Of course it might all end up spinning out of control anyway. That’s my hope.

“What do we want? I don’t know, what do we want?”

“I know what you want. You want to be invisible, invincible, invulnerable. You want to come and go like the wind, unnoticed but all pervasive.”

“Yes! That’s what we want! Can we have it by Thursday?”

No, not all of us. I myself went to a British Public School (public as in public telephone, i.e. as opposed to privately educated by tutors or in schools attached to cathedrals etc., and not free but fee paying, not public as in public service, i.e. publicly funded and free at point of use). That is not only a considerably older tradition than the Prussian one but also largely uninfluenced by it in more recent times.

Oh fuck. Fuck.

How do I prevent these people from exerting control over me when their older?:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdPSqL9_mfM

And I get called a nutbar?

Meanwhile, would that there were more like the Essenes, and fewer of the zomboid bastards I see.

Better.

Possibly thanks to the rise of ADHD (or whatever) will we have more and more people becoming fed up pretty quickly!

In all seriousness, all those willing today must guard the last human city on Earth, our Zion. You all know what it is! Many of the jobs Jim listed can’t exist as easily or at all. Its demise would set us back 20 to 30 years.

We can’t let the “last city” turn into one giant public school. Never!

Enoch Root, the character who goes over this point, says that he prefers the German way of describing it, “morphium suchtig” or “morphine seeking.” That describes his behavior, but doesn’t replace Joe with “addict.” Because, after all, Joe does other stuff that isn’t addictive.

In “The Morpheus Proposal” I make the analogy to the lesson of the agents, that “anyone still hard wired into their system” can become an agent of the state. That’s true for people who have much to lose – families, houses, jobs, connections to the grid in all kinds of ways. They can be persuaded, often without much effort, to spy on their neighbors, etc.

But I’m not sure how many of these people there really are. You see them portrayed a great deal in film and television. But how many “man on the street” encounters are locked away in studio archives because they didn’t want to air the cynical view of the person who had a skeptical reaction? How much of what we experience in others is what they want to show the world, rather than their hidden face?

One also has to wonder how long the instruction set is going to survive in the increasing meme competition going on. The deuteronomists wrote a passage into the Hebrew bible that demanded that the king read it every day and make a copy of it, adding not one letter to it, taking not one letter away. Evidently that worked for a few hundred years until Jerusalem was sacked and many Jewish scholars taken away into bondage.

Even without kings, we find groups of, e.g., Essene Jews keeping up the practice so that the bible they copied two thousand years ago is identical in text to the one we have today, character for character. Except the book of Esther, I think, or something like that. But the Essenes didn’t need kings, or a temple, or Roman governors to engage in their craft of scholarship.

Nor do we. Individuals can engage in agorism, programming, web development, art, architecture, and all kinds of other activities without let or permit, without being part of a hierarchy. Often without being “on the grid” or having a regular job or a regular mortgage payment. Children respond well to independent study and unschooling and all manner of other opportunities.

The unremarkable persons who go along to get along, who don’t rock the boat, who follow orders pretty well, also don’t innovate very often. Some do, and change their way of being. But many wait for the next thing to be supplied by someone else.

Much of what we see in the world today continues only because so many are, as the song says, “waiting on the world to change.”

When enough people are sufficiently fed up, the world will change, again.