Decoupling
Irish democracy arrives
In response to a post arguing that we’re stuck with metastasizing institutional failure and governed by symbol-performing fools — “trapped in a miasma of vicious mediocrity and weakness” — I got this comment:
And it’s a good question. I think the answer starts with something I’ve said before: “We’re healthy from the bottom up, and sick from the top down.” (If you haven’t read that linked post, “The Schism,” please consider reading it, because it’s my attempt to argue for the things we have that actually work.)
Focusing on things you can change, you can focus on your body and your household; you can choose, for example, to not inject poison into your body, or into the bodies of your children. When enough individuals make that choice, the decision aggregates, and you get this:
This is the point we’ve reached: They can’t give the shit away. Focus on the things you can change, and don’t help to form a market for Pfizer’s mRNA injections. It works.
As politicians increasingly perform nonsense for a living — happy Vulva Day, Canada! — it becomes increasingly easy, and increasingly necessary, to live outside their insane theater of dimwitted cruelty. James C. Scott: “More regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by what was once called ‘Irish democracy,’ the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal, and truculence of millions of ordinary people, than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs.”
The Substacker Margaret Anna Alice has written about Étienne de La Boétie, the 16th-century political theorist who wrote The Discourse of Voluntry Servitude; the end of tyranny, he argued, could be achieved by not going along with it: “Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.”
Decouple. Withdraw, in your mind and in your home, from worthless people who purport to lead. There are certainly some limits to this model…
But there are just as certainly limits to the model of coercion, as Albert Bourla is discovering. Withdraw them to death. Achieve incremental victories, like Pfizer sitting on billions of wasted doses, with the simple choice to decline.
Don’t show up for the clown show.
I have lived out and demonstrated my anarchism every day since February 2020. I will admit that there were about 3 days in the beginning that I washed my hands extra and didn't touch doorknobs, but after that I completely ignored every "order" and "mandate" in the 30 states I traveled as a truck driver. I was in NY and PA every week as a part of a dedicated run. For the first two weeks, my customers wouldn't even talk to me. After that, everyone had chin diapers and within a month or so, everything was back to "normal." There was a time in April 2020 where I had the genius idea to eat my Burger King burrito in a Dallas Texas truck stop shower since none of the slaves were allowed to sit at a table. There was a 45 minute wait so I sat in the floor...of a truck stop...during a "pandemic"...to eat my breakfast. No one batted an eye. I sat in the floor and ate, but if I would have sat my fat ass in a chair in the dining room, they'd have called the cops. You know, because safety. My family is defiant. My kids are defiant. What friends I have left are as well. The rest, well, fuck em.
i have said this for years- "my revolution." whatever it is that i can do to withdraw. stay out of the medical industrial complex, go to doctors that don't take insurance, don't have flu shots, don't take mammograms, opt out of the smart meter they want to put on your house, put black tape over the camera on your computer, rip up your jury duty summons letters, don't pledge allegiance to a piece of cloth or a governmental system, don't join a political party, don't ever sully your vote on the "lesser of two evils," give your heart fully, read Wendell Berry, buy your food from local farmers, cook your own meals, plant a garden, keep chickens, get rid of your television, pay off your credit card debt, establish a community, laugh out loud at Klaus Schwab.
the greatest news is that Pfizer is stuck with expiring doses of their useless (and harmful vaccine). i'm sure they'll still get paid for them because that's how they roll, although i've heard of countries refusing to pay. the tragedy of course, beyond the people who complied and were damaged, is the people who lost their jobs, their friends, their families. they will have to create new jobs for themselves, make new friends, establish new families.
remember this always: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
― Buckminster Fuller -
my partner and i both lost our jobs. he retired to avoid confrontation and ridicule and so is still held in high esteem by his old co-workers although with the knowledge that they would turn on him in a heartbeat if they knew he wasn't vaccinated. i was simply not asked back to a job i had held, passionately and brilliantly, since 1980. it's like i never existed. they replaced me with someone unsuitable and the report i hear is that it's all a disaster. the governor finally made it illegal to have a policy of medical Jim Crow but too late for me.
i have taken the heart break and found an old restored plantation with rental cottages. we are emptying our bank accounts of soon to be useless fiat money and buying, with another friend, this wonderful land. the estate manager for the late owner is so happy that we want to preserve this legacy that he has planted vegetables for us in the raised beds and aisles of fruit trees. it's a leap of faith but every time we visit there, i am more sure that we are doing something extraordinary.
i am still a passionate and brilliant person; if my old job is foolish enough to cast aside someone they were so lucky to have for 4 decades, fuck 'em. i will pour my passion into this new land