We live in a parasite-ocracy. Parasites hate freedom, because genuine freedom requires accountability. Parasites love liability shields, because they eliminate accountability. Parasites hate nothing more than accountability.
Freedom Requires Obligation
The opposite of Freedom is not Responsibility; it’s Anarchy. This truth is so important that Clownworld’s social engineers (and the demonic spiritual forces that control them) have spent centuries trying to cover it up and psyop everyone into believing that traditional obligations were oppressive chains to be broken and that a lifetime of adolescent self-indulgence is the ideal.
Freedom and Responsibility are two sides of the same coin. In some ways, the relationship between them seems paradoxical – i.e., an instance of “the Truth standing on its head to get attention,” to borrow G. K. Chesterton’s description of Paradox – but the connection between Freedom and Responsibility becomes obvious when we observe the consequences that befall a society, such as ours, that equates Freedom and Anarchy.
Anarchy ends not in Freedom for all, but in tyranny and nihilism. All anarchy ends up as “anarcho-tyranny.” The Hobbesian hell where life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” occurs not in a state of nature, but in a postmodern clownworld where the system operates according to the principle of “live and let live” when it comes to anything that makes you a slave to your appetites (so pornography becomes “free speech:) or that undermines trust and cohesion in your local society (so antisocial behavior and violent crime get a pass), but then suddenly turns draconian and sadistic whenever anyone tries to exercise genuine sovereignty in their own lives. The Clownworld Order is like a lurking crocodile: most of the time it looks half-dead and just kind of lies there, getting in everyone’s way, but as soon as someone tries to maneuver around it, the beast suddenly becomes hyper-focused and hypercompetent and attacks the perceived threat with surprising ferocity, speed, and agility.
You don’t get that kind of cruelty and capriciousness in a society where people are personally responsible for the work they do and for the organizations they lead. You get it when decision-makers are remote and protected by layers upon layers of late-stage bureaucracy and lawyerly liability shields.
In a world where everyone disclaims responsibility for anything and everything except for maximizing his own base, hedonic self-interest, no one is truly Free. For one thing, you aren’t setting your own priorities if you live that way, you are just an animal being conditioned to respond impulsively to incentives, so whoever socially engineers your incentives is your master, and you are a slave.
Also, in a world where nobody feels obligated to do anything other than respond to incentives like a trained animal, you can’t really predict what anyone else will do long term. Sure, you can figure out how the incentives work and then predict future behavior based on that, but that only works as long as the incentives stay the same. But unless you are operating at a high enough level to be the one socially engineering the incentives, you can’t assume that the incentives in place today will be in place tomorrow. So you can act today, but you can’t really predict how others will respond. You can think of many examples of this during the woke era or the scamdemic, where incentives suddenly changed and people behaved in ways that were incomprehensible if you based your assumptions on the incentives that had been in place only a short time before. Now, if you are dealing with someone who is moral and who acts based on settled convictions, then you don’t have to worry about them suddenly changing their behavior based on an arbitrary shift in the incentive structure. So in a moral society where people obligate themselves is more free, because you can act with a knowledge of how others will respond, and that in turn gives you a greater ability to change the world around you (meaning you are freer).
Healthy societies require boundaries, just as healthy bodies do. Maintaining boundaries means imposing obligations. For starters, you are obligated not to shit in the street or in a public waterway, because it spreads disease. Boundaries must be maintained to prevent literal shit from mixing with drinking water. But a society that brainwashes its citizens into believing that boundaries are inherently oppressive, and that “liberation” means tearing down and violating boundaries, eventually degrades to the point that it gets hopelessly contaminated with shit, literal and metaphorical. In such a society, you may be free to shit anywhere you like, but you can never be free from the stench of shit.
True Freedom requires Autonomy or Sovereignty
True Freedom requires responsibility, and responsibility requires autonomy or sovereignty. If you are truly responsible for something or for another person, then you must have the capacity to do, or not do, what is required for that thing or person to thrive under your care. If you are instead micromanaged, you are not ultimately responsible for the thing or person, the micromanager is, because the micromanager is the one with the decision-making authority and the one who will take credit for anything that goes well, as well as the one who will be stuck with the losses if they don’t. Your risk is limited to being dismissed from your office, after which you would have no ongoing involvement with the thing or person for which you were only nominally responsible. True Freedom means distributed ownership, or Distributism. What this looks like in practice is a local economy comprised of small businesses and family farms.
This is the opposite of the centralized managerialism that is the de facto governing system of both Capitalism and Communism, which are opposite horns of the same demon. Under both systems, the average person owns nothing and is supposed to be happy just being a cog in a big machine owned by, and operated for the benefit of, someone else. Hence, the uncanny convergence between the de facto governing systems of communist China and capitalist America noted by N.S. Lyons. Of course, what makes Capitalism, as we know it, possible is not a “free market,” but a fraudulent financial system based on a government-backed private banking cartel that can create money out of thin air in the form of “notes” that the government forces its citizens to repay (in the forms of taxes and inflation).
Something for Nothing requires separating Ownership from Accountability
Clownworld is premised on the lie of something for nothing, and for this lie to appear plausible, Ownership and Accountability must be decoupled. The only way to do this is through adopting the ethos of parasitism, and that is precisely what our ruling class has done. Only a parasite can get something for nothing, but of course that only means that the cost is passed onto the host.
I mentioned our fraudulent financial system. The Federal Reserve Bank produces sound money like a magician produces live rabbits out of a hat. In reality, the rabbit already exists and is pulled from somewhere else, and it’s only because of an elaborately crafted illusion that anyone is fooled into thinking the hat actually created a rabbit out of thin air. But that’s exactly how the Fed’s wizards create dollars, only it’s even worse, because a magician’s audience doesn’t have to pay compounding interest to the magician for all the rabbits he pulls out of his hat. Imagine a magician pulling 40 trillion rabbits out of a hat – or creating a debt instrument representing 40 trillion rabbits that theoretically exist inside his hat – and then obligating every man, woman, and child (whether they agreed to it or not) to service that debt via taxes and inflation, and you pretty much have our financial system. (Check out The Creature from Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin or the long-form essay at NeoFuedalism.substack.com for more on the pyramid scheme that is our financial system.)
Besides the financial system, the wizards primarily use two other parasitic methods to separate Ownership and Accountability and to keep Ownership for themselves while passing off Accountability onto others: (1) compromised officials and (2) corporate liability shields.
The first method of parasitic extraction is obvious. The joint Mossad/CIA operation known as Jeffrey Epstein is just the latest and most flagrant example. Compromise the officials with bribes or blackmail, and then use them to steal from the institutions they run. If you run this scheme at a high enough level, and especially if you involve enough intermediaries and sufficient plausible deniability, then you can do this with impunity. When shit hits the fan, you sacrifice the corrupt officials. If enough shit hits the fan, you sacrifice an intermediary (like Jeffrey Epstein). You just replace him with another errand boy and move onto your next scheme. The costs are ultimately borne by whoever is still foolish enough to support the now-corrupted and skinsuited institution, based on whatever legitimate purpose it used to serve and whatever credibility it once had.
How could you prevent the parasitic wizards from compromising officials? Requiring officials to have some skin in the game would go a long way. Imagine if public officials had to post bond whenever they obligated the public to pay for some scheme. For example, let’s say your governor is pushing for a $231 billion high-speed rail project. Would he still support that project if he was personally liable to reimburse the State if it failed or if it went over budget? Or imagine a politician telling Americans we have to go to war to stop a country in the Middle East from getting weapons of mass destruction. What if that politician knew that he would forfeit all his property and spend the rest of his life in a work camp if it was later revealed that he lied about the casis belli for the war he led the country into?
The second method of parasitic extraction doesn’t get enough attention: the corporate liability shields. Yes, I get it that this is what allows companies to raise money by selling stock to passive investors who know their downside is limited to whatever they invest. If buying stock in a new startup meant being personally liable for any judgment any random plaintiff might win in a lawsuit against that company later, then far fewer people would be willing to invest in new businesses. But that rationale has been expanded to basically include everyone, including owners who actively manage the business. And now we have reached the penultimate stage of reductio ad absurdum with corporate liability shields: private equity.
Suppose you are a high-level “investor” (the way this term is used is a complete bastardization of it, because they don’t invest; they only extract) in the private equity world. You are a member in good standing of the bankster class, so you get preferred access to their magic “something for nothing” money, which means you get it before its value has been inflated away, unlike the suckers who work for a living and who produce real, tangible goods and services. In fact, this money is created out of nothing the instant that you borrow it, so you and your friends basically create money from nothing in order to buy a legitimate business, say a legacy retailer that owns its own stores, like Sears or Toys ‘R Us. So you form a limited liability company (LLC) to act as a holding company, and your LLC borrows money and uses it to buy Sears or Toys ‘R Us. You form another LLC that serves a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT). Your REIT then borrows more money (again created out of thin air) and buys all the retailer’s real properties (the physical stores). The retailer books this as a profit and pays your holding company a handsome dividend, which your holding company then passes on to you. Then, your REIT charges the retailer exorbitant rent for the properties it used to own. Now, your REIT is paying you a handsome dividend from all those rents that are rolling in. But oh no, the retailer is now losing money, because it has to pay such high rent, so it starts selling off or mortgaging every asset it has left in order to pay rent to your REIT. After your retailer has sold or mortgaged everything it can and slashed its spending on its actual business as close to zero as possible (thereby starving the business to death), it defaults on its rental payments to your REIT, so your REIT terminates the leases and rents the space to someone else. Now, you’ve got an REIT worth billions of dollars. Who paid for it? Not you! And as for that once-proud retail giant, like Sears or Toys ‘R Us, that is spiraling towards bankruptcy? Well, you are not personally liable for any of its debts, so you walk away scot-free, secure behind several layers of corporate veils that no bankruptcy court will ever pierce. You just wrecked a once viable business by parasitizing its profits while dodging liability for all of its losses (that you directly caused). And that has been the process that has been repeated countless times over the past several decades, whereby the bankster class has financialized the entire economy and extracted wealth while socializing costs.
Now, take the parasitic practices of private equity and add in the whole 2008 financial crisis and the government response of making private debts public, and you have the Clownworld economy, where everything is fake and gay, where costs are always going up and quality is always going down, and where responsibility is obfuscated and accountability diffused throughout byzantine layers so that, to quote the Howard Jones song, “No one’s ever to blame.” Yep, no one’s ever to blame, but everyone has to pay.
Inevitably, and probably sooner rather than later, the day of reckoning will arrive for all this, and we’ll have another generational economic crisis. When it does, some of the wizards will be exposed, and they’ll scurry around like the rats that they are. It will basically be like in The Wizard of Oz. “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” Followed by bombastic threats and a bunch of how dare you’s. If the bankster wizards are really feeling cornered, they’ll switch tactics and start promising everyone a bunch of free and amazing stuff, and they’ll try to reinflate the bubble and kick the can down the road again.
But in the aftermath of the next collapse, if people are serious about fixing the system so that it doesn’t happen again, the corporate liability shields will have to be seriously curtailed. At most, investors should be able to form Limited Partnerships, where management of the business is handled by a general partner who is personally liable for the businesses debts and obligations.
Basically, real reform requires fusing Ownership and Accountability back together. I’m not optimistic that anything like that will happen, given how deep and pervasive the rot is in the current system, but the good news is that Reality has a way of reasserting itself, and eventually the cost of ignoring Reality becomes impossible for corrupt institutions to pay.
[Post script: I originally intended this post to focus more on the personal level of responsibility and accountability, but a digression about the macro-level social side of it became too unwieldy for it to be part of the same essay, so I did the macro/social as a separate post that will serve as an introduction for forthcoming post(s) about how responsibility/accountability and freedom are related in terms of one’s own personal life. Also, I think it will serve the same rhetorical device that Socrates described in The Republic, where the larger scale of society magnifies things that are subtler and harder to see at the smaller scale of the personal. So this post is basically an introduction to the more personal-level posts that I hope to finish up and post here soon.]
Thanks for articulating what I have seen and felt for years. My main concern for the giant bureaucracy is the fact that not a single bureaucrat ever is personally responsible for the decisions they force on the rest of us. They don’t even get demoted. Me, I run a small construction company. If I make a bad decision. I pay for it. I am also personally responsible that my people have work in front of them, even if I pay for it myself. Everyone I know that runs a small business does exactly that when they need to.
There is a horse blanket company I used to buy from that was bought by a private equity firm. It was once owned by an Irish family. Great product. Now it is no longer made in Ireland and the thread used is just strong enough to make it through the sawing machines. Damn things now fall apart. This private equity company is only trading on a once proud name and selling everyone garage. They will never sell me another one.
I really liked the content, except for the assumption that "no rulers" (anarchy by etymology rather than colloquial misdefinition as "chaos") somehow equates to the bastardized system currently destroying our society.
anarchy fails for much the same reason as capitalism or communism. that being, no matter how sound the rules they find ways around, psychopaths almost ALWAYS float to the top of social power structures, just like loose corpses in the swamp. and said psychopaths will invariably turn whatever system they bullied their way to the top of into a gang/mob system and retain power until forcibly ejected.