Thought terrorism

For us, human rights are contradictory to the rights of the people, because we base rights in man as a social product, not man as an abstract with innate rights. — Communist Party of Peru (Shining Path), Sobre las Dos Colinas[cite]

Khmer Rouge: “To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss.”[cite]

In democracies, laws supporting freedom of thought, expression and debate once contrasted with the communist governments which put ideology and social stability ahead of diversity and individual thought[cite]. In practice, western media and Hollywood were all powerful, allowing the five eyes and their corporations to use censorship by noise instead of Chinese style censorship by blocking. Freedom of the western corporate press also aided the western empires in controlling the governance of foreign states through propaganda. Insisting on ‘press freedom’ throughout their empires ensured their influence was impossible to counter. China’s recent investment in media in Africa[cite] acknowledges that this is still the case in parts of the world.

Social media has in a few years drastically changed the amount of ideas and the sources which people can be exposed to. All of the governments in South America usually targeted by United States propaganda were early and heavy users of social media and the U.S. is just catching up with getting their propaganda on social media as dominant as it was in the South American corporate press. Governments around the world are finding that neither their usual propaganda nor censorship are enough to counter real grass roots movements or to stop ideas which may spread virally on their own. In addition to massive new social media propaganda campaigns and legislation countering unaccepted speech when it appears on social media, new forms of blocking which go beyond technology and reach the individual sources of thought are being implemented.

The concept of terrorism has now been used to justify Maoist style thought reform globally. While terrorism still nebulously relates to an act, the designation of terrorist does not and rights can be stripped with no trial or notice based on such a designation. The designation of terrorist can be based simply on group affiliation and terrorism acts now include expression of forbidden thought.

In Canada, terrorism is defined as an act or omission committed “in whole or in part for a political, religious or ideological purpose, objective or cause” with the intention of intimidating the public “…with regard to its security, including its economic security, or compelling a person, a government or a domestic or an international organization to do or to refrain from doing any act.”[cite]

In the UK, terrorism refers to the use and threat of action “designed to influence the government or to intimidate the public or a section of the public” and “made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause.”[cite]

In Australia terrorism is “an act or threat, intended to advance a political, ideological or religious cause by coercing or intimidating an Australian or foreign government or the public.”[cite]

Unlike the definitions in the U.S. and E.U., which include such qualifiers as ‘seriously intimidating’, ‘unduly compelling’ or ‘violation of the criminal laws’, both Canada and the UK have designated any attempt to influence the government, the public, or any section of the public for a political, religious or ideological purpose as terrorism. While you may not go to prison for attempting to persuade your neighbour to boycott Israeli products you can certainly be designated a terrorist, put on a watch list, lose your citizenship rights[cite] and possibly be arrested in any state which shares (or steals) intelligence from these governments. Neither do you have to be expressing ideas deemed dangerous to the corporate states, simply listening to them is enough. Criminalizing ideas allows states to declare war against segments of their own population and strip them of citizenship and rights of due process based solely on their ideas.

This outlawing of diversity or individual thought is so similar to China it exposes the fact that so-called individualistic governments were never actually individualistic at all. The resistance to change is the same under both ideologies, one under pretext of a paternalistic concern for the greater good and the other openly as protection of the privilege of a few.

Since there is no terrorist act not also committed regularly by the governments of the world, the only thing separating the terrorists from the corporate states is the phrase “for a political, religious or ideological purpose”. State actors commit all the same acts in pursuit of power, celebrity and wealth. Actions taken for personal gain or as a result of following orders are not criminalized, the same acts motivated by social participation and expression of independent thought are. If you are upholding the trade economy you are not a terrorist, if you are working against the trade economy you are. Canada explicitly mentions the trade economy as something to be protected against terrorism.[cite] Terrorism laws openly exist to uphold the ponzi scheme of power, celebrity and wealth that is the current supranational empire and guard against the people having any method of escape from it.

Laws have been passed calling all citizens defending themselves or their environment terrorists. The Canadian Minister of Public Safety targets “domestic extremism based on grievances – real or perceived – revolving around the promotion of various causes such as animal rights … environmentalism and anti-capitalism.”[cite] It is the ideology and the group affiliation which scares them, not any action, and no one is higher on their list of terrorist suspects than indigenous people. In Canada, where 78% of the world’s resource corporations are incorporated, indigenous people are specifically named as a terrorist threat[cite] along with environmental activists who the government labels as anti-oil[cite]. In 2007, the United Nations adopted a declaration affirming the right of indigenous people to free, prior, informed consent with 144 states in favour.[cite] The only four votes against were from Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. The remaining member of the five eyes, the United Kingdom, does not have any people in its territories classified as indigenous.

Self defence is terrorism. Citizen armies have been replaced by corporate security worldwide and international trade agreements ensure there is no longer any regional authority over regional resources. Refugees whose homes have been destroyed are jailed for migration from places where they are dying. The mass refugee movement caused by corporate plunder is renamed as illegal immigration. Victimhood is criminal.

The motivations designated by corporate states as terrorist are all those leading to resistance from corporate plunder. Wherever we see the corporate hold on seductive coercion weakening and being diluted by other players we also see them increasingly reverting to old methods of hard coercion. The designation of terrorism has been used to allow methods so extreme they were very recently only found in the deep shadows, now openly brought forward to combat those whose thoughts have slipped out from under corporate control. Not only the torture and abuse of individuals but the mass extermination of entire populations through disease, starvation, environmental destruction and war have renewed acceptance among the most powerful. From the passive aggression of ignoring perfectly foreseeable crises like the Ebola epidemic[cite] and starvation in the Sahel[cite] to militia wars where corporate powers supply all sides[cite], environmental destruction which crushes all resistance and ongoing genocides such as Myanmar’s persecution of the Rohingya[cite] and Kachin[cite] people or corporate attacks on the indigenous of Brazil[cite] all illustrate what is waiting when seductive coercion fails.

Self-governance includes stewardship and use of the environment and its products by the user group. Any control or ownership outside the user group is enemy occupation, not self-governance.

Laws once focused on actions and a wealthy adult who stole a loaf of bread was to be judged in the exact same manner as a starving child. Recently, the focus has turned to judging the individual and their motivations for an act, allowing extenuating circumstances such as youth, insanity and other personal factors to influence judgments. Now we have progressed to judging motivations without any associated actions. We have attained a state where thoughts alone can be criminal. Since the same actions are legal if carried out by a government, we are even at a state where only thoughts are criminal. Foucault’s architecture as continual surveillance of the body[cite] has been extended increasingly to communications architecture and continual surveillance of our thoughts.

The solid block of common thought necessary to uphold Great Men in seats of power has a natural tendency to disperse and regroup like a true swarm. Coercive power has become more desperate to force this block back into formation as the swarm becomes louder and the points of influence multiply daily. Corporate power has expended huge energy on identifying those butterflies that may become hurricanes and discrediting and silencing them before they can build. In the end, they will fail and a new structure will emerge. Whether this new structure is built in favour of corporations or people depends on who wins the war of coercion and thought reform.

Throughout history, people have lived in autonomous and interdependent communities networked together into wider societies. We took a very wrong turn in the last brief period of our evolution. Everything about hierarchical resource ownership and an all pervasive economy built on trade has been a huge mistake with repercussions that could see our complete extinction almost immediately after adopting them. It is too late to return to our former autonomous communities and very few would want to. We no longer depend on only our own societies for companionship, knowledge or sharing. Many don’t even have one home society but belong to many different overlapping societies which have made our lives and our societies far richer and more interesting and able to accomplish much more.

The mid 20th century was the peak of dissociation in western culture. These were the dead years when people sat in their homes fully isolated and dissociated with only their television for companionship, emerging only to enter a cubicle or a factory and earn money to purchase their life essentials or a school to train for their lives in that cubicle. In that era, people attempted to fill their social void with drugs, or food, or consumerism, reaching for social approval in its dissociated form of currency and things.

Since the 1990’s, people have found a new way to fill their social compulsion and acquire new forms of approval online. People are finding new tribes in gaming and in social media and these new connections and allegiances are spilling over to real life. A turning point for the online enclave 4chan was when they met in the streets as Anonymous to protest Scientology and subsequently became a global movement and method of stigmergic action. The occupations of squares in Tunisia and Egypt inspired copycat occupations around the world, even where people had no clear idea why they were gathering or what to do when they found each other. 2011 and the years surrounding it saw a spontaneous reconnection of our societies. As soon as this became apparent, most states which saw occupations introduced new legislation banning or limiting these manifestations.

Most people enjoy helping others and few people enjoy abusing others. That is why the trade economy had to be invented and pretend its system of global slavery was helping others. The old adage “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” was co-opted by the trade economy to pretend it was helping people around the world become self-sufficient by creating jobs when it was doing the exact opposite. No one on earth has ever needed to have jobs created for them, we have all always found plenty to do. While waged labour has been considered lazy by its masters since its beginning, as have slaves, there has never been a free society that died from lack of industry to feed and shelter itself or care for its young. Human history is a history of industry as long as there is autonomy and free will over one’s own work.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Dismantle the corporations destroying his river and home and he can catch his own fish.

Self-governance is not only possible, it is what we have done throughout history excepting only the latest brief anomaly. While new structures and methods must certainly be developed to allow society to scale globally when necessary and reflect our new complex knowledge, the basic structure and memory is still there in our history and will still work. The thought reform efforts of the last many years were attempts to erase that memory, to reduce even the basic societal unit of families to trade relationships, to make a trade economy and rule by mafia seem not only logical but inevitable. While corporate control has fought to narrow and hold the public’s Overton window, others of us have fought to move and widen it. The new definitions of terrorism as attempts to influence the government or the public is a war against freedom of thought and societal auto-coercion. This is a war against self-governance.

Self-governance requires debate and free expression. For the first time, we have the communication infrastructure to enable societal auto-coercion and self-governance which can scale globally. The battle for hearts and minds is the only battle that matters and the only war that matters is the one between the oligarchs globally and the people oppressed by them. The most important weapon is global communication and the most important freedom is freedom of thought.

Excerpted from Autonomy, Diversity, Society. Citations will be transferred when I get a minute.

There are no nation states

A tribe’s faces are imprinted on their babies’ brains at earliest memory. The tribe’s smell permeates everything in the surroundings, their voices and music are heard in the womb, their dances are felt in the womb. The baby who has successfully imprinted their own tribe will cry or stare when they see a stranger. For those who were raised on it, leaving tribal land can bring a physical ache worse than the death of a family member. Tribal loyalty to their own land and people is the biggest obstacle to those who would exploit that land. The primary enemy of corporations everywhere is indigenous people. People with land and strong tribal bonds do not need money which is just an artificial, dissociated form of societal approval. Tribes already have their own source of approval in each other and that approval is contingent on them staying with their tribe and fighting for their land. There are still battles fought all over the world to sever or weaken any ties people still hold to their own land and their own nations, to somehow force or trick them into leaving their land and then destroy any chance they ever have of returning.

To remove power from families and nations and install a state governance system of law and corporate dependency, communities around the world were dismantled. Besides efforts to move, murder, terrorize or starve out indigenous communities, there has been a great deal of social destruction caused by state institutions such as schools and churches. The three largest criminal industries, human trafficking, weapons and drugs, are all genocidal in nature and are all deployed by state militaries and corporations in their war against indigenous people worldwide. Indigenous communities which are the most closely attached are ripped apart by social problems until many can no longer stand to watch their people destroyed and drift away. They sacrifice the possibility of the greatest joy through inclusion in a bonded community out of fear of the greatest pain through loss of that community.

The task of the trade economy has been not only to break the bonds between the humans in each society but also to uproot the society itself from any connection to its surroundings. The hallmark of indigenous cultures worldwide is not how long the same social groupings have remained intact (they haven’t) but how long these societies have remained connected to the same wider ecosystems. While nations can be transplanted or migrate to other territories, nations which are pulled from their ecosystems and made to live as landless workers in the trade economy immediately begin to dissociate from each other as they begin to rely on state or corporate institutions to meet their needs. Once people no longer have land, they are at the mercy of the trade economy and they have no choice but to use currency as a dissociated form of approval. This currency can buy them a simulation of everything their tribe once brought them, from acceptance to a comfortable home and food security. Removing people from their land cripples their resistance as the resulting dissociated nation, even when intact, is beset by the social problems which accompany grief, poverty and racism from the wider society and struggling to meet the demands of the trade economy. States then depict nations as ethnic groupings, which they never were, instead of a network of dependencies which was their true nature.

The original tribes and homes are replaced with larger societies grouped around churches, towns and cities. These are not real societies, they are a simulation given as a baby is given a plastic plug to suck on when they are weaned. There is no mutual dependency or shared labour to create community bonds. The cities are not real homes. Corporate downtowns of every city everywhere now have the same stores, the same clothes, the same music, the same factory smells. Houses are investments, not homes. Village elders are replaced by the church. Devotion to an abstract religion preaching slave morality and childlike worship of a Great Man-god replaces devotion to family (ancestor or clan worship) or devotion to ecosystem (animism, sun or solar system deities). Responsibility to your tribe is replaced by dependency on authority. Instead of duties that the entire tribe owes to each member, people are given rights, which must be enforced by a higher authority. Instead of talking to the tribe to ask for help, people are told to pray. Society does not have to be responsible because God is. If God refuses to help, ‘offer it up’ in the afterlife and God will add it to your salvation since humanity refused. If not the church, people are told to go to the union, the police or the Minister of Indigenous Affairs, and in all cases wait in a child-like state for solutions to be doled out instead of creating their own. Dignified, autonomous nations are reduced to children forever sitting in the waiting rooms of the powerful.

Centralized religion was very useful for creating a feeling of national unity across multinational states and was an essential component in establishing the second age structure of trading nations. The religions invented a remote control system where instead of dying literally by being shunned from your tribe, your soul would be condemned in the afterlife if you were shunned from your church. This allowed the churches to extend the power of shunning and inclusion far beyond the original reach of small communities and earthly life.

States attempted to create nationalist ingroup feeling for the state as well through propaganda and manufactured cultural trappings of music, flags and histories as well as outgroup shunning of everyone not in the state. State education taught children a history of state heroes to replace their own social memories and state borders to replace knowledge of their own land. Even corporations have attempted to use group affiliation to create ingroup loyalty in employees. Their chances of success are increased when church members suffer outside persecution, states are at war, or companies force employees to attend retreats and workshops which simulate dependency, but none of these nation-simulations have produced the solidarity of real nations as they are all imposed on dissociated populations with no real dependency on each other.

Allegiance once reserved for tribes has been destroyed and the people have been left dissociated and lost. Attempts to divert social allegiance into state nationalism, class warfare or corporate loyalty have not managed to fill the void left by the acceptance of a complete society. The more dissociation grows, the more vulnerable people are to self-destruction such as drug addiction or allegiance with any society providing unconditional acceptance and self-fulfillment, whether that society is a cult, a racist alliance, a criminal gang or all of them together in a group like ISIS or Boko Haram.

Nation is a concept and a fluid one; it is because its adherents say it is. Even in times when distance, mountains and rivers posed insurmountable barriers to assimilation, when nations were divided by language, dress, laws and beliefs, both the customs and the populations of these nations were constantly evolving. States have no resemblance to nations. States are created by the highly militarized partitioning of societies into economic markets and property ownership, completely regardless of who the people in those states are or how the creation of the state divides and restricts our nations. States attempt to present themselves as prefabricated nations, as if control of property and written laws and constitutions can be applied to populations and everyone in a geographical region will suddenly become bonded with national identity. Everywhere in the world nations such as the Kurds, Kachin, Catalan and many others refuse assimilation and states such as the five eyes prove they will never be anything but corporations.

While nations are living and fluid and variable depending on context and perspective, states are an attempt to freeze one official historical viewpoint for all time. States preserve culture to prevent it from living, keep it steeped in formaldehyde unable to breathe and grow. States seek to divide and categorize. Nations as defined by states are inviolable, to suggest change is sacrilegious, to question perspective or boundaries is deemed intolerable. The reality of layered and overlapping nations, of intersections, of cooperation and flexibility, is denied by the rigid borders and uniformity of states. Traditions of fluid property custodianship, sharing and merging, are rejected for one tradition of rigid ownership clamped down and made law for every region on earth. Ethnic and societal realities of no fixed lines between groupings are ignored for false categorizing. Nations extend families and states divide them. Nations are gathered for community, cooperation and sharing while states are imposed for segregating, competing and allocating.

States insist partitions between identical blocks of people are necessary for safety. The problems associated with trade economy are the same whether ownership is international, national, regional or private and will only be addressed by addressing trade economy. It is no less awful for people to be killed by a foreign corporation pillaging resources than by competing local nations. States did not bring peace to resource conflicts, they brought totalitarian rule by global resource mafia. Diverse nations already do live together and overlap peacefully despite having fought over resources many times in the past and state boundaries do not even stop regional conflict over resources. People in different nations sometimes oppose each others values to the point they wish to shun each other. International boycotts such as the BDS campaign against Israel prove this solution does not require states and indeed and states only boycott for economic interest, not social principles.

Nations are ideas and traditions which exist across borders and generations and they cannot be killed. States are tied to the property they control and they die without militaries and coercive laws to keep them in power. Nations are primarily autonomous, states are corporate markets for the trade economy, fully dependent on other corporate markets. While nations reveled in their diversity, states decree a homogenized sameness, a world where everyone wears the same grey suits, international law assures uniform belief systems worldwide and the trade economy is the one god all must serve to survive. Like agricultural crops, people are raised in the manner most efficient for industry, the same worldwide. Nations are people, states are corporations.

Nations create Us, states create the Other.

As the European trade empires spread, they divided their newly conquered territory into states. Border enclosures were placed around the commons worldwide to more easily claim ownership over resources. At first these states were openly occupied or placed under the control of puppet head of states, as Machiavelli dictated. In time, after the population was fully dissociated and dependent on trade, all of these states won ‘independence’ from their imperial heads of state and progressed to democracies with supposed governance by the people.

In reality, imperial control floated to a level above states, into the supranational third age where real governance was by international trade agreements, debt and the almighty trade economy. The imperial heads of state went home but they left their banks and corporations. Every state is increasingly dependent on the trade economy which demands an insatiable global tribute. People have rarely caused the disruption of culture that the trade economy always does but we are forbidden the free movement of people while every part of the trade economy, from multinational corporations to cartels, operates above the power of the states. States have become a curtain to hide corporate governance, the imperial forces who no one has gained independence from.

Even where state government had power, it was easily controlled. Unlike monarchies, democracies had elections. It is no longer necessary to fight wars to remove rulers if they can just be removed in an election with no resistance from the people. Increasingly, it has cost money to be a political candidate anywhere and those with the money and the inclination to support political candidates are corporations. Merchants also own the most powerful media and drive the dialogue behind the main issues in elections. To people who see jobs as freedom, any suggestion that a candidate would ‘lose jobs’, ‘hurt industry’ or cause the almighty economy to falter is lethal.

Besides the political parties that openly represent corporations, there are supposedly opposing political groups representing the people. These are almost always dedicated to ‘the workers’, identified as those people employed by the corporations. Almost never is there a political party in a democracy that fights for the rights of lifegivers, caregivers, the land, or anyone not involved in the trade economy. If a leader is occasionally elected who does not obey their corporate masters, laws can be changed, courts can be rigged, media is controlled, coups do not have to be the messy business they once were. Just ask Paraguay or Brazil. The people may protest for a time but trading partners all recognize the coups as legitimate government and life goes on with people still pretending they are governed by their state.

When states pretend to respect indigenous governance, they respect indigenous rights to govern within the limits of the state and corporate box they are placed in. Even uncontacted tribes are placed in a state controlled box where they are considered consensual citizens of a government they have never heard of. Ecuador claims the Yasuni as its property to sign mining contracts for[cite] despite their government warning Ecuadorians of the dangers of traveling too far into uncontacted tribal land[cite]. Supposedly autonomous governance for some involves councils governing allocation of funds and property in formerly moneyless, gifting, commons cultures. It is not autonomy if people cannot choose their own economy, membership, and method of governance. Telling formerly borderless nations that they can govern as they wish within borders is ridiculous as the governance they wish is borderless. Living and fluid societies that used continual shunning and adopting, joining and leaving, for their economic and cultural health, have been converted to dead cages and economic markets, an architectured global caste system. Declaring autonomy within those borders is akin to declaring freedom within prison walls.

While societies have always fought to preserve their cultures and control over their regions, this autonomy can be preserved without militarized borders or states. In a democracy, a huge influx of people into a sparsely populated area can overwhelm the existing society and use democracy to change the laws and customs. It is easy and common to write regional constitutions preserving the character of a society and its laws to allow the free migration of people while still preserving the most valued aspects of a culture. This would also allow migratory people to remain migratory. To meet the demands of both regional autonomy and global society and to allow the diversity of lifestyles and societies that are a reality today, states must be replaced with layered and overlapping societies that agree to regional constitutions and specialized collaboration across regional boundaries. There are strains of this type of government appearing in many areas and states are getting in the way.[cite]

Excerpted from Autonomy, Diversity, Society. Citations will be transferred when I get a minute.

The lazy man’s empire

The trade empires were the lazy man’s empire. They acknowledged no responsibility for the people under them. All the benefits of empire were delivered directly into the ruler’s hands with none of the former trouble or effort. All the old Machiavellian difficulties of how to hold an empire were resolved as there was no need to hold it. The powerful could lay claim to a property and profit from it instantly. Noblesse oblige, never a popular idea among dictators, was replaced by the idea that the formerly childlike citizens had personal responsibility and responsibility meant accepting corporate slavery. There was no need to justify corporate rule as the trade economy ruled for it. Even the  rulers were abstracted away behind corporate names. Their was no need to justify their privilege as wealth was its own justification. Rebellions were subverted by convincing the people to compete with each other for trade dominance instead.

Dissociation gave the promise of free will and autonomy to those who had lost it. For those who remembered, it gave the promise of autonomous nations which could hold power without imperial occupation. For those who had long forgotten their tribal autonomy, it gave the promise of freedom from the child-like subservience of imperial citizens. For those persecuted by their own society, it gave freedom from social approval. People and nations no longer needed the approval or agreement of their government or neighbours for anything. They didn’t even need to know their neighbours. They just needed to sell them something and they would have all the dissociated approval they needed to survive, maybe even to build an empire of their own.

The trade economy promised that slavery could be abolished as work could be freely accepted or refused and those who worked hardest or best would receive the greatest reward. By making autonomy and social acceptance available only with currency and currency available to the lower classes only through jobs, the merchant class was able to equate slavery with freedom. Instead of managing a lower class of slaves who demanded freedom, they gave the lower class their freedom and convinced them to demand slavery. People who would never argue that slaves were better off under slavery as they had food and housing would spend the next centuries arguing exactly that for wage slavery.

The dismantling of society left lifegivers and caregivers isolated, overworked, despised and exhausted. They were told that dissociation was there to help them. You don’t have to look after dependents, they are better off in institutions, the authorities said. Dependency became a product for corporations to profit from and caregivers were given the freedom to be enslaved by corporations.

Stratification of society encouraged everyone to concern themselves only with the needs of their own ingroup, isolating those in greatest need from any social assistance from those with the power to assist. Any type of bigotry and sectarianism to prevent empathy with others was encouraged and promoted and ingroup loyalty was expected and rewarded. Entrenched group narcissism ensured that any dissatisfaction with the paradigm could easily be diverted into hostility towards a competing outgroup. The trade economy acquired the status of a religion with greater virtue assigned to those who succeeded the most and vilification for those who failed. The trade economy was presented as the only possible economy and any reality which negated that was erased from view like caregiving or declared illegal like potlatches.

The very poor are not free to reject work and in some cases it is impossible to distinguish the conditions from slavery. Instead of empires ripping out people’s hearts to sacrifice to gods, we have people voluntarily selling their organs and blood to the powerful in order to survive, or being attacked by others who wish to sell their organs. Peter Thiel can buy the blood of the young legally[cite]. West African politicians can buy amulets made from the young with impunity[cite]. Those who thrived in the trade economy did not turn out to have any greater merit, only greater proximity to power and less social obligations. Freedom to act without concern for social obligations created a system designed for the promotion of sociopaths.

Dissociation was a corporate strategy to prevent solidarity among societies and to exploit dependency as a means for states and corporations to control others. The dissociated structure established has allowed everyone else to exploit it in the same way. Any gang or terrorist state is now equally capable of controlling dissociated populations by controlling the hospitals, media, food distribution and all other institutions of centralized and dissociated societies. Stateless gangs around the world have noticed the ease with which dissociated people can have their dependency exploited and be manipulated by the gangs who control the structures of society and currency. Gang members are attracted to the family aspect of belonging. The ingroup loyalty and the outgroup violence are the same that all were encouraged to cultivate in support of the state endorsed trade economy. The anti-societies of today, typical of lawless towns during gold rushes or other migrations where large groups of people assembled with no established societal rules, have become the norm across entire states and regions.

The dissociated approval brought by currency was also dissociated authority and dictatorship every bit as cruel but less accountable than the former empires. The dissociation which looked so much like freedom was just sociopathy, the individualism was isolation and impotence. The equality under a trade empire was no equality at all, as any egalitarian system imposed on unequal populations must result in tyranny by those the system was designed for. For many years those who refused to let go of the trade economy dream have insisted the tyrants were there by personal merit, not design, and punished those who failed to excel by insisting they were defective and attempting to reform them. Those who failed to excel also refused to give up on the dream and just demanded it be modified to let them in, giving rise to an endless succession of reformers demanding their rights to succeed in a sociopathic system of oppression.

Economists have replaced philosophers, banks have replaced churches, searching for profit has replaced searching for knowledge. People have been reduced to human composters who live, consume and die. The artisans have not won, or the athletes, the philosophers, the caregivers, the artists or even the warriors. The parasites have won.

The trade economy is a ponzi scheme however, and the longer it is in place the more its true nature becomes apparent. The centripetal force which draws everyone to the scheme pushes those already on the top ever higher while those on the bottom fall farther and farther out of reach. As those on the top are standing on nothing more than an illusion, the trade economy must collapse like all ponzi schemes.

Excerpted from Autonomy, Diversity, Society. Citations will be transferred when I get a minute.

The profiteers of division

As nations progressed into the third age of supranational power, merchants who were formerly privileged servants to the aristocracy began to marry and socialize with aristocrats, giving new political power to the merchant class. Merchants had been holding the purse strings for the nobility for some time, but suddenly there was a path of social mobility from a ruthless commoner to the nobility, an idea which has intrigued social climbers and romance novelists ever since.

Banks and factories were established for trade speculation, not to feed the populations which had never needed either. Instead of just selling an artisan’s goods, the merchants used their new wealth to lock artisans in factories and extract ever more goods from them. Monumental architecture was now built not for trappings of civilization, royal palaces or edifices of state or religion, but as symbols of merchant power. Lawyers became more prosperous than ever, writing the new laws to transfer all imperial authority to trade and commerce. The new merchant politicians convinced the public that the new laws were freedom from imperial control and a path to equality with the aristocracy, which, for the merchants, they were. Stratification of society and all the intellectual prose required to justify it allowed slaves, indentured servants and waged labour to be owned by the merchant class, even as political rhetoric preached equality and human rights. Any law benefiting trade was said to benefit society and any law restricting trade was said to harm society. Discussion of society was restricted to only one strata of men as trade economy became synonymous with governance and merchants became synonymous with the people.

The abstract power of the trade economy, not military might, allowed Europe to finally conquer the Ottoman Empire. The Crimean War placed the Ottoman State in debt to European banks. When it declared bankruptcy in 1875, its economy was placed under control of a European council headed by France and Britain who ensured their trade ambitions finally prevailed[cite]. During World War I, Britain, France, and Russia planned the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire with the Sykes–Picot Agreement[cite]. Under the initial agreement and subsequent treaties and agreements, France and the UK established trade dominance in the Middle East for themselves and their allies. Part of the propaganda from the self-described Islamic State today is that they will remove the effects of these agreements and reestablish an Islamic caliphate throughout the region, fulfilling the prophesy in a hadith in Musnad Ahmad ibn Hanbal which predicted a caliphate would fall and be succeeded by corrupt tyrants which would eventually be succeeded again by return to a caliphate.

It takes no imagination to understand how unpopular it would be to the still very much in existence trade empires established after World War I if a caliphate were to rise in this region again and engage in preferential trade within the caliphate. The reaction of the world to the human rights horrors committed by cartels and militias everywhere else is almost non-existent, but ISIS is a constant fixture in western media. Besides the Islamic State group, Boko Haram have threatened to reestablish the Sokoto Caliphate in West Africa which would include Nigeria, Africa’s largest oil producer and largest economy. The fact that the leaders of neither Boko Haram nor the Islamic State seem to have even rudimentary knowledge of Islam shows how religion is still being used on both sides to motivate support for a very irreligious trade war. China and Russia have no claims to a religious goal but are as engaged as ever in conflicts over the old silk road and all the other trade routes. Secularism has done nothing to promote peace on trade routes where the real religion is the trade economy.

In the 16th century, banks funded trading companies regardless of nationality and those trading companies brought their goods to every part of the world, not just their own. In 1600, the British East India Company was formed and rapidly rose to control half the world’s trade[cite]. The Company’s board of directors ruled India for one century, supervising both government and military according to the wishes of its shareholders, until it was replaced by the British colonial government in 1858. The merchant class of the 16th century had become the first supranational class, above government and not bound by any laws created by governments.

From 1773 until 1860, the British East India Company smuggled opium illegally into China. Despite two wars fought over the trade, China was unsuccessful in stopping the smuggling until they legalized production at home in 1860[cite]. The trade economy’s claims to enrich the societies it engaged were no more real at its beginning than they are now that fentanyl dealers in China are returning the favour with unstoppable postal shipments to the outside[cite]. International traders not bound by the laws of those they trade with has always been a staple of the trade economy and a primary source of its wealth.

In 1602, the Dutch East India Company was established and became the world’s largest company during the 17th century[cite]. It was given near governmental powers, including the ability to establish its own colonies and armies, wage war and negotiate treaties. It printed its own currency and had its own judiciary, prisons and executions which the Dutch government recognized as legal. Under the Dutch East India Company, the Dutch empire was run with profitability for shareholders as its sole goal. Subsistence crops were replaced by crops with maximum profitability to the point that repeated famines devastated the local populations under Company control. The indigenous populations were replaced by slave populations from India, Southeast Asia and East Africa. The trade goods and the majority of profits were removed to enrich the Netherlands. In 1800, the company went bankrupt and the area it controlled was nationalized under the Dutch government as the Dutch East Indies until the people there gained independence after World War II.

With independence, Indonesians had control of their own government but the dependence on trade and the merchant pillage remained. Indonesia is a member of the G-20 forum and it now has the world’s eighth largest economy by gross domestic product at purchasing power parity[cite] but its income disparity is one of the highest in Southeast Asia. The Indonesian government reported 28.2 million people living in “absolute poverty”[cite] in 2016, on an income around US$25 a month. Food price stability is still a major problem. The tyrants went home but the tyranny remained.

In 1670, the Hudson’s Bay Company was formed in England and given a similar governing role. It claimed 15% of all land in North America, one and a half million square miles[cite], making it the world’s largest land owner at least in their own minds. The HBC also minted its own currency, the MB (Made Beaver), with a value based on a standard beaver pelt and paper money based on UK currency. The courts and legal system, operated by HBC managers, enforced the HBC trade monopoly. In 1867, the HBC chose to sell the land they claimed to the new Dominion of Canada.

There is very little difference between the former Hudson’s Bay Company and Canada. Both were primarily resource corporations. The stripes of the blankets the Hudson’s Bay traded to indigenous people are still as iconic a Canadian emblem as the maple leaf flag. The government of Canada and indigenous nations still negotiate at opposite sides of bargaining tables and court rooms.The beaver, the animal whose pelts the company was initially established to trade for, still appears on Canadian currency. The court systems under both were established primarily to enforce ownership and monopolies by the merchant and banking strata. Canada today has a structure of laws that is unequaled in the world at protecting resource corporations in their global pillage. It has been rewarded by 78%[cite] of the world’s resource corporations choosing to incorporate in Canada to take advantage of this protection. These resource corporations employ militias to force their pillage and destruction on people’s homes in 108 countries[cite]. Instead of appearing in court for their human rights and environmental violations, they conduct their own remedy frameworks[cite] and pay fines instead of receiving jail time.

As a state, Canada has the ability to lobby for resource corporations at international state organizations such as the UN and refuse to sign laws supporting free prior informed consent[cite]. As a state, Canada has embassies all over the world which it uses to strong arm weaker governments into intimidating and assassinating those who protest its resource corporations[cite]. The state has a pretty flag and nationalist sentiment and credibility the company could never have acquired. The people call themselves citizens, not employees, but there is no question that the government’s primary function is as an employer. The government is there to provide jobs, trade product internationally and protect industry. The Prime Minister in 2016 ignored the free prior informed consent of Canada’s own people and approved two oil pipelines widely opposed by the people who will be affected by the environmental damage from them. Canada’s interests are resource corporations interests. Within Canada, the government’s benefit to the public is to provide jobs by increasing corporate activity, not to protect the environment where everyone lives. The three major political parties traditionally represent nationalist corporations, free trade corporations and unions although it is impossible now to tell them apart.

The United Fruit Co (now Chiquita) chose a less direct path of corporate control. In the late 1800’s, a US business man built a railroad connecting Costa Rica’s capital to its Caribbean coast in exchange for a 99 year lease on the railroad and 800,000 acres of tax-free land.[cite] The company’s monopoly on land use rights and transportation by both rail and sea allowed him near complete control over the country’s economy and a near monopoly on employment in Central America that allowed him to treat employees almost as slaves. Their economy depended on producing one product for one corporation, leaving them no option to demand better terms from their one employer.

As United Fruit expanded, it did not bother governing the countries it occupied. It was enough to control them with bribes, lobbying and the threat of war. Puppet governments were put in place that would sign crippling trade agreements and destroy any autonomy which may have given them the ability to resist. The countries in Central America and the Caribbean under United Fruit were left with no autonomy and no control over their supposedly democratic governance since to vote in their best interests meant war with the United States. The might of the United States military supporting business owners from the US meant that any government which supported any benefit to its people was labeled communist and threatened or crushed. In 1954, United Fruit convinced the US governments under Truman and Eisenhower to oust the democratically elected Guatamala president with a coup for proposing agrarian reform and labour laws[cite]. Obedient politicians served the corporation that paid them, not the people.

Since multinational companies were created in the 1600’s, the people of the world have been living under state governments and the state governments have been controlled by a supranational merchant empire. It is a popular notion that the British empire died over the course of the last century, with almost all of its overseas holdings gaining independence, including the United States which is popularly considered to be the new power. The British empire did not die and the United States is not a new power. No one received independence from the supranational trade empire and anyone who attempts it will still be crushed today. North Korea’s Juche is seen as an affront to the world and they are regularly called a pariah state by United States media in apparent reference to their attempt at autonomy (since human rights abuses in trade partners do not provoke the same reaction). Most of the world, including North Korea, lives under the shadow of the supranational trade empire in the form of trade agreements, world banking and international law.

After World War II, the five main seats of the British empire became the five eyes and they are in every way one empire, even one state or nation. This is the special relationship the United States and the United Kingdom always referred to between themselves. The United States was never an empire because it appeared when the world had passed the second age of empire states. The five eyes states all answer to the same supranational power, they obey the same international trade laws and they have the same goals of maximum profit for their investors, as do the supposedly independent state satellites who are more numerous and more interdependent every year.

Every other European trade empire is also still intact. They have all just evolved past direct government control. Areva still plunders Françafrique to power France[cite]. West African dictators plunder their own states and launder the money through France[cite] just as dictators around the world plunder their own states and hide the profit in United States[cite] shell corporations or real estate in New York, London and Vancouver[cite]. The states which make up the so-called anti-imperialist alliance, the Non-Aligned Movement, are not in any way anti-imperialist either. The same corporate names are on the skyscrapers and in the government offices of Shanghai, Moscow, Rio de Janeiro and Mumbai. The same ugly corporate architecture, the same ugly corporate suits and the same bland, mass-produced products are on the streets of every city in the world.

State power has now been almost completely undermined by international corporate power. From international trade deals which override sovereignty and state judiciary to militaries owned by corporate mercenaries, the most important functions of states have been taken over by corporations. Corporations own nearly all of the world’s resources, including knowledge, and people work for the corporations, not the community or state. People are dependent on corporations for all of their societal needs which are now seldom provided by the community or state.

The wealthy are now wealthy for being wealthy. The former merchant classes have followed the old nobility of the second age in convincing the public to continue serving them for no reason except habit and the laws they wrote themselves. The third age supranational empire no longer belongs solely to the merchants but is attainable to any with the right connections. The imperial power is above states, which means power is just as attainable by stateless organizations such as militias, cartels or state intelligence as it is by merchants or states. As mercenary kingpin Erik Prince has said[cite], the US was founded by militias and as he proved, the militias do not owe allegiance to states but the other way around.

The third stage supranational empires are most often associated with Europe, but it is far too simplistic to depict Europe as the oppressor of the world or the creator of the trade economy based on one moment in history. Europe had the upper hand on their old rivals in the Middle East, China, Africa, and India briefly, but the others caught up again quickly and they were all joined by the merchant classes who had risen to the top of their regions in every part of the world. Those outside Europe were behind in, but no less part of, the oppression of indigenous resistance worldwide. The contemporary habit of ignoring both the present and the past to depict old empires like China, Russia, or Egypt as anti-imperialist is obfuscating propaganda. The recent faux communism practiced in China and Russia did not daunt the imperial ambitions of either state, even when they called it communist internationalism. At this point, all the old players are openly back in the same battle over the same trade routes they have been fighting over for two millennia as well as all the other resources on earth. Pretending otherwise has derailed resistance efforts since the beginning of the third age, as all efforts were spent attempting to replace bad guys (Europeans) with good guys (non-Europeans) while leaving the supranational trade empire intact. Puppet states which pledged allegiance to the trade empire were hailed as self-determination while any attempts to opt out of the trade empire were brutally crushed.

History as told by Europeans would like us to believe that Europeans were fully responsible for the conquest which established them in the seats of power but indigenous people worldwide were far more involved in choosing the trade empire than they are ever given credit for and the trade empire remained in power even where the Europeans did not. The so-called Spanish, English, French and Portuguese conquest of the Americas could never have happened without what their history euphemistically called Indian allies, alliances of nations who vastly outnumbered the Europeans in every case and overthrew the existing empires or rival nations with the help of a few Europeans and their guns.

The indigenous women history deplores as sex slaves who had no autonomy or initiative were sometimes powerful to the point that it would be more accurate to call the Europeans their concubines, or even more accurate to call it a partnership. Hernán Cortés and his little band of 1300 men[cite] would not have survived, much less conquered the Aztec alliance, without the connections and actions of La Malinche[cite] throughout their campaign and her ability to negotiate alliances with all of the indigenous nations which provided the hundreds of thousands of warriors who overthrew the Aztecs[cite]. The Incas failed to retake Cuzco during the siege of 1536, not because of the 190 Spanish soldiers[cite] present but because of the army of tens of thousands¹ sent by the Inca kuraka, Contarhucho[cite] in response to a message from her daughter, the Inca princess, Quispe Sisa who was living with the Spanish ‘conquistador’ Francisco Pizarro. The combination of European bragging and photoshopping of all indigenous and female people out of history has given a very unrealistic view of the conquest of every nation on earth by the trade economy. It was not a few European men who conquered the world, it was an idea.

While no indigenous people, including those of Europe, chose the genocide and social ills that befell them after the trade empires moved in, and few chose oppressive foreign governance, the structure of the trade empire was both chosen and continued in use by enough of the population that it was impossible to overcome. Many first age tribes still resist, and within each tribe there were always individuals who never stopped resisting, but the appeal of the trade economy to certain members of each society is universal. Would all areas of earth have developed into third age dissociated empires without Europe? It is impossible to tell, but all areas on earth had trade empires and fully dissociated societies where everything is for sale are a logical conclusion of trade empires. It is not necessarily true that these trade empires would have emerged as the dominant second age form of society in all places, but once the third age merchant ponzi scheme was established it was an unstoppable vortex, destined to spread as ponzi schemes do until they collapse, upheld by the desperate and the greedy worldwide.

While the first age tribal nations were all contained under the domain of the current states, many still exist today living very much as they have for thousands of years, completely autonomously and without even any contact with those outside their nations. Of the second age trade empires, none survived. Within a few centuries, every region on earth was under the domain of one system of states under a supranational empire and the second age of nations no longer existed anywhere. Once the process of dissociation and acceptance of a trade economy began, the supranational empire won, in every case and against empires far more evolved and beneficial to the people. Without understanding how the supranational empire won, we can never evolve past it.

Excerpted from Autonomy, Diversity, Society. Citations will be transferred when I get a minute.

The supranational empire

WHENEVER those states which have been acquired as stated have been accustomed to live under their own laws and in freedom, there are three courses for those who wish to hold them: the first is to ruin them, the next is to reside there in person, the third is to permit them to live under their own laws, drawing a tribute, and establishing within it an oligarchy which will keep it friendly to you;

but when cities or countries are accustomed to live under a prince, and his family is exterminated, they, being on the one hand accustomed to obey and on the other hand not having the old prince, cannot agree in making one from amongst themselves, and they do not know how to govern themselves. For this reason they are very slow to take up arms, and a prince can gain them to himself and secure them much more easily.” – The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli (1532)

The new supranational empire is possible because recent history and overwhelming coercion have rendered the majority of the world incapable of self-governance. The populations described in the first paragraph have almost all transitioned through the recommended procedures and they are now the second type which Machiavelli identified as easily controlled from a remote centre. Outside of a very few, very isolated first age tribal nations, there is no longer anything close to autonomy or self-governance anywhere on earth and memories and belief in its possibility have all but been erased. The transition through state control has made it far easier for the entire world to now be governed by multinational corporations.

First age tribal networks

For almost one hundred percent of human history, people lived in autonomous, networked tribes. Their feats of exploration and the knowledge handed down over generations were equal to or greater than more complex societies, even in highly specialized areas. The medicinal knowledge of the Kallawaya in pre and post Inca society included brain surgery in 700 CE and using quinine to cure malaria before anyone else.[cite] The navigation and seafaring skill of the Polynesians brought them to over 25 million square kilometres of territory between Easter Island, New Zealand and Hawaii and also took them to America and possibly close to Antarctica.[cite] Polynesians and probably many others were not following or seeking food. They explored even when their survival needs were all met. Kallawaya still travel great distances to share their knowledge and skill, not because they need to but because it is their accepted social responsibility to do so. Kallawaya traditional knowledge includes uses for almost a thousand plant species[cite] and Polynesian traditional knowledge allows them to navigate using 220 stars[cite]. All of this knowledge was preserved in oral tradition for hundreds or thousands of years and was shared by the tribe, held by those with the interest and aptitude to learn it.

When tribes created complex societies, their achievements were not always the result of imperial control or warlike competition. The water management and sewage systems of the Indus Valley around 2600 BCE have been called greater than what exists in the region today[cite]. At least two cities, Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, had flush toilets and wells in every household, public and private baths and very sophisticated sewage and water retention systems[cite] in cities with no discernible state apparatus, priests, security forces or significant wealth disparity[cite]. The Caral society of the southern Andes has so far shown no evidence of violence or defensive architecture but they collaborated on monumental architecture and were one of the most densely populated early civilizations in the world[cite]. Hierarchy and oppression were evidently not necessary for the evolution or progress of civilization.

However, many very hierarchical and warlike empires emerged all over the world in the third millennium BCE as population densities increased. Early empires brought infrastructure, education, social evolution, religion, technology, judiciaries, all of the trappings of civilization which could be used to prove the benefits of alliances. The Inca fed ten million people with no hunger over a vast expanse in one of the world’s most difficult regions and created tiered agricultural zones to provide great food diversity and climate resistance in a solitary site[cite]. Kush used a water wheel to create agricultural surplus[cite]. Benin brought dozens of languages and ethnic groups to co-exist in one multi-cultural centre[cite].

Each showed unique motivations and methods for collaboration but all of the hierarchical nations required great strategy to manage as they inherited all of the responsibilities of the tribes. To maintain control, these empires required constant military presence, puppet governments which must be kept loyal, or very involved and physically present imperial governance. Although few hierarchical nations seriously disrupted the co-dependency of nations at their most base level, the relationships of families to each other and the peasants to the land, they all entrenched stratification and some level of bureaucracy and began the dissociation of relationships in communities.

Second age hierarchical trading nations

In the third millennium BCE, the first long distance trade route appeared between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley.[cite] International trade meant other tribes and resources could be conquered for profit and trade provided motivation to produce and hoard more than any nation could personally use. With incredible speed, the great trade empires of the Middle East, China, India, Europe and Africa first obliterated all of the neighbouring societies not primarily built around trade and then spent the last two millennia fighting for dominance over trade routes, much as the same states and attempts at resurrected caliphates are still doing today.

The trade empires of the second age, like the Incas, Greeks and Aksumites, started by occupying neighbouring territory and sharing knowledge and systems of government, religion and philosophy as well as trade. While extensive tribal knowledge was always held by only a part of the tribe due to unequal ability and interest or tradition, the greatly increased amount of knowledge in the new complex societies required much more knowledge specialization. With the establishment of the trade economy, that knowledge specialization became knowledge ownership. Guilds and other traditions and laws were set up to protect that ownership.

Trade economies have always resulted in tribes protecting assets which could bring them trade advantage, whether it was a volcanic mountain as a source of obsidian or access to outside trading partners. The global trade economy produced a great increase in trade secrets from tulips, silk and ermine to knowledge on all topics. As trade expanded, so did the idea of ownership, not only of resources and knowledge but also of rights and access to trading partners. Militarized borders were created to protect this access, block competition and increase profit to merchants. Instead of walling cities and surrounding agricultural areas for protection against invaders, kingdoms began claiming trade routes and protecting economic markets. Later trade treaties created trade cartels and access to capital was restricted by strata.

The growth of trade meant occupation of huge tracts of land and control of populations were no longer necessary for great empires. Control of the trade routes was enough for wealth. With the move of the western Roman empire to Constantinople, Europe’s trade to Africa, the Middle East, India and China was controlled by one city. Instead of all roads leading to Rome, all roads went through Constantinople. The fall of the Western Roman Empire caused Europe to lose a great deal of the empire’s knowledge from the loss of trade and collaboration and also because stratification, guilds and literacy had locked knowledge into only a small part of society. This loss of knowledge plummeted Europe into a period their history called The Dark Ages. Long before Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Caliphate, when it was still simply the new seat of the Roman Empire, the Venetians found their control intolerable and sacked the city in 1204 with the help of the rest of Europe. The knowledge and plunder from the sacking and fall of Constantinople during the fourth crusade was enough to play a major role in kickstarting the European renaissance and Europe refused to go back to controlled trade access with the east.

During the fourth crusade, the sacking of Constantinople was said to be the result of a schism between the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church with no explanation of what the plunder of gold and silk has to do with theological differences. After Constantinople fell again in 1453, this time to the Ottoman Empire, the European resistance to any control of their trade was framed as a Muslim vs Christian conflict, a ridiculous premise since both Roman and Greek empires had thrived (with aberrations) as polytheist states and the Ottoman Empire governed with millets, independent systems of law for each of the major religions under the empire. Intolerance existed, but the use of religion has never ceased being effective propaganda for wars to protect access to trade for the elite. Identical propaganda is still being used over the exact same trade routes today, by states and also by neo-caliphate groups such as ISIS and Boko Haram who use the promised second age of the caliphate to try to control trade once again.

Third age supranational empire

With the strengthening of Constantinople under the Ottoman Empire as the centre of trade once more, Europe was determined to circumvent the old routes and Ottoman control. Years of trade domination by the Middle East were finally broken by sea voyages from Europe which suddenly connected them directly with the entire world and allowed them to transport far more goods than had previously been possible by horse and camel caravans. As Europeans took to the sea in the late fifteenth century and established trade empires all over the world, they followed the Machiavellian maxim of occupation, slaughter or tribute until it became apparent that the old methods were not enough to hold a global empire.

The trade empires of Europe were hardly the first to exploit dependency or trade, but they were the first to use both to create a fully dissociated global empire. First, the trade empires would dismantle the entire social structure of a newly occupied people and establish dependency on trade at every level of society. Second, they would coerce the dependent people to trade something for nothing in the form of currency, debt payment, rights, intellectual property or other abstract, conceptual euphemisms for a tribute shakedown. The difference between these and former imperial tributes is that these new payments were to be made to corporations. Trade had fully abstracted the relationship between empires and the people they were exploiting. The newly dissociated and dependent societies would form the third age of nations, first under imperialism, then under puppet states and finally under a supranational corporate empire.

Excerpted from Autonomy, Diversity, Society. Citations will be transferred when I get a minute.

The fourth age of nations

Despite the prevailing philosophy of the last couple millennia, humans are far more of a social organism than a collection of individuals. Our knowledge is handed down and shared, not instinctive. No baby can raise themselves and no child can educate themselves to normative intelligence without social surroundings. The elderly cannot survive without the assistance of the young and the young cannot evolve without the experiences of their elders. The more knowledge and cultures are shared, the stronger each society becomes. Personal autonomy is only a relative degree of freedom in an individual’s reactions and interactions with society.

For societies to reach their full potential they must encourage the largest amount of individuals to achieve their full potential. This would require a balance between autonomy, diversity and society which we have so far never attained. Instead we have swung from extreme importance placed on society to extreme importance on personal autonomy and individualism. Diversity has been either eradicated or supported to the point of extreme sectarianism.

Societies are created through acceptance and shunning, the two primary methods of auto-coercion used to create a cohesive group of people with common social norms and understanding. If a society is small and intolerant, diversity and individual autonomy is shunned and the society provides fulfillment and acceptance for only a very narrow and homogenous group. Diversity has no room to express itself without supportive social structures. It is impossible to reach fulfillment or attain our highest potential without a supportive network of relationships to receive and reciprocate our thoughts and achievements. Diversity and movement between societies and stratification of societies has historically been necessary for individual diversity to thrive and for any individual autonomy.

The social structures and the continuum of dependencies that make up our societies have gone through three very distinct evolutions. The first tribal nations, barely removed from families, were the least abstract nations. They were real communities which provided for all of our social needs. Those tribes have achievements ranging from monumental architecture in complex societies to global exploration to achieving elite levels of specialized knowledge and passing oral history accurately through hundreds or thousands of years. Their social and cooperative strengths were unsurpassed but with few people to fill basic roles of survival there was limited room for diversity and extreme shunning or demands for conformity were typical. Personal autonomy was almost non-existent, but tribal autonomy was at its peak.

For hundreds of thousands of years, people lived in these autonomous and complete societies but also occasionally networked with each other. Every nation, including even those of archaic tribes such as the Neanderthals and Denisovans, was in continual or periodic contact with others and exchanged knowledge, goods, and DNA. Many tribes had periodic meetups where they would share knowledge and goods (and DNA). These tribes could be cruel or lethal to any in their societies they chose to shun but people shunned by one tribe were sometimes accepted into another. There were also people who moved from one group to another because of marriage, slavery, exchange, or war reparations. The Iroquois nations are famous for their adoption practices but these exchanges were not uncommon in most parts of the world. DNA analysis is finally proving that as people took divergent and separate paths to settle far away places, they continued to reconnect and network with each other. While the tribes people lived in were unmistakeably an ingroup, they were not invariably hostile to outgroups.

These earliest autonomous nations were typically governed by elders or councils. As they grew, they sometimes formed federations, complex societies and even multinational empires which ruled by controlling resources. As soon as populations grew to a critical mass, complex societies began to rise and fall all over the world. They completed huge collaborative projects, established agricultural advances, and allowed far more diversity of roles, wider perspectives and social circles and greater security while retaining some tribal social benefits. Freedom to reach their full potential was greater for some under a system with stratified jobs, greater leisure and larger specialized circles for knowledge sharing. Social fulfillment was also more likely for some within expanded social circles. Shunning and inclusion expanded to social stratas as ingroups and outgroups were created within each society.

Empires frequently promised protection and aid from dangers such as famine, enemy attacks and natural disaster. The price of imperial protection was submission. Empires and other hierarchical societies cost us our tribal autonomy, often forced stratification of jobs and society, and greatly increased authoritarian governance. Formerly autonomous nations traded their freedom for a child-like dependency on authoritarian figures. Societal coercion was replaced by hostile external coercion in the form of a military, religious or political authority. Centralized bureaucratic structures removed community authority over decisions such as food allocation, interrupting the direct dependencies between people and beginning the dissociation of relationships. With stratification, some roles such as lifegiving and caregiving were increasingly removed from the political and commercial power of society and the people who fulfilled those roles had their status and their access to power reduced.

Societal hierarchy was greatly increased with stratification and less dependent on age or skill. Centralization and stratification allowed specialized knowledge to be kept within certain groups, increasing powerful guilds and classes in society and contributing to the loss of knowledge whenever these societies collapsed. Hereditary and other secret knowledge was used to create elite classes instead of just elite individuals. Knowledge became a commodity to be hoarded and traded, both within communities and internationally.

The most powerful empires were those who became wealthy from trade. Goods had exchanged hands between tribes for as long as humanity existed and this is frequently referred to as trade, but it probably was usually just sharing. The tradition of state visitors bearing gifts is so long standing and wide spread it was probably present in our earliest societies. We know sharing was the only method of exchange between some tribes and it is hard to imagine most other early tribes conducting trades over their limited goods. Sharing is a social trait common to all people and it would have been easier to communicate and more effective than trade for meeting socially. No human would have grown to adulthood without a mother sharing with them, not as an exchange but as a gift. Since the elderly and weak would also not have survived without sharing, it can be surmised that this was learned behaviour practiced between all people, not just the parent – child relationship it has been reduced to today. Trade or reciprocal sharing did develop between neighbouring tribes with regular contact however, and this usually increased dramatically with stratified and hierarchical society.

Once hierarchical societies established centralized authority or ownership over commons property and resources, this resource hoarding could be used to create trade empires. Government by laws and institutions instead of tribal councils was used to enforce new rights to advantage only the higher stratas of society which made the laws. Permission to take goods from the community commons and trade them for personal profit was given to the upper stratas. The surplus goods people began creating for their own rulers were increasingly used to trade over long distances with the rulers of other societies, greatly expanding the occasional tribal exchanges. Because of the high cost of transportation, most long distance trade was for high priced luxury goods which increased wealth disparity and authoritarian power. Trade empires directed people to work for trade to the wealthy and those outside their communities instead of working for the needs of their communities and themselves. Eventually, trade led to the creation of currency and replaced dependency on society with dependency on currency. Freedom, autonomy and social approval were all now represented by the currency which could buy them all.

Trade empires created a new powerful merchant class which stood between artisans and the upper stratas who owned property and those buying their products and made vast profits from their parasitic trade. These merchants had access to foreign knowledge and access to those who controlled power and wealth in more than one empire. The widespread adoption of currency provided them with dissociated membership in multiple societies and access to all the privileges of membership. They also had their own networks within the merchant strata of many nations. They even frequently had their own international language. They were the first extranational class and the new societal structure they created became the second age of nations.

In time, the merchants grew so powerful and their extranational society so networked, they controlled the states. The merchant class created a higher supranational form of governance and law in the form of trade agreements and treaties which states obeyed. This is today’s sociopathic and fully dissociated global structure and the third age of nations. The higher authority allowed empires to continue without direct imperial control from any one state and gave the illusion of autonomy to formerly openly occupied states. This removal of authority was largely unnoticed because governance, law and resource ownership had already been removed from the people by states and was only available to the upper stratas who were all part of the new supranational class. Once governance and resource allocation had been taken from tribal councils and given to one strata of society, and governments were permitted to both represent a whole society and dispose of its property at will, this self-pillage was inevitable.

With the progression of our dissociation, wealth no longer follows tribal or imperial leadership, resources or even trade in resources. The basis for entrance to the elite supranational classes now is existing wealth, celebrity or power, in any form. The ability to write laws and treaties, control knowledge or manipulate the public is rapidly replacing the ability to directly control resources as the primary source of power. Tribal knowledge which was once hoarded by guilds is now copyrighted, patented and kept in the upper stratas, defended by lawyers and laws protecting rights which are unrelated to creation. Unlike power under the elite of the second age, the supranational class at the top of today’s global empire does not need to govern or be involved in any way with the divided state-societies below them. Power has become completely dissociated from governance or the well being of the people of the world. It exists simply to accumulate the currency which purchases dissociated entrance to any society. The supranational class is its own nation. Everyone not in their strata is their outgroup who they spare no empathy towards.

Autonomy is only possible as a whole society and as we have no more societies we are farther than ever from autonomy. There is no diversity under one grey, global empire. The prevailing culture around the world, in fashion, in music, in architecture and in lifestyle, is mass produced corporate ugliness, not evolved from any regional culture. We are educated in the same way for the same jobs and coerced by the same news and celebrities. We are all under the same empire but we have no great collaborative projects or joint plans for the future. We have lost our tribal societies but instead of receiving protection from outside plunder, the current empire has convinced us to plunder ourselves, to destroy our own homes and poison our own children and walk willingly into lifelong slavery with no chains. The global elite have no basis of authority but with no existing societies or system of collaboration that is not based on the trade economy, most feel helpless to change the underlying structure.

In the last decades, just as the third age of supranational power has become most invincible, we have seen the beginnings of a fourth age of nations. We have a new powerful technical ability to assist our still overwhelming human need to create societies and networks. Shunning and inclusion, our two most powerful social tools, used for millennia to create all of our societies, are currently up for grabs. The extreme dissociation that permitted our governance by a foreign strata of people has provided a structure that can be seized by anyone who can control currency, media or other forms of coercion. It is urgent that we all realize the power struggle happening over this control, the effects it will have on our societies and how, if we wish, we can collectively seize control of this power to create the new societal norms and structures we choose.

It is both possible and very necessary that we create a new framework for society building, more diverse, flexible and mutually supportive than the first tribal one and more rewarding and globally beneficial than the third parasitical, supranational one. This time, we must plan our framework and leave it flexible enough to provide many variations and iterations so we are never again trapped in one failed system. A fourth model for nations must meet both our social needs and our need to develop to our full potential, ensure local autonomy but protect global commons, and put social responsibility back in communities but provide a global safety net for those shunned or harmed locally.

We need nations which provide us with a balance of autonomy, diversity and society.

Excerpted from Autonomy, Diversity, Society. Citations will be transferred when I get a minute.

Autonomy, Diversity, Society

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One of our most overwhelming impulses as humans is to belong to a society. The pain of shunning is the most powerful coercive tool we employ against each other. Shunning can motivate people to take their own lives or the lives of others. Solitary confinement can rapidly destroy mental health. An infant left without human contact can have all of their physical needs met and still grow up with physical and mental damage. The need to belong can be used to overpower principles, deep rooted morals and self-interest. History has repeatedly proven that the majority of people can be coerced to do almost anything to themselves or others by the need for social inclusion. The desire to be a part of something bigger than themselves is frequently expressed as a motivation for action and duty to society a frequent excuse for compliance.

Most people are born with ambition to reach their own full potential in the areas which interest them. Autonomy, the ability to choose ideas and society for ourselves and the freedom to spend our lives in the way that seems best to us is a basic human need. A society which locks people in or out due to location of birth or ethnicity and roles which are presented as the only acceptable paths require rigid conformity which does not suit our wide diversity of characters and abilities. Accepted diversity is not just morally just or strategically wise, it is also necessary for a complete society to fulfill all the roles required or desired. Diversity gives society the benefit of as many viewpoints and potential solutions as possible.

We once had a chance to achieve a balance between autonomy, diversity and society. Many societies of interwoven dependencies worldwide had the potential to evolve and allow both autonomy and society for all. Instead we created a global, sectarian, stratified class system where everyone must strive for the same goals and all but the few setting the goals would fail.

The trade economy has denied the value of any work benefiting those in need of assistance and denied the value of resources in non-western countries. Both caregivers and resource rich continents are depicted as being in a state of perpetual begging for handouts from the wealthy despite the obvious fact that no one needs the wealthy and everyone needs caregivers and resources. The same power that once denied ownership by the commons with the homesteading principle now denies the rights of homesteaders in favour of foreign multinational corporations. Laws are stratified to ensure the powerful have superior versions of everything, including immigration rights at a time when much of the world will need refugee status from drought, pollution, conflict and natural disasters. Even natural life expectancy is unapologetically higher for the chosen strata. The world is being funneled through a eugenics program of a previously unimagined scale.

This callous and deliberate exclusion of most of humanity, even for moral nihilists, is ignorant and ill-judged. Our only hope of a livable future is in a singularity produced not from technology created by a population of self-appointed Übermenschen but from the collaborative creativity and experience of all of the diverse minds in the world. Where very recently a qualified tradesman could, and was expected to, understand everything related to their field, it is now increasingly difficult for one human brain to comprehend the overall workings of any complete system much less the interlocking detail of every system globally. Given the required tools and societal structure, we could create a resilient collaborative network that could act as a real hive mind. We could audit, bridge and develop complex original thought and create solutions with the speed required to solve the urgent problems we face today.

Every revolution in history has simply installed new faces on top of the same paradigm. Societies ruled by the majority create oligarchies of Great Men, those two standard deviations above the mean in every field, just advanced enough to impress and not advanced enough to baffle, always from the tiny demographic group accepted as rulers. The voices and ideas outside the circle of demagogues, the ones that need and drive revolution in every case, sink back into oblivion. It is evident that if we are to stop the endless cycles of revolution, or even survive another cycle, we will have to change the paradigm. The current corporate empire is eager to install the latest messiahs who will promise reform which will retreat to moderation and then back to the status quo or worse. As we can already see, this population is once more leading us past democracy and back to the deeper prison of fascism. This time it is essential that we go deeper and create a genuinely new system, not just new messiahs and new names for old tricks.

Excerpted from Autonomy, Diversity, Society.