Decentralization and Diversity: Keys to Survival

by Gerry Allan | Feb 1, 2023 | Future, Survival | 0 comments

“The only way to control chaos and complexity is to give up some of that control.”
— Gyan Nagpal

“We’re moving from a centralized understanding of the world to a decentralized understanding of the world.”
— Mike Cernovich

“It doesn’t surprise me at all that a Treasury secretary would find a decentralized potential currency… to be hostile to a currency that they control.”
— Francis X. Suarez

“I believe the role of the government is too big. Society must be more decentralized.”
— Pavel Durov

“True progress lies in the direction of decentralization, both territorial and functional, in the development of the spirit of local and personal initiative, and of free federation from the simple to the compound, in lieu of the present hierarchy from the centre to the periphery.”
— Peter Kropotkin

“The struggle between centralization and decentralization is at the core of American history.”
— Anthony Gregory

“Diversity: the art of thinking independently together.”
— Malcolm Forbes

“Strength lies in differences, not in similarities.”
— Stephen Covey

“If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.”
— John F. Kennedy

“Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilization.”
— Mahatma Gandhi

We have today tremendous forces at work driving us toward centralized control, one world government, and perhaps even totalitarianism. These will inevitably collapse, but not before causing great pain and suffering – as always. What can we do to survive? Decentralization and diversity are the keys. To succeed, both are essential. How might this work in practice?

The prior post looked at the World Economic Forum (WEF) and its strong, visible support for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). For a globally-purposed operation with stated goals involving a Great Reset, a Fourth Industrial Revolution, and One World Order, supporting decentralization seems most contradictory. Or is it?

DAOs are based on blockchain technology, which is inherently decentralized in its structure and functioning. It is rules-based and transparent by design, quite unlike the WEF or any of its globally-focused partners (e.g., UN, WHO, EU). How can a world made up of mostly decentralized organizations be surveilled and controlled centrally as the WEF and other globalists are trying to do?

The answer is quite simple: digital everything

The globalists want to surveil and control everything and everybody. Centrally. Unfortunately, people, aka us, are notoriously hard to control and we mostly don’t like being watched. In this respect, we are extremely decentralized. Herding cats comes to mind here.

Even if we are locked down, should such an unbelievable thing ever happen, or worse yet we are imprisoned, which has happened in past so it is rumored, the native human independence does not go away. It may be tamed for short periods, but there is always a rebellion of some sort popping up somewhere.

This aspect of human nature is extremely inconvenient for our globalist ruler-wannabes. They might try to get rid of people, which – however farfetched – has been considered, so I read, but this could leave them with nobody to control. So, people are a necessary ingredient of world domination. You will no doubt be greatly relieved to hear this.

The globalists then are stuck with us, or at least with a rather sizable number thereof, in order to have folks around to surveil and control. What to do?

Well, of course, today with our magical technologies, they can digitize us and almost everything we do. Computers are so much easier to control than people. We can be encouraged and assisted to interact, transact, and collaborate through DAOs and their kin. All highly decentralized, naturally. And autonomous, insofar as the blockchain rules and smart contracts permit. But, he who controls the internet can control everything digital.

Maybe then we will all own nothing and be happy. At last.

Much of our world today is highly complex and centralized

This is a trend that has been going on for centuries, and probably millennia. As the chart below shows, most of human history was tribal and nomadic. There were about 4 million people around 12,000 years ago, according to Our World in Data. Things really started moving civilization-wise around 6,000 years ago. By year 0, there were a guesstimated 190 million folks scattered here, there, and about. Still lots of tribal stuff, but growing numbers of supra-tribal towns and cities sprouting.

History tells of many sizable civilizations that devoted much of their spare time to wars and killing each other. Despite this regular inconvenience, the world managed to reach around a half-billion folks by roughly 1500 AD. From that point on, population growth exploded for various reasons – probably including people figuring out how to have more surviving kids than those who died early. The big push, so I read, came in the 1800s when sanitation and medical care improved hugely, resulting in dramatically reduced rates in infant mortality. This happy happening took us rather quickly to our current 8 billion people out and about.

A prior post had a scandalously optimistic look at population.

No matter. We have today so many people milling around that everything has become highly complex and quite confusing. We have nearly 200 nations, ranging from India and China at around 1.5 billion apiece, to a whole gaggle of small fry who mostly volunteer for United Nations posts and gratuities.

This is clearly way too many, as quite a number of ruler-wannabes have pointed out over the past few centuries. Their various efforts to bring this growing global population mess under some sort of centralized management has unfortunately led to quite a number of wars and somewhat lesser conflicts.

Lessons learned? Probably few, other than that such centralizing efforts seem to lead inevitably and inescapably to failure. Maybe until very recently when technologies provided a whole new set of powerful tools for domination. These amazing tools have not been fully tested as yet for purposes of centralized world domination. The WEF appears to be leading the charge in this respect, but it has a couple of strongly-contending competitors.

Size of the world population over the last 12,000 years. — Source: https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth

Fortunately, huge complex systems like our world are inherently fragile

A post a while back addressed this inconvenient (for ruler-wannabes) situation. Especially for systems that are tightly and extensively interconnected. Fragility is inherent in such complexity.

This means that our world is likely to collapse or otherwise self-destruct rather shortly no matter what we do. Random events stress such systems, routinely and unscheduled. Probability ensures that one of these will serve as a trigger for major nastiness or worse.

We must assume in all of this that the “random” event is not a nuclear global war. Unfortunately getting to be an increasingly shaky assumption.

Absent such a catastrophe-to-end-all-catastrophes, we appear to have some possibility of generating system-disturbing events and situations that will keep the ruler-wannabes occupied until conditions leading to their failure arrive. Messing with the system, speaking technically.

In what manner might us normal folks mess productively (for us) with our complex, fragile world system?

Well, we certainly don’t want to trigger a societal-scale collapse, as might occur if we happen to cause a big civil war or two, or maybe to blow up a whole bunch of essential stuff somewhere. What we need here is something that can work largely under the radar, and possibly even within radar-range as well.

Our presently complex, super-connected, inherently-fragile world system.

Centralization and uniformity create fragility

Without delving into complex systems theory, which tends to be excessively complex to normal beings, we can see that centralization of many social, political, and economic units will encourage these units to interconnect. If they don’t, then they will be prodded and coerced to connect in all manner of ways by the-powers-that-be-or-wannabe.

Having to manage, i.e., surveil and control, huge numbers of dissimilar units is far beyond the capabilities of even the smartest people around, let alone those who tend to over-populate centers of power. As a result, there are almost always great efforts made to reduce differences and create manageable uniformity. “Units” here are of course people and their organizations.

Today’s world of 8 billion such units, their 200 or so national groupings, and almost uncountable factions and organizations, is a sad fact of life for globalists and their kin. Despite various efforts to consolidate and centrally manage this obviously unmanageable mess, it will persist. Humans, aka us, have demonstrated an uncanny ability to survive whatever its leaders-of-the-moment do. Leaders for the most part are not smart, but tend to be sociopathic and even psychopathic. Or so a recent post argued.

Anyway, this global mess clearly needs major simplification in order to permit the necessary surveillance and control. Who better to handle such a task than the WEF, assisted or not by such powerful organizations like the UN, WHO, EU, and the like. They will shortly transform us (or greatly reset us) into a manageable global entity of some kind. Probably involving a Fourth Industrial Revolution if Klaus Schwab has anything to say about it.

You know – “manageable” as in centralized and uniform.

A One (or New) World Order is centralized and uniform

Good thing we are living in a democracy, or pretty much so. Okay, constitutional republic, to be more precise. Anyhow, in a democracy kind of thing, there is a limit to how much centralizing you can do before some group or other objects. Actually, groups objecting – protesting – seems to occur in all manner of political environments. Like in Brazil recently. This human tendency is very helpful for us wannabe-survivors in many cases.

Deep thinkers, however, see democracies as inherently unstable and relatively short-lived. Alexander Fraser Tytler, Scottish economist, in 1787 with reference to the emerging United States, offered this prescient view:

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage [emphasis added].”

Where would you say we might be along Tytler’s sequence? Maybe somewhere in the “abundance to selfishness to apathy to dependence” timeline? Toward the latter markers, I think.

Dependence and bondage are characteristics of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. Or worse. The WEF in particular has been quite open about its aims: “You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy”. This doesn’t sound to me like it is optional. Assuming that they succeed in world domination, of course.

Totalitarianism is certainly centralized and uniform

Totalitarianism seems to be an especially nasty situation. It is an extreme that may result from a “mass phenomenon” of some sort. Such as the recently-popular flavor “mass formation psychosis (or hypnosis)” set forth by Prof. Mattias Desmet. He has even discovered a link between this mass phenomenon and totalitarianism: “The Psychology of Totalitarianism”:

“Four things need to exist or need to be in place if you want a large-scale mass phenomenon to emerge. The first thing is that there needs to be a lot of socially isolated people, people who experience a lack of social bonds. The second one is that there needs to be a lot of people who experience a lack of sense-making in life. And the third and the fourth conditions are that there needs to be a lot of free-floating anxiety and a lot of free-floating psychological discontent. So: meaning, anxiety, and discontent that is not connected to a specific representation.”

“So, it needs to be in the mind without the people being able to connect it to something. If you have these four things—lack of social bonds, lack of sense-making, free-floating anxiety, and free-floating psychological discontent—then society is highly at risk for the emergence of mass phenomenon.”

The Professor helpfully offered some quantitative estimates of the size of such a hypnotized mass. Approximately 30% of people are completely hypnotized, with 40% to 60% not hypnotized but choosing to go along with the crowd, and a minority of 10% to 30% who resist the narrative and actively push back. I took a somewhat skeptical look at all of this in a post a while back.

Prof. Desmet cleverly links mass formation psychosis/hypnosis to totalitarianism.

Totalitarianism is generally pretty bad stuff

Yet another professor, Rudolph Joseph Rummel, an American political scientist and professor at the Indiana University, Yale University, and University of Hawaii, linked totalitarianism to democide in his book “Death by Government: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900 (1994)”. From Wikipedia:

“He spent his career studying data on collective violence and war with a view toward helping their resolution or elimination. Contrasting genocide, Rummel coined the term democide for murder by government, such as the genocide of indigenous peoples and colonialism, Nazi Germany, the Stalinist purges, Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, and other authoritarian, totalitarian, or undemocratic regimes, coming to the conclusion that democratic regimes result in the least democides”

“… where people are free, they create an exchange society of overlapping groups and multiple and crosschecking centers of power. In such a society a culture of negotiation, tolerance, and splitting differences develops. Moreover, free people develop an in-group orientation toward other such societies, a feeling of shared norms and ideals that militates against violence toward other free societies”

“He wrote that ‘concentrated political power is the most dangerous thing on earth [emphasis added].’”

Concentrating, and concentrated, political power is what we have today

This is not good news. We have not yet reached this endgame so far as I can see, but we are surely headed in that direction. A very recent example and warning comes from Michael Nevradakis via the Children’s Health Defense Defender site: “Exclusive: WHO Proposals Could Strip Nations of Their Sovereignty, Create Worldwide Totalitarian State, Expert Warns” [WHO is the World Health Organization, a United Nations agency]:

“In an interview with The Defender, Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., bioweapons expert and professor of international law at the University of Illinois, said the World Health Organization’s (WHO) latest proposals may violate international law. Boyle called for U.S. federal and state governments to exit the WHO immediately.”

There are a growing number of similar articles out there that point to an emerging world authoritarian/totalitarian order. Note that these are different. From Wikipedia:

“… the distinction between an authoritarian regime and a totalitarian one is that an authoritarian regime seeks to suffocate politics and political mobilization while totalitarianism seeks to control and utilize them.”

Note also that totalitarianism is different also from dictatorships, which as you might expect require a dictator. In totalitarian states, the state’s power is unlimited and controls virtually all aspects of public and private life. This control extends to all political and financial matters as well as the attitudes, morals, and beliefs of the people. No dictator required.

Umm … okay, so what if anything can us normal folks do about all this?

Model dictators: Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Benito Mussolini, and Kim Il-sung.

Decentralization and diversity

Given the current state of affairs in the world, it seems unavoidable that survival planning must be based on an unpleasant working assumption: the globalists of whatever flavor will succeed in the short term. They are too far along, have enormous resources, and have considerable momentum. The only real obstacle that I can see is themselves – and human nature.

It seems that we will have to tackle survival from within their hopefully-temporary realm. Here is roughly how I see this survival approach working:

Decentralization. For as many as possible of the important aspects of your life, possessions, and interactions, each one should be separated in such a way that the loss of any one will not seriously affect your survivability. This will likely involve having access to several reasonably secure locations, ensuring that each has a practical set of essentials, and that your interactions are spread among a number of people and entities. Exactly how this is done will be different for each person or group. In essence, it means not “putting all of your eggs in one basket”, as that old saying goes.

Diversity. This is not woke diversity, but instead ensuring that you do not have any concentrations of things like income sources, access to transportation, and types of money and exchange goods. You want to avoid being reliant on any one source, approach, set of essentials, and the like. If something here doesn’t work or becomes unavailable, you want to have diversity in replacement options. For example, suppose that air transportation becomes severely restricted or unavailable. What options would you have to stay as mobile as necessary?

Pretty clearly, this concept of a survival mechanism is extremely general and different for every person and group. It aims at ensuring that anything vital to your survival has multiple locations, resources, sources, and people.

Centralized regimes are hard to fight

The preceding outline addresses mainly personal and small group survival. There is also the matter of pushback against the regime itself. To me, this would be secondary despite its importance. Secondary in the sense that, if you don’t personally or as a small group survive, then such pushback planning becomes immaterial.

In this respect, I mention yet again a valuable example of high-risk resistance and pushback to a dominating regime: the 2006 German movie “The Lives of Others”. Playwright Georg Dreyman in East Germany prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall struggles to get vital information about the situation out to the West. He battles in subtle ways a surprisingly-human Stasi officer Gerd Wiesler at great personal risk to himself and others. The movie is an amazing study of human nature in both its great strengths and its many weaknesses.

Most of us will not have either the situation or the resources necessary to mount such a resistance. Courage also. Again, the number one priority is survival. Resistance, should one be so inclined, requires survival.

We may get lucky: no dictatorship

Resistance becomes a feasible option if the opposition is not a Hitler or Stalin or Mao. My sense here, for whatever it may be worth, is that we will not have to deal with a dictatorship. Totalitarianism or authoritarianism seem most likely. This means that our survival efforts may turn out to have a substantial amount of wiggle-room. Speaking technically.

Better yet, we may be able to mess constructively with the current world’s complex but highly-fragile system. System collapse seems assured at some point simply because of this fragility, but it is quite hopeful that we might actually be able to move this event along.

Decentralization efforts, even at the personal or small group level as suggested above, attack centralization directly. The world today is so complex that centralization in many cases simply won’t work. Too many moving parts. Too many points of weakness. Our efforts are almost certain to hit paydirt somewhere at some point as a result. Low risk, at least for the moment.

Diversity attacks points of central control, generating alternatives to whatever the control folks want to control. Control via surveillance and digital tools depends heavily on uniformity. One-size-fits-all techniques. They can’t deal with much diversity, so that’s what you want to generate wherever possible. This might well be done most effectively through the use of diversity efforts that are now active as part of wokeism. Or maybe not.

Societal collapse is good for the planet?

Thinking positively about extremely negative possibilities, yet another view from some professors – William Strauss and Neil Howe:

“Try to unlearn the obsessive fear of death (and the anxious quest for death avoidance) that pervades linear thinking in nearly every modern society. The ancients knew that, without periodic decay and death, nature cannot complete its full round of biological and social change. Without plant death, weeds would strangle the forest. Without human death, memories would never die, and unbroken habits and customs would strangle civilization. Social institutions require no less. Just as floods replenish soil and fires rejuvenate forests, a Fourth Turning clears out society’s exhausted elements and creates an opportunity.” — Strauss & Howe, The Fourth Turning

To give them credit, we really do seem to be in their predicted Fourth Turning Crisis phase that they scheduled in 1997 for the period 2007-2027. Actually, we are in the end-phase blowout where everything really bad happens – such as occurred during the last Fourth Turning’s Crisis phase featuring WWI/Great Depression (1929-1946). On this basis, we appear to be pretty much on schedule.

Bottom line:

Although we have today tremendous forces at work driving us toward centralized control, one world government, and perhaps even totalitarianism, these will inevitably collapse, but not before causing great pain and suffering – as always. Until they do, we probably can do little more than to focus heavily on our personal and small group survival. Because the emerging world order depends on a complex, highly-fragile global system that is both centralized and uniform, it seems that decentralization and diversity may be the keys to local survival and perhaps even active resistance. More than a bit tricky to implement, but we may have few practical alternatives.