ahead of the efforts to make war, commit atrocities, and enslave others. 

When you consider that a payment is just another sort of message, you begin to see how pervasive this information technology really is.   With the ability to have complete financial autonomy will come new kinds of freedom.  And that day is very close.

Telling the truth is a very important way of challenging those in power.  Truth telling is getting more and more popular.

 

Jim Davidson is an author, entrepreneur, and world traveller.  He sent his first email in 1978 and wrote his first piece of code that same year.  His first published writing was a letter to the editor of his local newspaper in 1977.