by Tom Baugh
If you work and save, eventually the monkey collective, the collective of the nice and the charitable, will deflate away all you have earned. If you invest, they will eventually pop that bubble, or punitively tax it from you. Invest instead your time and your energy in knowledge. Learn math, which is God's language, and the sciences, His art. How great Thou Art, indeed. And how great the works of man which have been built upon those rocks which He left for us to find. Only to allow the monkeys to swarm upon them and destroy in their ignorant way.
In the world which must come, and which evolutionary forces demand, the man who knows and can do will be the master of his world. The man who knows how to restore a tractor. Or the man who can hunt, or who can plant, or heal, or mend. Or who can reprogram an industrial controller or capture neutrons with uranium. All of these men will be far more valuable than the lawyer or the accountant or the bureaucrat or the cubicle slave or the community organizer. Any of these last can learn to provide actual value, transforming themselves into the former, if they will only choose to do so. And, any monkey can become a man if they only will.
Assets of the mind cannot be taken from you, other than by death. But even then you deny them to your murderer. In the future which must be as surely as the sun rises in the east to open the day, you will need these assets. And not figures on a flickering screen or on a fading ledger. The true assets, those of the mind, will help you provide for yourself as we restore the world after destroying theirs.
The faster civilization is torn down, the sooner it can be restored. Just like the charity thrift store in a prosperous area, the remnants of civilization can be used by men to rebuild: the buildings, the equipment and machinery, the paper mills, the refineries, the railways, the clothing, the materials, the nuclear power plants, and so on.
Let the decline happen more slowly, the path we are currently on, and all of those things will be burned for fuel. Or, worn out, or scavenged as if by prancing rabbits in a dumpster. These things will be consumed by monkeys rooting around in the deletria of men, with no hope of making more when it has been exhausted. The entire world under a slow decline will be like the inner city charity thrift store, with only the unuseable garbage remaining. The nuclear power plants will be dripping, rusting, crumbling hulks, their fuel hauled away and buried in a fit of sacrifice to their gods, praying for planetary salvation.
But this time there won't be oil bubbling under the ground in Pennsylvania or Texas, waiting for someone to drop a pipe on it. Or iron ore falling off hillsides in Alabama. Or coal crunching underfoot in West Virginia. Or gold tumbling down creek beds in Georgia or California. Or uranium and thorium in Wyoming and Utah waiting to chatter away at counters which won't be there to hear.
Restoring that civilization will be infinitely harder; the locusts will have consumed it all. It will take longer to restore that civilization than it would after a nuclear war, or after the Catholics destroyed free will almost two millennia ago by substituting enforced compliance rituals for true faith and thought. This dark age will be long. And deep. So long that men will have forgotten the math and the sciences which would have saved them, the books long ago rotted and moldy, or burned for fuel in the dark winter.
Take them down fast by starving them quickly, and they won't have a chance to consume everything else. Starve them fast, or they will starve you slow.
But that wasn't the secret. Those four billion people don't have to starve. They only have to think they might. If they are convinced that the blood they suck from your neck will stop flowing any minute, or does indeed stop flowing, many will decide to transform themselves from monkeys into men. Once transformed, they can begin providing value instead of merely consuming it at your expense.
Or not. And starve. Either way, four billion monkeys, or more, evaporate. And get out of your way. That's all John Galt wanted, right? That's all any of us have ever wanted.
Just get out of our way. But they won't. They refuse to get out of our way, and their appetite grows more insatiable. And now they know they surround us.
But that wasn't the secret, either. Ayn Rand was a brilliant woman. But she was wrong about one key issue. There will never be a Galt's Gulch. Yet, for decades men have wondered where it might be.
But there is no place on Earth where we can go to be safe from the monkeys. We have made them too many toys which they use to enslave us. Should we be so naive as to establish such a place as Galt's Gulch, they would simply defame us as they have defamed so many before. And then arrest, or burn, or bomb us with the weapons we have given them.
So we have to starve them from within their midst. And so we have to create this place, this Galt's Gulch, for ourselves wherever we might individually be. You must create a Galt's Gulch within your own mind and between what few producers you may find and choose to trade with.
Or, take my advice and move to B Country. While writing this I lived out my own advice and moved to B Country. You can, too. Once there, do everything you can to learn to be self-sufficient and of value to your fellow producers. Teach yourself the skills we will need when we put it all back together. Learn what you can about things of value, and teach your children the things which they will never learn from the collective.
This isn't the seventies survivalist advice, either. Those guys were just hoping to get by while the big boys duked it out. No, this is much more aggressive than that kind of optimism.
This is an aggressive act of doing nothing. A stone wall, if you will.
And when you see the monkeys starving and thrashing about, you have to harden your heart from pity, and instead rejoice that they will soon be gone from us. When you can watch the misery of a Katrina, and know that even within that maelstrom men fend for themselves while we are shown the monkeys pleading and whimpering, you will be ready.
The lesson of Katrina was simple. We saw the needy and the helpless paraded before us, and law enforcement cut and run or join the looters. But what we didn't see were all of those who needed no assistance. Those who had prepared themselves accordingly. We poured the resources of a nation into solving, fitfully, the problems of one Katrina. Now imagine a hundred, or a thousand simultaneous Katrinas. Imagine the opportunity to rid ourselves of the vermin who infest our nation.
In such a massive crisis traditional law and order and authority will vanish in the twinkling of an eye. And the monkeys will storm anything of value to steal what they can. Yet not one of them will pause to ask themselves, "then what?" What happens after the looting, after the stealing and the killing and the raping? After the martial law has destroyed individual liberty, and property rights, and along with that the means of production or the incentive to feed them next month or next year? Then what?
Simple. Then they die. And so will we unless we understand how to put the pieces together. Store what you must to live long enough unnoticed by the mobs until we can begin trading with each other again. Then we will work by the sweat of our brows and the light of our imaginations to restore civilization. But this time for us, and for us alone.
But the argument is presented, what of the family who has been caught helpless by the collapse? Are there not families in those multitudes of subdivisions who would be of value and deserving of our help? Perhaps. Perhaps there are families who would be of value. But whether they are deserving of your help, and worthy of eating from your larder is up to you to decide. And not a Governor who would seize your resources and give to them unthinkingly. Because then both families starve.
We have to readjust our attitudes about charity in a crisis. Our modern concept of charity is nothing more than the guilt-driven claim of another to your resources. Taxation and progressivism is itself merely dogmatic charity enforced by law. If it is good for one to help another, they reason, then it is infinitely more good to force all to help another. We see where that path led us. Socialism at the small scale will kill you just as certainly as socialism on the large. Church socials or ethics, no matter how well meaning, will only defer th
e question, "then what?"
Imagine if that day arrived, and a family arrived on your doorstep seeking assistance. What would you do? What would you do if that family was yours seeking assistance from someone else? I know what I would do in that circumstance. I would ask my potential host if there is anything of value which I can do for him.
I would help him repair his fences. I would help him tend his animals or repair his tractor or whatever he needed done to provide value. I would send my wife to the kitchen to help his wife prepare the meal and clean up afterward. I would send the kids out with his to do whatever work they were capable of performing. And I would help him defend his family and his property from those who would merely demand or steal. I would be the most valuable farm hand, or shop hand, or whatever hand was required, whom he had ever seen. I would do everything in my power to be more valuable to him and his quality of life than the food and water and shelter I am asking him to provide to me.
All of those fleeing millions could do the same thing. But they won't, because they will have, at some point in their lives, chosen the way of the monkey as their ethic. And when they steal or storm the barn or chase the chickens or break the windows the ethical decision will have already been made. They will have shown themselves to be as they truly are. And you will know what to do.
When they show up in a town meeting to decide what work must be done, and their first solution is that we must share the bounty among everyone, you will know what to do. When their solution is to seize the property of those most capable of helping through their own self interest, you will know what to do. Property rights and work and thought and trading value for value will see us through, seizure and confiscation will only accelerate the destruction of the rest of us.
When they stream from the cities into B Country, in some areas the refugees will encounter roadblocks erected by prepared communities who understand the threat they represent. Understanding the contagion of the ideas they bring with them, these communities and counties will have decided to keep them out, and only allow entry to those who can and will provide value. Systems of immigration policy will keep the unworthy out and let the worthy in. Are you a lawyer who only knows how to sue and destroy? A banker who only knows how to coerce the misery and need of others? You had better learn how to do something of value, and soon, because all of your millions will be nothing more than smoke. A welder, who can create utility from scrap, is of far more genuine value.
Each of those people fleeing the destruction of their world will have decided, and continued to decide each day of their lives, that their cities and their subdivisions were the right path. Each of them thought they would grow wealthy, or powerful, or in some way gambled that their lifestyle mattered.
When Obama was elected, I turned to First Wife and said that we were leaving. Within three months we had left our beautiful home in one of the highest-priced suburbs of Atlanta, and our nice office a few miles away, and moved to B Country. We placed our home and our office on the market at the worst possible time in the history of our nation. I knew that by so doing we would take a loss of at least a quarter of a million dollars and, possibly, much more, by the interruption of business for the entire transition and the writing of this book. I could be wrong, and if so all I will have lost is money. A lot of money, but still only money. If I'm right, and you haven't prepared yourself, what will you lose?
Obama's election, on the heels of the right wing suit-monkeys having forced us all to pay protection money to the bankers who accelerated this mess, was a signal that the monkeys were about to tear it all down. We may lose everything, but I can always build it up again. I have done it before, and I know how to do it again. Any one of these people streaming toward you could have done the same thing, but they didn't. If they thought about it all, they simply dismissed the risk by reasoning that one day they could simply take what you have for themselves. Or demand that you give it to them. Or send their soldiers to take it from you by force if you refuse.
Don't let them take it, don't let them demand it, and ignore their claims that we must fight each other. Soon, as the monkeys see their world crumbling around them, they will demand action. The particular political system makes no difference. Even dictatorships serve an electorate which votes to not hang them each day, the people finding their plight preferable to the effort to change it. So to placate their respective electorates, world powers will agree to fight one another to stir our passions so that we will continue to serve them at our peril. But, these conflicts will merely be illusions crafted to delude us into fighting ourselves.
Just as so many conflicts before have been illusions to defeat us as the monkeys sensed we were about to act.
Deny them your heroism, whether against disaster or crisis or feigned attack, and save that for only those you know are worthy of your efforts. Each meal you provide them strengthens them to hunt your brothers.
In their misery and plight and starvation if you bend to help them, you will have betrayed us all. And you will have betrayed yourself. Instead, offer them a chance to help themselves. But if they refuse to help themselves, walk them to the edge of the ravine with a smile on your face and your arm around their shoulder.
Nor was that the secret.
So here is your last chance. This book only gets worse from here, as if such a thing were even possible.
Put it down now before you turn this last page.
Still with me?
Good. I knew you would be. Because the secret is that you are one of many I have been trying to find. But some of you are fighting these ideas. And losing.
Fight me all you want.
But stop fighting these ideas.
And think.
For yourself.
Epilogue III
I released the first version of this work, subtitled "An Entrepreneurial Horror," in June of 2009. The cover of that book featured the trademarked Banana-HammerTM logo, as below.
Unfortunately, many who saw that logo didn't get the joke, and thought that this was a book promoting communism. This turned out to be fortuitous, since the new cover is much better, and more intuitively indicative of the contents.
It is now October of 2009, and the world is already a different place, as the various collectives struggle for control over what is already a shrunken pie of our economy. A pie which is shrinking faster still, not yet due to the influence of this book, but as the inevitable result of the way of the monkey of the left and the right.
Effectively, we now live in a third-world country. The largess of our nation is handed to whatever influential party has access to the halls of power. Banks which no longer provide banking services can write themselves checks as large as they wish. As can political canvassing organizations, car companies, investment firms, privatized prisons, environmental advocates, etc. Missing from the picture to make the comparison obvious are the four-wheel-drives with rear-mounted machine guns used to haul away the loot; in our advanced society the same plunder is transferred via computer. But the effect on our currency, and our treasure, and our hard-earned savings, and our work ethic will be the same when the inflation begins to mount.
For some, this book has had a profound impact already. I have been overwhelmed by the intensity of the reaction in some who have written me to tell me that this book "shook them awake" or transformed the priorities in their lives. Or those who hear my voice on the radio or read these words and tell me that these resonated with their convictions. I thank all of them for their thoughts, and in truth, I have merely repackaged ancient ideas, or put them in modern terms and supplied modern examples. These ideas are timeless, we have merely strayed from the path which took so long, and so many generations, to pave. And yet, there are millions, if not billions, of people who mouth these ideas as if a mantra and then turn away from their own words as they rip those pavements from the earth and heave them into the weeds in their teeming ignorance.
Some readers have suggested that I try to reach these millions throug
h various strategies. They believe that by "going viral" we may convince those millions to understand these words and apply them. And all I have to do to make this happen, some say, is to give this book away. To place it into the free domain of the collective, as it were. Because, they argue, if I believe that these ideas truly are the essential foundations of civilization, shouldn't I be happy to give these words away? However, to do so would be to miss the point of this book entirely. I won't even bother to explain why because if you understand this idea you need no explanation. If you don't understand, nothing I say here in these few remaining pages will convince you otherwise if the previous four hundred pages or so haven't.
This message has been generating attention, as the collectivists are beginning to awaken to this threat to their way of life, a way of life which exists only at our expense. For one example among many, I have been suspected of trying to divide the 912 movement. That movement, I predict, history will show to simply be a cleverly disguised ploy by the GOP to revive its brand image, but not its substance. As alluded by the new cover of this book, all of the philosophical warfare you are allowed to hear is merely one collective "battling" another for control of your spirit. Neither "side", as if there is such a distinction, is interested in restoring individual liberty; those are just words used to woo you.
And yet, those words are sufficient to woo millions, and continue to lead them astray. The 912 movement, while started as a sham, does serve two useful purposes. The first is that it has concentrated our brothers, although even there they are still woefully dilute. Nonetheless, the increased concentration in that movement, and others, versus the world at large serves a second purpose, which is to provide a forum for reaching out to them more easily. The early success at doing just that during late June through early July of 2009 led to that original forum being shut down for comment after my efforts to pay for advertising in so-called conservative venues were denied. Venues which, by the way, gladly accept advertising from their purported "opposition". As I write this, the collectivists on the right are busy trying to gobble up and contain the other forums which squirted out the edges in response to their censorship.
