"If you need nothing the system provides, then the system has no hold over you, and that is sovereignty.
"And, what most people are missing from their freedom self autonomy is consumer goods. Now, if i was stuck in an end of civilization setting, i could build all the modern appliances. They are quite easy/simple machines. However, most people do not comprehend what is going on inside them; the manufacturers make them as impossible to work on as possible, so you have to call their service techs.
"Now, if we break down the appliance into simple pieces, and make CNC machinery and plans for building each piece, then we could get normal people to build the parts of appliances in their garages. And if we get a bunch of people to make all the parts, then we could assemble appliances locally.
"And this is my path toward sovereignty."
Independence is freedom.
Schools no longer provide education, instead delivering children indoctrination, because the current state of technological development is decentralization of the means of production is more economically profitable than centralization, mass production. Of the several reasons this is the case, the fact that individual production eliminates parasitic losses, such as profits to owners of factories that mass produce goods, taxes on wages, sales, profits, and shipping, wholesale, brokering, and retailers, is the largest in terms of economic impact.
If you need a toaster and work a job to acquire the money to purchase the toaster, there are many points along the way to your purchase of the toaster that invite parasitic losses. Your wages are taxed, as are the wages of everyone that makes the toaster. The owner(s) of the factory(s) making toasters take a cut as profit, or ROI on the manufacturing investment in making toasters. The products need to be shipped, either to you, or to a market where you go to make your purchase, and the shippers get a cut, as does the retailer. When you make a toaster in your garage none of these parasitic losses impact the value of your production. If you make a toaster for your own use, just as if you grow a potato and eat it, there is no taxable event that extracts the value of the wealth you create. There are no taxable wages earned by you producing your toaster. There is no wholesaler, nor any shipper of the toaster, nor a retailer to sell it to you. There is not corporate profit, nor sale that is taxed. All the value of your production inures to you when you make your own toaster.
There are still such parasitic losses through the acquisition of resources necessary to manufacture toasters, so making a toaster yourself doesn't eliminate all parasitic losses, but it does eliminate most of them (and this is primarily because decentralization has only just begun, so it is using the old centralized system to build the new decentralized infrastructure). This decentralizes both wealth and financial assets (money), by not enabling parasites to extract the wealth you create (your toaster) for their own benefit. The rich have centralized wealth, concentrated it in their own wallets. So, decentralization eliminates the ability of the rich to concentrate wealth in their wallets, and enables folks with merit to keep the wealth they create. The rich oppose this, and they are very good at opposing decentralization, as they have demonstrated by centralizing wealth enough to become rich. While there are myriad parasitic mechanisms that the rich have managed to impose, which makes getting rich complex and difficult to understand in full, the principle of parasitic losses is simple and easy to understand, and making yourself what you need is how to avoid all of them. Kids taught this understand it easily, and this is why schools don't teach them.
Today tech advance increasingly makes it possible to yourself make what you need. Across every field of industry decentralization of the means of production is the cutting edge of tech advance. Whether it's food, power, household goods, or medicine, by adopting the most advanced tech you can become able to yourself provide the modern goods and services that create the blessings of civilization. One of the quirks of centralization is planned obsolescence. A company making refrigerators profits from selling their products, so if they don't sell products every year they don't make profits every year. I have a 97 year old neighbor whose father purchased a Kelvinator refrigerator in 1940, and whom has been using that refrigerator for 85 years. Refrigerators can be built to be very robust and durable. He put the refrigerator some years ago out on his porch, where the sea air here on the coast caused it to rust, and the door handle mechanism broke as a result. Because I do not have the means to manufacture that door handle, and Kelvinator no longer makes and sells that part either, his refrigerator no longer is useful to him, even though the cooling mechanism still works properly. Planned obsolescence strikes again!
The ability to manufacture that part is potential to me. I just haven't got there yet. The necessary tooling to shape and carve metal into the specific shapes in the door handle mechanism in 1940 weighed many tons. Today such tooling will fit on a tabletop. Such work is too messy for my kitchen table, however, and is better suited to a workbench in the garage, and I don't have a tabletop CNC machine yet. The recent advent of such table top machining capabilities means that those tools are still very early in development, and aren't yet widely distributed, but in due time I expect them to be part of every household, just like toasters and refrigerators. One of the most recent developments in decentralization is the introduction of FOSS AI, such as Deepseek. While the commercial introduction to AI we are availed focuses on text and images, where such FOSS AI as Deepseek will prove most useful and beneficial is in automating production. In 1940 only a skilled machinist trained thoroughly in the use of a 10 ton device would be able to produce the parts necessary to a Kelvinator door handle. This is why everyone didn't have such a capability when technology was in such a primitive state. Using AI to run a table top CNC machine in the garage, manufacturing such a door handle can be automated. Rather requiring a skilled machinist that has taken many classes, and then apprenticed to a master machinist for years, a person with only an introductory understanding of machining and the servicing and maintenance of such a tool can provide the parts specifications to an AI controlled CNC tool that only weighs a few pounds.
Centralization is barbaric. It is a relic of primitive technology. The future is decentralization, and decentralizing the means of production simultaneously decentralizes possession of wealth. Possession of independent means is the best definition of wealth, and as should be obvious, that wealth is synonymous with freedom, because it enables the capacity to prevent being oppressed. The future is freedom - but only for those that take responsibility for meeting their own needs. Free men make their freedom.
Thanks!