America: Home of the Free-range?

[causticus]

The biggest threat to an entrenched oligarchy is the free-range rich person. Y'know, the self-made dude who has oodles of "f*** you money" on reserve; he's basically immune from being cancelled and can say whatever he wants and fund whatever he wants. A free country has lots of free-range rich people. An unfree country sees to it that anyone who sufficiently makes it economically is recruited into "the club" and is told what they can and cannot do. Make it far enough and it becomes a Kompromat society, and the initiation ceremony is something akin to a visit to Epstein's magic island.

If America is ever again to live up to its "freedom" hype, it's going to need a lot more free people and less conformist sheep; people who are primarily motivated by material comforts and social approval from other semisomnous middlings. And not jut free range entrepreneurs, but also free-range philosophers and warriors.

Right now, the urbanized/metropolitan areas of America are full of people addicted to such comforts and totally tethered to their techno-gadget conveniences. These are the sort of people subconsciously (if not consciously) begging for more authoritarianism and hyper-bureaucracy for the purpose of limitless security (though oddly enough some of these people are now shouting 'abolish the police!'...but that's neither here nor here).

And thus now is the time to begin decentralizing and slowly dismantling the inhuman system that knows and watches everything you do. Freedom means going local once again and inter-depending on people who live near you whom you actually have face-to-face interactions with. Faceless 'systems' on the other hand don't care who you are or what happens to you; in fact, you are only a single data point in one or more metrics the system is looking to maintain, augment, or curtail.

The free-range person want to "f*** the system" but not in the physically destructive way, but rather by working around it and ignoring it. In other words, by walking away and creating someone better on a much smaller and more intimate scale.

Comments

[nodrog]

You are absolutely right.  The problem is that there is no way to “dismantle” an accretion of anything - rust or rock, or laws or political power.  It can only break.  Shatter.  And in this case, that will cause a collapse that will kill millions - billions worldwide.  “Die-off” - it may happen anyway, and freedom will result, but in terrifying form and a horrifying price.

[methylethyl]

Amen.