If you have never had the opportunity to listen to the most epic JFK speech of all time, I highly encourage you to check it out. I bring this up today because I want to stress the importance of Freedom of the Press. It is imperative in any free society that we allow for contrarian opinions, conspiracy theories, or whatever labels society puts on them. Above all things, it's most important that we allow for the safe reporting and whistle-blowing of egregious criminal activities and under no circumstances should anyone live under the threat of violence for exposing them.
The problem we have today, is that we don't truly have freedom of the press or protection for whistle-blowers despite laws that state the contrary. I imagine that I would be hard pressed to find many people that don't know what happened to JFK days after giving that speech that I linked above, but if somehow you missed that history lesson, then you need only to look at the current situations with Julian Assange or even Chelsea Manning as history is clearly repeating itself. What happens when you expose a corrupt and tyrannical government that claims to offer laws to protect people doing exactly that? Well it would seem you either get assassinated or labeled a terrorist or a traitor.
It's both a blessing a curse to be able to see beyond the veil and fully comprehend how our society works at a fundamental level. On the one hand, there's no pretense and you can see the games being played, but on the other hand you're cursed with the knowledge of abusive practices of corporations and governments hellbent on controlling people through the use of a broken monetary system that enables wage slavery and shackles of debt accompanied by laws that only apply to you if you can't pay or network your way out of the punishment. In other words the only people truly free perpetuate that freedom through the ignorance of the masses and a legacy of abusive activities that cement their spot atop the greatest Ponzi schemes of all time: The fiat monetary System and fractional reserve banking.
I realize perspectives very greatly and not everyone wants to believe this is the culmination of "western society" and the current plateau of human evolution. It's not a pretty picture looking at a world plagued by scarcity mindset and fear based tactics of control and manipulation. One thing I can assure you though is that every time they kill or falsely imprison good men and women for trying to break the illusion and free the rest of humanity, they make it harder for anyone to risk exposing the broken system and corrupt governments for what they are in the future. I don't fancy myself a conspiracy theorist or radical anything and the only hope I have for this world is peaceful coexistence, but I won't pretend like living in ignorance of the atrocities going on in our society is any path to peace that I know.
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Hear hear! Agree 101%. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this, as well as the best JFK speech ever 😋
@clayboyn, Freedom is a right and no one can take back that from anyone but in my opinion we are watching total opposite to it and System want to develop a world which will accept the slavery. Stay blessed.
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You are right about the extant system, and how most folks are fit into it. Yet your own piercing of the veil of ignorance reveals that not all people are so susceptible to being milk cows in the corral of propaganda. It can be a clever trick to parlay that understanding into actual freedom, and particularly in view of the chains of debt slavery and parasitism rentiers seek.
There is something that might be considered a secret that importantly affects the potential folks with understanding have to be free.
That secret is that those rentiers and parasites aren't free at all. They are bound more securely by the chains of debt than their prey. They are bound by their dependence, and they need to perpetuate that parasitic profiteering in a world that is producing technology that is advancing decentralization to an ever greater degree, across all industries. It is centralization that makes parasitism possible, and it is parasitism that makes centralization powerful. As decentralization increases, centralization decreases, and the profits of parasitism decrease.
Furthermore, we do not need to be potentates to be free. The machinations pertaining to plutocracy are demanding: the competition is fierce, and those at the top of the heap know damn well if they falter for a moment, their feed trough is going to be wrested from their grasp by their ever hungry ilk. To be free of that need to feed is liberty indeed.
We need enough, and not more than that, to be free, and more than enough makes us less free withal. We may not be free to fly to Jamaica on a whim, or to buy Wakaya from the Bronfman's of NXIVM, but those assets are actually liabilities. Clare Bronfman was denied recognizance because of her possession of Wakaya, for example, and to be able to fly off to a foreign paradise one must have a passport, be suitably vaccinated, legally insured, and so forth. Not really so whimsical, after all.
Many people believe that owning their own home creates an asset which improves their lot, but most people don't think it through and grasp that before the mortgage is paid off they have a liability - the chains of debt slavery you referred to earlier. Further contemplation reveals that to all assets inure via various vectors numerous liabilities, such as taxes, payments, obligations to positive acts, and negative prohibitions excluding one from other acts. Even after you have paid off the mortgage you must pay the taxes, ward off frauds, and guard against those you trust wresting your property from you. I am speaking from personal experience, not speculatively.
I once kept chickens. Free eggs! After a while having fun raising chicks my hens produced with nominal encouragement from the roosters, I had around 30 chickens. They laid about 2 dozen eggs a day. My family could reasonably consume a half dozen, with considerable planning of menus. It does not take long to begin to wonder what to do with eight dozen eggs. About a week actually.
That is not freedom, that is desperation. That is just the burden that the asset created, not the liability. The liability included needing one person to be present every day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, better or worse, hell or high water, sickness or health. No days off. Having just one chicken created that liability. Water is the most egregious need for a daily presence, and it isn't hard to think of ways to make sure water was automatically provided - but waterers break. Food goes bad, gets pests, and more. Foxes, raccoons, neighboring dogs, black bears, and hawks, amongst other things, all provide entertaining reasons to be present daily. Murphy's Law requires personal presence regardless of automated systems when you have livestock. There just is no substitute that is reliable and realistic.
The burdens of wealth are treated at length by John Smith, a Quaker who undertook a mission early in American history to prevent those burdens from causing undue harm to his religious community. It is a counterintuitive mission, but experience trumps intuition, and he did have no little impact on his neighbors.
The rich are the least free people in the world. Perhaps the most potent chain that constrains their freedom is our thoughts. For them to continue to bear their burdens, we must not escape our mental corral. Decentralization is increasingly making this impossible, and the more advanced the technology decentralized, the more quickly and completely that veil of lies becomes transparent. You well and truly point out that the truth is both an asset and a liability, just like every other treasure. One of the liabilities of the truth that decentralization is making tyranny increasingly impossible, and eventually will completely force us to be utterly free, is that we will no longer be able to just keep our heads down, perform our duties to our overlords, and depend on their crumbs for our room and board. We are going to necessarily have to take the bull of prosperity by the horns, and wrestle it into tolerable submission so that we provide our necessary means, yet do not overburden ourselves with oppressive wealth.
Given the state of the world today, I am confident that most all of us will welcome such burdens, when the present oppression has run it's historical course.
Thanks!
You make some great counterpoints in here. I've often considered getting into aquaponics, but the necessity of needing to be locked into one place daily seems kind of daunting to me. Ideally I'd love to just be a digital hobo, but it's a much more involved and intensive process than it probably seems and comes at lots of opportunity costs and doing without. Every walk of life certainly has it's burdens, but maybe I'm an idealist, but I'd like to believe that most people don't want exorbitant wealth at other's expense. The idea of being rich is great in theory, but like you point out, comes with hefty liabilities. I just want to have "enough." If only we could all agree on what "enough" is...
True words. Enough is often much different than what we expect it to be, and it is often catastrophe that reveals how wrong we were in our expectations. The chickens were a revelation to me in that regard! Regarding decentralized agriculture, such as chickens, or aquaponics, the transition from extant centralized markets and industries occasions more effort than just continuing to serve the present economy, but the reward eventually results in freedom, and not just from economic cost. The egregious chemical pollution, nutrition depletion, treating living creatures like machines, and much, much more are things I almost find more compelling to be free of than the financial cost of food. I hope soon to be able to capitalize on my experience with chickens and gardens in the past to dabble in aquaponics, with an eye towards effecting that transition at nominal cost in time and treasure.
One of the liabilities I didn't mention regarding great wealth was that it almost always occasions moral hazard. John Smith considered brightly colored clothing such, which may seem silly to us, but some of the folks he visited with were unwilling to part with their slaves, which seems an outrageous evil today. Sadly, such is the nature of moral hazard, and one saint's horror is one psychopath's most treasured blessing.
I have been quite surprised at what has turned out to be enough for me, mostly by living innawoods. A warm fire, a dry bedroll, and a roof seemed the core of the necessities of life. Some folks might need a Rolex. I don't, but won't disparage them as do. I'll draw the line well short of slaves though, as you do also.
Thanks for more often sharing your wide ranging thoughts lately, as I find them to be sparks for light that illuminates my own.
I just wanted to tell you before leaving Steem that I think you are a fantastic writer Sir @valued-customer. The way you articulate your thoughts is like nothing I have ever seen in my life. I have a great deal of admiration as well as appreciation for your thoughts.
Thank you for sharing them.
I hope you don't leave, or if you do, you at least check back in from time to time. Remember the reasons you came here to begin with, and also that Steem is changing fast. While things have gone awry for you presently, it is certain that conditions will change, and probably soon, regardless of the particulars that may be your specific concerns.
Thank you very much for your kind words! I certainly hope to be able to provide much more writing for your enjoyment, and to hear such accolades from you in the future.