What is the Greater Reset?

and can you change the system by dropping out or only drop out by changing the system?

A movement called The Greater Reset is gaining traction, based on a 1970 libertarian philosophy called Agorism. Its members aggregate in Freedom Cells and practice counter-economics, as explained by Derrick Broze in Manifesto of the Free Humans. I give my understanding of it and the speaker event that features people I admire, like Joel Salatin, RFKjr, Tess Lawrie, James Guzman, James Corbett, Catherine Austin Fitts and Foster Gamble. But I also raise five concerns and ask the question: can you change the system by dropping out one by one or can you only drop out as a community by changing the system? I explain how my system differs and why I think it would make The Great Reset obsolete.

what is the greater reset?

In Manifesto of the Free Humans, Derrick Broze explains that The Greater Reset is based on Agorism:

In the late 1970’s, anarchist, activist, and writer Samuel E. Konkin III (SEKIII) released The New Libertarian Manifesto … The philosophy behind the New Libertarian Movement was agorism, named after the “agora”, the Greek word for marketplace. “An agorist is one who acts consistently for freedom and in freedom,” SEKIII wrote.

Essentially, agorism is a radical libertarian philosophy that seeks to create a society free of coercion and force by using black and gray markets in the underground or “illegal” economy to siphon power away from the state. Konkin termed this strategy “counter-economics”, which he considered to be all peaceful economic activity that takes place outside the purview and control of the state. This includes competing currencies, community gardening schemes, tax resistance and operating a business without licenses. Agorism also extends to the creation of alternative education programs, free schools or skill shares, and independent media ventures that counter the establishment narratives.

Konkin describes four phases: from small, scattered mutual aid pods “agorists may want to start condensing into districts, ghettos, islands, or space colonies. We are, in fact, beginning to see the creation of Agorist minded communities, seasteaders, eco-villages, co-ops, and underground spaces…” From there, the Agorists will begin to dominate with statist spaces becoming more isolated, and finally lashing out with violence as it gasps its dying breath before “the remnants of the state are apprehended and brought to justice…”

Broze names Peru, China, N Korea, Cuba and Africa as examples of successful counter-economies. He states three internet tools that provide the means to accomplish phase one: “Each of these tools are a part of the technology of the countereconomy that have the potential to render government intervention and regulation completely useless.”

… the websites and apps FreedomCells.org, NextDoor.com, and GetCell411.com offer tools that can be used to strengthen our communities, grow the counter-economy, and push back against the state. Using the Freedom Cell Network one can locate other freedom minded individuals within their city, state, or country with the specific goal of organizing in the real world and bypassing the need for government. … NextDoor also allows the user to connect with the local community, both digitally and in the real world. The app has the added benefit of being focused on your specific neighborhood. This allows individuals to post important safety information, lost and found items, or counter-economic business opportunities, directly to those that live near them. Finally, Cell411 describes itself as a “real time, free emergency management platform”. This means it allows you to create “cells” or groups to which you can send out direct alerts in the case of a flat tire, car accident, violence from a state agent, or some other emergency. The app also allows for truly agorist ridesharing where a third party does not dictate the price of the trip or the currency that must be used.

I mention my own experience with Nextdoor.com, who I’ve researched for interference in local politics and biased censorship, and state my position that having a globalized, commercial platform to talk to our neighbors is a contradiction in terms.

And here are some of the Freedom Cells in the 30,000+ person network: Protect the Children (byline: Pedophile Lives Don’t Matter), Motorhome Survivalist Group, Freedom Entrepreneurs & Job Seekers, N Arizona Free Thinkers, 3D Printed Guns, Rural Michoacon, Panama, and Texas—the biggest freedom cell in the world. They are peer-to-peer groups using “peaceful resistence and alternative institutions” with the goal that every member has storable food, encrypted communication, a bug-out plan, and the means to defend themselves.

five flies in the ointment

There are five concerns I have with the Greater Reset plan:

1. We are a consumer society while the successful examples of underground economies are in producer nations. In my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, I research money from its origins and show that it's backed by the slave labor of other people for food, goods & energy. We're a services labor force—we don't produce. I don't think you can go from a slave-owning economy to a gift economy. You have to develop an economy of reciprocity in between, or you're giving away someone else's slave labor, not trading your own.

2. It leaves ownership of all property and the right to issue credit against them with the banks. As long as the banks own the properties, they own our labor. There’s nothing that can be changed while the bankers own everything. For a Freedom Cell to aggregate, they would need to own their property outright and not need to pay property taxes on it.

3. After the money created by mortgages circulates, it returns to the bankers who pass it to their other hand as venture capitalists, then to corporate employees who pay taxes, mortgages and insurances before it trickles down to those who provide services and the cycle starts again. Without people in the first tier of corporate circulation, money will be siphoned out without being replaced.

4. Tax resistance is only possible if you don’t make much money…. operating a business without a license is only possible if you don’t make much money. These can work on a small scale but once they scale up, they’ll be shut down.

5. Dropping out won’t hurt the system because those who designed The Great Reset don’t care if we live or die. By some indices, they prefer the latter. If we’re dead to the system, it’s all the same to them.

how regenerative economies differ from the greater reset

1. Under my plan, the community is the default owner of the properties within its borders with the exclusive right to issue credit as mortgages when they change hands. Using the US as an example, I capitalize community-owned public banks with the Social Security Trust Fund, giving it and retirement savings a high rate of interest, which is possible because banks can issue 10X their capital as debt. I rescind the right of private banks to loan money they don't have (thereby creating money) which is the exclusive privilege of government. I issue a community credit that I call carets as monthly targeted subsidies to all residents for locally produced food, wellcare, education & home improvements (thereby stimulating the local economy). I make locally spent carets free of taxes except for SS. However, I use a 2:1 exchange rate for dollars to carets and tax carets or dollars that leave the community at 50%. I give local residents who earn dollars the ability to exchange them for carets at a 1:1 ratio up to a monthly maximum (depending on the local cost of housing). So community residents have double the advantage in buying housing (over hedge funds or outsiders) and in competing with foreign-made products.

2. The money issued for mortgages is created as dollars to buy out non-local investors and mortgages held by private banks. But the debt can only be repaid in carets, transferring it from being a debt to the bankers to a debt to society. As a member of that society, this becomes a debt owed to YOU. The subsidies create your share of entitlement to the labor of others in your community. The labor you owe to them is in proportion to your own mortgage or rent. So if you have 1000 people receiving ^100 per month for local food, you’re adding ^100,000 a month in local food production. If that money recirculates, minus the 15% Social Security tax, the next month would add ^185,000 in local goods and services. Within a year, if it stayed local, ^3.6M in new economic activity could be added to the community for every ^100/mo., which can go up to a maximum formula of <debt + tax + 2X cash reserves>.

3. This operates in parallel with the existing system so that it doesn’t replace government funding for anything except Social Security. As “new money” its only purpose is to facilitate new local goods and services, transitioning to a producer society. Its success is measured by how many times carets circulate locally before being cashed out. The only people who lose from this are the international bankers.

4. Rather than “You will own nothing and be happy,” they will own nothing and you will be happy. It protects local property, infrastructure and labor from being appropriated merely to make the rich richer. Yay!

In summary, the Greater Reset is a fine thing for finding community and taking care of each other before changing the system, like Transition Towns except with guns. But we should reserve some of our energy towards developing a new plan to replace the system that’s currently in freefall. I’d like to submit my plan for your consideration.

And if you’d like to look at more of these ideas, here’s Patriarchal Pyramid or Matriarchal Matrix? on Vandana Shiva: Responding to Russell Brand's interview called On Fearlessness and Fighting Power, I nominate Vandana as Spirit Mother Earth Goddess and suggest Ganesh as her consort. I predict that we're at the end of 100 generations of patriarchy and should enter the matrix—the womb or place of origin—to imagine what comes next. I look at fear as the opposite of love, and the social distancing that says fear IS love. I cite another fearless Indian woman, Arundhati Roy, on the fighting power of the Maoists or Naxalites. I propose India's 1.3B people as 4000 self-governing commonwealths and end with a dream of Red King Kong and the Winged Green Dragon in which they have tea and solve climate change.

and this is What Emerges from the Emergency? on Luke Kemp: Responding to Russell's interview of Luke Kemp on Emergency Powers, I suggest that 100 generations of a system serving the ejaculations of men could be ending. I examine the four sources of power and their absence of the feminine representing home and family. I take a closer look at two examples Luke gives from history—Greek democracy and the Weimar Republic. The purpose of government is defined with a report card on the bipartisan pandemic administration. Russell is spanked for using patriarchal language but forgiven for doing it in the heat of his flirting bromance. And I end with a recommendation to "stay with the stuckness."