To Be Free Is To Be Self-Governing

The notion of living in a free society raises the practical question of what, exactly, we must become and do in order to be such a people.

Autodiathism is the answer. "Anarchy" has become jargon, saddled with impossible baggage. I jettisoned that term long ago, even though I still use it on occasion. I coined "autodiathism" some years ago from the Greek for "self determination". The idea is to be self-governing. It is a simple concept the requirements and challenges of which are monumental in spite of their outward simplicity.

Civilization is a condition in fundamental conflict with human nature. Civilization cages what is essentially a wild and free animal in its nature, and so the animal rebels against the bondage, however light it may actually be. Our choices in this regard are few: live with the constraints of living among and amid one's fellows, or kill each other until we are left with the last two cavemen, Thak Eisenberg and Grog Blumenthal, nervously eyeballing each other from opposite sides of the nightly fire, hobnailed clubs in hand and ready to deal the final period at the end of humanity's last sentence.

Clearly, the human instinct to survive - to LIVE - biases us toward learning to live with each other. This is perhaps the right choice, everything considered. But the challenges there are stupendous because the civilized state rubs against and thwarts our hunter-gatherer nature. Having been suppressed, the inner animal of nature's origin rebels, and so we have robbery, assault, and battery - as well as all the other "wrongs" that men commit against each other.

The Framers of America were quick to point out that free people must perforce be moral. In the context of civilization, morality turns out to be a huge hill to surmount. But once there, it is relatively easy to remain there, all else equal.

To be free is in deep part to be self-governing in accord with one's proper moral constitution and his habits of comportment. But even in a society that is morally sound in the general, there will be those who either cannot or will not self-govern. We call them criminals, most often... or in some cases just "assholes". Because they fail to self-govern, they must be governed by others for at least a time.

So a basic requirement for flourishing and ubiquitous autodiathism is that people BECOME "government" - but not in the usual sense of the lie with which we all grew up. Rather than governMENT, there must be governANCE; firstly of the self by the self, but secondarily and only where and when needed, of those who fail at it, by those around them. This is primary, but there should also be secondary roles of near-equal importance and of great utility, where we hire trusted guardians of the peace who discharge their sworn oaths as matters of primary obligation, paid of course. Because their lives are pledged to such service functions as investigations and trial of accused criminals, they become well adept at those functions that include law, forensics, and so forth. But they are not absolute authorities whose every fiat must be blindly obeyed. They are, indeed, servants who operate at our sufferance. They operate within an envelope of granted authority under agreed conditions making clear to them that any excursion beyond the metes and bounds of that generously granted authority will carry harrowing consequences, anywhere from losing one's position or life, to losing life itself, depending on the severity of the violation in question.

This all requires vast public participation, high moral standards, and an attitude of eternal vigilance, narrowly PROVISIONAL trust, and a grim intolerance of any breach of that trust, including the ready will to remove life from those who break faith with whom they swore to serve, i.e., the general public.

This is a task that, were we to begin today with full cooperation and material means for implementation, would take at least a full generation go get off the ground in a way we might even vaguely deem "comfortable". It would take probably at least three or more full generations to get most of the mental, cultural, and the various external poisons out of the population. And it would likely take a healthy number of public executions as stark illustrations and reminders of just what it means to betray the trust in which all such guardians of the peace have been vested.

Draconian response to tyranny is essential as the deterrent, no matter how seemingly trivial the violation may seem, It is the only way to best ensure that all comers to the altar of the public trust do so with shivers for fear of betraying it, whether through corruption or accident.

The price of tyranny must be set to such impossible height that all scoundrels are immediately dissuaded by their own choice to demur from public service. Let them endeavor to defraud grandma of her savings, rather than assume the mantle of trust, for tolerance of such people with the latter leads to what we now have: borderline chaos and endless grift with life rendered a misery for countless legions of otherwise good people. The time is now finally upon us to decide, and decide we shall, one way or another; whether through positive action of the default of evasion what sort of a world it is in which we wish to live. There is no escaping this, so my advice is to think on it carefully, realizing what you relinquish if you choose continuing tyranny, which will one day not too far off, advance beyond our reach to throw it from our necks. I continue to believe in the goodness of people, in spite of the evil that besets us on all fronts. And so once again I bid you adieux, and as always, please accept my best wished. May the Divine guide us all toward the light of goodness.

Somewhat Daily Diatribe, 5 February, 2026

The "left" whines and shrieks "racist!" endlessly.

Newsflash: we are all "racist" because we are wired to be.

Forgetting that the notion of "racism" was concocted by CPUSA in the late 1920s/early 1930s in response to America's "no thanks" response to the pitch for "communism", and granting for conversation's sake some marginal validity to the idea, the truth of it would be that our mid-brains are wired to the tribe: "us v. them" is in our DNA, which is a major reason why civilized humanity engages in so much warfare. We are a fundamentally predatory species oriented toward our most immediate filial and social relations. Couple that with our possession of a complex cerebral cortex that can a little too easily wander into strange territories if we fail to control how those cortices evolve from childhood, and the formula for some grand challenges becomes our reality. Add to that the fact that territorialism is yet another fundamental aspect of our midbrain selves, and we then find ourselves with the conditions for some rather serious trouble, as is borne out by our checkered history of ever advancing wavefronts of violence.

Civil life runs at deep odds with our basic midbrain programming. Therefore, remaining behaviorally sane in a civil world becomes a study at internalized warfare within individual in one manner and degree or another. Sedentary living even at the small village scale lies at some odds with the hunter-gatherer architecture of the human mind. The midbrain impulses suited to living on the constant move and taking what you need to survive from the unclaimed resources of the planet are engineered for basic survival under such conditions, and not a whole lot which is fancier. Those reflexes, however, have been perverted by the unnatural circumstance - the "cage" if you will - of civilization, and have run right up against the formalized, abstract ideals for life among and amid one's fellows under those conditions - products of the higher cortex. Therefore, crime, tyranny, war, poverty, disease, misery, and possibly eventual extinction as a species have arisen with the great advances to which sedentary civil life has lead the human species. Hunter-gatherer tribes were never going to send people to the moon. They also were probably not getting mugged on a lonely lower Manhattan street at 2AM on a Saturday in frosen January by one of their own.

We were engineered for the savage life, i.e. mobile tribal living, and not for sedentary civilization. Small bands of maybe 50 individuals can move quickly. No houses or huts to pack up and move. No pack animals to keep/maintain, and far fewer and simpler stresses. If a threat looms, you get out of dodge in minutes, or even seconds if conditions demand, with relatively small material losses, typically. Life is free, but in many ways very tough; but that toughness fosters unity and strength in both the individual and the group. Things are difficult enough when people work together as small but smart and well-practiced superorganisms. Therefore, the immediacy of overbearing reality renders gratuitous in-fighting as a very dangerous development to be avoided at almost any cost.

This is very different from sedentary, civil life where the populations are much larger, people who are strangers to one another live in unnaturally close proximity to one another, and the biggest superorganism in town is always the "government", stranger to all men, and which issues directives to which disobedience is often met with grim violence. Further complicating matters, "territory" is become static, much larger, and far more abstract in many cases, rather than small, fluid, and readily portable by a single individual human being. Property has become much larger, most often quite cumbersome, and relatively very difficult to manage, as opposed to that which one can carry on his back.

There are many advantages to civil life, but the price we have paid has been stupefying. And in more recent times, it has been shown to foster rank, raw stupidity, whereas much simpler savage life where one is on the constant move demands quiet, well-centered minds, patience, maximally engaged intellect and smarts at all times, wisdom from direct experience, and an attitude of understanding and respecting the consequences of one's choices in an indifferent and often very dangerous environment.

In those times, ages ago before the rise of sedentary living - and even well into that era - people moved physically with far greater mindfulness and deliberation. They did so because a broken leg would likely mean death. Today we have people doing the most insanely idiotic things, like jumping off 80-foot ice cornices into bowls of 8-foot deep powder snow so they can thrill-ride down to the lodge for a hot-toddy and some wild memories... assuming they don't end up buried in an avalanche. And if someone busts a leg, the ski patrol will take then to the ER where the booboos will be made all better.
Until comparatively recent times, people spoke with far greater elucidation, deliberation, clarity, and completeness of thought because no sensible man wanted to risk misunderstandings, especially with strangers, when the consequences could result in death or maiming injury.  When reading texts from times not even so long past, we see longer and seemingly flowery, almost redundant sentences uttered between people.  This expressive style was not used because people liked to hear themselves talk and show off to others how poetically they could ask directions to the nearest corner bodega.  It was to make as certain as possible that they were not taken as a threat to the other, nor were they offering any form of verbal disparagement.  As to that latter, it must be understood that in such times people even of comparatively meek social status were raised to understand and deeply respect the nature and power of words, whether spoken or written.  They understood that nothing in their lives were as immediately important than words.  Even a single poorly chosen word could mean severe consequences for an individual because neither were threats, nor disparaging remarks, nor defamation easily tolerated, especially by the upper classes, even among each other, much less from those of the lesser ranks.  Let a poorly considered sentence fly from your lips and you could find yourself on the field of honor the following morning, or just killed on the spot, a sword or dirk buried in your chest.

Today, due to the often will-contrived synthetic protections of "government", people have degenerated in their understanding of words such that people now as matters of constant habit allow all manner of wildly ill-considered statements to escape.

Your thoughts form your reality, and your words form your thoughts.

Let that sink in just a bit as you consider the things you hear people routinely say these days. You may wish even to consider some of what issues from your own pie hole. We all do it, and we do it because we can almost always get away with it. None of that bodes well for our future as a species. Such behavior as we routinely see today would have been seen as bordering on demonic possession even a mere couple of centuries ago precisely because it lacks any hint of basic sanity. But that is where mismanaged superorganizing on the modern civil scale has taken us. While many of civilization's byproducts border on the miraculous, the price exacted has been terrible on many fronts, and I often question whether it has been worth it, given the evils that it has all dragged along with it. By a similar token, one has to question how many of those evils arose a matters of nature, versus intentional introduction by men of lesser integrity, capacity, and perhaps even of malevolent intention.

The bright spot in all this is that it is by all means possible to live freely, healthily, profitably, happily, and properly among and amid out fellows. All hope is by no means lost... yet.

The dark spot is that far too often we choose not to. Our individual corruptions of fear, avarive, ignorance, and lassitude lead us to make poor choices in such matters. For all the miracles to which civilization has given rise, it has also corrupted the human animal deep in his marrow, and as of this writing things appear to be getting worse by the day. I question whether our pending plans for sending people to Mars will have proven worth the losses of freedom, not to mention the oceans of blood spilled on the path to getting us there. Only time will tell, but in closing I say this: we are not helpless. What we have broken, we can repair. Human relations are deeply ruptured these days, and I see no possible brightness in humanity's future unless and until we make proper amends in our habits and our attitudes toward each other. I have no idea how to do that on a global scale, but I can stake stabs at how to do it in America, which while a simpler proposition, nonetheless remains a monumental and at times seemingly insurmountable task. One thing I can say for certain, however, is that the fundamental divisions between "tribes" that include vaporous notions such as "right" and "left", or "progressive" and "conservative" have to be settled and mended as the level of the Principles of Proper Human Relations. Anything less dooms us to a bleak non-future where we retreat into a New Dark Age, full of hatred, anxieties, tyrannies perhaps yet unimagined, poverty, misery, and death for those who fail to toe the tyrant's line. There will be no more protesting the the quiesced rights that so many of us have taken for granted for so long. There is hope, but YOU have to become its vehicle, it's realization. The notion of such hope carries validity only when one acts, and does so properly in accord with the Principles of Proper Human Relations. We do not speak here of burning cities in the strident effort to dominate the other; to force him into the good mold, because human nature being what it is, he will fight you tooth and nail out of the resentment he feels at being given no choice. We must, rather and through example, convince the deceived and ill-trained of the virtues and pleasures of living properly among and amid each other; of the joy of it; the profitability. The only alternative is grim, leaden existence where vibrant, healthy, and free life ought rather to be found. And in order to become such an exemplar, one must master himself: the most nearly impossible task in all of human reality. Note "nearly". Barring some sort of Reset Event, the road ahead for us appears long and very arduous, and that is assuming we even bother giving our remaining hopes a halfway serious effort. The alternate path is nothing less than doom - and that does not have to mean the physical extinction of human animals from the earth. It can even more easily mean the extinction of freedom's last remnants and any prospect for their return. As the levers of human technology grow in power, coupled with the ever degenerating, tightening standards of individual comportment that reduce us to Merecog status, the window of opportunity to turn things back toward liberty closes ever more narrowly until the day comes it shuts completely. On that day, and in concert with what will almost certainly prove the ever growing and viciously enforced avarice of the Global Hegemon, all hope for humanity will have been extinguished.

All people will then have been reduced to the lowest, most demeaned, degraded, and disparaged status of rank and abject slavery possible. The juicy irony, for whatever cold comfort it may provide, will be that that the agents of "state" who have deceived themselves into believing they stand outside of the constraints of control they foisted upon the rest, shall themselves be equally imprisoned by their schemes. The technologies so many view today as miraculous will have been forged into the shackles of their perpetual misery.

So my suggestion is to get right with yourself by whatever means you need. If it means getting your lazy bones up and going to church, then do it. But whatever it is, I suggest you not wait even one more day because that window is closing on us all. Be good. Be loving. For Pete's sake be smart. And until next time, please accept my best wishes.