Being a Delta Rat

So, I was coding earlier today when I received an email from Doug Casey's International Man, which I reservedly follow.  He is good at describing the problems.  The title of the email was "Top Five Reasons Not to Vote."

The problem is political myopia induced by the enforcement of party lines and overarching political philosophies, which push out divergent, independent thought.


As Casey says,

According to the current usage, liberals tend to allow social freedom, but restrict economic freedom, while conservatives tend to restrict
social freedom and allow economic freedom. An authoritarian (they now
sometimes class them­selves as "middle-of-the-roaders") is one who
believes both types of freedom should be restricted.

But what do you call someone who believes in both types of freedom?
Unfortunately, something without a name may get overlooked or, if the
name is only known to a few, it may be ignored as unimportant. That may
explain why so few people know they are libertarians.

A libertarian believes that individuals have a right to do anything that
doesn't impinge on the common-law rights of others, namely force or
fraud. Libertarians are the human equivalent of the Gamma rat, which
bears a little explanation.

Some years ago, scientists experimenting with rats categorized the vast
major­ity of their subjects as Beta rats. These are basically followers
who get the Alpha rats' leftovers. The Alpha rats establish territories,
claim the choicest mates, and generally lord it over the Betas. This
pretty well-corresponded with the way the researchers thought the world
worked.

But they were surprised to find a third type of rat as well: the Gamma.
This creature staked out a territory and chose the pick of the litter
for a mate, like the Alpha, but didn't attempt to dominate the Betas. A
go-along-get-along rat. A libertarian rat, if you will.

I have been cursorily preaching on the problem over the past few years, but I had never found any good solutions short of a generic "resist the government" epithet, which was of little help in actually directing effective change.

Doug Casey's solution, being an International Man, is a good prudent solution if you are willing to throw your fellow man under the bus, which I am not sure is a proper Christian thing to do.  Hence my reticence in actually following many of his suggestions.

 However, he has suggested some very good advice in his post "The Single Wisest Thing You Can Do with Your Money,"

Scrooge McDuck had the right attitude.

One of the most formative stories I’ve ever read was an Uncle Scrooge comic written in 1953 by Carl Barks at Walt Disney Studios.
It finds Scrooge McDuck at play in his binful of money, diving and wallowing in it, doing what he likes best. As he leaves his bin to go out for his daily routine, it turns out that his nephew, Donald Duck, has decided to play a prank on him by putting a fake newspaper on the park bench with the headline “Coins and Banknotes Now Worthless!…Congress Make Fish the New Money of the Land.

Scrooge sees it and is stunned. All his cash is worthless. He plops against a tree thinking that he hasn’t even one little minnow with which to buy a crust of bread. By the next frame of the comic book, however, the courageous old duck has picked himself up and is ready to get back in the race, saying, “Well, there’s no cause crying over bad luck. I’ll get a job and start life all over again.”

Soon we find him down at the waterfront talking to a fisherman. He offers to paint the man’s boat for a sackful of fish. Scrooge earns his fish and takes them to a clothing store where business is bad. He trades the fish for a raincoat. Back at the waterfront, he trades the raincoat to another fisherman for two sacks of fish.

Since the fish are getting heavy to carry around, Scrooge trades the two bags to a farmer for an old horse, then trades the horse for ten sacks of fish.

By the end of the day, Scrooge has a mountain of fish: three cubic acres’ worth. As much of the new money as he had of the old. He looks at the cold, clammy fish and asks himself…how to count the new money? By the pound or by the inch? How to keep it? And how to spend it before it goes bad?

Sorrowfully he realizes that fish isn’t as nice to play with as his old money. Fish don’t feel good and they smell bad.

All of the sudden, he doesn’t want to be rich anymore. He hires a trucking fleet to take the mountain of fish to Donald, who always wanted to be rich. Donald’s house is buried under dead fish.

Donald’s joke backfired, but Scrooge proved his point: You can start from scratch if you have the right attitude and come out ahead if you play your cards right.

Scrooge didn’t have a fish to his name when he had to start over, a lot less than you’ll have if you liquidate all your unneeded possessions. They’re costing you money, and tying you down. Transform the junk you’ve accumulated into cash, which you can redeploy the way Scrooge McDuck might.

The next step in your plan is to start earning to add to your grubstake—that is, create more money. It was key to Scrooge’s second fortune, and it’s key to yours.

But it’s necessary to have the skills necessary to provide goods and services to others. Scrooge made his fish fortune by his skills at business, but there are thousands of others.

I also found today a blog post by Louis V. Galdieri titled "The Delta Reponse to Gamma Rats and Sociopaths" in which he referenced the idea of tikkun olam ("world repairing" or "building for eternity" in Hebrew) as a solution to the corruption that is manifesting itself in our society today.  He says,

The delta understands social collapse and institutional failure not simply as a crisis, but as an opportunity to create something new. The delta wards off doom by doing humble work, tinkering, fixing and reclaiming. As I conceive it, delta is all about tikkun — doing the difficult work of “world repair,” not throwing one’s hands up in despair. It takes imagination. Poets, painters and teachers can be deltas; they give us new models to work with. So can inventors and entrepreneurs. In fact, I would put social entrepreneurs and socially responsible investors at the forefront of the delta group. And delta is on the rise: B-corporations, which work to produce public benefits, have won legitimacy in seven states; legislation in pending in seven others.

Deltas work at a remove [sic] from the dysfunctional centers of power, on the edges of organizations, independently and within small groups, where they can experiment and learn from each other. The delta looks for alternatives to the destructive power dynamics of the alphas and the betas – flatter organizations, fair dealing, transparency and collaboration. If the gamma is entirely self-directed, even to the point of idiocy, the delta is other-directed, altruistic, a maker of community. Deltas stay networked, because they recognize the limits of the self, and know that our lives and our liberty take on meaning only with and in relation to others, no matter how much we may fantasize about going it alone.

Given our present political trajectory, I believe that a societal collapse in the U.S. is a very real possibility, and I have spent an enormous amount of time trying to envision how such a collapse would manifest itself and ways to avoid or mitigate the consequences to myself and society as a whole.

Part of the tikkun, or rather, part of Jewish custom as a whole is the idea of jubiulee, or across the board debt forgiveness and returning of land to heirs.  I am not altogether sure how one would implement such a thing in a modern society, but it would effectively be a mass default on debt across the board.  What I am certain of is that there is some deeper wisdom to this that within our modern context makes very little sense, but also looks like the only legitimate solution to our collective mounting debt problems.

Another concept that I was informed of is the idea of forming ecclesiastical courts to offer arbitration services to people, as the present state-sponsored judicial systems will collapse when the state collapses.  As Rousa John Rushdoony says,

We know from 1 Corinthians 6 [paraphrase] that Paul said: "Don't go to the civil courts. They're ungodly. Create your own courts." And they did. They were so efficient that after a while pagans were coming to the church courts and saying: "Adjudicate our problems for us. It takes years to get a case heard in the civil courts and it bankrupts us and then we don't get justice. Would you do it for us?" When Constantine became Emperor, he called in the bishops and he said, "The courts of the Empire are failing. We have cases that have been in the courts forty years with no justice. I want you men when you go out in the streets to wear the garb of a Roman magistrate by my orders so that the people of Rome and of the Empire will no [sic] that they can come to you for justice.

And now, we stand at the precipice of repeating this history, the new Rome, the United States of America corrupt and failing, nearly inevitably doomed to destruction by financial and social collapse.  I think that, as a delta rat, it would be prudent for Christians to begin the process of setting up all of the structures necessary to fulfill judicial duties in communities in the event that our government is overrun by debt and breaks down the social contract.  These two would go along ways toward mitigating the consequences of the seemingly inevitable collapse that is fast approaching in our society.  Although, I would hope that we would learn from the past and avoid going astray as the Catholic church did when the responsibilities of the state were thrust upon them.  We must be aware of all of the history surrounding the development and evolution of church courts based on Biblical principles.

However, none of this matters unless we can help to allay the root cause of all of this insanity which is the inability to think independently.

Democracies and republics only work when the voters are adequately informed and knowledgeable as to make prudent decisions on who they choose to cede power to.  When voters no longer think critically or independently, you end up with this myopic groupthink that is liberal, conservative, Republican and Democratic movements.

What is worse is that this myopic thought can be induced invisibly through measures such as Sesame Credit or Google search results.  Everyone, especially you dear reader, must make every effort to make yourself unable to be manipulated by malignant forces in our modern society.  Part of this involves distrusting every institution, including the church, and wielding that distrust to cause us to double check everything and ensure that our philosophical foundations are secure such that any insanity foisted upon us can be identified and discarded.  We cannot simply pull out of society, or even the church, but we must maintain a spirit of distrust to keep our minds sharp and intellects ready to identify falsehood and discard it.  This is a fine and very difficult balance that I have not achieved yet.  But at least I can see the seven thousand steps up the mountain, whereas merely a few months ago, I was wandering blind in this area.

Be a critical thinker, read, do your research, and be wary of Google search results. The future of society depends on it.