The Ethics of Rebellion
Free-Man’s Perspective
Parallel Society
We have it in our power to begin the world over again
Issue #19 Easy Print Version January 2021
The Ethics of Rebellion
People who live through major upheavals usually come out of them with scars… psychological scars. Part of that is because such events turn the expected on its head, but another part comes from being confronted with situations they weren’t prepared to process.
So, since we’re currently looking at a situation primed for upheaval, I think we should get clear on the reality of rebellion, and specifically on the ethics of rebellion. I don’t want any of us to have our souls torn during difficult events. And we all want the same for our families and our friends.
As we’ll cover just below, rebellions, even the best of them, are ugly adventures. Nonetheless, the economies of the West have been shut by authoritarian means, the holders of power are feeling very powerful indeed, and financial mayhem is all but guaranteed. I’ll leave off the details here, but even the official numbers are well beyond reasonable limits. Large percentages of the populace are unemployed, facing eviction, and/or reliant upon government handouts to survive.
It’s possible, of course, that the powers that be will somehow stabilize the situation, but that’s not at all certain, and so I think we need to cover this subject now rather than later.
First Consideration: Rebellions Always Go Badly
The first thing to remember about rebellions is that they always have an ugly side. At this stage of human development, that’s just what happens. Most people will avoid anything that smells of rebellion until they’ve borne far too much pain and are harboring far too much anger. a state that is not conducive to good decisions. It’s also an environment that makes it easier for mankind’s lesser impulses to express themselves.
During the American revolution, for example, those who held to their original British loyalties (Tories) were mistreated badly. Known and suspected Tories were forced to stand before local committees, and as Professor John Miller (Triumph of Freedom: 1775-1783) put it, “If the committees failed to persuade, the mob took over. Thus was created a police system, secret, efficient, and all-powerful.” Things like this happened all through the colonies, during and after the war, and this was one of the better rebellions.
Over-reaction is simply what happens when emotions are brought to a high enough pitch to move people from the avoidance of action into open rebellion. I don’t like it more than anyone else does, but so it has been, and we should be prepared for it.
This is why we shouldn’t be too eager for a mass rebellion. Those of us who see and feel problems before the great mass of people are forever upset by the long train of abuses, and rightly so. But it’s far less nasty to change the course of the world with new technologies and ideas than with force. Even when force may be justified, we should prefer to avoid it, for everyone’s sake.
The root of this problem is that the great mass of people are disinclined to rock any boat, something that Thomas Jefferson also noted in the American Declaration of Independence:
All experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
People, that is to say, wait far too long before doing anything about their unjust treatment. And by the time they do act, they tend to swing too far the other way and start abusing people who fall into the “enemy” category.
For this there are two underlying causes:
Primate influences. Our nearest animal relatives, with whom we share most of our DNA, live in dominance hierarchies, with a few dominants lording it over many more submissives, who find safety by remaining in their assigned places. As Carel P. Van Schaik notes in The Primate Origins of Human Nature:
Animals in groups can often be ranked in a dominance hierarchy, based upon who can displace or attack whom and who must flee or acknowledge subordinate status.
As as we’ve now noted in several issues, quoting Robert M. Sapolsky’s Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best And Worst:
After a mere 40 millisecond exposure, subjects accurately distinguish between high- from low-status presentations.
So, then, while we’re not doomed to dominance and subservience, we carry circuitry that is susceptible to it.
Leveraged primate influences.
Human dominators are a lot more intelligent than baboon dominators. And so they developed methods of leveraging their dominant role. This is accomplished with the massive spreading of fear… by publishing stories about those who tried to rebel against the dominators, failed, and suffered terrifying consequences. Here’s an old example, from an ancient Assyrian thug-king by the name of Ashurnasirpal II:
“I flayed all the chief men who had revolted and I covered the pillar with their skins; some I walled up within the pillar; some I impaled upon the pillar on stakes. Many within the border of my own land I flayed, and I spread their skins upon the walls, and I cut off the limbs of the royal officers who had rebelled.”
Things in our time, sadly to say, are not essentially different. Great boasts engraved on stone pillars have been replaced with news releases from government prosecutors, but they are of no essential difference. Consider the fates of Julian Assange and Ross Ulbricht; to the contradiction to the laws of the nations claiming power over them, they are being openly destroyed. The “head on a pike, paraded in front of the palace,” would be no more barbaric than what’s being done to these two men.
So, then, humans have an anti-rebellion bias, which has been exaggerated with intelligently- spread terror. As a result, humans are far too slow to react to abuse, and thus tend to overreact once they finally do break their stasis. Again, we must be prepared for this.
Now, let’s go through some of the ethical questions surrounding rebellion.
What Justifies Rebellion?
This is a very common question, but it’s not a terribly good one, because it implies to most of us an all-or-nothing response. That is, the image most of us draw from it is sitting quietly and passively, absorbing abuse, until we finally stand up and start hurling stones. And that’s a mistake; rebellion shouldn’t be all or nothing, and we shouldn’t wait for some sort of violence threshold.
Rebellion is justified in response to abuse. Abuse is unnatural and inexcusable. (I’m using abuse as a willful act, excluding accidents.) Small abuses call for small rebellions and large abuses call for larger rebellions.
What’s important about rebellion is that we get busy with it at an early stage. That is, we need to start our rebellion with the arrival of small abuses; that way we tend to delay (possibly prevent) larger abuses, while defending ourselves and not building up internal emotional pressures. Stress kills, after all. Certainly choosing to break stasis and defy authority induces stress in most of us, but that is temporary stress, even if it endures for some days. To live in a permanent state of “I’m being abused but I’m doing nothing,” may involve less acute stress, but it is far more deadly because it never subsides.
And on another level, if we don’t get used to rebelling in small ways, we may not be able to come though when the necessity for rebellion hits the higher levels. Our ability to act, like our muscles, atrophies from lack of use. Frangois Rabelais described this very concisely:
I have known many who could not when they would, for they had not done it when they could.
We must break stasis and rebel at the lower levels, not putting it off in the name of “the law” or anything else. Low-level rebellions run the gamut: Pulling your children from government schools, turning down government contracts, doing off-the-books business, building up the crypto economy, dealing in gold and silver, encrypting your emails, distributing forbidden medicines, teaching any of the above to others, and so on.
Large-scale rebellion may be necessary at some point, but it is an error to wait for it. The right time to rebel is almost immediately following abuse. Small abuses don’t call for large-scale rebellions, but they do call for some rebellion, even if only to defend your personal integrity and agency.
We have no obligation to bear abuse, and we err if we imagine that “bearing it” serves the interests of peace; it doesn’t. Mainly it teaches abusers that they have an inherent advantage over the peaceful.
Rebelling Toward What?
One of the greatest of all modern problems, particularly for the generations educated in government schools after 1985 or so, is that external points of reference have been stripped out of their mental universe. Christianity has been under attack for a couple of centuries and at an especially high level recently. Judaism has always been small and viciously attacked from time to time. Reason has been expelled from academia over the past thirty years with deconstruction, critical theory and so on.
Crucial external points of reference, then, have been removed. And this is also true of the family. How many young people do we know who went off to college and returned, convinced that their parents, aunts and uncles and so on were the ignorant dupes of an oppressive patriarchy? This was did not happen accidentally; it was done to wipe away traditional points of reference.
What, then, can a young person look to? What is their star to guide by? In most cases they see only a shapeless crowd, surging and contracting based upon emotional impulses and unchallenged dogmas which they pick up over social media. And so, with no external points of reference, they move to and fro, rather like flocks of birds.
Our rebellions, then, must feature distant and fixed points of reference. If not, we appear to be just another flavor of swarm and will be in danger of becoming such a swarm. Such movements never move forward very well (and need a Devil figure to fixate upon). Consistent movement in a chosen direction requires a distant star to guide by.
The Bible is sufficient as an external point of reference. So is the Golden Rule. So are the actual principles of science, a document like the American Declaration of Independence, some of the writings of John Locke, and so on. A reference point need not be divine and faultless, it need only be clear, distant and basically benevolent. Some reference of this type, however, is necessary.
I don’t even believe that we all need to share the same reference. All of the above, in fact, could be used at the same time in a set of rebellions. These don’t essentially conflict, and so can move together without forcing anyone out of their personal convictions.
To have personal convictions, however, that is essential. Without them we are doomed to one swarm or another, particularly when pressure is applied. Like the Biblical Abraham, at some point we must be able to stand alone. Leon Blum established just this point when he said this:
I have often thought morality may perhaps consist solely in the courage of making a choice.
We must choose, and be able to stand alone in our choice.
Pacifism, Violence And Complications
So, presuming we face elevated levels of abuse, we should be clear on how to respond to them. In the end, these questions come back to Can we ethically engage in violence? And Can we ethically kill, even?
Obviously these are potent questions, and ones we’d rather not think about in daily life. Still, if we’re going to be prepared for a difficult time, we should get them out of our way, at least as well as we can. So. Here are several decision points:
Pacifism
I am sympathetic toward pacifism. Destruction and killing are bad for us, not to mention others. And so I respect those who honestly choose to evade violence rather than sowing it into the world.
Still, I think violence is the least-bad choice in some circumstances: not to punish, but to protect.
If we are to use violence, it should be justified by the protection of life, whether our own or the lives of others. Our emotions while doing violence can run all manner of directions – we truly are not designed for it – but that’s something to be dealt with afterward. What matters most is that it’s justified on solid grounds.
I don’t think anyone comes away from killing scott-free (especially so if it transpires in close quarters), but if you honestly justified it in advance, you stand a good chance of coming through it without deep scars.
The destruction of property
Presuming a clear and present set of offenses – SWAT raids carrying off dissenters; raids on churches; house-to-houses searches and beatings for weapons, ‘illegal’ money, undisclosed encryption keys, truant children and so on – do we have the right to destroy property?
As I see it, and as I’m sure many others would, the targeted destruction of property would be a quite reasonable response to such abuses. Damaging property is direct and very often effective. If, for example, you can safely put bullets through the engines of the trucks used to haul off dissidents, by creative means ruin the buildings they use for headquarters’, and so on, you’ll undercut their abuses considerably. Removing their means of operating can be very effective. Granted, when you destroy property, you are destroying the fruits of someone’s life and labor, but that’s nothing like destroying life itself. So, the justification can be far less and the balancing of effects easier. The primary balance would be this:
What is the value of what I’m destroying versus what I am preserving?
If you can burn down something worth ten days labor to save a dozen young people’s lives, or liberate them from bondage, must of us would conclude that we should destroy the property.
There is, I suppose, the additional factor of disturbing the peace: Stopping peaceful people from pursuing peaceful production, whether directly or by filling them with so much trepidation that they cannot produce. But, presuming that things were already seriously bad (otherwise you’d never be at the point of destroying property), the additional disturbance would be negligible.
Violence, however, isn’t that clean in the real world. What if you set fire to something, and the fire spreads in the winds? Or what if you fire a rifle and miss? Bullets travel a long way and will, every so often, strike an innocent. These things must also be considered. There is no way to assure perfection where violence is concerned, especially since it will be carried out by humans whose emotional infrastructure is so poorly suited to it.
So, if you are forced to consider violence, make peace with this fact: There is some chance that, no matter how well you plan, something will go wrong and you’ll harm someone who didn’t deserve it. That’s not pleasant, but the better you can deal with it in advance, the better you’ll survive it if you get unlucky.
Likewise, your choices may have secondary effects that complicate or outweigh your goals. This being a deeply complex world, this is likely to happen some significant portion of the time. There are two ways to deal with it:
Ask yourself an extended set of “What if,” questions. The better you imagine difficult
scenarios, the better you’ll be able to clarify your plans and avoid unhappy surprises. This is crucial.
Be ready to adapt instantly. If you try something and it generates bad consequences, move on to another plan. If we had perfect knowledge this would be a lot easier, but we don’t. And so we must adapt once we see negative consequences.
The destruction of life
People who have actually killed don’t, as a rule, like to talk about it. As I’m saying now for the third time, this is not something that suits our souls; rather it’s something that deforms or tears them. Still, if by killing one corrupt life you are clearly saving a hundred better ones, the choice is obvious, even if terribly difficult. (Most humans cannot be brought to kill without serious prodding.)
If, God forbid, you find yourself in such a circumstance, remember that nothing you do will be perfect, and that the best you can do is save the lives, get home, and give yourself time to recover. Moreover, you’ll have my sincere condolences.
So… if at all possible, destroy property and information, and rather earlier than later. And here creativity is your strength. A carpenter can come up with all sorts of subversions based on his skill set, the electrician based on his/hers, the IT expert with his/hers and so on. These can be terribly effective, especially because they will be unexpected. The more we use these, the less killing will become a necessary option.
Alliances
As noted above, nothing having to do with a rebellion is going to be pristine. And this is also true regarding alliances. If the enemy of your enemy is ever really your friend, it’s for moments only. Alliances are recipes for disaster. And so, if at some point it seems you need to make one, please go through all the “what ifs” and get out of it as quickly as possible.
Bear in mind, please, that foreign powers always get their fingers into rebellions, if they don’t stir them up altogether. Do not play any part in such things. Hold it clearly in mind that the foreigners will approach you indirectly, offering you things you really want. These people will destroy you and your aspirations without remorse or hesitation. Stay away from them.
Remember also that the success of foreign takeovers (certainly over time) are dependent on local compliance. In the case of a breakup in the US, for example, it it might be in the interests of China to take over Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle. But even so, they’d have to install puppet regimes and play very nice for a decade or so to keep the workers in place. Taking a city can also turn into an ongoing disaster for the occupier.
Apologies
I’m sorry to write about these things, but I can no longer call monstrous scenarios “too unlikely to spend time on.” This past year has brought them to the doorstep of reality; we’ve already had a good deal of political rioting. And so I think we must be prepared in advance. I illustrated this at length in The Breaking Dawn, but the most likely dark scenario revolves around three parts:
- The Internet as a universal surveillance network. Google, Facebook, the NSA and the rest have already made this so. Unless you seriously protect yourself, the system is able to change your mood and to guide you, and reliably.
- Full control of commerce. The fiat economies of the world are already nearly all digital, and are fully capable of both surveillance and control. If they could cut off Wikileaks a decade ago, they’re now able to cut off any dissident at any time. Survival becomes difficult once your cards and accounts no longer work.
• Cash will be eliminated. Nearly everyone is deeply in debt, and nearly all their
retirement money rests in massively over-priced and centralized markets, To capture such a system is simple: Something like a cyber-attack on the securities exchanges will ruin almost everyone, with no necessity of a discernible villain. With people facing foreclosure and privation, the elites can step in with a solution: Sign on to our cashless system and we’ll cancel all those debts and give you a guaranteed income besides.
And so, if we are to build a durable parallel society, there is some chance we’ll have to deal with ugly things. And so I’ve done my best to prepare you in advance. I still haven’t covered war zones: thankfully that doesn’t seem necessary at this point. But if ever it does, I’ll get that information to you as well.
I’ll close with an important passage from Albert Camus’ The Rebel:
Analysis of rebellion leads at least to the suspicion that, contrary to the postulates of contemporary thought, a human nature does exist, as the Greeks believed. Why rebel if there is nothing permanent in oneself worth preserving? … Rebellion, though apparently negative, since it creates nothing, is profoundly positive in that it reveals the part of man which must always be defended.
And so, while open rebellion may become necessary, let’s keep it at low levels the best we can.
What’s Going On
Overview:
Here comes 2021. With an ugly and troublesome 2020 behind us, we step forward into another year. But even as troubles seem poised along the side of the road, I think we’d do well to remember a line from an old friend of mine: The world can be going to hell, but your world can still be beautiful. These are true words, and by holding them in mind we’ll recognize the beauties of life rather than passing them by in a dark funk.
The legacy economy:
It looks like the economy will begin to matter again at some point in 2021. Up till now the populace has been wildly distracted by a virus (with millions installed in front of televisions, trembling), by a wild Presidential election that’s not over yet, small businesses willfully destroyed while mega-corps are protected, and million of people surviving on government checks. It’s the setup for a whole genre of sci-fi dystopias, except that it’s real.
Another trend in America and Europe is that formerly productive people have accepted that they can’t win in a fight against the system, and so they’re carving out some sort of life on the dole. And that means that they’re not going to show up for low-level jobs, even for their old jobs.
To whatever extent this is true, it means that a major new model of Western survival is to cloister as safely as possible, to show yourself harmless to whatever storm of opinion is carrying the day, and to hope that things will eventually get better, if only by accident.
As a result, labor may be scarce. And that leads to all sorts of problems, like inflation and shortages.
At some point the 2020 US election will end and a President will be installed. And at some point, the virus hysteria will end. Even the black plague vanished after a year or two. It’s possible the usual suspects keep the hype running longer – COVID created a near-prefect environment for manipulation and it’s almost the only thing keeping television news alive – but that strikes me as unlikely. I guess we’ll see.
Once the distraction pulls back, there will be problems to face… and if history is any guide, the responses of governments promise to be foolish.
The Left will likely feature a mix of over-reach and devouring itself, and on the right, the politicians will wimp along while the people may in fact start demanding things.
We should also consider the Trump voters: These people overwhelmingly want only to raise families, do meaningful work and be left alone. The system they expected to support them had seen better days, to be sure, but in one short year it became something they never would have imagined.
Bear in mind also that these are the people who (by and large) grow the food, build the machines, man the critical systems and deliver everything. And yet they watched the congress run a fraudulent impeachment, with the FBI and CIA they admired supporting it.
Then came a corrupt election and the Supreme Court passing on the one type of case (a
dispute between states) that they have to take. All this, of course, on top of riots, looting, neoracism, and a televised plague.
These people may or may not start making demands, but if they do even secession is possible. We’ll wait and see, of course, but demands are no longer wildly unlikely. Especially so if economic hardship combines with demeaning politicians.
From a broader perspective, what we’re seeing in the legacy economy is complexity beginning to feed upon itself. This is something that Joseph Tainter noted in his book, The Collapse Of Complex Societies:
At some point in the evolution of a society, continued investment in complexity as a problem solving strategy yields a declining marginal return.
Politicians really don’t have anything to give that doesn’t involve escalating complexity. At the same time, 2020 moved the expiration dates for things like pensions and social security forward. Tainter’s declining marginal return seems well underway.
The new economy:
The big news here is that Wall Street is discovering Bitcoin, both to the good and to the bad.
The discovery is good, of course, in that it’s enriching a lot of Bitcoiners. I’ll be quite interested to see what comes of that in upcoming years. In addition, it injects a significant layer of honest money into the system. Bitcoin is created slowly (soon becoming very slowly) and earned with difficulty; unlike fiat money, it can’t be created on demand. And so, whatever percentage of world capital resides in Bitcoin, that much manipulation is removed from the lever-pullers.
That could make a very significant difference at some point.
Wall Street’s discovery is, essentially, that Bitcoin is a near-perfect store of value, clearly better than anything else, including gold. This rubs some Bitcoin enthusiasts the wrong way, because it was originally designed as electronic cash. (A result of the cypherpunk ethos.) That’s a worthy goal, of course, and some of the smaller coins and layers like Lightning may in fact accomplish it, but truth be told, Bitcoin is better for storing value than it is for buying cups of coffee.
Cypherpunk types will just have to hack this situation, as we have others.
The bad side of this is that governments will try to build a regulatory fence around Bitcoin with KYC/AML regulations. (Know Your Customer, Anti-Money Laundering.) Those names are ridiculously fraudulent, of course, but they will be used to force crypto transactions through compliant exchanges. That strategy will have less than complete effectiveness, but they’ll pursue it, having few alternatives.
And so, here we stand: The new economy is expanding in erratic and impure ways, while the legacy system dips closer and closer to chaos.
Please remember that we’re different, which is a feature, not a bug.
Political idiocy of some effect:
While we wait to see how the next few weeks unfold, it’s clear that there was extensive fraud in the election of 2020. The question is, what will people do about it? Some people are seeing the election of 2020 as a pivot, when the non-wokes decide to take matters into their own
hands. But how will things actually play out? The belief in democracy, we should remember, declines into sluggishness: No risk or pain is required. Just vote harder.
In Europe, things are still worse in many ways, although the Europeans are less hesitant to pour into the streets with demands. I hesitate to guess how 2021 will unfold there.
The whole picture before us is a mess. And if the surface can be somehow kept placid, the internal pressures are likely to rise all the more… and the better our new world, founded upon new and better ideas, will appear. Forward!
Culture:
Alas, as regards culture, I still don’t know the way forward from here. Perhaps some newly wealthy Bitcoiners will start commissioning fine art.
The Parallel Society Portfolio
Well, the big up-wave is certainly in motion. Wall Street has discovered us, the biggest banks are forecasting strong 6-figure prices for Bitcoin this year and one major figure after another is putting a billion dollars, or some significant portion thereof, into Bitcoin. And so we’re seriously in the money, almost certainly with a long way to go.
More than that, “the government will just make it illegal” becomes less and less of a serious statement with each life insurance company and hedge fund that joins the wave.
So, hold on to your hats, my friends, a Bitcoin wave is a crazy ride and will draw all sorts of emotions out of you. Try to stay as stable as you can, ever-reminding yourselves of your primary principles.
This is where we are on Thursday, December 31st:
Bitcoin (BTC):
Average recommendation: $4,539.57 Current price: $28,582.38 Up 530%
Litecoin (LTC): $
Average recommendation: $49.96 Current price: $124.42 Up 149%
Monero (XMR): $
Average recommendation: $52.90 Current price: $157.76 Up 198%
Zcash (ZEC): $
Average recommendation: $57.65 Current price: $62.96 Up 9.2%
Dash (DASH): $
Average recommendation: $121.76 Current price: $98.12 Down 19.5%
So, sell Bitcoin only if you truly need to, and otherwise stay firm and calm. If you want to clean up your portfolio, this is a good time to exchange some of the lagging minor currencies for Bitcoin. Please do that with decentralized exchanges. What we want from this whole exercises is a decentralized economy, and those are important pieces of it.
A Final Thought
Over the past few weeks I’ve been coming back to the concepts of a comprehensible world and the dignity of the producer. Along the way, I ran back into this wonderful little line from Primo Levy:
The dignity of a man who works and knows why.
Sometimes life comes back to simple things like this concept. Having this mind in ourselves – working to produce tangible good in the world and holding that image as a clear conception in our minds… this is the mindset of a better world… of better beings.
And this really is the kind of mentality we are creating in our new, decentralized world. I ran into this quote from a young Bitcoiner recently, and I find it very telling:
Bitcoin is the only real thing that I have ever done in my life. It’s the only thing I’ve done where I know why I’m doing it.
This is Levy’s line dressed in modern clothing. And it lies at the foundation of our new world: purpose and dignity restored to our lives and informing our energies. This is the thing that, if it spreads, will concretely change the world.
And as I’ve noted before, the great model we have of the world changing was the changeover between brutal Rome and Christian Europe. And at the risk of repeating myself, I’ll give you the summation of it all by the great historian, Will Durant (in Caesar and Christ):
There is no greater drama in the human record than the sight of a few Christians, scorned or oppressed by a succession of emperors, bearing all trials with a fierce tenacity, multiplying quietly, building order while their enemies generated chaos… and at last defeating the strongest state that history has known. Caesar and Christ met in the arena, and Christ won.
The world offers incomprehensible and erratic institutions, life-threatening responses, dogmatic “leaders” who are frequently exposed as deeply corrupt, and a steady series of insults and offenses that their victims are expected to bear in silence.
We, on the other hand, offer a world where we work and know why. Where the world we create is comprehensible, and where we’re proud to fill it with good things.
At some point people will comprehend this. Then Caesar falls.
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