Stop Trying to Win. Start Focusing on EXIT.
No one likes being conquered.
History is filled with cosmetic revolutions, wherein a little new paint is daubed on an old face or, in the more violent and destructive examples, a new head set on an old body.
—Peter LaNague, “An Enemy of the State”
This is going to be a quick post. I still have to unpack from our trip. Plus, I have to help clean the hundreds of oyster and clam shells we collected for my wife’s new side hustle. (She will tell me I don’t need to help her with that, but I am going to anyway.) And I have to get some more writing done for the big new book I’ve been threatening y’all with for a while now.1
But I do want to get this idea out. It is not exactly a new line of thought for me, but I do want to crystalize it a bit, for all of our benefit.
The inspiration to write about it today began with an appeal from leithian for unity and focus—to try to get people to stop fighting the red-blue war and instead channel their enmity toward the elitist overlords who are seeking to oppress us all.
I restacked her worthy appeal with some thoughts of my own, and Michael S. Alford replied: “People at war with each other are easy to control.”
Alford is correct. But it raises an essential question: why are we all at war with each other?
Yes, it benefits our overlords to pit us against each other. But that, on its own, would not be enough. Human beings are highly programmable, but we are not complete robots. If we’re going to fight (metaphorically or literally) our neighbors, there has to be something in it for us. Otherwise, why bother with the effort or the risk?
The answer lies with government itself—particularly, democratic systems.
The idea in a democracy or republic is that people attempt to gather enough political power to impose their blueprint upon an entire territory and people.
When you vote, you do not consent. You do not choose something that you want. You throw your ballot into a pile and hope your pile is taller than the other pile(s). If it is, then you have a greater chance that some of the things you want will be imposed upon everyone else—whether they want them or not.
Does that sound like a recipe for peace and harmony to you?
Here, use this ballot to try to get the other guy before he gets you. Fight hard, because if the other guy’s pile is bigger, a bunch of stuff that you don’t like is going to be imposed on you.
Democracy turns everything into a high-stakes conflict.
Win at all costs. Winner take all. Win, or the other guy’s gonna force you to do a bunch of stuff you won’t like.
Why do you think that is good? Tell me how such a system can be “reformed” so that it isn’t fundamentally a hate-filled scrum of competing groups?
Democracy isn’t good. Democracy isn’t noble. Democracy is monstrously evil.
You want the answer for why people are at war with each other? THAT is why. Democracy forces us to fight each other each other. Yes, even our constitutional republican kind. Yes, even in 1789. Always and forever. Get the other guy before he gets you. Impose your vision on everyone, lest a vision other than yours be imposed.
The problem lies in the notion that it is necessary to impose a single way of doing things on a whole people. It isn’t.
You want people to live and let live. I want people to live and let live. But they cannot.
They cannot because this system will not let them. People cannot put down their arms and make peace because it is not in their interest to do so. Because if they do, then thins will be done to them that they do not want. That they did not choose.
GOVERNMENT KEEPS PEOPLE IN A STATE OF CONSTANT WAR.
Not just governments that have been corrupted. Not just governments run by the BadPeople™. All democratic governments, when they are functioning normally, create endless war.
You want out? There is a way.
That way does not lie in the direction of trying to democracy harder. No amount of democracying can fix democracy because democracy is the cause of this problem.
That way does not lie in the direction of claiming that we can somehow get back to some purer version of the Founders “original vision.” No single such vision ever existed. And even if it did, the system they gave us suffers from the same fundamental problem as every other system that uses voting this way.
Parliamentary, republican, federal, constitutional republic, unitary, dual-presidential, blah blah blah blah. It’s all the same. Put down the tricorne hat and just walk away.
The answer lies in those very last words: walk away.
I know this is an unpopular sentiment right now, with such a high-stakes election looming. And I do not deny that it is high stakes. Of course…
Maybe Trump wins and it buys us some time, or maybe he wins and the creepy overlords who are really running things decide that a second Trump term is the perfect time to tank the dollar or stage a “Chinese” EMP attack to starve out 20 million or so of us. Who knows?
But no matter what happens, good or bad, the fundamental problem remains: people hate you and want to defeat you because they fear you. Because democracy gives you the power to do stuff to them. And you hate and fear them back for the same reason. Because the system leaves you little choice.
The answer is to start walking away. To recognize this for the hellscape it actually is.
You want to vote to buy us a little more time? Fine. Maybe it will help. But in the long run, you need to recognize the truth here, and start working toward a new reality.
We must send a message to our fellow humans:
You have nothing to fear from us.
We are not trying to impose anything on you.
We are not trying to take your money or manage your lives.
We are not trying to impose anything on your children.
We are no threat to you.
JUST LET US GO.
We need to begin focusing on EXIT. On seceding. On forming parallel systems and new polities.
We need to send the message that we are not trying to take anything or control anyone.
JUST. LET. US. GO.
It is going to take a while for this message to sink in. First, we ourselves have to understand it, believe it, and feel it. Then we have to start making others understand:
We are no threat to you. Our departure is no threat to you.
Yes, there will still be some people who don’t get it. But many will, and their numbers will grow.
Yes, there will be some people who don’t want us to leave precisely because they want to keep siphoning resources from us. But their numbers will be more manageable.
Yes, there are always some who are obsessed with the collective and cannot deal psychologically with the notion that anyone would ever leave it. They’re just going to have to suck it up.
Revolutions are not the way.
Winning and imposing our blueprint is not the way.
You want peace between red and blue, between left and right? Take away the high stakes that makes those conflicts inevitable. Walk away. Build the new world.
This is the way.
PS: AI didn’t quite get what I was looking for in an image for this article, but whatever. Close enough.
"In truth, in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent, even for the time being. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having even been asked a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights under peril of weighty punishments. He sees, too, that other men practice this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further, that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self-defence, he attempts the former. His case is analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or be killed himself. Because, to save his own life in battle, a man attempts to take the lives of his opponents, it is not to be inferred that the battle is one of his own choosing. Neither in contests with the ballot-- which is a mere substitute for a bullet--because, as his only chance of self-preservation, a man uses a ballot, is it to be inferred that the contest is one into which he voluntarily entered; that he voluntarily set up all his own natural rights, as a stake against those of others, to be lost or won by the mere power of numbers. On the contrary, it is to be considered that in an exigency into which he had been forced by others, and in which no other means of self-defence offered, he, as a matter of necessity, used the only one that was left to him.
—Lysander Spooner, “No Treason”
Okay, so this ended up being just as long as every other piece. I got on a roll!
I have some good news. For the last 33 years I have been keeping track of a few metrics. In 2018 about 125 million Americans who were eligible to vote did not do so. In 2016 it was about 115 million. We don't actually know what the figures were in 2020 or 2022 because the filthy Marxists made up votes and voters in the millions in order to get their way. Further to this point the commissioner of the irs reported to congress in the late 1990s at hearings on CSPAN that 66 million Americans who the irs thought should file taxes did not do so. In 2019 it was over 123 million.
There were in 2019 over 95 million Americans who were not in the workforce and only 41 million were receiving food stamps. So tens of millions of Americans are economically successful without regular work.
The truth is that nearly a third of the country is not involved in the stupid red blue game. But they don't make lot of noise. Why bother? Making noise gets people who want to be left alone the attention of govt and of other people. And Americans have in general become loud, rude, ugly, filthy, nasty jerks to one another and to visitors from overseas. You let Marxists screech and burn homes and businesses. So why visit your crappy cities?
People who don't want much from other people are all around you. They go on being alive no matter what you say. Why should anyone try to get through to ugly rude Americans? You're not done wrecking things.
I agree that secession is the answer. Unfortunately, our democracy will declare violent war on secessionists, just as they did in 1861.
That doesn't mean that we don't do it, but that we be prepared.
We can begin with micro-secession activities like homeschooling, planting a garden, learning how to fix things and build things, becoming more self-reliant.