What’s the most important thing in your life? Family? Friendship? Good health? We like to think so, but what do we most worry about? Money. Security. Finding ‘me time’. We know that the most precious moments are those spent with children and lovers, yet we pack our kids off to school, kiss our spouses goodbye and stay behind after hours at work in the hope of getting that next promotion. The things we proclaim to value are shoved aside to make room for what really matters, whether we like to admit it to ourselves or not.
The title of this substack, How to Survive the Apocalypse, is sort of jokey; it’s half-meant as a light-hearted take on the general feeling out there that the world seems to be coming to an end in a very Biblical way. Yet it’s a pun, really, rooted in a serious observation. The word ‘Apocalypse’ comes from the Greek apo, meaning ‘off’ or ‘away from’, and kalyptein, ‘to cover, conceal’. In other words, it means revelation, an unveiling, a revealing of what was hidden. Isn’t that exactly what’s going on right now?
For those who love life’s little coincidences, 2020 was a gift. 20:20 is, of course, used to describe perfect vision. The year 2020 gave some of us exactly that, through two events: the American presidential election, and Covid. The one revealed the deep corruption of the state. The other, the corruption of commerce as Big Media, Big Tech and Big Pharma all worked in tandem, along with the corrupt state, to poison our bodies and minds.
Revelation 6: And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see.
2 And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.
3 And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, Come and see.
4 And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword.
5 And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.
6 And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.
7 And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see.
8 And I looked, and beheld a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.
Whether you believe in the Bible or not, the wisdom is discernible from history: where conquest, strife, and avarice go, death swiftly follows. They’re among us now, alright.
The Czech Dissidents and the Parallel Polis
The year was 1976. Elton John had ridden high in the charts with Pinball Wizard that spring; by the time summer rolled around, American kids were bopping along to Candi Staton’s Young Hearts Run Free. Over in Czechoslovakia the kids also liked to listen to music, but under Communist rule things were a little more difficult. That was the year that the Prague-based band Plastic People of the Universe were arrested.
The band had formed eight years earlier, taking their name from Frank Zappa's band The Mothers of Invention, which had a song called "Plastic People" on their 1967 album, Absolutely Free. Musically, the band also drew heavily on the Velvet Underground, and the American counterculture band The Fugs. They weren’t allowed to record their music, so fans passed around bootleg copies at their clandestine gigs. After being convicted of “organised disturbance of the peace” band members served prison terms ranging from eight to eighteen months.
While the arrests were clearly designed as a show of strength on the part of the state, they had the opposite effect. The arrests prompted leading Czech and Slovak dissidents to draw up Charter 77, criticising the government for failing to uphold human rights standards, as stipulated in a number of documents it had signed. Charter 77 was banned, although it was passed around as Samizdat; many of the signatories were themselves arrested, some serving up to five years in jail.
“The ecstatic sensation of liberation caused by signing the Charter gradually gave way to disillusionment and deep scepticism,” wrote Václav Benda, one of the Charter’s architects. In a short essay titled Parallel Polis, hastily thrown together to serve as a discussion point, Benda laid out the problem with the Charter as he saw it. The Charter had successfully “gathered together a broad spectrum of political opinion and civic attitudes”, he noted, and had “eliminate[d] this schism by stressing moral and ethical attitudes over political ones.” But the problem was that, by focusing on matters of morality, the Charter had been too abstract to hold people together. What was needed, Benda thought, was a more concrete strategy that could “gradually lead us out of the blind alley we are in today. This strategy can be summarised in two phrases: what unifies and drives us must continue to be a sense of moral commitment and mission; and this drive should be given a place and a perspective in the creation of a parallel polis.”
Benda took the rest of the essay to sketch out what he meant by a Parallel Polis (‘polis’ being the Greek word for ‘city’). In short, his idea was to “join forces in creating, slowly but surely, parallel structures that are capable, to a limited degree at least, of supplementing the generally beneficial and necessary functions that are missing in existing structures.” Rather than facing down the Communist Regime head on in a futile attempt to drive them out, he planned to edge them out slowly, over time.
These structures would be created in seven arenas: law, culture, education, science, information networks, the economy, and foreign policy. The key to success was for each to be small-scale and independent. Benda hoped that dozens of parallel polis structures would spring up all over the place. When one fell, more would move in to take its place.
Those involved in creating these parallel structures typically practised passive obedience to the regime in their day-to-day lives, allowing their work in building alternative structures to fly under the radar. “The mission of the parallel polis is constantly to conquer new territory, to make its parallelness constantly more substantial and more present,” Benda wrote.
The strategy was a resounding success. After the Regime fell in the Velvet Revolution of 1989, Benda became head of the Bureau for Investigating the Crimes of Communist Party Officials. In 1996 he was elected to the Czech Senate, holding his seat until his death in 1999.
A Warning to the West
The Velvet Revolution and the others like it that brought down the Soviet Empire were supposed to spell the end of totalitarianism. In the great battle of ideologies that was the Cold War, Communism had lost, Capitalism had won, and the future was supposed to be one of ultimate freedom and prosperity for all.
Instead, totalitarianism has risen again, yet this time it’s the Black horse, not the Red, that has led the charge. Rather than oppression through government, we are suffering the despotism of the money men. When supranational organisations, NGOs run by globalist billionaires, and the money markets, can together topple Prime Ministers, as happened in the United Kingdom only last week and, apparently Brazil a few days later, it’s foolish to argue that government and only government is the problem. So what exactly is going on here?
For an answer to that, we must turn to another Czech dissident and champion of the Parallel Polis, Václav Havel. In the early 1980s, Havel was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Toulouse, and he was invited to give a speech. Unable to leave the country, the speech was actually delivered on his behalf by the playwright Tom Stoppard; the full text was later translated into English, and published in the second edition of The Salisbury Review by Roger Scruton and Erazim Kohák under the title Politics and Conscience. (I am publishing his full essay alongside this article — subscribers, look out for it in your inbox).
Much like Jefferson two hundred years earlier, Havel used the speech to argue that there are such a thing as natural rights and a natural way of living. And he argued that both Communism and Capitalism were enemies of natural life, as both came from the same impulse: the wielding of “impersonal power”. As a result, he foretold that the totalitarianism that had overtaken the Communist world would soon overrun the West too.
“I think that, with respect to the relation of western Europe to the totalitarian systems, no error could be greater than the one looming largest: that of a failure to understand the totalitarian systems for what they ultimately are — a convex mirror of all modern civilization and a harsh, perhaps final call for a global recasting of how that civilization understands itself,” he wrote.
Writing of the Western tendency to see totalitarian regimes as either a self-contained experiment in achieving general welfare which could be safely ignored, or an expansionist threat to their neighbours (remember, this was the 1980s), he dismissed both of these viewpoints.
“Totalitarian regimes are not merely dangerous neighbours and even less some kind of an avant-garde of world progress. Alas, just the opposite: they are the avant-garde of a global crisis of this civilization, first European, then Euro-American, and ultimately global. They are one of the possible futurological studies of the Western world, not in the sense that one day they will attack and conquer it, but in a far deeper sense that they illustrate graphically the consequences of what Bělohradský calls the “eschatology of the impersonal.”
How prophetic those words have turned out to be, and not because of some dastardly plot by the Soviets to infiltrate the West. By embracing scientific rationalism, we have been the architects of our own undoing. How else could the demands that we sacrifice our own personal interest and welfare in the name of The Science and Public Health be properly understood?
So how are we to dig ourselves out of this mess?
“The question is wholly other, deeper and equally relevant to all,” Havel wrote: “whether we shall, by whatever means, succeed in reconstituting the natural world as the true terrain of politics, rehabilitating the personal experience of human beings as the initial measure of things, placing morality above politics and responsibility above our desires, in making human community meaningful, in returning content to human speech, in reconstituting, as the focus of all social action, the autonomous, integral, and dignified human “I,” responsible for ourselves because we are bound to something higher, and capable of sacrificing something, in extreme cases even everything, of his banal, prosperous private life-that “rule of everydayness,” as Jan Patočka used to say — for the sake of that which gives life meaning.”
He continued: “It really is not all that important whether, by accident of domicile, we confront a Western manager or an Eastern bureaucrat in this very modest and yet globally crucial struggle against the momentum of impersonal power. If we can defend our humanity, then perhaps there is a hope of sorts — though even then it is by no means automatic — that we shall also find some more meaningful ways of balancing our natural claims to shared economic decision-making and to dignified social status, with the tried-and-true driving force of all work: human enterprise realised in genuine market relations.**
“That task is one of resisting vigilantly, thoughtfully, and attentively, but at the same time with total dedication, at every step and everywhere, the irrational momentum of anonymous, impersonal, and inhuman power — the power of ideologies, systems, apparat, bureaucracy, artificial languages, and political slogans.
“We must resist its complex and wholly alienating pressure, whether it takes the form of consumption, advertising, repression, technology, or cliché — all of which are the blood brothers of fanaticism and the wellspring of totalitarian thought.
“We must draw our standards from our natural world, heedless of ridicule, and reaffirm its denied validity. We must honour with the humility of the wise the limits of that natural world and the mystery which lies beyond them, admitting that there is something in the order of being which evidently exceeds all our competence.”
** For a discussion on true free markets as the antidote to globalism, see last week’s article:
Rediscovering Natural Wealth
So, to recap, we are in the midst of an apocalypse, or revelation. It is increasingly clear to millions of people that the old ideologies are no longer viable. A new way of doing things must be created, and to create it, we must start by creating new structures of our own, quietly, slowly at first, to edge out the old. These structures must be based in the natural order of things, if we are to regain our humanity. But what should those structures actually look like?
If human flourishing is our aim (and given that we are human, it probably should be), a good place to start would be to identify the real sources of wealth in human society. Not the ‘material stuff’ of capitalism, nor the forced ‘solidarity’ of communism, but natural wealth.
This substack has drawn on the works of Daniel Quinn before, and here I turn to him again for an outline of what natural wealth in human societies looks like. A reminder, Quinn splits humanity into two groups: Leavers, or tribal people, who Leave their fates in the hands of the gods, and Takers, or civilised society, which overrules the gods to Take control of their own fate. This excerpt is from his book My Ishmael.
“The foremost wealth of tribal peoples is cradle-to-grave security for each and every member. There are hundreds of millions of you who live in stark terror of the future because they see no security in it for themselves anywhere. To be made obsolete by some new technology, to be laid off as redundant, to lose jobs or whole careers through treachery, favouritism, or bias — these are just a few of the nightmares that haunt your workers’ sleep. This is unthinkable in tribal life, and not just because tribal people don’t have jobs. As surely as any of you, each member of the tribe has a living to make. The wherewithal to live doesn’t just fall out of the sky into their hands. But there is no way to deprive any member of the means to live. He or she has those means, and that’s it.
“To live and walk among your neighbours without fear is the second greatest wealth of tribal peoples. This doesn’t mean that nothing bad ever happens to anyone. It does mean that it’s sufficiently rare so that no one lives behind locked doors and no one carries weapons they expect to have to use to defend themselves from their neighbours.
“Equal to these is a form of wealth you lack so profoundly that you’re truly pathetic. In a Leaver society, you’re never left to cope with a crushing problem all by yourself. You have an autistic child, a disabled child. This will be perceived as a tribal burden — but not for altruistic reasons. It simply makes no sense to say to the child’s mother or father, ‘This is entirely your problem. Don’t bother the rest of us with it.’
“I find it truly heartrending to see the people of your world suffering without this wealth. One of a couple in late middle age contracts some horrible disease, their savings are wiped out in a matter of months, former friends shun them, there’s no more money for medication, and suddenly their situation is completely desperate.”
Quinn goes on to explain that this sort of wealth pays its own dividends. To function, Taker societies must have a hired police force, schools, and paid carers. Because wealth accumulates in the hands of the few in Taker societies, access to the best of these services is readily available to the rich; barely or not at all available to the poor. In Leaver societies, they are free for all.
Wealth generated in the tribal economy has no tendency to flow into the hands of a few. This is not at all because Leavers are nicer people than you are, but rather because they have a fundamentally different kind of wealth. There is no way to accumulate their wealth — no way to put it under lock and key — so there’s no way for it to be concentrated in anyone’s hands.
Shaping Our Own Parallel Polis
So how do we reclaim the sort of society in which natural wealth is free for all? If the Czech dissidents’ have taught us anything, it is that the answer is: slowly. But also, surely, if done incrementally.
Already, some rudimentary efforts are being made to dissociate with totalitarian society and begin to form something new. The group Reignite Freedom has been publishing weekly tasks to help people disengage from the old order and rediscover local community. These tasks include using cash, only shopping locally, supporting local farmers, moving bank accounts to smaller banks, and cutting off the mainstream media.
While the initiative is welcome and the tasks are useful, they display a certain timidity. There is no grand vision behind these tasks, only a sort of reactionism: we don’t like the MSM so we’ll get our news elsewhere; we don’t like the big banks so we’ll bank elsewhere; we don’t want our payments monitored and cut off, so we’ll prop up cash. What Reignite Freedom wants is the world as it currently stands, but without all that annoying totalitarianism stuff. In other words, just to be left alone.
But how’s this for some tasks: Become fully responsible. Become totally self-reliant. Thousands of people were forced into getting vaccinated last year because they were afraid of not being able to provide for their families. Hundreds of policemen swallowed down their moral objections to keep the population locked up because they were afraid of losing their jobs. But if you’re not reliant on the establishment for anything, they have no hold over you. They can’t take away your means of earning a living if you can provide for yourself.
So, learn how to build yourself a house. Learn how to make your own clothes. Learn how to make furniture. Learn natural medicine and midwifery. Learn how to keep yourself warm and fed in the depths of winter. Find others willing to do the same and trade your skills with them. Create a barter-based totally free market — or mint your own gold coins as currency for your new local polis.
Educate your children collectively, by having them work alongside you. Care for each other’s elderly and infirm, so that no one has to rely on a capricious state. Become naturally wealthy. Live free.
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I wonder if some of our dependence is a product of the rapidly evolving nature of technology. I know that’s a broad stroke, but we have become so collectively dependent on it, and so few seem to understand how much of our wondrous creations actually work. For example, I run an appliance repair company for a living, and while I probably shouldn’t complain about people’s ignorance (keeps the business going), it never fails to amaze me how one could be so functionally dependent on a machine like a refrigerator or a clothes washer, yet have no understanding whatsoever as to how said machine actually works. This is also at a time when answers to almost any technical problem are literally a click and a glance away. On that note though, and rather hypocritically, I can’t tell you exactly how the phone I’m typing this on works either, and yet I use it (more than I should) every single day. Your article definitely has me doing a self-examination of my own knowledge and abilities.