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Jul 5, 2022Liked by CulturalHusbandry

Cultural Husband, your essay reads with the passion and principle of the Declaration of Independence - but that document was about independence from a tyrannical, thieving foreign power. Your Declaration is about liberating ourselves from an endogenous, insidious tyranny that has evolved rapidly in the past 50 years or so. There is no clear starting point; it has been incremental and accelerating. The problem is scale. At the time of our founding, the 13 States could easily secede from the Union and survive with complete autonomy if they had to. The threat of secession was a powerful weapon, a check/balance against tyranny arising all over again, this time from within. Sparsely populated, with simple economies that were primarily agrarian, and blessed with seemingly inexhaustible resources, undeveloped land, at a time when the speed and pace of communication, travel, and life itself made it impossible to have the nearly instantaneous reactions as today, the States could secede and succeed. Now states are fused together, like conjoined twins bound so tightly, sharing their circulatory and nervous systems, that "surgery" would be violent and potentially catastrophic. California, with ~40 million people, cannot survive prosperously without water from other states. It is powerful and parasitic, and uses its asymmetric power in Congress to force other states to supply the water - basically, "water taxation without representation". Texas, which rumbles all the time about secession, cannot possibly sustain the current way of life of its citizens independently, respond to internal disasters, etc, without "federal" assistance. Fusion of this sort is synonymous with loss of freedom, creating a syncytial mass, an unsustainable bubble in which the central government has to impose - coerce - standardized behavior over a geographically, economically and culturally heterogeneous population. Artificial intelligence, computer algorithms, etc - amoral, automated, heartless - are increasingly required to manage the flow of resources - and their restriction - to keep the syncytial mass alive. Social homogeneity at this scale is impossible. It is the basis of Stalin's observation that "when one person dies, it's tragedy; when a million people die, it's a statistic". Central bureaucrats make sweeping decisions based on statistics, not on anything remotely resembling natural compassion as found in a family or community. As the saying goes, a man who cares for all children equally neglects his own; but we are being increasingly pressured to neglect our own children to take care of total strangers. We are achieving de facto Communism/Big Brother through the backdoor of an increasingly totalitarian central government that parades around in American flags under the banner of "democracy" that is just a self-serving tyrannical bureaucratic duopoly that does not represent the people. The problem is that at this scale, the fusion process - a morbid codependency between the States - has enslaved us all. Somehow or other we have to return to a hierarchical localism that is viable, even if tensions persist between the levels. That's what "checks and balances" is all about. It will be a painful and revolutionary process. States raising their swords and shields (interposition and nullification) is a good place to start. You are a good neighbor. Good neighbors will die for each other, but strangers are less inclined.

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Jul 5, 2022Liked by CulturalHusbandry

Boom! Been saying this (though not nearly so eloquently) for several years. Didn't think about it before 2016....wrongly accepted Federal supremacy as the standard. 2016 changed that. And this essay clearly articulates why. It's a delicate balance between optimizing the benifits that comes from the economy of scale 50 states operating under a common objective brings.... and respecting state sovereignty.

And right now we are very out-of-balance.

If we could get to a Convention of States (getting closer but not holding my breath) we could have this debate without Federal intervention (though I suspect they'd do everything in their power to sabotage a CoS).

Bravo again.

As always, I'll be kind to my neighbors.

Cheers

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