The Individual, his freedom, and victory

The Individual, his freedom, and victory

By Jon Rappoport

We are in a war.

The State, as now constituted, pretends it favors giving away the farm for nothing “to those in need.” What they really means is: they steal the farm, and then they give it away on their terms.

Genuine entrepreneurs know what it’s like to get up in the morning and re-create their enterprises and make them work every day. They know how much energy it takes. They know it isn’t the easiest thing in the world, but they value the FREEDOM it brings. They know how it feels to follow their own desires. These people are real. They exist.

They experience frustrating days when their business isn’t going well. On those days, they feel trapped in the very universe they created. They wonder how it might be to give up and go to work for someone else. They even wonder how it might be to get a desk job in government and feel the protection of government. But they don’t give in.

They’re too stubborn to give in. They show up every day and they push their enterprise forward.

And these are the people about whom Obama said: “If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

Sure, Mr. President. We weren’t there at all. We’re fictions. We don’t exist. Other people are always standing in for us. It’s not our sweat, it’s not our power, it’s not our imagination, it’s not our commitment that invented and sustained our businesses. It’s all done by remote control from Washington. I’m glad you finally clarified this mystery for us. You’re a genius.

People who’ve never started and run their own enterprises don’t understand. They don’t know what the sweat means and the struggle means and the vision means and the power to keep doing it every day means, and they don’t know what the joy of earning their own way means and what deeper victory means.

There are people who don’t understand what a FREE INDIVIDUAL is. They want a world of Central Planning. They feel a welter of emotions, all negative, when they contemplate THE FREE INDIVIDUAL.

Newsflash: Money is not inherently evil. Profit is not inherently evil.

What is evil is trying to melt the individual into the collective. That has always been evil.

For the free individual, “the highest work possible” doesn’t involve leaving one’s desires behind, in order to become the abject servant of a Cause. He doesn’t suddenly develop an egoless and empty personality in order to “connect” with a goal that floats in an abstract realm.

The free individual isn’t shaped. He shapes.

He doesn’t fall on his knees and grovel to seek public acceptance.

The mob, the herd operates on debt, obligation, guilt, and the pretense of admiration for idols. These are its currencies.

The herd, seeking some reflection of its unformed desire, constructs a social order based on need—and the substance of that need will be extracted through coercion, if necessary, from those who already have More.

This need, and the proposition that the mob deserves its satisfaction, creates a worldwide industry.

Among the industry’s most passionate and venal supporters are those who are quite certain that the human being is a tainted vile creature. Such supporters, of course, are sensing their own reflections.

The great psychological factor in any life is THE DESERTION OF INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM. Afterward, the individual creates shadows and monsters and fears around that crossroad.

Freedom is the space and the setting, from which the individual can generate the thought and the energy-pulse of a great self-chosen objective.

In that place, there is no crowding or oppressive necessity. There is choice. There is desire. There is thought.

“Being absorbed in a greater whole” isn’t an ambition or philosophical prospect for the free individual. He sees that fixation as a surrender of self.

The Collective, whether envisioned as a down-to-earth or mystical group, promises a release from self. This grand solution to problems is a ruse designed to keep humans in a corral, a prison. After all, how are you going to control and eventually enslave people if you promote the notion that each individual has freedom and free choice? The abnegation of self is a workable tactic, as long as it is dressed up with false idols and perverted ideals.

Self is fundamentally creative, dynamic, forward-looking, energetic, powerful, engaged. The Collective looks for shadows of those qualities in the government as its source of survival.

The free individual isn’t opposed to helping others, but he is against a culture that is so preoccupied with “raising up the lowest” that it nurtures a hatred of liberty. And this is a crux, because growing millions of people are all too eager to shed the last fragments of their Selves to join in a fantasy of “everybody gets everything.”

The fantasy doesn’t work. The melting down of all of humanity into a mystical goo is an illusion that can’t stand the test of time. Eventually, a person falls out of that construct and remembers he must depend, to an alarming degree, on his own inner resources.

The free individual doesn’t act in ways that limit the freedom of others.

Self-sufficiency is both an essence and outcome for the free individual.

If America had pursued a path of making the nation self-sufficient, without relying on entangling foreign political and business relationships, it would have avoided the corruption that naturally flows from those relationships, and it would have become living proof that freedom and the principles of the Republic work. It would have become a shining example to the rest of the world, a new standard to emulate.

Far from committing the “sin of isolationism,” it would have provoked others to try the experiment of freedom.

The free individual discovers his way through imagination and creative power, because that is the answer to the question: what is freedom for?

Without exercising imagination and creative power, freedom withers and dies. It becomes an empty slogan. It becomes an empty stage.

We are told, in a thousand ways, that the free individual is the personification of greed and theft and crime. That is false.

The free individual imagines and creates on a scale that supersedes and ignores the Collective. His work naturally spills over and benefits others.

Advocates of the Collective falsely claim the free individual is cold and uncaring and remote and “without humanity.” Meanwhile, their picture of a society based on need is a poisonous affectation; it is constructed because these advocates are walled off from their own power. Therefore, they substitute endless entitlement.

Their only nod of acknowledgment to the individual has been to propagandize him as an outsider, a potential danger, a lurking menace, a person waiting to be diagnosed with a mental disorder.

These days, it is the Group that is elevated. We must absorb the individual in the system so the Group is protected and safe. We must omit mention of the individual in teaching children. We must say that now the nation is nothing more than an interconnected Whole. We must promote interdependency as the highest ideal. We must declare it is obvious that all actions must be judged on the basis of how they will affect the well-being of the Collective.

Even accepting Mill’s specious pronouncement that society should be organized on the basis of the greatest good for greatest number, the questions remains: what is the greatest good? Is it that which makes us, more and more, into a Group? Or is it that which liberates the individual to pursue his highest aspirations?

The greatest good liberates the individual, and then the door is open. Who will walk through it? Every person who has divested himself of collective consciousness.

Then perhaps historians and scholars will be forced to change their stories. Perhaps, some day, they will admit that history, before it was hijacked, revealed a progression away from the Group and toward the individual. Perhaps they will be forced to admit their affected fetish about “primitive societies” was a ruse to convince us that, once upon a time, we lost our way, when we disentangled ourselves from group consciousness.

Oh, there will be screams. There will be many screams. There will be accusations that we are deserting the human race, that we are leaving others behind, that we are refusing to help those who need it.

Eventually, those screams will die on the wind. As many wake up and realize they had sacrificed their lives on the altar of the Group, the protests will fade out.

Because many will see, as if for the first time, what freedom means and how it feels.

And against that, there is no argument.

The titanic myths that have been foisted on humanity and the titanic acceptance of those myths by humanity are all focused on one lie: the individual cannot stand on his own; he must subjugate himself to a system.

I don’t care what form that higher system takes. It’s all a lie. It’s all geared to promoting slavery. It’s all geared to allowing the few to control the many.

And the few WILL control the many, until the day comes when enough individuals throw off ALL the deceptions that permitted them to think The Individual was less than he is.

The day will dawn when the individual knows he is greater than any and all groups and collectives by any name flying under any flag, espousing any gibberish, elevating any fairy tale, seducing with any promise, hypnotizing with any idol or misbegotten legend.

That day will dawn.

But why wait?