paul rosenberg Archives

There Will Never Be Enough Good Jobs Again

by Paul Rosenberg – FREEMANSPERSPECTIVE

It’s over. Except for a short moment or a wild and self-exhausting governmental mandate (both of which are doubtful), there will never again be enough “good jobs” to go around. That model is gone and we need to root it out of our imaginations.

Sure, there will be some good jobs, but nowhere near enough.

About half of the Western world is already on the dole in one form or another. 93 million Americans lack a decent job and have no real hope of getting one. And so long as the current hierarchies remain, things won’t get substantially better.

I’m sorry to dump that on you, but it’s better to face it directly.

But please bear in mind that I’m a confirmed optimist. Just because there are no “good jobs” doesn’t mean that we’ll all languish in a meaningless existence. Far from it. Once we get over our addictions to status, hierarchy, and dominance, a glorious future awaits us.

Why It Won’t Get Better

The standard response to what I’ve noted above is to call it “the Luddite fallacy.” That line of argument says that in the past, innovation has not wiped out jobs, that new types of jobs were created and filled the gaps fairly well.

And that statement is true. Individual jobs were wiped out, but new jobs came along and (more or less) picked up the slack.

However, that is not happening this time, and for a very simple reason: Adaptation is now against the law. Previous rises in technology occurred while adaptation was still semi-legal.

Please take a look at this graph and remember a simple truth: Regulation forbids adaptation.

The US government is currently spending $60 billion, every year, to restrain business activity. (And the EU is worse.) On top of that, reasonable estimates show that US government regulations cost businesses nearly $2 trillion per year.

And let’s be honest about this: The primary purpose of regulation is to give the friends of congressmen a business advantage. Why else would they pay millions of dollars to lobbyists?

So, the new jobs that should be spawned, will not be. Mega-corps own Congress and they get the laws they pay for. And mega-corps do not like competition.

Furthermore, the political-corporate-bureaucratic complex will bite and claw to retain every scrap of power they have, and small businesses will be their first victims. (They already are.)

Trapped Between Hammer and Anvil

So, the people who are hoping and waiting for a “good job” to pop up are trapped between hammer and anvil. Robots are starting to roll into the workplace while the job creators (small entrepreneurs) are in regulatory and economic chains. They can’t come to the rescue.

In the 19^th century, all sorts of possibilities were open to entrepreneurs. This remained at least partly true, even into the 1970s, when I watched the business heroes of my youth having a gas while making piles of money.

It used to be that a clever person could get ahead, independently, and have a ball doing so.

Those days, alas, are over.

These days, to get rich, one needs to take government as a partner. If one does not, regulation and legislation are likely to destroy your business. At this point, many of us (myself included) have had businesses – good businesses that benefited everyone involved – crushed by legislation.

To avoid being crushed these days, you have to be smarter and fleeter of foot than everyone else. Not many of us can survive in that situation, and as regulations continue to rise, even that number grows smaller and smaller.

For the generation before of mine, independent success required ambition, but it was reachable. For my generation, only those of us blessed with unusual talent had a chance at controlling our economic destinies. For the young generation of today, it’s nearly impossible. These days, if you want to jump ahead, you need to be part of something big… and you need to start as a sycophant.

So…

So, if you’re looking for the proverbial good job, stop waiting for “The Hierarchy That Is” to sort things out and get everything back to normal. Good jobs get fewer and fewer every year, and those that are lost won’t be coming back.

But… if and when you’re ready to change your thinking – to seriously change your thinking – this is good news too: You can reclaim the parts of yourself that you were ready to sacrifice to the “good job.”

You see, the “good job” was nearly as much a curse as it was a blessing. Yes, I know, steady wages and benefits are a very comfortable thing, but they also play right into a ridiculous, predatory script.

You know the one: where you struggle to display your status to all the other worker-bees. You feel like you have to do what the ads tell you: Get the new car, the bigger truck, the video player in the back seat, the gigantic TV, the most “amazing” holiday parties, the expensive shoes, the designer bags, the organic veggies, etc., etc., etc.

I would like you, please, to consider this quote from the boss of Lehman Brothers, just as the World War I production surge was failing:

We must shift America from a needs, to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old had been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.

Would you agree that their plan worked?

As long as you follow their script, you’ll remain in a permanent deficit mentality. No matter how much you have, you’ll always feel like you need more. It’s life on a shiny gerbil wheel. The “good job” kept us from knowing ourselves; it allowed us to sleep-walk through life. We got a “good job” and never developed ourselves any further. Work, retire, die, ho hum.

Then What?

So, if we forget about having a “good job,” what happens?

Well, it might very well mean that you do what you’re already doing, but you stop feeling bad about it. It means that you get over the endless grasping after status… of letting ridiculous ads define what “success” looks like… of letting other people define your self-opinion.

Letting go of the “good job” delusion means that you stop pining for the days when you could blow a third of your money on status crap. It means that you start taking pleasure in growing your own food, developing new ventures, and improving yourself.

It means that rather than begging politicians to ride in on a white horse and fix your world, you ignore them and start paying attention to your actual life.

Fundamentally, this means that we start using our own initiative, without seeking permission, and start building better things.

Rather than going on, I’ll leave you with two quotes, both from Erich Fromm. I think they are worth close consideration:

Our society is run by a managerial bureaucracy, by professional politicians; people are motivated by mass suggestion, their aim is producing more and consuming more, as purposes in themselves. All activities are subordinated to economic goals, means have become ends; man is an automaton – well fed, well clad, but without any ultimate concern for that which is his peculiarly human quality and function.

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.

Paul Rosenberg

[Editor’s Note: Paul Rosenberg is the outside-the-Matrix author of FreemansPerspective.com, a site dedicated to economic freedom, personal independence and privacy. He is also the author of The Great Calendar, a report that breaks down our complex world into an easy-to-understand model. Click here to get your free copy.]

Why We Don’t Yet Live in the “World of Tomorrow”

By Paul Rosenberg, Freemansperspective.com

The following is a quote from a digital currency mailing list, posted at some time in the late 90s or early 2000s:

Consider that up to say 1970, people invented and developed Major Shit left, right and center. Jets, spacecraft, fiber, chips, laser… plastic… satellites… it goes on and on.

In contrast, the world’s done Absolutely Nothing for a good 20 years – at best, refinement. (“TV now has OVER 100 channels! and MORE PIXELS.”)

Indeed we presently live in a time of sort of… fantasy inventions. “Nanotech!” “Robots!” etc — all fantastic on paper, but totally nonexistent.

However flamboyant, this statement is true. Since 1970, there have been very few primary inventions. What we do have are mere improvements.

The Laws of Physics Are Old

Physics has gone almost nowhere since the 1960s. Here’s a short list of developments in physics:

Gravity: The laws were defined by Galileo and Newton in the 17thcentury.

Planetary motion: Defined by Kepler in 1609 and 1619.

Mechanics: The base laws were defined by Newton in the 17th century. Other specific laws were understood as far back as ancient times.

Gasses: Boyle defined his law of gasses in 1662.

Hydraulics: The laws and uses were developed between the 17th and 19th centuries.

Electromagnetism: James Clerk Maxwell defined these laws in 1865.

Relativity: Galileo defined the first laws of relativity in the 17th century; then Einstein defined new ones in 1905 and 1915.

Quantum mechanics: Einstein expanded upon the work of Max Planck and defined the quantum effect in 1905.

Atomic theory: The modern model of the atom was clarified by Neils Bohr in 1913.

Superconductors: Superconductivity was discovered by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes in 1911 and clarified by Fritz and Heinz London in 1935.

Quantum electrodynamics: Defined by Feynman, Tomonaga, and Schwinger in about 1962.

And what has physics done since then? Not a lot. Most visibly, physicists argue about theories that require twenty six dimensions and smash subatomic particles together.

In other words, physics has turned into a major yawn. Even the few exciting developments we have seen, such as cold fusion and high temperature superconductors, have gone nowhere. And exciting inventions like 3D printing, public cryptography, and cryptocurrencies have not only come from outsiders, but have been attacked by institutions.

Consider the major inventions that erupted between 1870 and 1970: railroads, telegraph, telephones, electricity, radio, TV, airplanes, cars, rockets, spacecraft, plastics, fiber optics, etc., etc., etc.

In the forty three years since – nearly half that time-span – what did we get?

That’s right: louder speakers, more pixels, and smaller screens.

So… either science has been hobbled or we’ve already discovered almost everything.

The Prison of Science

Since I don’t for a moment believe that we’ve discovered all that can be known, the obvious conclusion is that physics is being held in a sort of stasis.

My argument has been this:

Institutions are oppositional to individual will, and individual will is the only thing that creates breakthroughs in science.

Albert Einstein agrees with me, by the way. See this:

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.

And this:

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.

And this:

Great spirits have always been violently oppressed by mediocre minds.

Within an institution, a scientist must either please the authorities or see his work jettisoned. And scientific grants always have to please authorities.

So, who are these “authorities”? They would certainly include government bureaucrats, but the authorities that really matter here are older scientists who have given themselves over to institutional politics. These are the more common oppressors of new and different ideas.

There’s an old joke that reflects this:

Q: How does physics progress?

A: One funeral at a time.

The oppressors of new scientific theories are entrenched in scientific institutions. From there, they either allow or disallow almost every research project. And anyone who is not part of those institutions is ridiculed, excluded, and ignored.

It was farm boys, outsiders, and self-educated people who invented radio, television, the airplane, the electric light, the telegraph, the phonograph, the automobile, radar, and much more.

The creations of institutional science have been considerably less impressive. And those advances generally required the inventors to suffer along the way. Young Albert Einstein, after all, was rejected by all the institutions of his time. He made his great discoveries while working as a mere patent clerk.

God only knows how many wonderful things have been lost to institutional politics.

All of this is not because of “certain bad people” – institutional power turns good people into bad people. (Ask a grad student.)

Is There an Answer?

Sure there is! The same thing that worked in the 19th century: the separation of science and institution.

If you believe the line coming from today’s universities, you’d think that nothing scientific could exist without them. But to believe that, you’ll have to pretend that the previous, non-institutional era never happened.

But it did happen, and the pre-institution era of science produced far more basic discoveries than the institutional era.

We may have been indoctrinated by these institutions, but that has nothing to do with truth.

Paul Rosenberg

The Earth Belongs to the Living, Not the Dead

By: Paul Rosenberg, Freemansperspective.com

What if your grandfather had gone on a wild spending binge, long before you were born, and put himself millions of dollars in debt to people who knew he could never pay? Would it be your obligation to work double-shifts all your life to pay that debt back? And if you died before paying it off, would it become your baby’s obligation?

I think most of us would answer those questions with a resounding “No way!” As well we should. We are not and should not be slaves to the past – slaves to actions we never took and for which we had no possible means of consent.

On September 6th, 1789, in the very first year of the US Constitution, Thomas Jefferson endorsed precisely this conclusion in a letter he wrote to James Madison:

I say, the earth belongs to each of these generations during its course, fully and in its own right. The second generation receives it clear of the debts and encumbrances of the first, the third of the second, and so on.

For if the first could charge it with a debt, then the earth would belong to the dead and not to the living generation.

He wrote the same thing to John Wayles Eppes twenty-four years later, in June of 1813:

The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.

To lay debt upon the unborn is thoroughly immoral. To try to enforce such a debt is thoroughly criminal.

Your Child or Grandchild

This conversation is critically important, because each child born in the US is born massively indebted. Using $200 trillion to represent the promises already made to people now living (some estimates are higher) and assuming a population of 310 million, that comes to $645,161 of debt, by the time your child reaches his cradle. If you expect your child to become a productive person, his or her share will be roughly twice that amount, or approximately $1.3 million.

(The US government is not unique in this regard, by the way. I use the US example, because it’s easier and because most of my readers seem to be Americans.)

Would you sign papers loading your baby with such a debt?

I am stating these facts in personal terms to cut through the usual BS that passes for public discourse. I am also using the voices of “founding fathers,” partly because it undercuts the fraudulent government story that “we’re following the wisdom of the founders.” Beside, we’re talking about real persons here. Making it personal is not manipulative, but accurate. To make it amorphous would be manipulative.

And while I’m on the subject of founding fathers, here’s something George Washington wrote in a letter to James Madison, also in 1789:

No generation has a right to contract debts greater than can be paid off during the course of its own existence.

I think that’s a very clear and very moral expression. It is not, however, what has been done.

A group formed recently under the phrase, “Not our debt.” I know nothing about the group, but their phrase is entirely correct. The debt of the US government does not belong to us, and we have no moral obligation to repay it.

Most of us do pay something toward that debt (which grows exponentially, just the same), but we should stay very clear as to why we pay. That reason, of course, is naked force, as in coercion and violence. There is no morality to it, except the morality that some people might invent, either to salve their consciences or as sycophants to power. (Though most just do what everyone else does, never considering why.)

My advice is this: Do whatever you want as far as paying under threat, but don’t ever be confused about the morality of this situation. This is a swindle of gargantuan proportions. And that’s precisely what Thomas Jefferson believed. You can see this in a letter he wrote to John Taylor, dated May 28, 1816:

The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling posterity on a large scale.

Do what you need to do, but don’t ever think you have a moral responsibility to pay that kind of debt.

Paul Rosenberg

The Secret Appeal of Politics

By Paul Rosenberg, Freemansperspective.com

The Internet is full of stories about politicians acting badly and doing the opposite of what they promised. Talk radio is full of the same things, all day, every day. Even around office water coolers, almost everyone will admit that politicians are liars and thieves.

Given all of this, it’s rather bizarre that people still believe and obey the bums. If we knew such things about a neighbor, would we continue to take them seriously?

Yet, for some reason, politicians get a permanent pass on anything stupid they do.

The first reason for this is simply that most people have been bamboozled. They were taught that government is necessary and that without it, we’d all be ignorant savages, eating whatever few berries and roots we could scrounge… that without government nothing would be built, nothing invented, and nothing taught.

That’s all propaganda, of course, paid for by the people it praises. But, it’s what we were all taught and it’s hard for people to let it go, no matter how stupid it is.

The second reason is that people are afraid. We all know why.

None of that, however, is what I want to cover today. Instead, I want to look at the subtle reasons why people can’t let go of “politics.” These reasons are very powerful, but they lie beneath the surface and are harder to identify than self-serving, government-funded BS.

Reason #1: I Can Blame Anyone but Me

Somehow, people all across the West have become pathologically afraid of blame. It probably began as a corrosive fear of hell: If I’m to blame for anything, I’ll go to hell, and that must be avoided.

But be that as it may, this fear of blame allows political parties to provide a highly desirable service: They help you assign all blame to others. If you like the Red party, you can always affix blame to the Blues and not to yourself. If you’re in the Blue party, you can lay all blame onto the Reds.

It’s actually an elegant scam. The Blue v. Red show lets everyone avoid taking any blame onto themselves, while the big machine keeps right on running.

This fear of blame is ridiculous, of course: We’ve all made mistakes. What matters is correcting them and not repeating them. But if we pretend we never make mistakes, nothing gets fixed and the problems continue.

This neurotic avoidance of blame puts politicians in wonderful position – they don’t actually have to solve anything, and any blame is deflected to their evil opposition.

Reason #2: It Makes Me Feel Brave at No Expense

Politics lets us pretend that we’re fixing problems at no expense, save talking. Actually doing something is not required. Politics empowers our mere words to generate powerful results.

At least that’s what people want to believe. It’s the easy way out. You never have to get up and act. You never have to take a real risk. No blood, no sweat, no tears.

This is just another scam, of course: The politicians continue do what they want, and the people keep right on believing, even though their words seldom generate any real results.

All they need to do is keep you in the game. So long as you keep hoping that your words will affect the future, they can do whatever they please.

The alternative would be taking responsibility onto yourself and acting on your own. Gain would require pain… precisely the thing that people want to avoid.

So, instead, they keep believing that politics will magically turn complaints into results, and they remain tied into the system, no matter how badly it fails them.

Reason #3: It Makes Me Feel Noble at No Expense

Politics lets you pour charity onto the targets of your choice, without any personal expense. The magical money pot in the capital city dispenses it, and you feel no pain.

It doesn’t matter what your target of choice is, by the way. For some, it’s “the less fortunate,” to others, it’s people on another continent. It really doesn’t matter, aside from the fact that it makes you feel good to help people and that you never have to put your hand into your own pocket.

Again, this is clearly a scam: The money comes from ourselves (in ways we don’t think about), from others (those super-rich people), or, primarily these days, from generations yet unborn in the form of state debt.

But, those are things that can be ignored, and politicians are always quick to help us ignore them.

Paul Rosenberg

The Economy Can Never Fully Recover as Long as This Remains…

By Paul Rosenberg, Freemansperspective.com

When I was a young man, the older men I admired were the independent businessmen. Being a corporate suit issuing orders to underlings never appealed to me, but being a successful man who controlled his own life and business… that did.

Perhaps as a result, most of my friends are independent business people of one sort or another. Not long ago, I had a notable conversation with one of them, during which he said:

You know, Paul, business used to be fun. I’d take my children around and show them what we were doing, and explain the differences we’d make.

I waited just a beat as he winced and then continued:

Now, I don’t want to drag my kids into my business. Every time I move, there are regulations, permissions, forms to file. It takes up most of my time, for nothing. Business isn’t fun anymore. If I could find something else, I’d get out.

And this is a man who has been in his business since childhood, who loves to tell stories about it, and who used to enjoy his work immensely. If this guy is looking for the exit, the problem is dire.

It’s pretty obvious why

I have limited faith in government statistics, but there are a few informative ones on this subject:

The US Small Business Administration (SBA) recently reported that the annual cost of complying with government regulations is more than one trillion dollars per year and has been since 2005.

It goes on to report that big businesses (500+ employees), pay about $7,550 per employee to comply with the regulations. Small businesses, on the other hand (up to 20 employees) pay about $10,600 for every person they employ. And this is just one reason why small, independent businesses are being swallowed up by giant corporations.

Also bear in mind that this is just the cost of compliance with federal regulations. States also impose regulations on businesses. So do most of the county and city governments, especially large city governments.

New rules are produced constantly, and the cost of compliance rises constantly. In the US (and many other places), the cost of doing business has long since become prohibitive.

The Work-Arounds

Clever folks always find ways to get around this insanity, of course. But those ways are extra work and probably help relatively few people.

#1: They get rid of their employees

They find niches in their fields that allow them to escape the endless paperwork, penalties, and senselessly wasted time that comes with being an employer. (If you’ve ever had employees, you know what I mean.)

And what of the workers? Well, some get hired by the few related-industry employers that remain, while others have to take a mind-numbing mid-level corporate job just to pay the bills or get insurance. The rest are living on food stamps, disability, or a dozen other welfare programs.

#2: They go offshore

If your business is not resident where the regulators are, they usually can’t say anything about it.

Not many business people have moved abroad, but lots of them have set up offshore companies and are conducting business on the Internet. These people get their lives back… if they can find a way to make it work.

That is the dirty little secret of offshore companies, by the way: It’s not about escaping taxes; it’s about escaping all that ridiculous, insulting, pointless paperwork. No more spending days crunching numbers at tax time, no filing new reports every time you do something. You just take care of your customers and deliver good product. (Which ought to be enough.)

#3: They pay politicians for protection

Why would anyone donate thousands of dollars to a politician unless they expected to get something in return?

Big businesses pay politicians so that they can make a phone call to get problems that arise fixed. Small businesses can’t afford that, and most small business owners have moral problems with bribery.

Legit Is Dead

Unfortunately, the old “American way” of working hard, conducting honest business, and succeeding is gone, dead, and buried. It may still happen from time to time, but infrequently and off the beaten path.

Not long ago, I found this sign posted on a streetlight in Chicago:

The sign is right – the old “legit” way of doing business is dead. If you want to get ahead these days, you either try to play a game that is rigged against you, you pay politicians to bend the rules for you, or you avoid the situation entirely.

It seems that the best and brightest – the would-be drivers of the economy – are choosing the last option.

What does that say about where things are going?

Paul Rosenberg

A Report from Middle America

by Paul Rosenberg, Freemansperspective.com

I was recently involved in a day of meetings with small business owners in the American Midwest. It was both encouraging and sad at the same time.

What I Found First

Overall, I found a large room full of productive human beings. It was uplifting. Most of these people were between thirty and seventy years old, more men than women, and they were all productive people, the kind who get up early every day, make sure that complex systems are producing properly, fix anything that is broken or near breaking, plan for the future, cooperate with large numbers of other people, and then go home at the end of the day and love their families.

If all the world lived like these people, we’d be halfway to a paradise by now. And that was a thought that made me sad.

Why? Because these people – by any standard of decency – should be left alone to create their better world. But instead, they are forcibly tied to wasteful, parasitic, and destructive systems. Half or more of their earnings are taken from them every year. Their actions are restricted by their moral inferiors. They live less than half the rewarding lives they should be enjoying, and for no defensible reason.

The Other Things

Beyond my overall happy/sad impressions, I found quite a few particular things:

These people would have preferred to discuss the practical particulars of their businesses – tools, materials, technical obstacles and solutions, and so on. But instead, they were forced to discuss government compliance. Almost every subject discussed from the front of the room dealt with government regulations. Most of the subjects discussed on the sides involved tools, equipment, business strategies and so on.
Dealing with employees is a major issue, especially involving the immigration police. These people are justifiably concerned with fines and indictments, just from hiring employees who are clearly long-time Americans. (That is, not Hispanics or other recent immigrants.) A few of the comments I heard:

“Good luck trying to explain that to an ICE agent.”

“Do NOT waive the 72 hour waiting period.”

“Do NOT allow them to enter your facility or inspect anything without authorization from counsel.”

Nearly all of these people agreed that government in America is out of control, abusive, and oppositional to their happiness. I think that’s a positive opinion, since it reflects reality, meaning that they have stopped looking at the world through myth-colored glasses. The sad part of that is…
These (good) people don’t know what to do about it. The system they grew up believing was their friend has turned against them. They’ve gathered the considerable courage required to face that, but they don’t know what to do next. They are working within the system as they can, trying to avoid its hazards, but don’t see any clear alternative – and no path of escape. They’d like to do other things, but they also need to feed their kids, and don’t know what to do about it all.
Bitcoin is spreading everywhere. One of these business owners, in a very rural area, has built a Bitcoin mining operation. And not only Bitcoin, he is also mining for the other crypto-currencies. And, he’s telling everyone else about it. I was surprised (and pleased) by this, since this meeting had absolutely nothing to do with computers, economics, or anything else that usually connects to crypto-currencies. This man simply saw a great opportunity and jumped on it.

All In All

All in all, I came away from the day more confident in the future than I had been the day before.

We are exposed to so many horror stories every day. The images thrust upon us show a world filled with danger and discouragement. The reality, however – once you remove yourself from the newsfeed – is that there are a lot of very decent people who are generally doing the right things.

Our job now is to define newer and better ways to live and to spread that information to as many good people as we can. And to remind them they DO have the right to live good, happy, prosperous lives.

Please do everything you can along these lines. Thanks.

Paul Rosenberg

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out – A Modern Interpretation by Paul Rosenberg

By Paul Rosenberg, FreemansPerspective.com

This was a big phrase in the 1960s, as young people turned away from
the corporate conformity of the 1950s and decided that they wanted more
out of life than being an adequately-fed cog in a big machine.

Let’s be honest and admit that the modern corporate script involves
selling your own wishes and dreams for paychecks. I know that a lot of us have played along with it because of necessity, but this is not a way of life to cling to, it’s a way of life to escape.

You are meant to live your life. Yes, I know it can seem hard, but
it’s the only life that’s really worth living. You have to give meaning
to your life, and you’ll never get it by following the televised script and hoping for pats on the back from the people who are playing along with you.

This life you have is precious. Human beings are engines of creation;
we are able to imagine and to turn our imaginations into reality. And we
are capable of supercharging our creative abilities by sharing our lives
and loves with other people. We are astonishingly capable creatures.

Don’t waste all your life’s abilities in a corporate cubicle. You’ve
already seen how that goes: Work excessive hours, go home tired, watch
TV, sleep, and start over. Your kids end up in mini corporate worlds
called “schools,” where they are taught to sit, be quiet, obey, and turn
off their internal desires and loves. If you play that game you’ll miss
most of your life in the process, as well as most of your children’s
lives.

Once you get some corporate inertia going, it is all too easy to get
sucked into it permanently. Don’t let that happen to you.

So, here’s my modern (and slightly adjusted) interpretation –
Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out:

Tune In

Wake up and see the world as it is. Turn off the
talking heads on TV and get to know the real world. Stop spending all
your brain cycles on celebrities, sports heroes and gossip hounds – get
to know your neighbor and the old woman who lives around the corner,
strike up a friendship with someone on the other side of the world. Travel. Spend your time with real people; get to know them, and reveal yourself to them. It only seems weird because the people who programmed you didn’t want you to think freely.

Do you think I am being dramatic by referring to “the people who
programmed you”? If so, read this:

Education should aim at destroying free will so that
after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished.

That was from the highly esteemed Bertrand Russel, by the way, and
I’ve got plenty more of them. Take this seriously, because your
programmers have been.

Tune in to yourself rather than your programming: What do you really
want? Most people can list a dozen things that bother them, but not a
single thing that they really want. This is a problem. Find out what you
want. What do you love? What do you want to work for?

Do you remember all those times in the Bible where Jesus berates
people for being “hypocrites”? Well, the real word he used was actors –
as in stage actors. And whether you are religious or not, this is
crucial: Stop acting in someone else’s play. Take off all the masks and
find yourself.

Turn On

Start doing what you love. Don’t wait for someone else, do it
yourself. Start helping your friends and neighbors, spend serious time
with your children – not at a game or a party, but just you and them,
talking. Find out what they love. Tell them what you love, what you are
proud of, what you regret. Tell them you love them. Tell them things you
don’t tell your friends. Let them know you.

Start living, not merely existing. DO the things you feel an urge to
do. And don’t fall into the usual trap of “what if I make a mistake?”
That’s simply fear-based conditioning. Resist it. Do what you love, and
in so doing, you will turn yourself on.

Are you going to go through your whole life and never follow your own
wishes, always sacrificing them to the tyranny of other peoples’
opinions? Please don’t do that to yourself – you’ll suffer greatly for
it when you’re old.

Screw all the expectations and turn on – act on your own will.

Drop Out

Stop wasting your time and energy on governments and arguments and
politics. Drop out of their mindset and start reclaiming all those
wasted hours. Lying politicians are simply not worth your devotion. Drop
the endless party fights and stop arguing about them. Politics is ugly,
and politics on the brain makes us ugly.

Stop paying attention to the hundreds of ads you see every day – they
are scientifically designed to grab your thoughts. Turn away. Stop
buying trendy things, and definitely stop buying things for the purpose
of impressing other people.

Stop trying to fit in, and stop living according to other people’s
expectations. Let them call you weird. Let them talk about you. Stop
caring about it. If they were real friends, they wouldn’t treat you like
that. So if they are willing to call you names, you’re better off
dropping them now.

Don’t fight the system – that just keeps all of your energy and
attention focused on them. Forsake the system and start creating a
better life for yourself, the people you love and the people you
respect. Stop giving all your life’s energy to a barbaric system of
force and manipulation.

Let the system go; all of it. Move on and let it rot where it sits.

But We Need A Plan!

No, you don’t. You need a life!

Let go of the plan addiction. Life is organic, not mechanical.

First of all, you need to identify what you want to create with the
precious life you’ve been given. Not what you want to stop, but what you
want to make.

If you’ve never been told to do this before it may seem hard, but you
can do it if you try.

Don’t sit and wait. Stop talking and start doing.

ACT! NOW!

[Editor’s Note: Paul Rosenberg is the
outside-the-Matrix author of FreemansPerspective.com, a site dedicated to economic freedom, personal independence and privacy. He is also the
author of The Great Calendar, a report that breaks down our
complex world into an easy-to-understand model. Visit his site to get your free copy.]