Fragile Systems, Resilient Communities by Jim Davidson

“Pretty soon there’ll be a new kind of murderer, who will kill without any reason at all, just to prove that it doesn’t matter, and his accomplishment will be worth no more and no less than Beethoven’s last quartets and Boito’s Requiem– churches will fall, Mongolian hordes will piss on the map of the West, idiot kings will burp at bones, nobody’ll care and then the earth itself’ll disintegrate into atomic dust (as it was in the beginning) and the void still the void won’t care, the void’ll just go on with that maddening little smile of its that I see everywhere, I look at a tree, a rock, a house, a street, I see that little smile– That ‘secret God-grin’ but what a God is this who didn’t invent justice?–So they’ll light candles and make speeches and the angels rage. Ah but ‘I don’t know, I don’t care, and it doesn’t matter’ will be the final human prayer.”

– Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels

Publisher’s Note: I am a committed collapsitarian and thank my friend Skip for essentially reviving the term.

Jim touches on some thoughtful notions germane to the coming Endarkenment. I am an antifragility advisor (one of my jobs) at my current employment and have presented two papers at the Military Operations Research Society annual symposiums on this very subject. The good news is that all insurgencies are by their nature antifragile while the counterinsurgency efforts in the western world have tended to a fragility that sunders their effectiveness.

Some random thoughts:

How am I faring off Twitter? It is a wise moving getting off Twitter. It is a swamp that puts you in touch with some of the more toxic and cancerous elements of humanity. It’s an ideal platform for the intellectually beggared belief systems of the government supremacists. Best case scenario is you waste time and get annoyed, worst case scenario is a Tweet against the hive mind causes an angry Twitter mob to dox you, and you lose your job or worse.

I don’t understand why anybody wants to be involved with Twitter or any social media that encourages the briefest and lowest forms of social interaction at the expense of genuine communication.

Haiku is an art form best left to the savvy and dedicated practitioners.

On reflection, there used to be a lot less “here and now”. The mass distractions and casual pleasures we take for granted didn’t exist for most of human history. Go back 150 years and there’s no internet, TV, radio, or recorded music and even photography was still in its infancy. Go back a bit farther and you’re in the “world lit only by fire”. Go back further and you have the advent of silent reading that directly led to the huge advancements in the West.A contemplative knowledge gathering exercise that demanded your active participation and cognition.

Put down your personal surveillance devices (cell phones) once in a while.

I urge everyone to consider stepping out of the digital shallows, take your eyes off the digital space and think for yourself, by yourself.

Master the cognitive bias codex and yourself and nothing will stand in your way.

I’d like to thank ACA for reviewing my Irregular Warfare series with ProfCJ.

Enjoy Jim’s essay. -BB

Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise:

“This fragility is integral to the system and generated by it, in periods of boom and bust,” writes Wolf, instructing us about the invisible force that propelled the world into 2008, when this fragile system came too close to shattering into chaos. 
~ Martin Wolf, Forbes, 2014

For some months now, my friend Skip who posts on Twitter as TheFreeRifleman has been using a term he coined, “Collapsitarian” to describe his outlook.  Like many things in life, it began with a long series of sardonic posts in which Skip lamented the fact that Bankster Elite Pedophile Illuminati Globalist Satanic Luciferians (BEPIGS) rule the system as it presently exists, and that we should anticipate a day, soon, when we “burn this stupidity to the ground” (BTSTTG or in variants, BTFSTTG, BTSSTTG) or “back off and nuke the site from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.”  Skip also likes to refer to the current seat of governmental power as Mordor on the Potomac.  So he has lots of great ideas.

The concept of a collapsitarian is a philosophical libertarian who is aware that the system as it currently exists is going to collapse.  It is going to collapse whether you vote or not, whether you file paperwork the government asks for or not, whether you comply with their endless rules and regulations or not, and it is not going to be very long.  The system that “nearly” failed in 2007-2009 in an enormous financial crisis which saved itself through all kinds of chicanery and bailouts and give-aways to corporate giants did not fix any of the fundamental problems that resulted in that crisis.  It hasn’t fixed any of the millions of other problems it has, either.  The systems of the economy, banking, finance, law, justice, foreign policy, electric power, and online access that have any connection to government processes are fragile.

Fragility is widespread.  Systems are teetering on the brink.  A collapse is coming, and one collapse is very likely to trigger many others, in a cascade failure.  Whether the triggering event is a natural disaster such as Yellowstone going up, or a Carrington event, or a large series of earthquakes and tsunamis, or Earth passing through an active meteor zone such as the Taurids and actually being hit by something large, or a foreign policy debacle ending in a nuclear strike or several, we have no way of knowing.

Given that you can anticipate a lot of things that you may be relying upon suddenly becoming unreliable or unavailable, what should you do?  In the words of ZeroGov.com founder Bill Buppert, “up your preps.”  You have time to prepare.  You have time to buy ammo.  You have time to outfit yourself with supplies, with equipment like night vision gear, gas masks, potassium iodide (which helps your thyroid survive in the event of volcanic or nuclear distribution of radioactive iodide by filling your thyroid with non-radioactive iodide), water filtration gear, food storage equipment, food, ammo, and more ammo.  You have time to team up with people in your area and near your area and not too far from your area so that you can coordinate in the event things go bad.  You have time to train with your team.  You may even have time to build a mesh network or other resilient communications system.

But you don’t have much time, so you should not delay any longer.

Resilient Communities

In the last two years, I’ve been working very actively on building resilient communities both online and in the real world.  I have located several really good prospective areas for development, including the Montrose county, Colorado area and the Greenup county, Kentucky region.   As well, I’ve been in contact with developers and entrepreneurs involved in projects in Argentina, Belize, Burma, Chile, Europe, Uruguay, Canada, and elsewhere.  My friend Kurt Hanson has suggested we develop a new Hanseatic League of free communities, and I think that’s a great idea.

If you are living in a city on the east or West coast of the United States, I urge you to re-locate.  You are in danger.  You are in danger of certain kinds of natural disasters (tsunamis, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes) and in the cases of cities like Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Baltimore, DC, New York, the metro areas of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Maryland, all kinds of political and economic dangers.  If you are not living in a place where you can grow enough food to keep yourself and your family alive, you should seriously consider relocating to somewhere you can do so.

Happily, the places I know of include several that are actively looking for additional people.  There are businesses to get involved in.  There are networks of online activity you can participate in.  There are many new systems, much more resilient than the old ways, developing right now.

You don’t have much time to improve your situation.  But you do have some.  And about 100 million Americans are aware of the difficulties, I believe, based on their actions (ignoring the census, not voting, etc.).  So I think there are tens of millions of people who will be willing to help when the collapse starts happening.

Not to be too gloomy, but there are also people in government who are going to continue to apply fraud to all revelations that they’ve been lying and increase the amount of force they’ve been applying to all the problems caused by excessive force (wars, prisons for profit, economic turmoil, etc.).  Among other things I think you should anticipate is large scale prison camps near major cities where dissidents and people in rebellion, including those targeted by “red flag” laws are going to be concentrated.  Yes, FDR created concentration camps in 1942, and other presidents were involved in a long history of “reservations” for Native Americans, so don’t imagine anything new is being said when concentration camps in America are discussed.  Be prepared to free the slaves, stop the wars, and end the state.

If you aren’t motivated to change your circumstances, perhaps you have it all figured out.  Or perhaps you are in a good situation.  Changes are coming.  Stay ready.

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Jim Davidson is a member of the religious society of the Friends of Truth, the people known as Quakers.  He is an author, entrepreneur, actor, and dancer.  You can find him on the web and Twitter. He can be reached at jim@resilientways.net.