The Narrow Road to Self-Government

“Are we already at the end of the evolutionary line for the self-governing individual human?”

Entombment by Paul Delvaux (1957), Painting

The following article by

Nowick Gray

is as relevant as ever, and it’s especially timely given our latest Chat topic about self-reliance (which I will plug here — click here for more information, and select the ‘Chat’ tab to participate in the conversation).

In this article, Nowick tears apart the illusion of democracy, the ‘democratic’ electoral system, and the ruling elite’s attempts to tarnish the populist ‘threat.’ He also delves into the importance of voluntary, consensual affiliation in intentional, cooperative living.

The piece can be distilled into the following quote he shares:

“Believe in yourself. Reclaim your sovereignty. Demand your liberty” — Martin Geddes, The Total Reset of Everything 

This article is included in Nowick Gray’s book Metapolitical: Practicing Our Human Future

Elect to govern yourself.

“Democracy” is a sacred cow in political discourse, unquestioned as a form of government that promises fairness, equality, justice for all. The US has championed that ideal above all other nations, but in its insatiable quest for power as a global empire, it shows how the word and concept have been perverted and inverted. Like “peace” and “freedom” (or the more recent co-opted idols, “diversity” and “science”) democracy is another casualty of Orwellian doublespeak. The classic example was the policy to burn Vietnamese villages in order to “save them from communism”—reminiscent of the original genocide based on the psychopathic motto, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”

Aside from the more blatant perversions of democracy, there is the more subtle masquerade of modern democracies purporting to represent the will of their populations. Pretending such freedom of choice happens once every four years or so, by voting for one of two, or at most a handful of hand-picked henchmen and handmaidens of the ruling elite. It’s an exercise in burying one’s head in the sand.

More insidious even than the hidden hand of corporate lobbying and deep state puppeteering, is the influence of mass media propaganda and censorship. Deprived of a free press and fully informed consent, the popular will loses its organic basis and becomes a manufactured commodity. Without free speech, there  is no democracy.

To return to its original meaning, democracy conjures notions of local and grassroots self-government by a people. More radical still, we might probe to the possibility where each person is a sovereign being, beholden to no ruler or collective authority. That possibility in turn brings us back to how we might truly evolve in harmony with each other, in self-governing cooperation.

The Perversion of Democracy: A Primer

Politically savvy individuals know that democracy has rarely existed and probably never outside small groups of humans who deliberately organize themselves to share power or grant it temporarily to one or a small number of people for a particular purpose. In most contexts, ‘democracy’ is simply a label used to deceive the unwary into believing that ordinary people have a say in how we are governed. But this has never been the case in any political framework on a larger scale. —Robert J. Burrowes

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny. –Thomas Jefferson

We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force. —Ayn Rand

Half of the country lives in reality and the other half lives in a bubble world of fear and loathing handcrafted by the oligarch elites. One side plays by one set of rules, the other plays by no rules at all…. The experimental vaccine isn’t about health and it isn’t about politics. It’s about power. Power over your body. Power over your mind. Power over your soul. Resist. Keep the faith. We are children of God. After all: “my body, my choice,” right? —Andrew Torba, Gab

Without our obedience, the parasite class is currently nothing but a group of ineffectual, wannabe plutocrats, sat on piles of paper, created from nothing and worth nothing…. COVID 19 is nothing more than a casus belli for the Third World War. As the representatives of the State openly admit, that war is a hybrid war…. All is war and we are the enemy. The military objective is to grind us into docile and compliant slaves, serving the new normal State. —Iain Davis, “COVID World – Resist!”

The Roots of Anarchism

While the charade of supposedly democratic institutions hypnotizes the masses into sheeplike compliance, the word “anarchist” has been given a bad rap—the caricature of a bomb-throwing terrorist. I first encountered an opposite, positive vision of “Constructive Anarchism” in an off-campus college course (taught, it so happened, by the wife of legendary writer J. D. Salinger, but that’s another story). Delving into theory from over a century ago (Bakunin and Kropotkin), and contemporary discussions of land-based, cooperative living, the course helped us understand anarchism as an intentional form of self-government, with the advantage of being voluntary and consensual.

The working out of such arrangements is not written in stone, but rather depends on the historical context and the character of the people most involved. For example, the pirate colonies of the early seventeenth centuries had to grapple with the core issue of invested authority, even as they formed their own councils of decision making outside the established rule of law. The whole pirate tribe being by nature outlaws and renegades, yet there were gradations among them, breakaway factions who could not even abide the local replicas of the national governments they had fled, spurned, and plundered. (See The Devil’s Anarchy: The Sea Robberies of the Most Famous Pirate Claes G. Compaen & The Very Remarkable Travels of Jan Erasmus Reyning, Buccaneer, by Stephen Snelders.)

The rogues gallery of the high seas paints a bleak picture of human nature and of the state of the world in that era of supposed “Enlightenment.” On the underside of hotly contested oceanic imperial warfare, the pirates jammed their own survival plan forward, at the expense of the world’s seagoing powers. Then, loaded with silver coin but going hungry, they preyed on poor farmers and villagers, raiding peaceful coasts for meat and women.

Can we do better, when we choose to refuse stultifying obedience to idiot law and draconian enforcement? Let us hope our capacities have evolved enough in the three intervening centuries to create, together, humane and nonviolent alternatives to coercion.

Faced with escalating treacheries of inherited government, despite all promises to the contrary, we must admit that pirates in business suits have now taken over the ship of state. We are faced with a new existential choice and task and indeed sacred mission: to become meta-pirates.

To live and breathe and share and broadcast the truth, exposing first the lie that serves to justify: that we need or want the so-called security offered by the state. To launch then our houseboats of self-and convivial security, powered by positive human nature.

No flags flying.
Free again.
Humans without state.

Remember the Iron Curtain… Freedom for the taking, when enough rose up.

And what of the reality shows of the day, that others prefer to cling to: bourgeois dreams and bourgeois nightmares, as seen on TV?

Subvert them, don’t play along. Create alternatives.

What doesn’t change in a total reset is the pole star of loving kindness: “Good Wins” because we inhabit a universe whose physics seeks connection over compartmentalization. That this process of uprooting evil is “Biblical” is not just a metaphor: it traces its roots back through our “family feuds” as a species, all the way to our origins…. The best is yet to come, but to arrive there we may yet have to traverse the worst too. Be accountable for yourself; let others choose their own path. Self-care, self-compassion, and self-worth are the watchwords. Believe in yourself. Reclaim your sovereignty. Demand your liberty. —Martin Geddes, The Total Reset of Everything

An anonymous 1943 German manuscript that appeared amid the horrors of WWII contained this watercolour, which was a copy of an Illumination from a 1785 German text called Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians. The work depicts the struggle between good and evil, represented by the Garden of Eden’s Tree of Knowledge.

The Rise of Populism

Anarcho-tyranny has taken over on behalf of the Globalist American Empire.…
If the American Populism movement is to be successful we need to operate a spiritually centralized, but materially decentralized movement. For peaceful secession to happen, which I believe is inevitable, we can’t have a centralized figurehead or group for the Globalist American Empire to isolate, target, and destroy. This must be a materially decentralized movement. –Andrew Torba, Gab

Anarchism in its contemporary incarnation is akin to the more widely recognized “populism.” And like its historical counterpart, populism is being widely tarred and feathered as a dangerous threat to the ruling world order by its power-mongers, plutocrats and ruling-class presstitutes. It is deemed “extremist” to advocate grassroots anything. Old-style “conservative” is now branded with the fringe label, “alt-right,” which in turn is lumped with “racist” and “Nazi.” By the anti-populist logic, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are “Russian asset” bedfellows because they espouse popular causes and rouse organic enthusiasm among large masses of actual humans. “We the people” is a phrase that will likely get you sent to a detention facility as an actual or potential “domestic terrorist.” In short, if you dare dissent, you are a threat to the establishment, the deep state, the status quo, national security, science and reason itself… target of the hollow shouts of a decaying empire, which now serves its new masters, the global technocrats.

Yet populism doesn’t cease being popular. The more the State clamps down, the more the wave of popular aspirations for self-government rolls on, building like a swell that crosses oceans and continents, bypassing censors and gatekeepers, defying lockdown orders, confronting police with common sense and moral courage.

The Threat of Transhumanism

The cutting edge of global control is no longer in the street, or even in the propagandized media—both fatally exposed for the abuse of truth and political fair play, for anyone who cares to see. The most existential threat to popular human will and freedom is taking place in the invisible realm of transhumanist technologies.

The misnamed vaccine has already turned half the world’s population into walking bioweapons, their cells reprogrammed to manufacture deadly and debilitating spike proteins. Meanwhile 5G installations on the ground and satellites in Earth orbit are ramping up to zap all of us with microwaves, with a range of harmful biological effects, plus a “smart” interface with the nanobots now implanted in our bodies and brains. This emergency on a mass scale supersedes the other radical changes being implemented from the top down, but dovetails with them in “The Great Reset.” Any who survive the genetic holocaust will be pre-groomed to take part as denatured citizens of the new fake democracy.

Programmed from inside and out, we are granted no choice but to vote our assent to the replacement of human social institutions with artificial “intelligence,” “autonomous” vehicles that make human autonomy obsolete, a cashless financial system subject to central control, and 24/7 surveillance and censorship that ensures continued lockdown of our innate human freedoms of movement, assembly, speech, and increasingly, thought itself.

Will what’s left of the human spirit be left to wither on the vine?

The question for regular people isn’t how to stop this technocratic revolution from taking place. Barring some circuit-frying electromagnetic pulse, that ship’s already sailed. The question is how to stay human in this emerging world. At what point are you just being stubborn? On the other hand, at what point have you sold your soul? —Joe Allen, “Scientists Are Mixing Human Body Parts With Robots And Monkeys. We Don’t Want To See What’s Next”

The Evolutionary Experiment

With the apparent success of the transformation underway, are we to give up all hope in the original ideals of democracy?

Are we already at the end of the evolutionary line for the self-governing individual human? It may be that the willing sheep of the new pharma normal are voting themselves right out of the equation. As for that erstwhile bastion of democracy, the good old USA, it appears that the premise of a national democracy is on shaky ground. Given the fundamental difference between real democracy and its demonic doppelganger, a rending of that fabric may be in order:

The best possible outcome right now is that conservatives congregate, unify and organize from the local level to the state level to the point that we act as a deterrent to future tyranny…. At least we will be living among kindred spirits, and at least there will be a glimmer of hope for the world. Sometimes the greatest act of rebellion is to offer people an alternative, a place where the rules of tyrants hold no weight. Conservative states and counties are doing this today, and it is a beautiful thing. —Brandon Smith, Red States Are Fighting Back Against The Reset – What Does This Mean For The Future?

For the rest of the world, the tensions are the same, especially under pressure from above to conform to a uniform vision, no exceptions. I cannot imagine how such a force, imposed by a billionaire elite, could hold power over all the rest for long, unless we are all literally dehumanized and depopulated in the process. Until then, may we be guided by the wisdom of our truth-keepers.

Kennedy paints a picture of a “band of brothers and sisters” fighting for survival. This is the anarchic, ad hoc cooperation of the pirates against the empire. The struggle is the life; but with Kennedy’s leftist pedigree, it implies the Marxist ideal where one day, after the revolution has achieved success, the state itself will “wither away.”

Journalist Jon Rappoport comes at it from the right-hand side. Against all temptations of group fulfillment, he champions the bedrock value of individual, creative, self-governing freedom:

When all obsessive group-consciousness on Earth is finished, exhausted, when it admits defeat, then a different era will emerge. But for now, we are in the middle of the collective experiment…. How long until the collective age is over? A hundred years? A thousand years? The answer is, as long as it takes for every human to realize that the experiment has failed, and why.

The why is clear—the individual has been overlooked. He has been demeaned. He has been grabbed up and drafted into groups. His creative power has been compromised in order to fit in. The majority of the world still believes in this approach, as if from good groups will flow the ultimate and final solutions we have all been seeking. This is sheer mind control, because good groups morph into evil, and vice versa, in the ongoing stage play called reality.…

But there is no “we” to make the breakthrough. It comes to every person on his own. And it does not arrive as the thrust of an external force, but from one’s own struggle, accompanied by insights for which there is no outside agency to lend confirmation….

One or ten or a hundred collapses of civilization, and the resultant rebuilding, are not enough. The pattern endures. It can only dissolve when overwhelming numbers of individuals, each in his own way, absent self-deception, sees its bankruptcy. The “we” and the “us” are merely postponements and cover stories splashed on the front pages of the mind. Fighting for what is right, here and now, is vital. But it does not preclude the knowledge that, as long as people are fixated on groups as the Answer, the underlying problem will persist.

by Nowick Gray

This article first appeared in The New Agora (May 2021) and is included as a chapter in the book Metapolitical: Practicing Our Human Future by Nowick Gray (pp. 153–163). Read Paul Cudenec’s review of Metapolitical here.

You can find Nowick Gray’s Substack here: