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From the depths of the scamdemic to the craziness of the trade wars, we’ve seen the economic destruction and disruption of our daily lives that can be caused by authoritarians who presume to rule over the world. But the society they are crafting is not the society we have to live in. Join James for this edition of #SolutionsWatch where he explores the concept of parallel societies and the steps that can be taken to create the building blocks for such societies to come about.
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SHOW NOTES
The Trade Wars: You Are Not Prepared
Parallel Societies vs Totalitarianism – How to Create a Free World
US town governed by a wizard where everyone is ‘100% certifiably insane’
Slab City Exposed: Homeless Growth and the Dark Side of America’s Last Free Place in California
Inside Slab City, The Lawless city in the Desert | Last Free Place In America
Episode 394 – Solutions: Survival Currency
Fight the Banksters with Cash Friday – #SolutionsWatch
Interview 1593 – Introducing Agorist.Market with Mike Swatek
Black Market Fridays – #SolutionsWatch
2025-03-05 — Ernest Hancock interviews James Corbett & John Sneisen Corbett Report) MP3&4
We moved to East Tennessee 5 years ago. Pretty much we have two friends. There is an Agorist group in Chattanooga, but it’s an hour away and their interests are not that aligned with ours. Their focus is agriculture, and most of the members are a lot younger than us.
I just wanted to comment on the Cash Fridays concept. In the US there is a website that collects information on estate sales and we have found it valuable to buy goods off the grid, without tax. It is estatesales.net. I primarily buy tools through it, but everything a person could need is available. It’s a great tool. Most sales are Friday- Sunday, but we regularly find sales mid week as well. Yard and Garage sales are also great sources. These are always cash only events, and also networking opportunities. There are apps for this as well.
We are retired, and holding our own yard sales is another way we could get cash income outside the system.
These are gray market solutions, totally Agorist.
100 watts can talk around the world on Ham radio 🙂 if you have the right skip. though not at the frequencies you use on a handle talkie or Mesh. You probably want to actually know stuff if your going to buy something that can hit the major bands, but you can literally pick most of it off YouTube videos if you don’t like to read.
People ought to get their HAM license which is ridiculously easy- to the point you can download the exam questions, which is ok if your just going to get a hand held that uses repeaters (“relay”) for voice locally
https://www.arrl.org/getting-licensed
Great! Thanks for the reminder. I’m in. I’ll be keeping a closer eye out for my neighbors’ sales this summer. It should help me meet more of my neighbors! Also, I feed by friends’ chickens with my produce and he rewards me with eggs. I buy his chickens a straw bale for their bedding and he returns that well manured straw to me for compost. I keep another friends’ family in fresh produce, and he keeps me in firewood. Barter has always been a naturally occurring parallel society phenomenon, and I love it.
This is such big fun for young well off and talented people, or the very poor. I despair for elders, disabled, chronically ill, and poor children, the expendables who have nothing to trade. This is the same ideology as capitalists, if you’re not productive, you get nothing, get out of the way.
“….if you’re not productive, you get nothing, get out of the wa…..”
That’s the way the world has always been for the most part, TBH. There is actually more slack for non productive people to exist today then ever before- which is not in all ways a good thing.
I hate to say it but capitalism is why we have so many non productive people alive…. Without the masses of excess food and goods capitalism created they would have just died off in the bad season like they did in ye olden dayes.
Capitalism is not perfect but the non productive have never had it so good as now, that’s kinda the problem since the system appears to farm useless
And helpless people for its own reasons.
The reset won’t be kind to them sadly
I believe you misinterpret the present “capitalism” with true capitalism, like I used to do.
True capitalism is without interfering governments, so no tariffs etc. True capitalism is the real deal.
Ayn Rand was a very clever woman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmcmauM78FE&t=12s
From my decades as a social/political activist, writer, musician and a practitioner of a high level of non participation in the pop culture, it is quite obvious the reoccurring us/them paradigm is very intentional.
After 50+ years of no movies or television, when I did enter that dark world reality in 2016, and started looking at the offerings it was very revealing to see the blatant use of psychological conditioning at work. People were in lab rat conditions. All the “scientific” studies about “Why do we have us/them conditions” constantly point to various sort of logical, but not on the button reasons. Like people “need to feel part of…” and that thinking.
In reality, strict group thinking causes people to act irrationally and uncooperative, from being more concerned about conforming with one’s group instead of thinking intelligently for ourselves, or recognizing other people’s interests and values outside of our own social circle. This can even be witnessed here on James’ site.
And that is the key to most everything regarding today’s highly conditioned human behavior. I commented the other day about this talking about the political us/them behavior by people who have never questioned why we have political parties in the first place.
So the idea of “parallel society divisions to me is just a renaming of the basic us/them Operant conditioning instilled in our daily lives. It is furthermore intensified by the foolish digital discourse where behavior modification takes place in a reward or aversive stimuli of being canceled or censored or supported and admired.
And the irony of that of course is with Internet anonymity that breeds no civil accountability, you don’t even really “know” who your “friends” are or where truth lays.
My “parallel” world for a half century has included men, women, Tribal folks, etc. who have some very important common interests that carry no idolatry to anything more then truth, kindness, generosity, and an affection for life in general. So by spending a lot of time with them when I have to venture into the “market place” I am less affected by their behavior…road rage, rudeness, toxic stuff in general, from the strength of my “normal” daily experience.
This division has been and will continue, as I have said here before: Our history is our foreseeable future, since neither the beliefs and practices, nor the controllers profiting from it have changed. With a severe lack of real discipline and focus on psychological and personal exploration and change, citizens in this infantile, caroonification world of cliche’ language and behavior show little promise that humanity will ever be able to extricate themselves from their bonds.
WALKING BETWEEN WORLDS (song)
https://old.bitchute.com/video/YV58suiSIw0K/
In the spirit of parallel economies and along the lines of my post in the March forum, here’s a question that everyone always gives me a bullshit answer to (and I’d be shocked if I’m the first person to ask this):
If people want to come together and 100% of them decide they’re going to live in anarchy without government, how is that not this thing everyone calls direct democracy, and thus a government?
It’s always fun to watch people start to bend and destroy definitions for this one. They eventually wind up showing me how everyone always wants to act like man defines the universe rather than man simply exists in the universe at its whim.
Actual anarchy is a BS idea that is the starting stage of society- as an actual form of organization for society its akin to thinking baby is the finished form of humans.
I suspect that what most people actually want is a less invasive, less “total” state. That a good goal imo.
Part of the issue is people are less and less able to maintain themselves without “the system “ and thus have grown weaker as the state grows stronger. This solutions watch points the way to people becoming stronger and thus weakening the total state system
“Part of the issue is people are less and less able to maintain themselves without “the system “ and thus have grown weaker as the state grows stronger.”
Yeah, that’s about right regarding people getting weaker and more dependent. I see lots of this working in hospitals with the homeless population. People with mental illness and drug addiction and complete dependency on “the system”
It’s sad actually and there is nothing to do for these people because I think the issue is feeling a lack of purpose. I think people would be shocked to see the degree of abject despair. Some of these people will come in covered in feces and behave like 3 year-olds.
And the implementation of “universal basic income” will probably make this problem worse. Not to say all homeless are this way and feel a lack of purpose but I suspect a large number of them do. I think human beings have to have something, some sort of “work” that they feel a sense of purpose to do. Perhaps it is a basic need.
@Duck:
“Actual anarchy is a BS idea…”
That’s actually a full sentence, expressing a full formed premise. You could have ended your sentence right there, but “…akin to thinking baby is the finished form of humans.” is pretty clever. Funny, actually.
I cannot agree with you more.
🙂
@Vienticus Prime
As I touched on in this interview ( https://edwardslavsquat.substack.com/p/the-revolution-will-involve-fermented ) I do not spend much time focusing on all the various flavors of involuntary governance and “democracy” people are getting excited about so you`ll have to clarify how you are using these terms before I answer your question.
Please comprehensively define all the working parts in this hypothetical “direct democracy” you are asking about.
Thanks.
Here’s a definition I read and I’ll post it here:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/direct-democracy
Ron Paul mentioned something “tyranny of the majority” that might exist in this type of system too.
@cu.h.j
Thanks.
The definition provided there still leaves so much room for interpretation and different expressions of the concept that I do not feel confident I could answer “Vienticus Prime’s” question above without knowing what he means exactly when he uses the term.
For instance, the link above mentions:
“..some ambiguity and controversy as to whether procedures with a focus on directly electing or recalling holders of public office (executive positions, legislators) may be meaningfully included in the concept of direct democracy..”
I also could not find any info on taxation dynamics and law enforcement dynamics, so I guess we can assume, those things would remain exactly the same as they are now? But, instead of all the voting fraud shenanigans we would have an actual functioning system where the majority is able to effectively exert its will to coerce the minority of the population to capitulate to their priorities and pay for the things that majority wants them to pay for (using the threat of violence)?
If so, I would say that is still a system that is inherently immoral and a system I will boycott, seek to sabotage (peacefully) and resist to my dying breath.
My assumption is that “democracy” implies that there can be a tyranny of the majority built in.
TBH, I don’t really know what this type of system would look like in modern form.
Cu.h.j
Try this video “why rich people want democracy “ ….. LIBERAL democracy is a great way to hide who is actually running things.
The Biden admin was wonderful at showing that the President is not the actual decision maker
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6jEzmoTcaic
That really drove that idea home for me. You know how you can know something intellectually but not really believe it until you see it. Well, I really saw it with Biden. Now I know how it works.
I’m still curious who the “elite” cabal was running Biden versus now with Trump. It seems like Peter Thiel is the main guy and Elon Musk. I just wonder if there are other players too, like someone we never see or hear about.
Maybe it’s a network of 100 “elites”?
Personal taste: One principle I think is often left out in the discussion of parallel societies is the old “don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” When people do talk about it, I don’t think they emphasize it enough. The simple idea I put to people is relying on single point of failure systems; if everyone’s on the same page, what happens when that page burns?
The black pill pushers and their “dark version of Field Of Dreams”
haha you crack me up sometimes James! Well said. 🙂
Some of the ideas are nice, but we are a LONG way off from being beyond the systems of oppression. I do everything I can to grow my own food and pay cash for many things. But I’m not seeing anything like a parallel anything by me even close to fruition (unless one can actually be off the tax grid).
I’ve said this before, and I’ll probably say it again: There is no way to live beyond the system unless one hides out in a remote area unfound (which isn’t even likely anymore). And one best have some scary-Good survival skills to do so, which most of us don’t have… Otherwise, even though I own my house, if I don’t pay exorbitant property taxes every year, THEY will take my house from me. And while local mesh networks for communications sound great, they are not readily available; and they would be somehow hijackable/hackable like everything else these days.
I don’t mean to sound like a Black Piller, but things are progressing very quickly on the elitist front.
And what if we don’t have any connections beyond ourselves (which is my situation despite trying very hard to establish community)?
I won’t be able to drive my 2002 Honda Civic without a Real ID and registered license plates by 2027. And I’ll need a government passport to travel?
All I can say is we need to do the best we can.
The future is always in motion, like yoda says 🙂
Your right , no one can do everything but if you are just a bit hardened against things people have a lot of opportunities open that others won’t- and the ruling class does not always get its way for one or another reason.
If they always got. Their way we’d be in pods or dead by NOW. 🙂
From my point of view, all you need to drive your 2002 Honda is gas and oil, and perhaps the keys!
When the systems comes down there will be no goons getting paid to enforce the rules, except for maybe robots, but then there has to be a way of cutting off the energy required to run them.
I was talking to a guy from Germany that still had German Plates on his Motorcycle after being here in Michigan for years. He said that he had ridden the bike allover the place and never got stopped.
The rules are pretty crazy when you do the research. As it turns out, most of what keeps people from being free is the fact that they have unwittingly agreed to one form of slavery or another.
For example the form most people sign to get a “Drivers License” is regarded as a Contract that makes them a slave to Highway Laws, yet one does not need to be a “Driver” to travel in ones own vehicle. A “Driver” is defined as one who is involved in commerce and the government has been delegated to regulate commerce. Give them an inch and they take a mile.
Another example is Federal Income Tax which was only for those that made money by way of some government privileged or actually worked for the government. For Individual men and women,, the Income Tax, was, and still is, Voluntary. Most people knew this going into WWII, however if you didn’t go to fight the war, then you had better pay an Income Tax or the corporate media will turn the mobs out after you. Another way the IRS gets people is that when people sign a 1040 Form they have signed a Contract stating that they Owe the amount of money stated on the Foam and the IRS will take the money from a person’s bank account whether they actually owe it or not.
I love all your work. But this, this was a beauty for sure!! Some great links also, cheers James. Thanks.
While I agree with the sentiment, we just need look at Wako to understand what happens when you attempt to run a parallel society. “They” infiltrate, and corrupt and destroy. The alternative is not laying down though James, it is standing up. People will need to make change in existing society. Very difficult after Covid. Most people are psychological munted and all the money is with the controllers. For example all the universities in Australia are mostly reliant on Defence and Banks funding research grants. It will take some creativity. It will happen, Darwins monster will come along and give society a backhand, it’s just a matter of time, but that doesn’t mean sit on your hands.
They sure did destroy the parallel society in Waco Texas. I think part of what made them a target was they were armed and said they were anti-government, so their “optics” make them an easy target.
On the other hand if you look at the Amish have more or less been left alone by the state.
I don’t think the people in Waco did anything wrong and had a right to have their guns, but it appeared to be a threat by the state. This has been mentioned by JC in other podcasts about how the state will destroy people who use violence or in this case imply they are capable of violence.
The concept of parallel societies are to build community that is better than the state and competes with it and is not using violence to do it. It is a “parallel” system that exists along side the other system. Once a large enough group stops using the state system, it would fall away.
It would be like if a majority of people dumped their social media and stopped using Iphones. Can the state force people to use social media and IPhones? How would they force this? Roll out a bunch of police and go door to door? This looks bad and I don’t think they have the man power to do it. Drones on civilians? Maybe but that tech is expensive. It would create something too big to sustain. Which is why the state uses incentives and companies manipulate people. The state uses consent to function. If people withdrew their consent the state would become smaller and smaller.
It would be impossible to impose a slavery system by force. Even people in China could overthrow their system by refusing to work for it. It’s like a massive boycott.
“….would be impossible to impose a slavery system by forc….”
I hate to say it but I actually think it would be possible or even easy in a lot of cases…. If you TAKE AWAY THE MEANS OF FEEDING THEMSELVES OUTSIDE THE SYSTEM most people would go along and be docile.
It just would not be economically all that viable a system. Slaves are lazy and you need to drive them more than free labor since they have no buy in….. They are only real good for unskilled manual labor like farming or heavy industries.
Slave revolts are pretty rare in history and. The vast majority of moderns IN THE RIGHT CIRCUMSTANCES (like there being no way to feed themselves outside the system) would go along as well as 19th century slaves did.
The Soviet Union was not far off being a slave state in the days of Stalins industrialization (or rather re-industrialization since Imperial Russia was on the way to being a bigger manufacturer then Imperial Germany )
Slavery is also wasteful and inefficient because you have to actually take care of your slaves if you want any buy in at all and people without buy in are lazy as hell.
Honestly having free range slaves (like free range chickens) is much easier to do – minimum wage workers really are not any better off in MATTERIAL life then their equivalents back in the old south.
A comparison
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eiS-cSUKsh8
If you ever feel like making yourself
a bit nauseous you should listen to “the anti humans” on martyr made podcast by Daryl cooper. Or for a fictional example you could read the Draka books I recommend before by SM Stirling.
I would assume that there would be some individuals who would reject an obvious slavery system, i.e. by force. The “buy in” idea makes sense. And many people do buy into the existing system to get stuff for “free”
Modern “wage slavery” seems to be just slavery however in theory there is still a choice to improve ones situation. I’m not sure slaves back in the old days (or in modern times-i.e. human trafficking) could leave if they wanted to. Free will comes to mind. The wage slave can theoretically learn to function more independently.
Is there not an innate desire for freedom? Perhaps this is what causes despair in people who see no sense of purpose and feel trapped by their circumstances.
The point that seems to be overlooked here is this is not about our immediate happiness. If you are happy with syndicates of corporate mobsters running the world then the future looks dim indeed. We have a responsibility and that does not involve operating in parallel. This is parallel approach in nothing but a passive version of giving a president powers and the next president with differing views using those powers against the best interests of all. You allow this structure to continue then you will reap what you sow. Or you can be selfish and trade potatoes and beans all so our future generations can face enslavement. I’m very sorry but y’all gonna need to face reality. I’m not black pilling here, not by any means, but the solution is not parallel economies whilst let the wound fester. Just look at how well the parallel economy is going in Gaza. Yep, come back to reality or get lulled into tyranny.
So join the Amish or realise your uncomfortable reality, those are the options that have been forced upon you. Joining the Amish doesn’t guarantee future security. Realising your uncomfortable reality is just that, uncomfortable. The only coloured pill we need to be talking about is red.
WHAT is freedom?
Freedom as you under it probably would have been a weird, even offensive, idea to people through most of history. The Germanic tribes had a pretty egalitarian way of doing things but even they would think it weird not to have serfs and slaves or for peopyto just live life “however” they liked outside of social norms.
For example the founding fathers had slaves, and would have not been cool with homosexuality and abortion for the most part- Tom Paine was an outlier and a weird radical in his own time.
“…. I would assume that there would be some individuals who would reject an obvious slavery syste….”
You would think so, but considering the rarity of slave revolts I don’t think many would.
Consider that the soviets enslaved a large number of German combat soldiers (men already experienced in fighting) and worked them to death in Siberia after the war. Gulag revolts were not a major thing…. Spartacus was an odd case be the was of a people allied to Rome captured and sold to Romans and allegedly felt angry that his allies biugjt and kept him as a slave…. Most people’s minds appear to adapt and accept things “the way they are” a only a tiny minorit will value autonomy enough to die for it.
The only successful slave revolution I know of is Haiti, which has been a revolting dump since they murdered all the whites and mullatos…. As I understand it conditions were VERY harsh there And their own story is they made a deal with a demon to do it. (Not kidding that’s THEIR story)
The definition of freedom is a huge philosophical topic, but I’ll link two definitions from the Oxford dictionary and Cambridge dictionary here:
https://www.oed.com/dictionary/freedom_n
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/freedom
I understand it to mean freedom from unjust and unethical interference, confinement and harm. For example forced vaccination, slavery, rape and torture. Ethics and morality need to be discussed when we talk of freedom.
Are there limitations? Yes there are. Are minors free to do whatever they want. I say no. They are under guardianship of their parents until they are adults. Are we free from conscience or to do what is right? I’d say no.
Must I attempt to save a person’s life if I am not in my place of work (since I have the training and skills to assist)? My conscience says if I can help, I must, but only if it does not risk my own life in the process. So I have ethics and morals that limit my behavior.
Does freedom mean “do whatever you want”? I say no it does not.
Yes, people have behaved barbarically and slavery was and is common. But it does not make it ethical.
In America, the ideas of freedom and liberty were explored and more fully fleshed out and my ideas about these concepts were formed by living here and through my upbringing.
For me, homosexuality and other sexual matters that transpire between adults are private matters and should stay that way. I don’t want to see or know what other adults are doing in their bedroom. I think people should be “free” from sexually offensive material and behavior.
I think there is “appropriate” behavior in public, modesty and some degree of civility that is often lacking nowadays.
Should there be a government office that approves the types of sexual behavior that occurs between adults in private? A knock at the door and inspection? I don’t think that is appropriate either.
“Most people’s minds appear to adapt and accept things “the way they are” a only a tiny minorit will value autonomy enough to die for it.”
Yeah, I also think it depends on the culture from which a person comes from as well. Also their mental state.
Stockholm syndrome comes to mind. There are many ways to imprison “the mind” that makes real physical slavery easier to sustain.
Some people seem to consent to it, but then if people consent is it really slavery?
I would say it’s still slavery , just that people adapt.
Now you mentioned Stockholm syndrome I think it’s a good question as to WHY does stockholm syndrome exist?
There was that dude who kidnapped a woman and told her she was his slave, then she had free run of the house and just went along…. Or that kid that the Mormon kidnapped in Utah and took out in public wearing a face covering and she went along too….. probably the REASON stockholm syndrome exists is that in ye olden dayes people who got kidnapped by neighbor tribes either started to identify with their new owners (and tried to get the same response from THEM) so that they wouldn’t just get killed.
I read something like 1 in 4 kidnappings have some kind of transferance of emotion but I can’t recall if that was a decent study or not
Red Balloon affiliated with the Tucker Carlson Network….They” infiltrate, and corrupt and destroy.
Anything on the internet is not parallel, it is reliant and entirely within the existing structure.
You are correct, the tech is getting better. But so is the snooping. You will not be able to do what you are thinking with existing infrastructure.
spoken word economy, pen and paper
Thousands of autonomous drones can easily get in between those arrays, your encryption ain’t nothin’. This is not a reason to be excited, it makes people complacent and doesn’t help. The human race has cancer and this is just ignoring the tumor.
Just as I was perusing Ernest’s website, it was “suspended”. I guess he has made fans worldwide 😀
https://occupytheland.org/
While creating and experimenting with parallel societal structures and systems will call for one’s creativity, education, reason/logic, imagination, and other critical/creative thinking skills, more important and primary will be development of ATTITUDES of a spiritual nature.
“Meher Baba’s teachings emphasize that the heart’s guidance comes before the mind’s, with the mind’s role beginning after the heart has had its say.”
Why does Crapuchettes display the corporate American flag?
Brazil Clears 8 Miles of Amazon Rainforest to Make Space for UN Climate Conference
https://gizmodo.com/brazil-clears-8-miles-of-amazon-rainforest-to-make-space-for-un-climate-conference-2000574955
Oh boy, we may have hit peak hypocrisy. This news brought to you as courtesy of JD.
I have been doing the “Cash Friday” approach after doing talks at local horticultural, preserving, naturopathic and other meetings locally and selling my book (that comes with seedlings/seeds for people to start their own food forests/regenerative gardens).
It simultaneously helps people connect their current health/gardening related focus to a more holistic framework (which empowers them as individuals) while also increasing the resilience of our food security locally as a community.
It helps people access and share food without being taxed by statist regimes and it gets people sharing seeds and knowledge with neighbors, building a web of symbiotic relationships that resembles a sort of mycorrhizal network-esk web of give and take, share and support where these different groups connect, share knowledge and everyone learns and builds their confidence together synergistically.
Great episode James.
Thanks for another interesting solutions watch. As you say, it’s a vast topic. I was pleased to see you topping and tailing the podcast with content from the ever excellent Academy of Ideas. I’ve been consuming their content for quite some time. It’s always very thought provoking and, in my opinion, there is a sizeable overlap between their focus on totalitarian systems and your own work.