Cryptocurrency: Cut The Chains Of Your Financial Serfdom

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12 Ways To Cut The Chains Of Financial Serfdom

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Just because nobody talks about financial serfdom doesn't mean it's not real.

Ours is a neofeudal economy of financial serfs in servitude to a
Financial Aristocracy. The Financial Nobility / Aristocracy own all
the debt and the serfs owe the debt to the Aristocracy. The serfs own
assets that don't generate much income, the Aristocracy owns assets
that generate trillions of dollars in income. The serfs pay high tax
rates if they make above-poverty wages, the Financial Nobility pay low
taxes thanks to tax-avoidance scams arranged by the Aristocracy's
toadies and lackeys in the Central State. The serfs create value, the
Financial Nobility is parasitic.

That we are powerless is one of the key social control myths
constantly promoted by the Status Quo. What better way to keep the
serfs passive than to reinforce a belief in their powerlessness
against Financial Feudalism?

But we are not powerless. Our complicity gives the Financial
Aristocracy its power. Remove our complicity and the Aristocracy
implodes.

The pathway of liberation is to opt out of financial feudalism. Here
are twelve paths any adult can legally pursue in the course of their
daily lives:

    1. Support the decentralized, non-market economy. The core
ideology of consumerism and financialization is that non-market assets
and experiences have no status or financial value. This includes
social capital, meals with friends, projects done cooperatively with
friends, home gardens and dozens of other decentralized activities
that cannot be financialized into centralized market transactions.
Identity and social status are established in the non-market economy
by collaboration, sharing, reciprocity, conviviality and generosity.

    Decentralized means localized; farmers markets are examples of
local market economies where the transactions are in cash (so banks
can't skim transactions fees) and the money stays in the local economy
rather than flowing to some distant concentration of capital.

    If you start valuing non-market assets and experiences as the most
important markers of status, you are resisting both financialization
and consumerism.

    Top-down centralized "solutions" imposed by the Central State are
the problem, not the solution, as they further the concentration of
wealth and power into unstable monocultures. Stop looking to overly
complex fake-reforms and centralized solutions to unsustainable
systems and start exploring decentralized, localized solutions that
bypass both the Central State and the Financial Aristocracy.

    2. Stop participating in financialization. Financialization is the
insidious imperative of the Financial Aristocracy that seeks to turn
every human interaction into a financial transaction that can be
charged a fee, and transform all assets into financialized instruments
that can be commoditized and sold for immensely profitable fees.

    As the finances of local governments implode under the weight of
their protected fiefdoms, many are heeding the siren song of
financialization as a temporary (and inevitably disastrous) "fix" to
their structural insolvency. For example, the revenue stream from
parking meters is financialized into an asset that is sold to a
private corporation. When parking fees double, the residents of the
city have no recourse via democracy or petition, as the meters in
their city are now "owned" by a distant concentration of capital that
can double late fees, charge outrageous transaction costs, etc., at
will.

    This is how financialization inevitably transitions into financial tyranny.

    The erosion of America's middle class security has several
structural causes, but chief among them was the financialization of
the housing market. This has led to serial bubbles of housing
valuations and the widespread extraction of equity for
consumption--the classic "windfall" that financialization always
produces in its first toxic blush.

    3. Redefine self-interest to exclude debt-servitude and dependence
on consumerism and the Central State. Unless you are long retired and
have no other option, minimize reliance on the State. Reliance on the
State weakens the correlation between sustained effort and gain, so
the work ethic and entrepreneurism both atrophy as they no longer
offer competitive advantages in a system where bread and circuses are
guaranteed by the State.

    4. Act on your awareness that the nature of prosperity and
financial security is changing. Dependence on centralized
concentrations of power (Wall Street and the Central State) is now an
extremely risky wager that what is demonstrably unsustainable will
magically become sustainable via pixie dust or more Federal Reserve
trickery. Security flows from resilience, self-reliance,
decentralized, diversified sources of income and abundant social
capital, not speculation fueled by Fed policies and Wall Street.

    5. Stop supporting distant concentrations of capital that subvert
democracy by using their gargantuan profits to buy the machinery of
State governance and regulation. For example, stop watching broadcast
programming owned by the six global media corporations that control
the vast majority of the media/marketing complex.

    Stop eroding your health and sending your money to corporate
headquarters by no longer frequenting fast-food restaurants and by no
longer buying unhealthy packaged foods from corporate agribusiness.

    Close your accounts with Wall Street investment firms and the "too
big to fail" banks that dominate the mortgage, credit and debt markets
in the U.S. If you need such an account to transact your business,
maintain low balances so the banks cannot sweep your capital for their
own use every day.

    6. Stop supporting the debt-and-leverage based Financial
Aristocracy. Liquidate all debt as soon as possible, take on no new
debt except for short periods of time, explore localized or
crowd-sourced private-capital loans that exclude the banks and limit
the number of financial transactions that enrich the banks and Wall
Street.

    7. Transfer your assets out of Wall Street and into local
enterprises or assets that do not enrich and empower Wall Street. Buy
assets you control 100%, without the mediation of Wall Street.

    8. Refuse to participate in consumerist status identifiers and the
social defeat they create. Stop admiring and respecting those
displaying status signifiers (supercars, $300 million yachts, etc.);
start thinking of them as pathetic prisoners of a pathological
mindset. Stop judging people based on their lack of status signifiers.
Free your own mind from the toxic sociopathology of consumerism and
social defeat. Stop watching commercial television and streaming
corporate distractions and minimize your exposure to marketing and
consumerist propaganda.

    9. Vote in every election with an eye on rewarding honesty and
truth and punishing empty promises. Unless the incumbent has renounced
corporate contributions, unsustainable debt, financial tyranny and
Central State encroachment of civil liberties, then vote against the
incumbent, for they are just another lackey of the State-Plutocracy
partnership. Avoid voting for either the Demopublican or Republicrat
branches of the plutocracy; vote for an independent or third party
candidate.

    Remember that resistance isn't just about refusing to participate
in pathological neofeudalism; it’s about establishing a sustainable
alternative to the unsustainable State-Aristocracy partnership. When
people say that voting for a third-party candidate is "wasting your
vote," reply that voting for either of the plutocrat parties is the
real waste of a vote because their "leadership" is dooming the nation
to destabilization and insolvency. As independents pick up more and
more "wasted" votes, they shift from being "marginalized" to becoming
powerful voices of integrity and transparency.

    10. Stop supporting inflationary policies such as money creation -
QE by the Federal Reserve and Federal deficit spending. Act on your
knowledge that inflation is theft and that the Federal Reserve is a
private consortium of banks that is the enabler and protector of the
parasitic Financial Aristocracy.

    11. Become healthy, active and fit. Refuse to consume unhealthy
junk food and packaged food, refuse to squander much of your time in
sedentary "consumption" of corporate "entertainment" and digital
distraction, and devote your energy and time to mastery, new skills,
developing social capital and friendships, projects you own and
enterprises that benefit your true self-interest. Refuse to follow the
marketing/media siren song into chronic ill-health, social-media
addiction and social defeat.

    12. Embrace self-directed plans and construct a resilient,
community-based, localized life of identity and meaning. Build a
social ecology of positive, productive, collaborative,
non-pathological people of like minds and spirits. Be powerful via
Self-Reliance, not powerless via apathy, passivity and complicity.