Do you find yourself having the same conversation over and over again? Y’know, the one that goes something like:
A: Seen the news lately?
B: Bad, isn’t it?
A: What is the government up to?
B: Dodging taxes most likely!
[Both chuckle]
A: Still, it is a problem though.
B: It is that, alright.
A: All those people!
B: I know. Total travesty. My sister said the same thing happened to her hairdresser’s best friend’s son! He was only 23!
A: Awful. Something has to be done.
B: But what though?
A: … Sometimes I think the French had the right idea.
B: But would you really want it to come to that?
A: No… but still, we can’t go on like this.
B: True, something does have to be done…
That conversation. I know you’ve had it. I know you’ve been looking at your pension plan and wondering whether it will still be there when you retire, or at your heating bill and worried whether it might keep going up, and if it does, what you’ll do about it. Or at your children or grandchildren, or the children playing out in the street, and wondered what their lives will be like in the years to come. Will they have the same things we had? Not just the opportunities to travel and to buy a bigger house than our parents had, but basic things: meat to eat, books to read, cars to drive. Or will those things have been wiped from the history books by then?
Something does have to be done. We are reaching an inflection point. The ever expanding wealth that we have come to view as normal and ‘our right’ is about to go away, or at least be funneled to the very top while the rest of us see our lot get ever more meagre.
And it’s no good turning to our politicians. Leaving aside the fact that they are causing many of our problems right now and seem to have no appetite to fix them, even if they wanted to, they couldn’t. The problems are structural. They can’t be fixed without dismantling the systems that our societies are run upon, and no politician will do that, for it would mean the end of their career. Moreover, the swift coup that took out Liz Truss last year suggests that the vested interests simply wouldn’t let them even if they wanted to try. So no, we’re on our own, folks.
Although it doesn’t seem it, this is actually good news. It means that we can stop waiting for someone else to come rescue us, and we can start to rescue ourselves. It will take hard work. It will mean, for some, learning self-reliance. It will involve lifestyle changes. But if we start now to build robust lives that don’t depend on global supply chains, and robust local communities in which people connect in person to support each other, we can come out stronger overall.
Yet what would that actually look like? What would need to be done — specifically? In my last post, I mentioned that I was considering writing a book to answer just those question. I am (tentatively) looking for a publisher (one has already seen it. They said it sounded “interesting” but that it is “not going to be commercially viable”, which I find astounding). But I thought I’d also turn it over to you guys, to get your feedback, and hopefully your support. Instead of waiting for a benefactor to come along and take a chance, let’s crowdsource this through subscriptions to this substack channel. The more of you who sign up for a subscription, the less time I’ll have to spend on other work to sustain me, and the quicker I’ll be able to get this book done. I will also give a discount on the printed book, once complete, to anyone who subscribes.
You can sign up for a subscription now, by clicking this link, and enjoy 25% off for the lifetime of your subscription.
Want to know more about the book first? Here’s the pitch I’m sending to publishers, including you:
Book pitch:
Walk Away: The Case for Radical Localism
by Donna Rachel Edmunds
Overview
Something has shifted in the last three years. The world we all thought we knew is turning out to have been a sham. Governments that seemed to run countries in an orderly fashion have been revealed as chaotic, grasping at easy solutions with no real plan or direction.
The economists who, we were told, had their hands on the levers of steady finance, are instead at the head of a speeding freight train pulling frantically at those levers, which are long since detached from any mechanism they were supposed to control.
Scientists, the rationalists of our world, who explained the material universe to us in such precise detail that their description must have been true, are mere alchemists, claiming to turn lead into gold.
And the people are starting to wake up to these facts. Covid pulled back the curtain on our society to reveal an old man and a box of tricks.
The outcome is inevitable: no society can withstand widespread loss of faith in all of its institutions. And yet humanity will survive. So what comes next, and how do we get there?
In Walk Away, the case for radical localism, author Donna Rachel Edmunds makes the case that the world as we knew it has come to a natural end, that we must now dig deep into our past to reinvigorate the wisdom of our fathers, and that we must start to build from the wreckage a new world, one build on human connections and local associations.
Why is this book timely?
In a recent monologue, Fox News contributor Glenn Beck, discussing a recent trip to New York, said the following:
“There seems to be no end to the politicians in Washington that are willing to sell our sons and daughters into financial slavery to the highest bidder. I sense that people are waking up, and not necessarily becoming conservative, but are becoming American again they have more faith in each other in themselves, their families. People are waking up.
“DeSantis, in his swearing in speech "spoke of the benefits to the people of Florida due to returning of common sense and common decency”. The most important thing I noticed — and I had not heard this before — he is now referring to Florida as ‘the free state of Florida’. ... It immediately made me think of the Free States during slavery, and then I started thinking ‘We are slaves to this state. We are slaves to the debt. They treat us like slaves, they’re not listening to us’.
“That should be a goal: that you are The Free State of fill-in-the-blank, because the time is coming and we're going to sift each other out. We're going to — and I urge you to do this — move to where you feel you are surrounded by people like you. You don't want to be alone in what's coming. I sense for the first time in a while, and it might have just been his speech yesterday, but I sense there is a change and we are not absolutely at the end of the road. There is a shot we pull this off.”
What is the ‘this’ Beck was referring to? In essence, what he is proposing here is Radical Localism — a repudiation of Big Governance, and a return to local governance within small communities of like-minded people, run by members of the community for members of the community, who may form leagues or associations with nearby communities.
So far, there is, admittedly, little widespread appetite for a radical overhaul of our systems of governance, despite widespread dissatisfaction with national and even supranational governing bodies. But in his book, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization, geo-political strategist Peter Zeihan explains that change is inevitable.
According to the blurb on his website:
“Globe-spanning supply chains are only possible with the protection of the U.S. Navy. The American dollar underpins internationalized energy and financial markets. Complex, innovative industries were created to satisfy American consumers. American security policy forced warring nations to lay down their arms. Billions of people have been fed and educated as the American-led trade system spread across the globe.
“All of this was artificial. All this was temporary. All this is ending.
“In The End of the World is Just the Beginning, author and geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan maps out the next world: a world where countries or regions will have no choice but to make their own goods, grow their own food, secure their own energy, fight their own battles, and do it all with populations that are both shrinking and ageing.
“The list of countries that make it all work is smaller than you think. Which means everything about our interconnected world — from how we manufacture products, to how we grow food, to how we keep the lights on, to how we shuttle stuff about, to how we pay for it all — is about to change.”
If we are to survive the tumult of the next few decades and come out stronger, we need a roadmap. Walk Away; the Case for Radical Localism lays out just such a roadmap, and invites people to get walking.
What other works is it most like?
Walk Away will be closest in tone to perhaps an unlikely candidate: The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, by Rod Dreher. In that book, Dreher makes the case that Christian society has already fallen in the West, and that practicing Christians who want to preserve the old way of life need to form communities to do so. His work draws heavily on the idea of the Parallel Polis, as developed by Czech dissidents Vaclav Benda and Vaclav Havel.
Walk Away in effect makes the same case but on a grander scale: it’s not just Christianity, but Western Civilisation as a whole that is in the process of being lost. Our reliance on modern technology is resulting in thousands of years worth of knowledge of how to carry out traditional crafts being relegated to the annals of history, and much of that could well be lost for good unless we make a concerted effort to preserve it.
The book will also draw on the style and ideas of some others, most notably:
A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life, by Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein.
The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray
The ‘Ishmael’ series by Daniel Quinn (‘Ishmael’, ‘My Ishmael’, ‘The Story of B’)
Who is the audience?
Concerned citizens, both left and right politically, who can see that our current world is in crisis, and who are looking for potential solutions. They will mostly be from the Anglo world — USA, UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, although Europeans will also take an interest. They will be politically switched on, though likely sceptical, and may well have fallen away from voting entirely. They are interested in large-scale trends, anthropology, and history.
Chapter Breakdown
Part I: The Problem
Chapter 1: The Real Big Lie
In late December 2022, Tucker Carlson reported on the partial release of documents relating to the murder of President John F Kennedy. Or, more to the point, he reported on the failure to disclose all the documents, despite being legally mandated to do so. Speaking to an anonymous insider, Carlson reported that the agent had said, quote, “It’s a whole different country from what we thought it was. It’s all fake.”
The report came amid the release of the Twitter files, in which it was disclosed, among other things, that the FBI covered up the Hunter Biden laptop story to aid the Democratic Party in beating Donald Trump to the Presidency.
If politicians are at the mercy of superior forces in America, the situation is no better in the UK. British Prime Minister Liz Truss was decapitated as leader of the Conservative Party just days into her tenure, not by intelligence agents this time, but by the markets, which balked at her Thatcherite plans for fiscal responsibility.
It’s becoming increasingly clear to citizens across the west that democracy itself is a lie. Not only do we not have free hand to pick our leaders, those who do claim office have no real power to change the lives of citizens for the better.
Chapter 2: There’s Nobody at the Wheel
If we can’t rely on politicians to run our society, can we turn to the money men?
Central banks, once believed to have all the levers of the economy at their fingertips, are discovering that, thanks to a global economy built on the Eurodollar, those levers have become detached. The economic machine is now a juggernaut running at full steam, but with no one at the wheel able to direct it, there’s no telling when or how it may crash, taking us all out with it.
Chapter 3: How about the scientists?
Covid, and the failure of the vaccines, revealed to many the hubris within the world of science — and the corrupting effect money has had on the medical industry at large. Thanks to scientists, we now live in a world in which a pandemic was caused entirely by humans, and the cure turned out to be worse than the disease, killing millions worldwide.
Chapter 4: The Rise of the Machines
Nonetheless, digital subterfuge is still much more widespread than most people realise. Increasingly, human interactions are being replaced with ‘smart’ interactions. Whether it’s the use of chat bots to answer text-based customer queries, or the development of AI to mimic human phone receptionists, we’re moving toward a world in which none of our interactions with other humans are legitimate. This trend will hyperdrive the atomisation of society that has already taken place in the last few decades, but it also has profound implications for global economies, as workers become financially obsolete.
Chapter 5: Wanton Decadence: The Liberal Religion
All of the above (and more) has created a meaning crisis. Liberalism’s answer has been to fetishise individualisation with religious fervour: as of January 1, California is a sanctuary state for children who want to ‘transition’ to the opposite sex.
Those who don’t prostrate themselves at the feet of Moloch by mutilating children have other ways of participating in the new liberal religion, environmentalism being foremost among them.
The result is a fundamental unseriousness, and therefore refusal to get to grips with the very real problems we face. The outcome can only be disaster.
Part II: The Solution
Chapter 6: Humanity has been here before
A look at previous societies who apparently abandoned civilisation and ‘walked away’.
For example, the City of Cahokia, a thriving metropolis inhabited by native Americans, was abandoned in the 1400s. It appears that the residents may simply have decided to go back to a more simple way of life.
Chapter 7: The Benedict Option
In the early 500s, St Benedict founded 12 monasteries in the hills to the east of Rome. They were intended as a sanctuary from a world that had descended into chaos as Rome fell, with the monks as conservators of civilised thought. Benedictine orders preserved classical knowledge through the ages until it came to the fore again during the renaissance, some 1000 years later.
In 2017, Rod Dreher wrote The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, which made the case for modern Christians to form communities and steward Christian morals in a godless age.
But framing this as a Christian solution is too narrow a view. What we need is a Benedict Option for Western civilisation at large, and the body of knowledge contained within it, from Adam Smith’s economic insights on the free market, to folk arts and crafts, to the scientific method.
Chapter 8: Closed Communities & Parallel Polis
Benedict’s monks largely took themselves away from the world at large, living within the walls of the monastery. But while this sort of closed community may work for some, it won’t work for everyone.
Drawing on the work of Vaclav Benda and Vaclav Havel, I take a look at the Czech dissidents’ idea of a parallel polis - a parallel ‘free’ city that exists within the same geographic space as society at large, and how it could work for modern dissidents from the technocratic age.
Chapter 9: Rescuing Gepetto
I make the case that we as individuals need to dive deep into our culture, and bring to the fore the forgotten wisdoms of our fathers, committing to preserving knowledge in whatever way we can. For some, that will be by practising agriculture as it has been for thousands of years. For others, it will be mastering a folk craft and apprenticing young people. Others still may prefer to collect intellectual information such as literature and essays, and share it with others.
Chapter 10: The Case for Radical Localism
Radical localism is a rejection of high-level governance, and a return to life within local communities, the leaders of which are directly accountable to people who know them and whom they live amongst. It is more of a long-term solution to our society’s malaise, but we need to start building the foundations now.
Post-script: Life in the Midst of a Meaning Crisis
An investigation into the unbearable condition millions of supposedly affluent people find themselves living in. We are material goods rich, spiritual goods poor.
Drawing on the work of Daniel Quinn, I make the case that we need to reassess our value of wealth, recalibrating it from ‘money’ to ‘human interaction’ (see my essay ‘This is How We Beat the Globalists’), as the basis for our new localist world.
About Donna Rachel Edmunds
Donna read Zoology at Cardiff University, when all her school tutors were advising her to read English Literature at Oxford. On the surface the decision seemed flighty and childish: who chooses grubbing in the Welsh mud over Chaucer and Milton in lofty halls at the epicentre of British philosophical thought? In fact, the decision stood her in good stead. Science, back then, still demanded intellectual rigour in a way that the arts had already abandoned, and anyway, she already knew how to read and write.
So Donna took her Zoological training and, after a few false starts, ended up at the perfect place to apply it: The European Parliament, where she worked as a research assistant and political advisor to a British Conservative MEP. From there, she moved to Westminster and did the same, before jumping ship to UKIP and running for the European Parliament herself, narrowly missing out on a seat in Brussels in the 2014 elections.
Having failed to catch a second ride on the EU gravy train, Donna was scooped up by Breitbart News, writing for the London desk for three action packed years: 2014 - 2017 saw the migrant crisis worsen in Europe, the Brexit vote, and the election of Donald Trump as President, among other historic moments.
In 2019, having taken a couple of years out to write a novel, Donna moved to Israel, where she first took up with The Jerusalem Post, before running for the hills and vowing off any work for the mainstream media ever again.
She currently works as a freelance writer.
Got feedback? I’d love to hear your thoughts; simply hit ‘reply’ to this email. In the meantime — shameless plug — please help me crowdfund the writing of this book by signing up for a paid subscription to this substack. Sign up now and get 25% off:
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Where do I pre-order?!