Originally published via Armageddon Prose:

The mythology of independence is uniquely Americana and noble, a relic of the pioneering spirit as settlers traversed the vast continent before them, braving the wild and fashioning lives for themselves from the elements furnished by nature.

But it is largely myth; the truth is that we are all, by virtue of the necessary sustenance to sustain our physical and spiritual existence here, dependent on something or multiple things — be they of a financial, social, psychological, pharmacological, or environmental nature — to varying extents.

Rather than striving for the pipe dream of total independence, the key, it seems, is controlling to the best of our limited abilities what we are dependent on and how much.

The media landscape is rapidly evolving, as are the interests that control and direct it. Substack — along with Rumble, and BitChute, and a handful of others — is a beautiful platform. Some, if not most, of the best and bravest truth-tellers in the world use this platform to advance their ideas — ideas otherwise condemned as dangerous and verboten in the legacy media.

There are no advertisers here. All revenue is generated by reader support and shared roughly 80/20 between creator and platform. We can quibble about the ideal distribution of proceeds, but the platform covers the technical (but not journalistic, obviously) operating expenses and shields creators from the vultures seeking to cancel them — rendering them independent from the would-be censors that would see their voices memory-holed — and functions as a valuable nexus where likeminded individuals converge.

Rest assured that, behind the scenes, the enraged powers that be are hard at work figuring out how to shut down this and any dissident platform.

If we’re going to get out of this mess, there’s no silver bullet, and no individual savior. No one entity short of a Biblical messiah who returneth — no, not even Donald Trump — is going to dig us out. It’s going to take a mass awakening and mobilization, and a mass awakening and mobilization require free media to spread the message, independent of the anti-human technocratic, increasingly AI-driven machine of the multinational corporate state.

To achieve a global win, the reality is that we’re going to be dependent on each other. There is no bunker deep or fortified enough, nor any island remote enough, to keep the wolves at bay; sooner or later, and it’s looking more and more like sooner, they’re going to have to be met head-on — hopefully defeated in the information war and not a kinetic one. There will be no hiding.

In that vein, I’ve often noticed a schism within what we might call — as Elon Musk recently did — Team Human between the bunker hunkers and the stay-and-fight people. The former advocates total disconnection from The Beast and relocation to a remote stretch of arable land to live Amish-style but with semi-automatic rifles. The latter advocates staying in the trenches, fully immersed, and trying to kick in the captain’s cabin door and steer the Titanic away from the iceberg.

In my view, the best approach — and I am a hypocrite in this regard, as I’m far too deeply interconnected with The Beast, a sin I will attempt to remedy in the new year — is to live with one foot in both camps. It’s necessary to stay involved because, left to its own devices with its NPC army, the machine will come for everyone in the end. However, the danger in maintaining a portal into the Matrix — to mix metaphors — is that we start to believe that it’s reality and give ourselves over to it, a fear rightly held by the bunker camp.

Balance.

If the Eastern mystics got one thing right, I believe it’s balance. We should neither ever allow ourselves full dependence on anyone or anything, but neither should we delude ourselves that we can ever be fully independent of everything on this giant island of a rock hurtling through space. What we allow to fester outside of the gates will inevitably find its way inside the gates if it’s not confronted.

/endrant

I’m open to alternative perspectives on the matter. Feel free to drop yours in the comments.

Merry Christmas and God bless.

Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

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