fox files

Almost every aspect of our lives requires permission.
Our money is dispensed through centralized services like banks or Paypal.
Our electricity is controlled by centralized power companies.
Our internet connections are run through the most hated companies (if you’re in America, at least).
Our web pages are filtered by Google.
Our passwords are dependent upon the websites accepting them.
Most of the time, it all seems to be working well enough.

That is, until Paypal shuts down your ability to receive payments online, or your bank closes your account, or the Fed’s funny munny policies bludgeons your savings account into debt-fueled submission.

Or your domain is seized by a faceless bureaucracy…
Or Google ranks your website low because a few employees were triggered by a savior complex.

Or a few opaque algorithms are executed out of a need to lift dull corporate propaganda above your content because their biz model is flawed (and, worse, dishonest).

Or you spend years building a massive following on Youtube, helping the platform become the behemoth it currently is, only to be de-platformed and demonetized because you failed to abide by the wishy-washy guidelines.

Even Amazon has blacklisted self-published authors from using their services and without a word of explanation.

That’s their prerogative, sure.
But it’s a bad long-term strategy.

And all of these examples reveal the need for decentralization in an increasingly complex and polarized world.

The Dumbing Down of Righteousness
We aren’t naive enough to blame the companies themselves.

Centralized companies who use the hammer of censorship arbitrarily are kowtowing to mass-mindedness a mob mentality that can only possibly see the world in the lowest resolution possible.

The kind of mentality that arrogantly thinks the emotional center to which it desperately latches onto is the center of gravity around which everything else must revolve.

Anything that does not resonate in such a grandiose solar system, then, should be eradicated from existence as it is clearly against the laws of physics.

This is the problem with “movements” in general. They allow people who have plenty of personal demons to deal with (and don’t we all?) to project those demons onto their neighbors and instead attempt to slay them there.

And, worse, it eradicates any chance for individual ingenuity.

As Stephan Hoeller writes in his book, Freedom, the mass-minded individual “takes to collective and political movements wherein their already precarious and puny individuality dwindles to minuscule proportions. Imitation, dependence, lack of personal judgment, a lowering of the mental level are the inevitable accompaniment of the submerging of the individual in a mass movement.”

Psychologist Carl Jung once said that any movement, even if composed of wholly admirable persons, has the morality and intelligence of an unwieldy, stupid, violent animal and the bigger the movement, the more unavoidable its blindness and stupidity.

The Romans had a saying along this vein: Senatus bestia, senatores boni viri.
Translation: “The senate is a monster, but the senators are good men.”

The mob-mentality often demands that society “society,” according to the mob, being some self-existing entity, having a life and meaning apart from its members take care of all the dirty, slimy, uncomfortable stuff, smooth out the edges of life, and abdicate individual responsibility in every respect (im)possible.

Jung put it this way in Psychology and Alchemy:

“It is so much easier to preach the universal panacea to everybody else than to take it oneself and, as we all know, things are never so bad when everybody is in the same boat. No doubts can exist in the herd; the bigger the crowds the better the truth and the greater the catastrophe.”

Mass-mindedness is behind the great regression into infantilization.
You don’t have to look far to see examples of the mass-mind at work. Just this past week:

The UK has decided to ban any commercial which might portray “harmful gender stereotypes.”

(Translation: We decide what define men, women, and everything in between, not you, or the individuals who buy your products.)

Texas wants to make suggestive jokes illegal.
Simon Black of Sovereign Man reports the following.

“The Texas state legislature has passed two bills which would define ‘harassment’ on campus as ‘unwelcome, sex-based’ words. Hearing anything that makes you feel even slightly uncomfortable would be considered sexual harassment.

“The legislation allows university professors to be fired or imprisoned for failing to report any instance of harassment that falls under this loose definition.”

(Translation: Hey, kids. Don’t like the grade your professor gave you? Well, boy do I have a solution for you.]

Frogs and the “OK” symbol are symbols of “hate”

A leaked internal memo from Facebook has identified a cartoon frog and the “OK” hand symbol a bannable offense — as they are, of course, “hate symbols.”

What started as a joke by 14 year-olds on 4chan is now a punishable offense by our social media gods.
(Translation: Yes, sure, let’s trust Facebook with our financial lives.)

Emotionally Stunted Madness

Those who cheer the banning of “hate speech” (AKA, anything that makes one feel uncomfortable or the need to feel morally superior).

Are also the same types who would’ve in the past ironically enough, given our modern moral pulpit’s (apparent) distaste for religious dogma shunned people out of society for blasphemy, heresy, and apostasy.

Today’s secular church doesn’t care what you look like so long as you become a sounding board for its 3,333 ever-shifting commandments.
If not?

The digital mob will try to alienate you from society by doxxing you, harassing your employer or via public humiliation.

No matter how you shake it, this isn’t a very good long-term strategy, either.

There’s a long-held axiom of war that goes something like this:

The weapons I use on my enemy today will be used on me with equal or increased intensity tomorrow.

The thing I’m most excited about is the “blockchain revolution”:
The potential to make freedom a moot point. Not because I want people to be able to spew vile, emotionally-stunted ignorance, but rather because I want to live in a society that’s strong enough and emotionally mature enough to be able to handle such conflict in a responsible and adult-like way.

I look forward to a society where the individual owns his or her own emotional stuff and realizes the difference between psychological projection and actual conflict.

And furthermore understands how to resolve either of them in such a way that not only is the tension of the polar opposites resolved and not left to fester until it explodes.

But perhaps a transcendent third emerges out of the ashes of the conflict and a new way of seeing the world and the “other” is breathed into life.

Few are truly naive enough to think we can just sweep conflict under the rug (by banning it) and it’ll disappear. That if we close our eyes tightly enough the baddies will go away.

I don’t think we need less conflict. One of the main causes of polarization is people are opting out of conflict, opting for fake, superficial, posturing forms of conflict. I think we need more conflict. But the healthy stuff.
The raw, heavy, sweaty, inescapable, cathartic conflict.
Where truths come to light and are sat with and digested.

This will mean, of course, sometimes, things we don’t like could very well rise to the top.

But rather than repressing, suppressing, or depressing– responses that, psychologically speaking, only serve to turn ideas into fixations, obsessions, and ideological possessions (AKA demons) — the mature society would face it and see it for what it is: part and parcel of the human condition…

Society’s devils and demons are born by following the instinct to avoid and isolate the things that trouble us — by not facing them head-on.
Without facing them head-on, however, true progress is impossible.
We’re only left celebrating faux, superficial progress.

Progress that lacks any soul or wisdom.
Progress that lacks any wholeness, richness, or depth.

Only freedom — especially the freedom to bring the festering darkness into the light will offer us such an opportunity.

When freedom as an inalienable right becomes a moot point, that’s when the real work will begin. Until then, we’ll invest our time and energy in continuing to plant the seeds of it, for those of us willing to put the time and energy into it that is.