Brave New Worldview
Seven reasons to anticipate a great 2008

The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations... This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution. — John Adams

The other day a friend of mine from the Mid-Michigan Atheists and Humanists (MMAH) called and was distressed about the state of the world, worried that the Cartel and its secret societies had amassed so much money and power that he desperately worried that the end of freedom was close at hand. Believe me, I know what he was going through. I had recently become morose at Ron Paul's showing in the New Hampshire primary (8%), lamenting to my significant other that they'll be coming to take us away any day now.

But soon after my own episode of catastrophizing, I came to a more positive attitude... in fact taking heart from a Ron Paul letter following the NH primary indicating how thrilled he was about his performance there and elsewhere so far. In the letter Dr. Paul claims a century of the welfare-warfare state—big-tyrannical government (BTG)—doesn't end overnight, that the positive response to his message, especially among the young, is a benefit that won't go away even should the campaign end without him moving into the Oval Office.

So thinking of that message from Ron I encouraged on my atheist-humanist friend—a remarkable individual named Jim Hong, by the way—to look on the bright side. Not sure I expressed to him each of these points, but I wanted to say something about it in my Web column.[1] So here are the seven fundamental arguments why I believe we have the bad guys on the run for good starting this epochal season of 2008:

The Ron Paul Campaign—with unprecedented online support, fundraising records, and youth enthusiasm that makes old leftist-ideolog universities like the University of Michigan his base, Ron Paul is exciting the passionate, thinking masses like no other freedom advocate, well, ever. Even Barry Goldwater takes a back seat to Dr. Paul in knowledge of the Constitution (Ronald Reagan, frankly, doesn't even make it onto the bus)—and constitutional liberty will be Ron Paul's enduring message.

Back on that day when the Paul campaign raised more than $6 million, a classical-liberal 30-something friend of mine from Texas emails me that he is sending in $200 to the Ron Paul revolution... on top of a $100 or so more. They have a couple of kids and a mortgage and I'm sure several areas to which the money could be applied, but he writes, "I believe." Well, I do too. And the thing is, regardless of whether or not Paul becomes president this year, the nuts are off the buggy of the freedom movement for the foreseeable future: no politician running for national office will speak on any college campus without having to defend Social Security, the Federal Reserve, and the income tax... much less any meatgrinder overseas. The constituency for constitutional liberty has only just begun.
The Free State Project—Embracing the Ron Paul campaign is the freedom movement itself. A longer-term, on-the-ground corollary of Paul's 2008 watershed presidential run is the Free State Project in New Hampshire, a migration to create a limited constitutional government and maximum liberty in a large political subdivision of the United States. 500 people have already moved here, and 500 more are due to arrive this year. Those of us who came in the first waves know how effective a small number of freedom individuals can be in a state already oriented toward live and let live.

Here's a special Web page from our former maximum leader Varrin Swearingen (Gesundheit!), that shows some of the key successes we've had already: including defeating a smoking ban, defying federal real ID, securing freedom for home schoolers, defelonizing marijuana (soon to come), and keeping helmet/seat-belt choice free and legal, etc. Also home of Free Talk Live. Trust me, we are going to be seeing amazing strides from New Hampshire this year.
Advances in "Sustainable" Living—One could entitle this item alternative living, and not a subject with which I'm familiar enough, though I plan to make it a priority for my own knowledge this year. I have commented on the increased awareness we find among the scientific community of the ecology of human commerce, as well as the massive comprehension people are acquiring regarding our species' tenuous relationship with the atmosphere and the ecosphere. One can also consider this topic (as most of the others I've identified here) to belong under The Evolution of Consciousness.[2]

The sustainable-living movement, alternative-living movement, ecologically sensitive movement, etc., depending on what you want to call it, has millions of active working proponents. It's not primarily a head thing. Also here I think of Catherine Austin Fitts and the folks at Solari.com, the voluntary-currency phenomenon with Bernard von Nothaus and his the explicitly targeted-at-the-corrupt-and-dying-Federal-Reserve-system Liberty Dollar or the peripatetic Thomas Greco and Reinventing Money among the communities of the world. I also want to throw a link toward Jack Shimek and my friends in the Alt Expo world; I expect to see a lot of fruit from those seeds.
9/11 Truth and Death of Empire—Both of these areas—and my links here are to important books that identify and illuminate the horrors of what the Controllers (i.e. the Cartel) have inflicted upon us, particularly most recently with the advent of the Neocon conspiracy and the Bush-Cheney steroid-enhanced criminal class. 9/11 Truth is a topic I've spent quite some time on, now as a bona fide member of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, and I have no doubt we are on the cusp of major public consensus that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated by our government—then covered up and distorted by the Bush administration's 9/11 Commission and other sources. It will then be a small step to impanel a citizens' grand jury with subpoena power to root out the actual perpetrators of the crime, bringing large numbers of people in the Bush-Cheney administration (as well as career military and intelligence officials) to justice.

It's important that the truth come out reasonably steadily in order to avoid any dark chaos that could result if people were to become aware of their leaders' atrocities precipitously. Toward that end, the documentary filmmaker Ken Jenkins has produced a DVD that shows how to best overcome people's psychological resistance to learning the truth about 9/11. Indeed, this is a vitally important work, that I have reviewed just the previous week. The purpose of 9/11 was to terrorize the American people into supporting a bogus "war on terror," continued world empire by the United States' corporate-military junta, and unparalleled expropriation of wealth into the coffers of the Wall Street war machinery.

The percentage of the American public who accept the above explanation is rapidly approaching 50%; it will only take one mainstream media journalist of stature to attest to the validity of the 9/11 truth arguments—to call the emperor naked as it were—and (forgive the mixed metaphor) the whole house of cards will come crashing down. The discovery will produce a short-term dislocation as anyone implicated in the crime is excised and punished, but ultimately we will reach the prescribed Jeffersonian end: "whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
The Impending End of Drug Prohibition—In addition to the end of the Drug War, which is being pursued at the national level with notable progress by LEAP, MPP, NORML, NHCommonSense (my personal favorite), and others, we are going to see the end of Prohibition-related monopoly restrictions on the production of agricultural hemp. I don't think the latter economic liberation of the American farmer can be underestimated in terms of bringing much needed real wealth to millions of men and women in the productive class. Estimates of the rewards of hemp and marijuana production—hemp is the natural nonpsychoactive strain of cannabis sativa—are into the trillions of dollars... annually. It is no mystery why the DEA and the oil-and-drug-industry-funded federal government do not want environmentally sound real
wealth to flow widely to the American people.

This is the year, the Federales' drug monopoly collapses in a heap. It is simply unsupportable as an economic barrier on agricultural wealth and it is losing the hearts and minds of those who are on the front lines of the Drug War with guns. Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) is particularly significant in this regard, because when the enforcers themselves rebel against an unconstitutional government aggression—polls show 70% of the police in America are against Prohibition—that means the guns are still under (psychological) control of the citizenry. The citizens want freedom; the corporate-state wants slavery. It won't be too long before many of those in the government who are armed (and dangerous) refuse to carry out unconstitutional orders of any kind against their neighbors.
Progress toward the Singularity—I want to wrap this up now (one of my New Year's resolutions is to get better control of the amount of time I spend on these commentaries and reviews) but these latter two items are fundamental to the point I'm trying to make: that we have every reason to expect a New Enlightenment very soon.

The link is to a book I reviewed from Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, which articulates a vision for humanity on the threshold of a convergence between our biological consciousness and its creations. Along with the revolution in how we think of ourselves in the world, the technology for rendering us effectively immortal and significantly enhanced in every physical and mental way is at hand. And when I say "at hand" I mean, 2020 to 2030. Indeed, there are some reasons to think of progress toward the Singularity—transhumanism if you will—as driving our progress toward individual freedom itself. In any case, these technological trends are people-centered of necessity, they're more or less inevitable, and they spell doom for institutions and persons clinging desperately to the old way of central, mind-control domination.
The Evolution of Consciousness—I'm including this reason for optimism to cover mainly my recent explorations of the work of Eckhart Tolle. He argues that to fully appreciate our living, breathing lives, we need to draw our awareness—which is distinct from one's mind—into the overriding existence of the present. In so doing we gain being and defeat the consciousness-destroying pseudo-self of what he terms the egoic mind. Unchecked the egoic mind will trap you in the nothingness (the unconsciousness) of past or future.

There are several other authors whom I feel move the cart of human awareness forward in the spiritual realm, including Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), James Redfield (The Celestine Prophecy), and others... even Sam Harris (The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation) waxes poetic on rational spirituality. As of course does Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged) in her unique Aristotelian way, but unfortunately not enough of her adherents "give goood mind." Finally, I wish to mention a vein of gold I plan to be mining this year, at least some of the work of Jon Rappaport (The Secret behind Secret Societies). Jon's leitmotif seems to be: as we humans tap into our individual creative source by "living our dreams," those who would control and enslave us fade to insignificance. It appears that process is well underway.

So that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Jim (my friend from the MMAH), I think if you'll check out all of these salients, especially the more down-to-earth political ones, you'll come to realize we're on the threshold of a brave new worldview... with a universe of practically infinite potential laid out before us. Moreover, unlike in the past when because of aging and mortality only our descendants got to live the dream, we ourselves will experience the pleasure of the ride.

And I haven't even mentioned what I personally intend to bring to the journey. Recognizing that the Cartel, the leviathan state writ large, is well on its way toward arbitrary imprisonment, isolation, or even murder of those who would bring its heinous crimes to light, I'm just this month (February) cutting chips on my next political book. (My first book is a panegyric to the Free State, New Pilgrim Chronicles.) My second lays out the Sacred Nonaggression Principle (SNaP) in the simplest and briefest of fashions.[3] As Kryptonite is to Superman, the SNaP will become to the Leviathan State: when virtually everyone on the planet places the nonaggression principle on the highest pedestal of morality, we'll see clearly how pathetic that little guy behind the curtain truly is.

###

[1] No Blog! I've never considered my work here on the Coffee Coaster to be in the nature of a "Web log" or what is ubiquitously abbreviated Blog. I prefer the concept of a "Web column" (abbreviated Wum?) and will discuss some of my thinking on the matter another time.

[2] The progress of society is all a matter of awareness or consciousness, isn't it? At the very least the specific consciousnesses of those who care for the future of themselves, their families, and their fellow humanity. Oddly— and this reference may seem obscure to many readers—I think of the remarkable book by the late Neil Postman, Building a Bridge to the 18th Century, in this context. As we build that bridge of the literature of freedom to the 18th century (the century of the Enlightenment), we will surely be building a bridge to the New Enlightenment of the 21st century.

[3] Note, if anyone wants to scoop me on this idea of the SNaP, you have my eternal heartfelt blessing. Two books of this nature will bring down the Beast even faster than one; by the way, there's already a complementary book making its quiet, determined way through the culture, Healing our World, by Dr. Mary Ruwart. Highly recommended.