By
Joe Withrow
Author of “The Individual is Rising”
(Cognitive Dissonance – While I edited “The Individual is Rising” for Joe I am not participating in any revenue from the sale of that book. However I did purchase several copies for personal use as well as to give to family and friends.)

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
Modern society does not care much for the individual. National interest, public policy, and the common good are held up as the ideal. We still hear lip service paid to the individual rights of man on occasion, but only within the context of individual servitude towards one or another State-driven collective goal. Of course these goals are presented as moral and upright, but there is a little catch – no one can truly opt-out of supporting the chosen goals. The State, in all its benevolence, is going to take your money to support the collective goals of society whether you like it or not.

Sadly, most individuals buy right into their societal servitude because the default programming does such a great job of convincing individuals of their own ineptitude. The default programming steers individuals away from their own interests and passions and funnels them onto the same “lifestyle path” on which they are pushed to “be a productive member of society”.
The government educational system is the leadoff hitter in the programming lineup and children have been relinquished to the educational blob at progressively earlier ages over time. Kindergarten was developed to precede First Grade. Then Preschool was developed to precede Kindergarten. Now we have pre-Preschool in place to precede Preschool. We guess they ran out of creative names for this last one.
So the kids are herded into government schools where their creativity, critical thinking ability, and common sense are systematically destroyed. They learn to unquestioningly obey their superiors at all times and to ask for permission to go to the restroom. To top it off, the kids are spoon-fed faulty history and they are taught that government is a righteous institution forever and always seeking to make their life better. Their teachers are mostly decent folks, mind you; they just don’t understand what government really is either.
Perhaps worst of all, students are conditioned to never seek a deeper understanding of the world around them and to never focus on discovering and developing their passion. Instead, students quickly learn that grades and social status are the only worthy goals to be sought after.

The next leg of the default programming is college. The kids were constantly told for at least a decade that they absolutely must go to college in order to be successful in life, so they load up on federal student loan debt when they hit 18 and march off to whatever college will have them.
While there are certainly some exceptions, especially in the more specialized fields, most students quickly learn that college is just another system to be gamed and completed. Attaining the highest grades possible with the least amount of work is the name of the game for most students – just like it was in high school. Social status is still a viable goal as well, but the playing field has changed. Instead of football games and dances, social status is now earned in the basements of dirty fraternity houses with an abundance of crappy beer.
Students have been through 16-20 years of default programming within government-approved educational institutions by the time they graduate college. Amazingly, a vast majority of these students have learned nothing about money, capital, or finance, and most are completely oblivious to how the world that awaits them actually works. The poor saps that majored in finance or economics have actually learned less than nothing about money, capital, and finance and they come out with a completely warped view of the subjects.
Most graduates have seen each level of their education as an obstacle to struggle through so they take that mentality with them to the next level of the default programming – the corporate rat-race.
Once in the rat-race, our degree-wielding worker bees struggle through the work-week and then pursue all manner of entertainment every weekend, regardless of the cost. The dirty frat-house is traded for a metropolitan bar and the cheap beer might be upgraded to something a little better, bottom-shelf liquor perhaps.
Now that they are responsible adults, they watch the news and discuss current events around the water cooler at work. But there is a little problem: the news is propaganda mixed with celebrity worship which serves to warp priorities and paint a distorted view of how the world actually works.
Thanks to this wonderful system of default programming, most good citizens come to believe things like:

• The foreign wars raging in some desert thousands of miles away are being fought to protect my freedom here in the United States; after all, they hate us for our freedoms.
• The TSA must grope and harass all of us before we travel so they can keep us safe from the bad guys.
• Social Security is a noble program that just needs a little tweaking to make it more economical.
• The government absolutely had to bail-out the Banks with my money for my own good.
• The $17,500,000,000,000.00 national debt is no big deal – we borrowed it from ourselves.
• Quantitative Easing is a very complicated monetary procedure designed to stimulate the economy; it is in no way, shape, or form a method to steal from me and perpetuate a massive Ponzi scheme.
• The economy is recovering marvelously and my job prospects for the future are looking bright – my goal is early retirement!
• Everything will be wonderful if we can just get everyone to vote for better leaders.

Of course there is a major gap that cannot be explained between these beliefs and what is actually taking place in the world which creates a great deal of cognitive dissonance within much of the population.
The simple fact is: this is not what a free society looks like.

Okay, so American culture may be a little schizophrenic. So what? Why should we care? We believe in laissez-faire and non-intervention so how is it our problem?
Well, despite our best efforts we still have a sense of justice. We just can’t keep quiet while the default programming converts unwary human beings with infinite potential into willing victims of the collectivist Ponzi.
You see, the default programming is designed to trick individuals into giving away their power – first to school teachers, then to professors, then to bosses, and always to government thugs and globalist bureaucrats. All of that personal power is then used to further strengthen the systems of enslavement. Of course the school teachers, professors, corporate middle managers, and the petty government officials and bureaucrats do not have a clue that this is what they are really doing – they have bought the propaganda proclaiming them heroes working for the common good of mankind.
Truth be told, we also have selfish reasons for opposing the default programming and schizophrenic culture – we are poorer because of them. The default programming has created a lifeless economy where zombies consume a very large percentage of the ever-dwindling wealth.
Roughly fifty percent of the American population is now directly receiving some form of payment or benefit from the government – this is common knowledge. On top of that fifty percent, there are numerous zombie industries consuming massive amounts of wealth – very nearly all of which is redistributed to these zombies from the small productive sector of the economy.
The military-industrial complex destroys massive amounts of wealth in order to build tanks and planes and missiles to sell to the government – much of which are obsolete by the time they are sold and the rest are used to cause havoc in faraway deserts (for democracy, of course). Government subsidized Big-Agra works to create Frankenfood which serves to squeeze the small-time farmer out of business and also wreak havoc on the health of the American population.
Meanwhile Big-Pharma works diligently to create dishonest drugs and government-mandated vaccines designed not to cure anything, but rather to temporarily placate all of the serious and not-so-serious symptoms that frequently plague people addicted to genetically-engineered processed food loaded with high fructose corn syrup and MSG while perpetuating sickness and obesity – at a massive profit margin of course. Local governments get into the wealth destruction act by authorizing and funding (at least partially) SWAT teams, military grade weapons, and sometimes even tanks for small police departments. Something about Middle America seems to scare the daylights out of the “authorities”.
All of this misallocation of capital and wealth destruction is made possible by the Federal Reserve System and its banking sector which perpetually transfers wealth from all of us to the insiders while also conjuring money ex nihilo to purchase government bonds on all levels to keep the Ponzi going.
Of course zombies beget more zombies so the amount of wealth consumed and destroyed continues to increase over time. We are all poorer as a result; poorer in monetary terms as well as in ways that cannot be quantifiably measured.
So we feel obligated to call it out.
We just can’t help but envision a world in which the old principle of laissez-faire is respected and individuals are free to claim their natural-born sovereignty. We envision such a world where the capitalist principles of sound money, free markets, and property rights drive vibrant economies geared towards production, innovation, and wealth-creation. It’s a world where governments do not hold a monopoly of force over particular geographic areas and individuals are free to voluntarily associate with or disassociate from any society, organization, or institution that catches or loses their fancy. The only rule is that these societies, organizations, and institutions must respect the natural rights of all individuals.
Now we are not suggesting that this laissez-faire capitalist vision of society should be forced on everybody… far from it. We would just like for it to be an option. There can be other options as well.
Want to live in a socialist utopia? By all means! But your utopia would have to be a voluntary association of individuals. You know that 50% we mentioned earlier? We bet many of them would be happy to join you! We will be real interested to see if you can make it work for even a month without a coercive government to steal the fruits of individual labor and force individual servitude, however.
Speaking of, that is precisely what’s wrong with coerced collectivism as a societal structure – it requires forced individual servitude in order for it to limp along for any extended period of time. If this isn’t tyranny, we don’t know what is.

Liberty and Tyranny have done battle since the dawn of civilization. ‘Democracy’ was idolized in the early 20th century specifically to trick people into confusing one for the other. “We must make the world safe for Democracy!” Wilson cried as U.S. troops crossed the Rubicon.
The other warring nations on both sides must have looked at each other in confusion. “Why in the hell would anyone want to make the world safe for democracy?” they must have asked each other. After all, there was not one single nation that referred to itself as a democracy when World War I began. The Allied powers featured republican governments teamed up with imperial governments and constitutional monarchies to fight the Axis powers which consisted of imperial governments teamed up with both absolute monarchies and constitutional monarchies. There wasn’t a democracy for as far as the eye could see.
There were 123 “democracies” in existence by the year 2007. By good old Woodrow’s logic, peace and prosperity must have been raining down from heaven!
But as it turns out, roughly 500 million people have been violently killed in one government war or another since the world became safe for democracy. The Universe, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
Of course we know nothing will change until it all comes crashing down and hits rock bottom with a resounding thud. We know the masses will just point and laugh; if they even pay any attention at all. They could not care less about our laissez-faire vision, and our disdain for regulatory democracy might anger them. But we also know that there is a Remnant out there. These are the people who have conquered the default programming and are pretty peeved about being lied to for decades. It is the Remnant that gives us cause for long-term optimism.
Here’s to a laissez-faire vision of Liberty… and to a world safe from democracy.
08-03-2013
Joe Withrow
For more of Joe’s thoughts on the “Great Reset”, the global paradigm shift, and regaining individual sovereignty please read “The Individual is Rising” which is available through Amazon in both paperback and Kindle editions here.

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