Excerpts from The Sovereign Individual

If you try to put yourself in the position of a Roman of the late fifth century, it is easy to imagine how tempting it would have been to conclude that nothing had changed. That certainly was the optimistic conclusion. To have thought otherwise might have been frightening. And why come to a frightening conclusion when a reassuring one was at hand?

Part of the reason that Rome fell is simply that it had expanded beyond the scale at which the economies of violence could be maintained. The cost of garrisoning the empire’s far-flung borders exceeded the economic advantages that an ancient agricultural economy could support. The burden of taxation and regulation required to finance the military effort rose to exceed the carrying capacity of the economy. Corruption became endemic.

Whenever technological change has divorced the old forms from the new moving forces of the economy, moral standards shift, and people begin to treat those in command of the old institutions with growing disdain. This widespread revulsion often comes into evidence well before people develop a new coherent ideology of change. So it was in the late fifteenth century, when the medieval Church was the predominant institution of feudalism. Notwithstanding popular belief in “the sacredness of the sacerdotal office,” both the higher and lower ranks of clergy were held in the utmost contempt—not unlike the popular attitude toward politicians and bureaucrats today.

Faster than all but a few now imagine, microprocessing will subvert and destroy the nation-state, creating new forms of social organization in the process.

Sovereign Individuals will no longer merely accede to what is imposed upon them as human resources of the state. Millions will shed the obligations of citizenship to become customers for the useful services governments provide. Indeed, they will create and patronize parallel institutions that will place most of the services associated with citizenship on an entirely commercial basis. For most of the twentieth century, the productive have been treated as assets by the state, in much the way that the dairy farmer treats milk cows. They have been squeezed ever more vigorously. Now the cows will sprout wings.

Towards Libertarianism ¶

One of my main joys in life is reading. I have always been reading all kind of stuff, but since COVID I expanded my interest with a new addition, that could be called libertarian. I read classics such as Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead but also highly controversial texts such as The Sovereign Individual and Democracy: The God that Failed .

These kind of books help me to stay agile in my worldview, and prevent a lock-in, as such books confront me with whole new ideas and force me to rethink my own presumptions and assumptions - the best of these books then lead to a fundamental transition of my thinking by shifting and expanding my worldview. This led to me finding out that I am much more a libertarian than a liberal. Note that liberalism and libertarianism are distinct philosophies, though they share some roots. Libertarianism emphasizes individual liberty, minimal government, and free markets, often advocating for near-total personal and economic freedom, including laissez-faire capitalism and strong property rights. Liberalism, historically and today, supports individual freedoms but often endorses a more active government role in promoting social welfare, equality, and regulated markets to achieve those ends.

Democracy: The God that Failed, written in 2001, had a deep impact on my political thinking. Reading it felt extremely heretical, as it is essentially a fundamental critique of Democracy - something that was pretty much taboo in my thinking up to this point. Hans-Hermann Hoppe argues that democracy leads to short-sighted governance and economic decline, as politicians prioritize immediate voter appeasement over long-term stability. Hoppe contrasts democracy with monarchy, suggesting the latter fosters better incentives for rulers to preserve wealth and societal order. However, despite flirting with Monarchy, the book advocates for a libertarian framework, emphasizing private property and decentralized governance over state-controlled systems.

With The Sovereign Individual on the other hand I felt I got a framework on how to make sense of the fundamental changes that happened over the last few years. Although being at times quite challenging and a bit repetitive, it makes very unique observations about history and draws interesting conclusions:

Written in 1997, it anticipated the emergence of digital (crypto) currencies, beyond of the reach of the nation state.
The authors compare the current mass-democratic nation state to the catholic church in the 1500s: a massively bloated, corrupt apparatus, that is a drag on peoples lives, dictating and controlling and regulating increasingly more and more of peoples lives; with the original purpose lost. In this it overlaps with Democracy: The God that Failed.
They make the remarkable argument that always when the returns to violence changed, a fundamental change in society happened: the collapse after Roman Empire led to serfdom around 1000, introduction of black powder resulted in modernism around 1500.
They make the point that the ultimate goal of nation states is to syphon as much money from their citizens into the nations military apparatus as possible, and that in this light western democracy and communism had/have essentially the same goal. However western democracy was a more effective system, surviving longer than the eastern communist block, but that western welfare states ultimately cannot keep up the costs for very much longer due to dramatic changes in technology which allow individuals to escape the grip of the nation state.
They predict the end of the mass-democratic nation states due to the rise of microtechnology, resulting in smaller autonomous regions, where so-called “sovereign individuals” live. Those autonomous regions are in competition with each other to attract sovereign individuals, therefore driving down prices for services such as protection of property rights, health care and policing. The reason for the collapse is a vicious cycle: microtechnology allows more and more individuals to escape from the grip of the nation state, reducing the income of the nation state, forcing the nation state to increase taxes to fund the state, however costs of the state are increasing due to corruption, changing demographics, technology changes, welfare costs, which in turn leads to more and more tax-paying individuals to escape the nation state, resulting in lower returns, forcing higher taxes and so on.

After a lot of thinking and reflecting I came to the conclusion that the systems outlined in The sovereign individual and Democracy: The God that Failed are unsustainable as they would ultimately end up in serfdom because if anything history has shown us, than that people are anything else than ultra-rational actors, and that violence is never in equilibrium but tends to get monopolised or in the hand of a few. The Sovereign Individual makes the point that violence can be held in check and actually become too expensive (returns of violence diminish) under new disruptive technologies that they are projecting and that we have seen since the book released. So we can make the point that we are actually long-term headed towards a combination of Hoppes system and the Sovereign Individual, where the latter provides the playbook for the transitioning phase and the argument why we might see actually an equilibrium of violence: because of the vastly diminishing returns on violence due to the disruptive technologies that allows to withdraw from grip of state - similarly to invention of black powder. However one of the main points the Sovereign Individual makes is that it will not bring utopia for everyone but only for the so called sovereign individuals, that are able to make the most of the transition and of the new system.

I don’t believe that anarcho-capitalism is the solution, as it leads to an extreme form of individualistic, cruel and cold society - humans survive best if they voluntarily cooperate. I believe the solution is to go back into smaller tribe-like groups. However the essential unsolved problem is the one of violence: due to scarcity of resources, there is always an incentive to exploit, and no privatization of violence will solve this - on the contrary: if you out-source violence to a private contractor, then they will become the de-facto strongest group, because they simply control violence and can exercise it, to extort goods from groups. Yes, technology allows those groups to fight back, but this means we are going back into civil war. Yes, also anarcho-capitalism argues that privately owned power is unlikely to extract too much from the producing groups because it would deprive them of an income in the long run - however this is a purely rational argument, based on the fact that humans and more importantly, groups of humans, react rational. If anything, after the 20th century we know that this is not the case, but rather wishful thinking. Also, if we go back to serfdom, where landlords held the violence monopoly, the serfs were in a pretty bad situation, and the landlords extracted exactly as much as they could just so that the serfs could barely survive. It is unlikely that the libertarian utopia is gonna unfold and even if, it is simply gonna replace old elites with new ones, so nothing fundamentally changes.

The main problem however I see with the libertarian thinking is that it is focusing mostly on the material and political side of existence and seems to be the completely ignoring Spirituality of existence and is therefore incomplete and set up for (long-term) failure of its goal to liberate the individual from the grip of the elites and the managerial state. This is what the books Sovereign Individual and Democracy: The God that failed as well as Atlas Shrugged ignored and missed - they only look at the materialistic side of the problem.

However, these times require Spiritual Sovereign Individuals that are able to navigate the current upheaval in the world, and guide and help others, and are beacons to start new communities and seeds for the new times ahead. An economic sovereign individual without being a spiritually sovereign is not sovereign at all.

Let me explain what I mean by Spiritual Sovereign Individuals by taking a detour, looking at the current state of the world. The main point I want to drive home is as follows: We are currently living in times of tremendous upheaval and there are many good reasons for it, which can be explained by economic and systemic arguments. However an essential point that is very rarely made/ignored is that we have abandoned spirituality which made us easy prey to the attacks of the machine, evil, darkness, that is seeking to destroy life. If we want to stand a chance against the attack of the darkness/evil/machine and guide the world through this upheaveal we need to reclaim our spirituality and become spiritual sovereign individuals,

The Western Civilization in 2025 ¶

Let’s start in looking at where are we now as Western Civilization in 2025.

The grip of the managerial state has increased: COVID-19 was the ultimate demonstration of how far the western democratic nation state is willing to go, and we see it now squeezing their citizens to pay even more billions of tax money to finance the Ukrainian-Russian war (Germany is going to use this as a means to get their struggling economy back on track) and to pay back the debt from the COVID-19 spending - all that after record spending during Covid lockdowns, therefore ever increasing money printing and spending/redistribution of money the state ultimately doesn’t have.
Mass adoption and explosion of cryptocurrencies. Nation states trying to regulate them with the usual fear tactics of “financing terrorism” and “drug money” - I don’t want to go into a deeper discussion here, but I take a rather strong stance here, following cypherpunk ideas, that these technologies are a necessary defense against the nation state, and that the fact that they can be used by terrorists and drug lords as well is something we have to deal with. This technology has been used and is used to escape the tax system, embargos, escape inflation,… therefore ultimately allowing citizens to bypass the grip of the state and the tax system.
Rise of AI and Robotics are changing the job landscape dramatically, threatening to make large number of jobs obsolete or changing them fundamentally, therefore putting an increased strain on the welfare system of the state, because where shall those people be put? Probably the only solution for elites is to give them cheap access to alcohol, streaming and computer games to keep them numb and don’t give them ideas of revolution.
At the same time EU regulations to restrict new technologies: AI, crypto cripple the EUs competitiveness.
The sovereignty of the political elite over the interpretation of reality and its message control has been broken by social media and the new media. This has put the world into a rather chaotic situation in terms of what counts as truth and what not, and what is real and what not.
Changing demographics, where people are growing older and older due to the success of the health care, therefore putting an increasing strain on the welfare with an increasing number of elderly people having to be cared for.
The breakdown of traditional values such as family and religion in the western societies in favour of liberalism. Although not without their own downsides family and religion has always been a bulwark in society, especially in morals. Although western societies (specially EU) sees themselves as the pinnacle of morality, their morality is hollow and implausible because built on a void (see next point).
Scientific positivism has completely taken over, resulting in ousting of religion, spirituality, beliefs in anything else than science - in short, science has become a new religions, with a full decent into materialistic worldview.
Increased nationalistic, populist tendencies and rise of the (far) right in many parts of the world, such as USA, Russia, Hungary, Germany, Austria. This is no surprise as people see behind the lies and corruption of the ruling liberal elites, voting for populists, which was pointed out very eloquently by JD Vance when he delivered his remarks at the Munich Security Conference . However those populists are just the flipside of the same coin, and nothing fundamental will change if they get into power.
There is the perception that the current generations (Millennials and Gen Z) seems to be poorer than their (boomer) parents generation: stagnant/declining incomes relatives to costs, housing affordability crisis/ownership decline, student debt burden, lower job security,… Despite it is not as clear cut, and there are obviously a lot of winners on the current generation side, which are far better off than their parents, on the average this perception creates a lot of resentment and gives the impression that the social contract is slowly but surely eroding into a farce - demography changes and low birthrates are certainly not helping and are objectively measurable threats to the social contract.
People increasingly lose faith in the old system, which creates a vicious cycle accelerating its downfall, and breeding the disruptive forces we are increasingly seeing.
Politics are unable to keep up with the pace and volatility of changes in the world, caused by internal factors (Trump) and by external factors (Pandemics, Natural Disasters).
Europe is committing cultural suicide by have allowed unchecked mass immigration, and its increasing loss of confidence in its own values and identity.
Europe is also falling apart by attacks from within and outside such as cultural relativism, identity politics, and anti-Western ideologies, undermining Western values, history and institutions.
We have gotten obsessed with gender fluidity and transgender issues, which, when drawing parallels to the late stages of ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, according to Camille Paglia signals cultural decline .

It seems to have become blatantly clear that the 20th century politics of conserving and preserving after WW2 has failed - especially in Europe. But how to interpret these things? Is it a Civilization/the West in decline or is it just “business as usual”?

In countries where the status quo is still very stable and people on average have good lives with strong, stable social welfare states (Austria, Switzerland, Germany, large parts of the EU,…), people claim that things are great and prosper and that it could be much worse, compared to other countries: it all still looks very good compared to other countries, so we should not complain and be happy. I think the flaw of this argument is that it only looks at the state now and not at the trend which I believe is much more important to look at, when judging the above facts in terms of a long term prospect: the outlook is grim, but how could this be? We created such an economic miracle and success story in Europe after WW2 and now the Western Civilization seems in full-force declined. Where did we go wrong?

Explanations for the Upheaval ¶

Ray Dalio gives the following explanation:

… we are seeing a classic breakdown of the major monetary, political, and geopolitical orders. This sort of breakdown occurs only about once in a lifetime, but they have happened many times in history when similar unsustainable conditions were in place. More specifically:

The monetary/economic order is breaking down because there is too much existing debt, the rates of adding to it are too fast, and existing capital markets and economies are supported by this unsustainably large debt.
The domestic political order is breaking down due to huge gaps in people’s education levels, opportunity levels, productivity levels, income and wealth levels, and values—and because of the ineffectiveness of the existing political order to fix things.
The international geopolitical world order is breaking down because the era of one dominant power (the U.S.) that dictates the order that other countries follow is over.
Acts of nature (droughts, floods and pandemics) are increasingly disruptive.
Amazing changes in technology such as AI will be highly impactful to all aspects of life, including the money/debt/economic order, the political order, the international order (by affecting interactions between countries economically and militarily), and the costs of acts of nature.

Of course Ray Dalio isn’t the only one to provide an explanation for the current situation. Douglas Murray has written about it at length in The Strange Death of Europe as well as The War on the West . He attributes this decline essential to cultural suicide. Another view, which goes deeper and resonates therefore more with me, was put forward by N.S.Lyons and Paul Kingsnorth which have described the current situation in the world as the Rise of the machine (Kingsnorth) and the Rise of the managerial state (Lyons). Both have made carefully laid out arguments that ultimately what we see is the self-perpetuating dynamics of a power system. There are no conspiracy theories necessary for explanation - only the interplay of many actors with a similar mindset interlocked in the same managerial system/machine, making them behave in lock-step following the mechanism of how power plays out.

But what does Rise of the machine actually mean? What is the Rise of the managerial state? Ultimately it means we got lazy. We delegated too much to the managerial state, which was more than happy to take over ever more details of our everyday lives so we can indulge in “more important” things. It lured us into a new form of serfdom (what else are taxes and inflation?), told us every war was a just war (after they caused it themselves), have taken control of reality (which is now falling), controlled us via money (which has softened now via crypto), crippled our minds with schooling (not much change there, but it has become obviously hollow) - all for our own safety and to our best. All the while hating us, and being utterly suspicious of the people, that cannot be trusted with the truth but must be controlled by mass media propaganda what and how to think, after they ran us through school that taught us to conform rather than to think for ourselves. The culmination was probably COVID, which clearly showed how far the managerial state would go to ensure our safety, invading even into our own homes to an unprecedented degree, whether we wanted it or not. My point is not a discussion about COVID and the counter measures, but the matter of course, how things developed and how (mostly) everyone (I don’t count me out) was fully in with it from the beginning. However eventually, the COVID pandemic was an eye opener for me in regards of the managerial state and how far it has invaded into, managed and regulated details of our every day lives. We have allowed it to replace the traditional family and it’s values with its own system - the backbone of our western society is no longer the tight-knit traditional family and its values - it is the managerial state. This very managerial state has been corrupted to the core and is increasingly failing because it is unable to keep up with and adopt to the changes in the world. By the way, this was already foreseen way ahead of our times by James Burnham in his 1941 Book The Managerial Revolution . In this way we can understand the handshake with the managerial state and elite as the original sin: the managerial state promised to free us from many burdens but we didn’t ask for the price, nor were we able to fully anticipate it.

So it seems that our elites, our current system, our western Civilization is slowly eroding and failing and falling. The essential question is: what can we do? Before I am going into a potential direction, I want to take one more detour, by digging ever deeper.

The War for Humanity ¶

To truly understand what is going on, I found inspiration in a whole different kind of writers: J.R.R. Tolkien and his dear friend C.S.Lewis. They anticipated the disenchantment caused by materialist rationalism, the corruption of education, and the slide into nihilism already way ahead of our times. They foresaw a techno-state seeking control and ultimately the abolition of humanity, driven by a rejection of objective values. They very openly wrote about the reality of evil, which comes from good intentions that were driven too far and got corrupted, portraying Evil as a force that exploits human flaws, leading to spiritual and societal decay, seeing this as the war for humanity .

Both, Tolkien and Lewis deeply believed in the existence of some form of personificated Evil existing in another dimension, that is reaching into our reality and is waging war against Humankind. In our modern times, we feel uncomfortable talking about The Evil. Yes we attribute the term evil to all kind of people (mostly politicians) but we don’t believe in a personificated source of Evil any more, which makes us very easy prey to actual Evil. I don’t want to go into the technical details of who or what this personificated Evil is - this is an (extremely difficult) topic for another article. What is much more important is that we need to understand the way that Evil wages war against us: by being systematically against life, by means of lies, by twisting reality, by telling us that there are no objective values, that there is no objective truth, replacing it with cold calculating mechanics, that everything is up to us, tempting us, in the same way as the snake did with Adam and Eve.

I believe that this is precisely what we are seeing now. In search for ever more progress and progressivism, we fell into the trap set for us by Evil, so we started abandoning objective values and truth, the awe of nature and the belief in the existence of something higher. We started replacing reality with simulated copies , that are more real than the original, with the prime example being currently AI.

Now we scratch on the surface of simulating life through AI, which might replace life as we might mistake it for actual life. Let me be clear here - I am not making the luddite argument here: I use AI daily and am impressed by it, but we need to be careful with how we interpret and handle it. AI is often seen as truly intelligent and there were people that argued that an AI became sentient such as in the case of the Blake Lemoine incident at Google and the Harmony Intelligence incident. Obviously those cases are seen very critical, but the point is that we are actually discussing them and investigating them, rather than simply dismissing them as what they are: a simulation of a conscious life form that has tricked us into taking the claim that it might have become sentient serious enough to investigate it - rather than to shrug it off as the outcomes of a fancy technology, but certainly not life.

Interpretation of reality and what objective truth meant was always a delicate issue, and it often changed but it was generally the elites deciding on it - actually who defined what reality is, was elite, such as Emperors, Kings, Religious leaders. The important point here is, that objective truth was never abandoned, there was always a belief in something higher, and that the Emperor, the King, was the manifestation of this on Earth. Now it has completely changed due to Internet and social media. Podcaster have huge influence and everyone can give their interpretation. The elites reacted with hate speech laws but this wont change things. Pandoras box has been opened already. Again I am not arguing against the technology, I am using and consuming it on a daily basis. Yes, it has made things much more difficult to understand because of competing views, but im glad we are now in a situation where we have channels of much more differentiated content than the ever similar lies and propaganda of mass media which is in line with the managerial state, trying to desperately cling on to its last bits of power, but actually the war has long been won, the change is inevitable.

I think one can make the point that always when objective truth was abandoned and twisted, things started to go horribly wring: the horrors of the Nazis, Communism, and North Korea are a warning example for that. In recent decades this has also infected the West and its open society, which most importantly lead to widespread abandoning of the belief in something higher. This led to a widespread belief that reality is up for debate and ultimately that there is no objective truth. The woke mindset is probably the purest form of this thinking, because literally everything is open for debate and one only needs to choose: gender, sex, giving birth, as well as the control of language because language shapes / creates reality and therefore IS reality (Note that current AI is all about language, so it fits in nicely with the language = reality). Of course is nothing else than magical thinking, so it seems in the extreme we have come full circle round to the irrational, to the magical, where we try to control, shape, define reality by means of words and language. Ironically it was the Wests deep suspicion about the mystic, which probably really took off after the Nazis were defeated as in some way Nazism could be seen as a deeply irrational mass hypnosis and hysteria of the german people.

So in this way we can see AI as the latest incarnate of Magic and Humankinds attempt to create something in their own image. It is the culmination of the “simulated” world we live in today: a huge amount of things in our world have become replaced by simulacras, that is, of simulations of the original, with the original disappearing. This process happens by packaging something and then people beginning to mistake the package with the original, for example Yoga, Vacations, Music, Crypto. AI is the culmination because it simulates life itself, and most remarkably, is replacing life in the way that people begin to mistake it for actual life, a new God if you will.

And indeed, I believe the endgame of AI is to create a new God. Obviously, it is not the declared goal, but it is implicit, because as soon as the AI seems intelligent enough, Humankind is going to ask it to save Humankind. So far we are not there quite yet, but AI is capable of simulating and faking a lot, therefore the endgame for this is to fully crush the last belief in objective truth, which is already under way because AI is a tool to produce lies that are indistinguishable from reality. If objective truth falls, everything is possible - and it is a necessary step towards the AI God saviour. This is the antichrist in its essence: cold, calculating, mechanics, the opposite of love (that was the essence of Yeshua).

There will rise an AI who will be declared conscious, a singularity, a new god, upon which a new belief system will be built because the old one has to had give way. Therefore, the ultimate achievement of Humankind will be to have replaced God with a simulated version, built by Humankind themselves - a horrible recursion, because what is the AI God if not a different form of Humankind? Resist following it: this is true Evil, as it is a soulless mechanical existence, overriding free will, stopping progress of life, applying rules mechanistically.

So to return to where we started from: the essential point I am making is that a purely materialistic, progressive technologist path to the Sovereign Individual makes us easy prey to the machine, the Evil - which is precisely what we are seeing currently in the world. Instead of liberating us, the technology we hoped that is going to free us is actually enslaving and devouring us: countless crypto scams and hacks, AI rising as a new God, Robots replacing humans in care of elders, replacing family, we lost the wonder of nature, ultimately living in a simulacrum - nothing is real anymore, objective truth is under full attack and has nearly been abandoned. The endgame in this war is for the Evil side to make humans forget that light, that nature, that life exists, and prevent them looking for it altogether. This is why Goethe Faust Part 1 is probably the most important piece of literature ever written, because it was Goethes genius to fully understand all of this already in the 18th century - so he was a modern man, two centuries ahead of his times.

So at this point it should be clear that we are completely powerless if we approach this problem from a purely materialistic direction. It is now time to finally answer the question of what we can actually do.

What can we do ¶

We need a bulwark against the Evil that is trying to win us over ever since humankind has started to walk on this earth. The key is a fully integrated spirituality, deeply rooted in normal life. We must rebuild the backbone of our society, by bringing back the core of the traditional family, and build on that a community with spiritual values and spiritual Sovereign Individuals to keep the rise of a new managerial elite influenced by the Evil in check.

What we need is a spirituality free from institutions, free from dogma, free from guilt, based on truth seeking and personal experience. Our guides on this path are many that came before us: Christian mystics, Sufis, Yogis, Zen Masters, Buddhist monks, Shamans, Deep Trance mediums. They all went beyond and returned a glimpse of the one objective truth, expressing it their way. Without a spiritual safety belt we just become easy prey to the Luciferian/Faustian temptations of technology.

The question is: what is this spirituality and the truth that those mystics came back with? I think, ultimately their goal was liberating humankind, so we can also see the spiritual path as a path of achieving sovereignty. But the question is: liberating humankind of what? The answer can only be: fear, and to be more precise: fear of pain and most importantly, liberate humankind from the fear of death.

So when developing a sovereign spirituality we need to rid ourselves from the fear of death. Ultimately, spiritual sovereignty means ultimately to live in peace, which means to be free of fear - a truly sovereign individual is at peace, which means absence of fear. It is important to acknowledge that means that there doesn’t rise fear within one - fear is simply a too old and too strong mechanism deeply hard wired into the system over millennia of evolution - but it means that we do not give in to the fear, but to reject it from our hearts. Yes it can be there, on the surface but its not getting to our core.

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain. – Frank Herbert, Dune

Once you are free from the grip of fear, you can not be manipulated anymore into things you don’t wan’t, or which are to your detrimental, or that might lose you everything. However, how do we live in peace, free of fear?

Develop a belief in something that exists beyond our material, visible world.
Develop a deep love for humankind and life in general: love is an awareness of others, to see and accept them as they are, without judgement.
Develop a belief in an entity like God that is benevolent towards you and can be asked for support and guidance and with whom you can have a personal relationship.
Develop a trust that you are guided on your path through life and that it will be shown to you if you only ask for it.
Develop a trust that death is not the end and that everything you experience in this life serves the purpose of learning and therefore has a purpose.
Develop humility.
Develop gratefulness & give thanks for what you got in life.
Develop a belief that the current existence, despite of all its horrors, is still the best possible existence.
Life is not about creating paradise, it is about accepting that the current existence is the best one we have and make the most out of it.
Each soul is fully responsible for its actions.
Each soul picks their incarnate in advance to enter circumstances that allow it to have the experiences and learning in this life in the best possible way.
There is no death.
There is no sin, only cause and effect (Karma).
There is free will.
We are guided and protected by a loving spirit realm if we ask for it and believe in it.
Surrender free will to the guidance from spirit.
There is no need for fear. With fear you become a tool for destruction.
Life is the attempt of the conscious spirit force to make all possible experience that consciousness can make.
Understand that love is an awareness of others.

If done consequently one ends up developing a kind of universal love, which is truly transforming and the only power to truly transform systems as it completely opts out of violence, and lifts the conflict to a different level, becoming infectious. Love is the most radical transformational energy there is. Note that I am talking about a different love that e.g. N.S. Lyons writes about in Love of a Nation . The writer only goes so far but a universal love goes beyond everything.

How can we achieve that?

Learn to think for yourself. Even a Twitter/X with its free speech keeps you blinded by creating and channeling anger and distorting your perception of reality, making you manipulatable, not questioning what lies behind it all and whom it serves. It distracts you and shows you continuously how broken the world is so you want the paradise on earth even more:
Don’t let emotions guide you in your thinking.
Always ask yourself: Who benefits and why.
Often it is more important THAT something was said, and not WHAT exactly was said.
Meditate to strengthen your connection with your inner self.
Pray to ask for guidance on your way and for help in desperate times - be prepared to act upon that which will be given.
Communing with your inner self, with spirit, with God.
Cultivate and learn to trust your intuition.
Stay in tune with nature.

So we see that this is a deeply individualistic, highly esoteric, internal way. It is NOT about joining a church, a religion - on the contrary. These things might only help in the initial phase of this undertaking but at some point you need to go beyond these institutionalized belief systems. This will ultimately lead you to be able to abandon the fear of death which is the most liberating and powerful thing every human being can achieve, rendering it completely free. Why is this so? When we understand there is no death, and accept suffering as a necessary mean to grow in this best of possible existence, then there is no need for fear (of death), and thus we truly become free.

Also, we need to lead a way through the ever increasing rise of new technologies, most importantly AI. I think we have only seen a minor fraction of the total disruption that is gonna be caused by the technological changes of the last 20 years, but they are already far reaching. We need to lead a way through them by showing what these technologies are, and what they are not. At the same time we need to embrace them and understand them, as there is no turning back: this stuff is here to stay and in order to deal with it, we need to understand it, otherwise we gonna fall for the temptations of the Evil which is warring against us.

At the same time we need to go back to something much, much, much older, predating classical thought, into mystic pre-Atlantean times: we need to return to the early raw and deep spirituality but paired with the deep love that Yeshua brought. Societies run on stories. Not on facts. Not on risk analysis. Not on Science - which ultimately means that we also need to change our expectations of science. It has its values and place in society, but it should not be used to run whole of society: we are a metaphysical and religious species, not a scientific one.

As for the community: connect with people, the right ones will come to you as you start developing your inner spirituality. Build your network locally and across the world. Support each other, build true, deep friendships. Get Married, and have kids, and raise them, and pass on your spirituality in a gentle way without forcing it. This way the light and love can gently spread and will push back the flood of darkness and evil. And when the old system fails, the new (decentralised) system of local communities, built on networks of families, is there to catch the lonely and lost souls to uplift them and grow a new form of society, that might find a new way forward for humankind.

This is a path that never ends, it continues even in what comes after death. So we need to fully embrace it also while we participate in building a new society from local communities. There is no other option than to live through these times. Fully embracing progress would devour your humanity. Falling into nostalgia will send you down into the valley of resentment, bitterness and darkness that will ultimately kill you. We need to be strong, we are not alone, we are in this together.

Long periods of peace and quiet favor certain optical illusions. Among them is the assumption that the invulnerability of the home is founded upon the constitution and safeguarded by it. In reality, it rests upon the father of the family who, accompanied by his sons, appears with the ax on the threshold of his dwelling. – Ernst Jünger

Werd ich zum Augenblicke sagen: Verweile doch! du bist so schön! Dann magst du mich in Fesseln schlagen, Dann will ich gern zugrunde gehn! – Johann Wolfgang Goethe