Freedom Force International

[teddy]

I highly recommend the writings of G. Edward Griffin who has set up the web-site Freedom Force International. www.freedomforceinternational.org

His version of how the world got to where it is today is extremely interesting and one I have a lot of time for. The main argument is one of collectivism vs individualism, where just about all major societies of the world, whether left wing, right wing, or centre, use the collectivist model, and the result of this is the situation we find ourselves in, including false flag attacks and loss of freedoms. His theory is that collectivism was the aim of the elite to make the people sing from the same hymn sheet, and has been going for over 100 years now. I suggest you read Part 1: The Chasm all the way through to Part 5. I particularly like his phrase "... what is unfolding today is, not a war on terrorism to defend freedom, but a war on freedom that requires the defense of terrorism."

[Steve Gardner]

I've been getting through the essays at a much slower pace than I'd hoped due to work committments, but it's clear I've been wrangling with the very same issues Griffin describes.

Take a look at the following extract from his first essay, The Chasm, for example, and then read the three pieces below it, which I posted elsewhere back in late '06.

The first deals with the diminution of our decision-making capacity; the second with the fact that rights are defined and not intrinsic; and the third with the Feminist movement and its possible link to the gradual breakdown of societal cohesion.

Note: the last one is a little obtuse and difficult to see unless you treat the promotion of the Feminist movement as a sort of 'false flag' attack on society, requiring government intervention.

One of the quickest ways to spot a collectivist is to see how he reacts to public problems. No matter what bothers him in his daily routine – whether it’s littering the highway, smoking in public, dressing indecently, bigotry, sending out junk mail – you name it, his immediate response is “There ought to be a law!” And, of course, the professionals in government who make a living from coercion are more than happy to cooperate. The consequence is that government just keeps growing and growing. It’s a one-way street. Every year there are more and more laws and less and less freedom. Each law by itself seems relatively benign, justified by some convenience or for the greater good of the greater number, but the process continues forever until government is total and freedom is dead. Bit-by-bit, the people, themselves, become the solicitor of their own enslavement. (source: The Chasm, pg. 13)

We're Losing It.

I used to work as a recruiter. One of my banking clients used to like asking young, wannabe traders the following:

I have three upturned cups on the table. Without you watching, I place a ball under one of them. I invite you to select the cup you think the ball is under and place your finger on it. Then I remove one of the other two cups and show you it is empty. There are now two cups left on the table – the one you have your finger on and one other. I offer you the chance to change your selection or stick with the cup you have your finger on. What do you do and why?

Now I know some of you will recognise this puzzle, but for those who don’t, the answer can be truly baffling. I have had heated arguments with people about this and, despite my best efforts, some just will not accept the answer.

Why do hiring financiers like this problem so much? Because it tests a candidate’s ability to recognise the smallest competitive advantage, which is vital when trading huge volumes at wafer-thin margins.

What has this to do with the topic? Well, sometimes we only ‘get it’ when you zoom out a bit. In the case of the puzzle above, people only ever seem to click when I ask them to start with one million cups. The same is true of this point of this topic, which will seem rather obscure and obtuse unless you take a step back.

(Talk about anti-climax!)

Does anyone else feel that we’re gradually being robbed of our ability to exercise our own judgement?

Here’s a really simple example.

I live near a town called Bury St Edmunds. The A14 skirts around Bury to the north. Traffic flow on and off of the A14 into Bury is by the usual method of slip roads and roundabouts. Whilst access routes into and out of the town are slow around rush hour, they are pretty much incident free.

My gripe is the relatively recent addition of traffic lights on the roundabouts. And they’re cropping up everywhere by the way – not just at roundabouts, but at every damn junction too, and there’s simply no requirement for them. Can’t motorists be trusted to use their own judgement when negotiating a roundabout? To compound the problem, these damn things are sequenced in such a way as to allow four cars through per phase. And, as if the superfluity of the lights themselves were not enough, they’re on 24x365. If you’re unlucky enough to be travelling behind four cars at 3am on a Wednesday morning, you simply won’t get through.

Now this may seem daft to you, to suggest that something so mundane could be interpreted as contributing to our diminishing capacity to decide for ourselves, but I’ll refer you back to the trader’s problem. Take a step back. There are examples of this sort of nonsense all around. It’s a creeping paralysis.

My personal favourite is the ‘fast lane’ idea for pedestrians on Oxford Street. I mean, seriously, are we really so incapable of making our own way along a busy street that we need to be herded into lanes? It’s just preposterous.

Another is the apparently very useful Sat Nav. Not so long ago, we had to plan our journeys and, once en route, deal with the misgivings associated with the feeling you might have taken a wrong turn. But at least the responsibility was ours. Now, Sat Nav girl tells us where to go and which exit we should take off of the next roundabout, so long, of course, as the traffic lights are in our favour.

And then there’s the whole gamut of social conventions that restrict our ability to really act or speak as we feel. We have become conditioned into silence. We’ve got a political correctness thread running already so I won’t dwell further. But it all contributes to the same thing.

My worry is for the future. I appreciate we have to abide by rules and that there is a balance to be found. But I fear there is too much nannying and, if it continues to spread unchecked, we’ll lose our capacity to decide for ourselves altogether.

If you don't see this as a potential problem, then perhaps you're not familiar with the 'million cups' way of thinking.

The Hypocrisy Of Human Rights

Let me be blunt, as is my way: I don’t believe we are all equal, and Human Rights are a crock of shit.

Human Rights are conferred ‘rights’. They are the product of the intellectual mind, not natural, intrinsic Rights. They are conceived by a few with political agendas. Their interpretation of what constitutes a ‘Right’ differs from the general public’s. Their ‘Rights’ are simultaneously used to defend our freedoms as well as to destroy them. The so-called preservation of Human Rights is often used to justify acts of oppression - witness the ‘liberation’ of Iraq. Such hypocrisy.

This goes hand-in-hand to some extent with the misguided notion of Equality. We are not all equal – this is blindingly obvious. We have different capacities and values in society. Please don’t confuse my dismissal of intrinsic Equality with Equal Opportunity. We should all have opportunities, it’s just that some are eminently more capable of taking them than others. Some of this has to do with circumstance, the rest is down to ability, or lack of.

If Equality and Rights are the product of the human intellect, then our civility will be own undoing. We are not born with natural Human Rights, only Rights ascribed to us in law. We are not all born naturally Equal, we have Equal Rights ascribed to us in law. These concepts protect the weaker members of society at the expense of the stronger.

Nature takes a long-term view. Nature ensures those fit enough to survive do so, for they will be best equipped to deal with what’s to come. To dilute the strength of the population is to ultimately threaten the species.

Try to take out the ‘here and now’ from your view of Rights and Equalities and look long-term. Is it in our best interests to flout nature’s law?

Feminism, Has it damaged our society?

Over the past few years, the West has been battered into accepting that the Muslim culture is a fundamentally inferior one. One of the arguments that has been used to demonstrate the barbaric nature of their culture is their flagrant abuse of women in society. And there’s no doubt, some of the examples we’ve heard about have made us recoil in horror and shame.

It’s a little surprising then, to learn that women are treated pretty badly in other parts of the world. One recent example from Israel’s haaretz.com describes how a 50 year old American-Israeli woman, who was travelling by bus to pray at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, was attacked and badly beaten by a group of orthodox Jewish men, known as a ‘modesty patrol’. The reason? Because she refused to move to the women’s seating area at the back of the sex-segregated ‘mehadrin’ bus.

In the West, we seem to have rid ourselves of the habit of beating our women - at least, in public. In fact, in this PC age, we’ve rid ourselves of doing or even thinking anything that might be deemed even slightly offensive to women, for fear of one almighty and grossly disproportionate backlash. Mike Newell’s end-of-game rant at women officials being a good recent example.

Now, I’m not advocating a return to any bygone age, however enthusiastic I might be about the prospect of smacking my mother-in-law about every so often; I’m more interested in how we got here, where it leads and whether, on balance, it’s a good thing.

Back in the mid-19th century, the modern-day father of eugenics, Sir Francis Galton, recognised that human natural selection can be distorted by social conventions, which in time would lead to a ‘reversion towards mediocrity’. What he meant is that the natural world in general has a rather nice habit of improving over time, whereas we, by dint of our intellect, appear to have a rather nasty habit of talking ourselves out of it.

The natural world appears to have well-defined roles for males and females. We seem to be tinkering with them. Is the women’s movement an example of the sort of convention that is ultimately damaging our society?

Our attitude towards women changed dramatically throughout the 20th century in particular. It broad terms, our attitudes have been shaped by two phases: first-wave feminism and second-wave feminism. The former concerned itself mainly with women’s suffrage in the early part of the 20th century. The latter, and most recent, concerned itself more with women's rights. It spanned a thirty year period between the early ‘60’s and late ‘80’s, and appears to me to directly correlated to some uncomfortable looking trends in our society. First, a quick look at a couple of the more positive looking aspects of the second-wave.

Women became increasingly better educated. In the early 1960’s, women obtained around 23% of all first degrees. By the late 1980’s, this figure has increased to around 45%.

Throughout the same period, more women became more economically active. In 1961, around 38% of all women were considered to be economically active compared to around 47% in 1991.

But there's an apparent flip side.

Overall the number of marriages has declined, even though the population has increased. In 1960, there were 394,000 marriages (a rate of 7.5 per 1000 of population), of which 57,000 were second marriages. In 1990, overall marriages were down 5% to 375,000 (a rate of 6.5 per 1000 of population), with second marriage rates rising 137% to 135,000.

Of course, some of those second marriages also ended in divorce, so the actual divorce rate is a little higher. Statistics show that, between the second-wave dates (1961 and 1989), divorce rates increased five times.

Take a look at crime statistics for the same period and you find an almost identical pattern. In 1960, there were approximately 15 offences per 1000 of population in England & Wales. By 1990, this figure had climbed rapidly year on year to stand at just under 80.

One interpretation of the above trends is that during the second-wave feminist movement, women became better educated and developed greater aspirations. This led to women becoming more economically active and independent. Marriages fell both in number and in per 1000 of population terms, whilst there was a sharp rise in the number of divorces. During the same period, crime has risen steeply.

Is there another interpretation that shows these trends are unrelated and coincidental, or is social convention leading us towards mediocrity, as Galton suggested? Maybe you believe that these trends are directly related to the feminist movement but that they are a price worth paying.