Why I am Optimistic...

I began awakening about the same time as Szechuan Death. It was difficult at first. I had to do a lot of research and then I had to learn to discard most of the education I had gained in the prior 30 years or so. It didn't fit. It could not be made to model actual conditions. It was wrong. There are many reasons why it was wrong, but the most evident was because the state wanted it to be wrong.

Now that I have learned some truths about history, about economics, about states, things have become quite clear. I don't need to battle the state. The state requires my support. I only need to deny that support and the state will collapse. I have stated it many times on this blog (and others), "IGNORE THE STATE". Now many of you are fearful of ignoring the state. That is understanable as that is what you have been trained to. But if you want freedom, you need to start thinking for yourselves, protect yourselves, and most of all support yourselves.

Szechuan Death has his own perspective that closely mirrors my own:

Most Root Strikers, in my estimation, came to their beliefs because they are officially broken, factory defects in a world not of their making whose functions are strange and counterintuitive, where everything seems at least the slightest bit "wrong." Because of their perception of the craziness of the things they are told and made to do whether they will or no, whether that perception was conscious or not, they started pulling and tugging at threads around them until a couple came loose. They did not and do not BELEEEEEEEEEEEVE On The State like they were supposed to, never completely, and so consequently went looking for other explanations and found 'em, back when it was hard (or harder, at any rate) to do. That's my story, in a nutshell; I've been broken since Day One, non-traditional all the way, a freak from the word Go. I've had a general low-level dislike for things which violate that natural law which all of us are born knowing but most somehow manage to forget, but only since 1998 have I made any strides toward understanding the larger picture and its mechanics, largely due to the improved access to information the Information Age has afforded the general public. Now, here I am, scribbling out little screeds in my spare time, one of the phosphorescent plankton flagellating about in a decaying Leviathan's wake, doing my best to keep afloat and prosper. That's my "how," and from what I've read, it's scarcely unique. Most heartening is that it seems to be getting less and less unique as time goes on.

The danger to the State is not that these people, these heretics and apostates of its Cult, will band together and work to destroy it; it is far more insidious, and far more overwhelming, than that. These people have access to the information that was previously unavailable due to cost, or inconvenience, or both. These people are replicating this information, analyzing it, reading it, disseminating it, discussing it, and refining it, all without realizing or caring that they are only meant to be burning it during the Two Minutes' Hate. They pound little drums for Liberty all across the planet, and slowly those drums are coming into synchronization of their own accord, converging on one single, pure harmonic, the low seismic thrumming of Truth and self-fulfilled prophecies that even the oblivious are feeling and swaying to. These people are wise and canny; they do not need the State, and feel no love for it in their breasts, and will not be there to prop it up when it begins to fall under its own weight. And that is, perhaps, the greatest danger they pose; that while they may not lift a hand to harm they sure won't lift a hand to help, that they will, at the very end, the last extremity, that crucial hour when all good men must come to the aid of their Crown so that the unthinkable prospect of an outbreak of uncontrolled human activity can be stifled, will finally render unto those panic-stricken, directive-spewing, impotent toadies of Caesar begging for assistance and compliance just that which is due them, the immortal wisdom of the fat sage Cartman: "Screw you guys, I'm going home."

And the by-now-certain-to-occur, once-in-a-millennium opportunity to deliver that line and walk away smiling to live our lives free, that is why we should be optimistic.

More here...

It really is that simple.

"Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer."
-- Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776