A free, post-scarcity world will not be prevented by archaic systems scratching and clawing to retain their domination. We will evolve freely, unburdened by an unfortunate past. This will happen, and today I'm going to tell you why.
But more than that, I want you to understand that we deserve to win, and that the future – the world of our children, grandchildren, and so on – very much needs us to win. Our culture stands for – and supports in action – the things that make life thrive on Earth.
Let me make this point very clear:
We believe in the Golden Rule… as in actually believe in it, all the time. Our culture takes it seriously and acts like it's the only healthy way to live.
The easiest and most gutless life is to follow the crowd. What makes the world better, on the other hand, is to live by what's right. Making unpopular choices – developing and trading crypto, homeschooling your children, ignoring brain-locked regulators, pursuing unapproved cures, changing religions where it's forbidden, pursuing what is disliked by the powers that be – these things require strength of character and dedication to real principles.
Regardless of our occasional stupidities and errors, our way of life clearly deserves to win.
How We'll Win
“To change something,” said Buckminster Fuller, “build a new model and make the old obsolete.” And we've been building a new model considerably more than we may realize.
A new model is precisely how the personal computer came to be and how the Internet came to be. Regardless that computers and the Internet have been recaptured by the status quo, the model remains and has also spawned encryption and Bitcoin, technologies that are ephemeral and a lot harder to conquer.
Moreover, the cryptosphere is growing tremendously. When I started pursuing such things back in the 1990s, there were very few of us, and far between. Now I run into crypto advocates in grocery stores, not to mention in general business circles.
Likewise there are dozens of VPN providers these days. When we started Cryptohippie, few people outside of technical circles had any idea of what we were selling.
Furthermore, there are tens of thousands of people working to develop, improve, and spread cryptocurrencies every day, often at their own expense and with considerable uncertainty. Because they believe in them. Because they believe they're building a better world.
Homeschooling makes another fine example. When I started my involvement, parents had recently been arrested for homeschooling in the US. We had to get busy supporting a legal defense fund. Now there are a few million homeschooled kids in the US alone, and everyone knows that homeschooling produces excellent results.
We'll win by doing these things, followed by others like them. Little by little, step by step, planting seed after seed, we're moving toward our goal faster than we've appreciated.
Once human action of these types account for enough of our activities, it'll be almost unstoppable, and the legacy system will begin shrinking. We can expect screaming, threats, and even bloodshed from the obsolete system, but over time it will give up its operations piece by piece.
This isn't to say that our new systems will be immaculate, but they'll be far better than the Bronze Age relics that currently dominate mankind.
And if Not…
If, for whatever reason, we fail to continue what we've begun, our new civilization still wins in the end. For one thing, human evolution continues. We are notably better than we were a few thousand years ago – qualitatively better – and we'll be still better in the future.
More immediately than that, however, the next cycling of rulership will finish the job for us. As we covered back in FMP #18, civilizations always cycle. They always have and almost certainly always will, until violence-backed hierarchy ends. When the next cycle comes along, it will do so in a rich technological environment. Because technology does not cycle. Rather, it accretes… it builds up.
So, once the present hierarchies break up and vanish for a few hundred years, tech will be free to come out and play. We'll be free to reorganize in innovative new ways. Things simply will not be rebuilt according to the same old model. That's how history works.
But while it's nice to know that the insanity will pass one way or another, I think all of us would like it to be sooner rather than later. For our own sakes and certainly for those of our offspring, time is important. And so we need to believe in what we're doing and to do it with vigor.
“The fashion of the present world,” says the Bible, “is passing away.” Let's help it along.
* * * * *
As it turns out, history was never too hard to understand; they just told you the wrong story.
Comments from readers:
“This is the most amazing little book I have read on history in 36 years of reading history.”
“It will change the way you look at nearly everything.”
“I will flat out say that this is the best history book I have ever read… I am fairly well read, but I learned a tremendous amount that I hadn't known before or hadn't aligned so that it made sense.”
“This is the best and clearest description of the history of Western civilization I have ever read.”
“Packed with insights on every page concerning how the world came to be the way it is and what we might expect in the future.”
Get it at Amazon or on Kindle.* * * * *
Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com