Whoever controls the volume of money in our country is absolute master of all industry and commerce. When you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate.
― James A. Garfield
As should be expected after moving, I’ve been going through a bit of a change.
Despite having grown-up in the country, I spent the majority of my adult life in busy cities living in apartment after apartment and dealing with annoying absurdities, but also spoiled by convenience and countless avenues of opportunity. There are perks to the city, but frankly the choice to move away from urban centres was an easy one to make. However, finding similar opportunities out here is a bit of a challenge.
While I am grateful to escape those busy highways and the half naked neighbours who’d stare at you from across the road, like everyone else I have bills to pay and a future to build. There are some promising career opportunities out here, which may fruit shortly, but in the meantime I have to settle with achievable opportunities first. And right now that happens to be — retail, with bizarre conversations behind the Employees Only doors and weird small town drama. However this experience has taught me a few lessons, and since I consider myself a perpetual student of life there’s no better way to learn than to humbly sit back and observe.
“Going-off grid” is somewhat of an idealistic myth.
The phrase may simply imply avoiding the electrical distribution system through on-site generation, but often describes an ideal of transitioning to a decentralized local economy. That sounds nice, but what is an economy? The word economy is thrown around like a heavily used, abused and violated rag doll, with very little functional meaning left behind it. In simple terms, the economy is a system of exchange for goods and services that enables social cooperation to improve standards of living.
Grandma’s cookies are good, but I’m not too confident about her homemade toilet paper. Personally, I’m tad fussy. Homemade toilet paper sounds nice, but leveraging the economic system frees up time and usually guarantees better quality, because the real economy is effectively human cooperation, where each participant contributes and reaps mutual benefits. Thankfully not everyone has to make their own toilet paper.
Agriculture is one of the best examples to understand economic mechanics.
A farmer grows a crop and could then process, distribute and sell it, but that’s a monumental task. The steps from seed to plate are more efficiently distributed through specialization, called the division of labour. In this system, food is grown by a specialized farmer, purchased by a specialized processor, and distributed and sold to the general public by retail specialists. Chefs are another class of specialists that add even more value to retail or wholesale food. The farmer could do all these tasks, and some small farmers do, but specialization is more efficient and improves quality.
However each division must exchange value between steps. In a barter economy, this done through an exchange or payment in kind. For example, the processor could pay the farmer in kind through processed food that the farmer couldn’t produce, and the retailer could pay the processor through another commodity not easily accessible to the producers, but this type of payment is inefficient and only works if there’s a double coincidence of wants. Otherwise, division of labour can’t operate.
Money solves this problem. In this simple economy of goods and services, the most sellable commodity serves as the medium of exchange, unit of account and store of value, which was described by Aristotle in 350 B.C.E. called The Commodity Theory of Money, where an agreed upon commodity is used as coinage to facilitate pricing and exchange. But there’s a second and seemingly conflicting theory called The Credit Theory of Money, which claims that coins, notes and tokens represent an abstract social construct, i.e., a credible and transferrable promise to the holder of a token. In other words, the transactions between divisions of labour represent credible, transferrable and redeemable promises. Within this frame, socially constructed money has the potential to create a “sustainable” and “equitable” monetary regime by regulating contracts through the state, the most creditworthy issuer of money.
Which theory of money is the correct description?
My recent move and experience in retail got me thinking.
In the country there’s a lot of opportunity to produce and source basic necessities, but there’s still the need to transact with others, including the state and institutions for taxes and insurance. “Going off-grid” is not possible in the technical sense, because there’s no ability to separate from the liabilities of the state. We would literally have to become pirates or a separate country. If we lost the ability to transact, possibly if our money was no longer recognized as credible by the state in a new monetary system (e.g., Digital ID + CBDC), then we couldn’t pay taxes. Nor are we able to produce or procure every single good or service, like toilet paper, toothpaste or plumbing. The best we can do is increase our resiliency and recognize these limitations.
What about a parallel economy? Well, first there needs to be a network of trusted social relationships willing to transact in kind, which is not a defacto option. From my brief experience operating the register, barely anyone still uses cash or understands the concept of barter in kind. Even the Hutterites use credit and debt cards. Essentially, we’re stuck using the system until enough people realize it’s broken.
Despite my current retail employer being a cooperatively owned business, where community members own shares and decisions are made in the interest those shareholders, it must follow all state and federal regulations first. Funny enough, locally produced vegetables and meat are difficult to sell because of the regulatory overhead necessary to offer it at retail, which wasn’t always the case from my understanding. If government so desired, a slight change in regulation could easily choke the food supply or dramatically increase prices from compliance costs.
Who really has control over the company, the local shareholders or the government?
Since so many customers use digital payments, a technical disruption could easily halt commerce and impact the community’s ability to procure basic necessities. Some older customers shop daily and don’t keep much food at home. On the inside, I can directly see that the store has a limited inventory that is maintained through biweekly shipments. When those shipments are delayed or if there isn’t enough staff to unload the delivery, it’s apparent on the shelves rather quickly.
People seem to have forgotten the shortages in 2020, income coercion in 2021 and frozen bank accounts in 2022. Barely anyone is publicly discussing the root causes that impaired our economic system so severely, which could possibly happen again.
Which theory of money is correct?
For those who enjoy conspiracy theories, which I found entertaining like scary camp fire stories — until they started to happen, you should be familiar with Behold a Pale Horse by Milton William Cooper, and if not — read it. I never use to take conspiracy theories seriously, because I assumed if anything was severe enough it would become widespread knowledge out of pure survival instinct and self-preservation. However I still gave conspiracy theories a decent thought experiment, because really who knows. The first time I read Chapter 1 from Behold a Pale Horse, I was absolutely shocked.
Chapter 1 is an alleged leaked manual from the 1950’s that describes the beginning of the Third World War titled: Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, which is full of technical nuance that most people can’t read, but I can. Whoever wrote that either has an extremely sophisticated sense of humour, or it’s not a joke.
For decades, a world war has been waged in complete silence to totally control society through analysis and automation using literal engineering, which is what the remainder of the chapter is about and includes systems of differential equations to describe socioeconomics. In other words, this chapter describes detailed technical methods for technocratic totalitarianism derived from energy sciences. The models abstract the entire socioeconomic system as an electrical circuit using the Hamiltonian, which could be monitored and controlled like an industrial system through high speed computerized technology. A predictable economy under this scheme would require that the “low class elements of society be brought under total control” by disintegrating the family unit and creating poor quality education to ensure the inferior class “cannot extricate themselves from their assigned lot in life.”
CONSEQUENTLY, in the interest of future world order, peace, and tranquility, it was decided to privately wage a quiet war against the American public with an ultimate objective of permanently shifting the natural and social energy (wealth) of the undisciplined and irresponsible many into the hands of the self-disciplined, responsible, and worthy few.
— Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, pg. 7
So again, which theory of money is correct?
Well according to that model they’re both correct, because The Commodity Theory of Money and The Credit Theory of Money would respectively refer to the real and complex components of an energetic circuit of human work, which implies currency is like current, production is like a magnetic inductor, supply is like a capacitor and consumption is like a resistor. It could also be thought of as the duality between the hardware and software of a system, where software can’t fix a hardware problem and hardware can’t fix a software problem, but both are needed to make it operational.
Imagining this premise implies we’re connected to an even larger grid than previously understood, and digitization is an attempt to add fine control points to manage all human behaviour, work and labour. This is the fundamental purpose transhumanism. Such a feat would be considered the largest engineering project ever created, designed to fully harness the power of human beings for political power.
Apparently, The Matrix was a documentary.
If each individual is a component in a grid and requires an active supply of energy to survive, how is it possible to go off-grid through a parallel economy? The safest method would be to gradually migrate through parallel operation, and the least safe method would be a hard shutdown, transfer and restart.
Unfortunately, the first method is currently in play against us, because the digital technocratic system, with centralized monitoring, control and heavy regulatory compliance, is already operating in parallel and the public has mostly transitioned. Secondly, a hard shutdown, transfer and restart already occurred during COVID, where many systems were completely digitized. Most large companies now use cloud technologies like SharePoint Online, SAP SuccessFactors and Microsoft Teams that have centralized control functions built-in. For example, SuccessFactors has a module for vaccine compliance that wasn’t turned on for most companies, but could easily be activated by government policy or crises that would provide fine control of corporate employees through HR. And how much biometric data has been collected by Teams? What company information is analyzable from files stored on data centres? The productive components of our economy already have deep hooks lodged in them.
The real purpose the quietest war, the Third World War, is to control energy and its beast system is designed to control the physical world, the kingdoms of the earth and truth itself. These are promises of absolute control to the would-be principalities, powers and rulers of darkness. Those who have no interest in this totalitarian economic system have to carefully understand how parallel systems work and its technicalities. The key is energy, which takes on many forms because of conservation principles. This explains why there’s so much political controversy over food, electrical generation and internal combustion engines, and also includes public perception and opinion since social energy is considered part of the model.
16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
Our economy is an energetic grid of human work.
To develop a functional parallel system, the first step is a redundant backup, like homesteading and preparedness, and followed by a trusted network of productive specialists willing to transact in kind. The final step is to influence the broader public by fostering a skeptical and questioning attitude. If one half of the system depends on credibility, then reputation is its weak point, which necessitates alternative media, investigative journalism and demonstrable real-world results.
I may not be able to look at the stars and predict the future, but I have faith that those who seek the narrow path will be guided after trials and tribulation. The last few years were a test that many failed, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from our mistakes and build a real future for new generations. The quiet war and its silent totalitarian beast system is already running in parallel. What are you going to do about it?
When I first started a business remodeling houses I told people, we can pull a permit but it will cost 40-50% more and take at least 25-50% more time to finish the job. Not one person ever said yes, let's pull permits.
Years later I was still working without a license. A state investigator fined me $4000, reducing it to $1000 if I would get a license. I got the license and still have it. No one has ever complained about my work. No one called the state. The investigator found my web site. I offended the State.
As for off grid, it is best to be on grid/off grid, doing as much off-grid as you can, so when TSHTF and everyone else is freaking out, you and yours are fine. Best to have a community of such people though. Glad to see you talking about it.
Your methodical analysis of the coming disaster is part Biblical and Alex Jones. And I don't mean in a bad way. You provide the road map to a conflict that is on our doorstep. Transhumanusm is the demonic goal of the power brokers. How this war ends is, I believe, up to God. Ted, you once again sound an alert that most don't even realize is on the horizon.