Dealing with our new totalitarian reality, part II
(We have just two jobs to do)

There’s a strange paradox at the heart of our unique and growing totalitarianism.

On one hand, our ruling classes are as putrescent as any powdered princeling from France’s ancien regime. They have been for a very long time. Marie Antoinette may never have said, “Let them eat cake” when informed the deplorable masses had no bread. But today public and “private” figures like “let them eat ice cream” Pelosi, “take your jabs and pay no attention to my depopulation dreams” Gates, and “fighting climate change by blasting hydrocarbons from my private jet” Kerry are an undeniable fact of our lives.

It’s hard to say which is worse among the elite — arrogance or cluelessness.

Virtually every traditional institution has lost all credibility. No one of good sense trusts any any official or any piece of information they can’t verify for themselves.

In other words, if ever a regime was ready to prolapse into an oozing lump of rotted illusions, it’s this one.

However.

This same exhausted, diseased, and all-but-mummified elite controls — or is controlled by — the most extensive surveillance and superintendence apparatus ever known to mankind. No one, from Cardinal Richelieu of old to the STASI of recent vintage could have imagined, let alone operated, a system like the one that watches us day and night. Not only watches us, but has the power — through a few keystrokes or a decision by anonymous, autonomous AI — to turn us into pariahs.

This system — partially “private” and partly Deep State (but can you tell the difference?) — may have the capability to outlast the depraved class that built it. Whether it will operate autonomously as Skynet or be operated by humans … who knows?

But what we appear to have — our paradox — is a strong control system built by a weakening elite.

More about that toward the end of this screed.

Source: John Wilder, The fall of freedom in Australia in 16 memes

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There’s so much we can’t know. We can’t know whether our own ancien regime will fight for its life when the day comes or already be so rotted (like the old Soviet Union) that it will passively collapse upon itself at a touch. We can’t know what will replace it — something better or something even worse. Will we get Thomas Jefferson or Robespierre? Vaclav Havel or Fidel Castro? Or tiny states with different convictions (a few even leaning toward freedom!)? How about a Dark Age of a thousand years?

All we can know is that, after some unknown period and one or more unpredictable triggering event(s) (the classic “Gradually and then suddenly”) our decomposing elite will fall.

In the meantime we have two jobs to do. Just two: live with the new totalitarianism and plan to outlive it.

Live with does not mean tolerate. Outlive doesn’t mean to wait passively until it dies on its own. On the contrary.

Living with the unlivable — in a spirit of freedom

No, we do not have to tolerate the intolerable. Our job of living with the new totalitarian reality doesn’t mean accepting it on its own terms. It means first acknowledging reality, evaluating our position, then taking positive steps to go around, through, over, or under the obstacles in our path. In totalitarianism, obstacles are many.

Early steps:

1. Because of the nature of the “crisis” that enabled mere tyrants to transform outright into totalitarians (albeit still “totalitarian lite”) the very first order of business in this first job of ours is to guard the sovereignty of our bodies.

Bad enough we’ve tolerated governments telling us that we can’t put certain useful substances into our own bodies. When they tell us that we must put certain substances into our bodies, they have gone too far. We must study, compare, judge — and resist (if such is our informed choice) — on our own.

2. If we find ourselves in a minority that is judged to be vermin, the cause of society’s ills, without redeeming value, then without hesitation we should get ourselves and our families to a safer place while we still can. DO NOT stick around and try to reason with a crazed mob. DO NOT imagine that reason and humanity will return in time. DO NOT hold false hopes. Go.

Where is your place of safety (if any exists)? I can’t say. Offshore (if you can get there)? At sea (if you have sailing skills or means)? Another state? Another region within your own state? A hometown where you’re known and respected? A family homestead? A hermit’s cave? Wherever it is, if you have good reason to believe it’s safer than living where people hate you merely for existing — go.

Beyond those initial steps, a lot of what we need to do to “live with totalitarianism” might be pretty familiar:

• Black Free marketeering
• Smuggling
• Monkeywrenching
• Mockery, non-cooperation, or malicious compliance with Authoritah
• Ferreting out the truth for ourselves in a world of lies
• Preserving books, movies, and historical documents from destruction
• Using distributed online communications systems
• Using encrypted and/or otherwise hard-to-trace communications
• Transacting via barter or non-approved currencies
• Secession — whether at state level, county level, or individual level
• Focusing more on our neighborhoods or tribes
• Developing alternative systems for necessary social functioning (e.g. medical care, education, justice, transportation)
• Keeping principles and culture alive within our hearts and our families
• Practicing our beliefs with greater vigor the more the regime attacks or undermines them.

Too familiar to long-time freedomistas? Sure, some of it is. But it’s time to do the above harder and smarter and with more resolution — and bolder Outlaw panache. Then do even more acts of freedom than we’ve thought of before. (The blog Commentariat is sure to have ideas.)

Living with totalitarianism does not mean going along to get along — except in the case of the Freedom Outlaw Mole, whose role of reporting and sabotaging from within becomes more important than ever as evil tightens its grip.

Under totalitarianism — with all its dangers even for the most mild dissenters — we deplorables will each make our own decisions about how visible we’re willing to be. Already some formerly public noisemakers have opted to slip away into silence while others redouble their public rages against the machine.

But even if we we choose to appear to be good, obedient members of the proletariat, we will not ever stop routing our way around or through a system that is bad to its tubercular bones.

Outliving totalitarianism — by being better and more adamant

Our second job — outliving a rotten system — also does not imply passivity. It means we do all we can to ensure our own healthy survival while hastening the ancien regime’s inevitable downfall.

Ah, you’ve already noticed that some of the many items under “living with it” (above) do exactly that. Provide (hope of) safety. Undermine the already rotting roots of the system.

And that’s how it works when things get as bad as they’re getting. Real battles may be necessary, but merely existing as creative, free-thinking, sovereign human beings goes a long way. Because totalitarianisms rot from within.

Totalitarianisms are inherently flawed. Whatever the differences between them (and remember, that every totalitarianism looks different), they’re all based on the laughable belief that a tiny, out-of-touch elite and their minions can understand and completely control a nation or the world — and that the masses will either go along or be crushed like bugs so that more compliant masses can emerge.

In the beginning totalitarian elitists try to persuade said masses that their diktats, economic catastrophes, persecutions, restrictions on free speech or freedom of movement, even their mass murders, serve some greater good. In the beginning, millions may believe it. But in the end, control by an elite is simply impossible — and that goes double for an elite like ours, which is already in a state of decrepitude and decomposition.

What they’re doing now looks like an exercise of power, but it’s really desperation. They will stop at nothing because nothing — the abyss — awaits them when the billions realize they’ve been had.

But they will stop. Because one day they are finally so weakened that even their most ardent partisans won’t (or can’t) stand for them any more. At that point … doom. Their doom.

So to outlive totalitarianism may mean to fight, physically, to the death. (As I keep saying, I don’t advocate violence and I hope it doesn’t come to that. But as a sane person in a crazy world I have to recognize the likelihood.)

“Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum.”

As you cling bitterly to your guns, take comfort that, contra Biden and Swalwell, the mighty United States government and its entire Deep State apparatus was just trounced in Afghanistan not by F15s and nuclear weapons, but by tribal goat herders.

But equally, “outliving totalitarianism” may mean not taking up arms. It may mean being prepared to thrive when the totalitarian elite sink under under their own greasy adipocytes and their senescent confidence in their divine right to rule.

Be flexible, be fast, be ready to spot opportunity, even if it comes in a form you never anticipated. And oh please try not to be stupid. Let all the stupidity be on their side.

Finally, some hope

Let’s end on an upbeat — even if “upbeat” must be interestingly relative in these strange and parlous days.

It will be interesting to see what role, if any, the Biden regime’s recent theater-of-the-absurd (or was it Grand Guignol?) exit from Afghanistan may play in the eventual plunge. Trigger event? Or just another datapoint in the long history of the fall?

It will be interesting to see what role the giant global COVID control campaign will have. Trigger event? Mere datapoint? Who knows?

All we can be sure of is that events will unfold very differently than we expect.

The odds are against us coming out of this with freedom enhanced. But I think we have two great hopes.

One — almost inevitable — is economic collapse. It may come in the form of hyperinflation, depression, bursting bubbles, the sudden demise of the welfare state, or all of the above. It won’t be pretty. It won’t be easy. And this time Fed conjuring just won’t be enough. But however it comes, people will be pissed. And desperate.

Desperate people may be crazed enough to demand even more of the same type of bad governance that get them into their hellhole in the first place. But some, at least, will see who’s really at fault.

The second hope — and this is trickier and has way less historic precedent — is that those “immortal” surveillance and superintendence systems our deepest Deep State elite created as their personal panopticon aren’t as immortal as they look from outside.

Now, if we actually get Skynet, yeah, that would not be good. But if humans remain in control of the technology even as one political system falls and something else strives to replace it, then different story. Because the reality is that the apparent immortality of surveillance and control technology is — like the power of the elite themselves — an illusion.

Data centers rely on huge power systems — and even big, savvy outfits like the NSA aren’t immune to  multiple explosions in their data centers. Green energy follies are making power grids more vulnerable, and even though smart spymasters build their systems with layer upon layer of backup, failures happen. Stuff breaks — on its own, or from human error, without the need for saboteurs or angry attackers.

And in this future we’re heading into where “diversity” and “equity” outrank skill and knowledge … who will fix the broken pieces of such sophisticated systems?

And what of the now-silent freedomista designers, programmers, and techs who help build and maintain the panopticon? What happens when they go full Edward Snowden and decide that they can no longer support the increasingly putrid ancien regime?

Whatever happens or doesn’t happen to oligarchs, plutocrats, technocrats, and the totalitarian systems they build, if those vast surveillance networks fail — or are given a well-informed strategic shove — we will have taken one giant leap toward becoming free individuals and building free societies once again.