Parallel functions

I'm not 100% sure what the solution is here, but the Z-man offers plenty of food for thought. One of my other daily dissident reads is Vox Day who has done an awful lot towards creating his own parallel structures, particularly in the arena of pop culture.

There is no solution to the problems of liberal democracy at the ballot box. Most Americans have no representation in politics as both parties are committed to destroying normal life. This fall the Republicans will win the election and everything will get worse. Whatever promises they have made will be broken on day one. They will set about giving the oligarchs whatever they want while pretending they are doing their voters a favor.

Even knowing this, people want to do something. This is even more true for dissidents who are more political than normal people. The reason you end up on this side of the great divide is you have engaged with politics and learned from it. Walking away entirely seems like quitting to most people. On the other hand, participating just empowers the people who want you dead. This is the dilemma that ruined the conservative movement and haunts the dissident right.

This leaves only one option and that is building a counter culture. Channeling activism into building a parallel society bridges the gap between ideas and activism. In a way, this is what we see globally with the alliance of non-Western powers. China, Russia and India want to create a parallel system that can challenge America. The same thing has to happen domestically. It is a bigger challenge for obvious reasons, but parallelism is the only way forward short of revolution.

This is actually very similar to the old American ideal of what freedom meant, which has been bowdlerized beyond recognition, but which now seems pretty relevant: to be beholden to no man. There are parallelisms to all kinds of problems. Food scarcity and prices? Grow gardens and keep food storage, and you'll be less affected. For instance.

I've been doing some independent research about the daily life of people in the manorial British Middle Ages, as much as its possible to do so. A low social rank, below even a serf, was a cottar, cotter, or cottager, spoken of in The Domesday Book as making up about 30% or so of the population that was surveyed (which was not the full population of England, but still... it's a data point of sorts.) Cottars lived in cottages, and the names of the two were closely related. A cottage, by definition, was a small, single-family dwelling, but it was required to be equipped with just enough land to feed a single family, about 4 acres, on average. Usually the land was fenced and had a barn as well, although cottars did not usually own horses or other draught animals. But milk cows, chickens, pigs, and small fields for single-family farming, as well as farm labor as his main occupation were what defined a cottar. While cottars were low on the Medieval social hierarchy, it seems likely that most of us are destined for an even worse standard of living and freedom than cottars enjoyed without a change in our current trajectory.