15A013 Paths to Freedom by Jim Davies, 2/18/2015    

Ever since I led the development of TOLFA in 2006, and indeed before then, I've been watching for alternative ways to end the government era; but have seen none. There's a very encouraging boom all over the Internet, of articles and groups deploring the chaos that governments cause, with more and more insight into how dreadful they are, but virtually nothing about how to end the mess. This is surprising; TOLFA seems still to be the only game in town. I expect other, better education courses to compete with it in due course, but the associated on-to-one replication method is, I think, indispensable. Each graduate finds one friend per period to take the same course, and so after 28 periods - each being a year or less, I hope - 268 million adults will understand the government scam and so decline to work for it. Then it will cease to exist in America, and similar progress will follow fast elsewhere.

Two other possible, nonviolent solutions have been mentioned, though, so let's take a look.

Progressive Secession

In a recent and well-considered article about National Borders, author "Bionic Mosquito" notes that the number of countries in the world has risen from 150 to 200, during the "last few years." No extra land has been created, so that means there's been a good deal of dividing going on and that's a kind of secession. Right now for example people in the Eastern provinces of Ukraine are trying to secede from that country's government.

Bionic writes that he's all in favor, and looks for the day when there won't be just 200 self governing groups in the world, but 1.5 billion - he says "That’s as far as I’m willing to go." I suspect he heads a family of five! More seriously, individual self-government is the aim - all 7 billion of us.

Several authors favor this idea, of repeated cycles of secession with one nation splitting into two, one county into two, a city then a neighborhood then a street dividing into individual, self-governing households - notably on that site, LewRockwell.com; but unfortunately, I've not seen any crisp account of how it could be achieved, how it might play out, using Bionic's note of the recent 200/150 rise during, let's say, the last third of a century.

That's a 33% growth in 33 years, which would, if continued, more than double the number of governing entities in the world in one century. Taking 2x to be conservative, that means in 2115 there could be 400 countries, in 2215 800, in 2315 1,600 and so on. If my math is right it will take 25 centuries to produce 7 billion, and by then the population of our species may have quite a lot more members than 7 billion. Either way, it's too long for me.

Will the rate of progressive secession increase? I've not seen reasons why it should. In fact, there's plenty of precedent to say that existing governments will viciously resist moves to secede; in the USA Lincoln's caused one person in sixty to die, rather than allow it. By nature, governments like to grow in power, not to shrink.

P2P Undermining

Governments are busy ruining their economies, just as all parasites end up destroying their hosts; the PIIGS countries are well known and already, the US FedGov has run up an impossible level of debt. The core idea here is to give them an extra push, towards collapse - to undermine them; especially by using peer-to-peer (P2P) payment systems that bypass all their taxation procedures. Bitcoin is a prime example.

That has already met fierce resistance (eg the destruction of Silk Road) and will attract more - for it's an obvious, frontal attack on government's financial lifeline. P2P will indeed prevail as the normal form of money transactions in and shortly before the coming ZGS, as a recent ZGBlog suggested, but that's after such hostility has vanished; the question is, how to get there from here. But let's assume it can be done; that our cryptologists will beat their code breakers. Will the resulting collapse of government bring about a free market society?

I don't think so. The prerequisites are that all participants in that society understand and accept that they are each free to run their own lives, and are responsible for doing so. That is so radically different from the dependency culture that prevails today that, if government were to vanish tomorrow morning, it would be back in business by next week, by popular demand. Sick though it seems to us, currently most people actually want government!

So there's just no alternative, to universal re-education; every person needs to see that his or her interests are being damaged by government, not served. No change is needed in human nature, of course, but a big change is needed in human understanding. That is what The On Line Freedom Academy provides, and why it (or some other course like it) is prerequisite for a ZGS. There are no short cuts. Nothing more is needed, but nothing less will do.