“Now we have a whole army of experts, whose job is to tell you success only comes with you being part of a group. Your status as an individual is transmitted to you through some diabolical portion of your brain that is loaded with false messages. Therefore, give up on the greatest adventure in the world. Take the elevator down to the basement, get off, and join the crowd. That’s where the love is. That’s where your useless courage dissolves into sugar, and the chorus of complaints will be magically transformed into a paradise of the lowest common denominator. Give up the ghost. You’re home. The sun never rises or sets. Nothing changes. The same sameness rules.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

Since the 1960s, many people have decided that, in order to create the future they want, they should engage in a certain amount of introspection.

Spiritual or psychological introspection.

I have encountered a large number of such people, who have swung the balance to the point where introspection has become indecision and paralysis.

There are “so many issues to consider.”

Starting in the 1960s, we saw the import of various Eastern philosophies and practices. They arrived here in diluted and distorted forms. They introduced their own versions of “karma” and “balance” and “surrender” and “abdication to the wishes of the universe.”

“If it doesn’t happen, it wasn’t meant to be.”

In the end, it amounts to waiting around in a cosmic station for a train that never arrives.

Or in psychological terms, it is: “I have to resolve my past before I can pursue my future.” “How can I know what I want if I’m trapped in past conflicts?”

The effect of all this was to diminish the potential realm of human action. It was a kind of court case where all the priors of the defendant were allowed into evidence and dominated the verdict.

More recently, another limiter came on to the scene. It is expressed this way: “Now I see through fake reality, I see how reality is being manipulated by the powers-that-be, so what can I do? We’re at the mercy of these forces.”

I could suggest that these vectors were and are an intentional operation, whose purpose is to demoralize the individual and cut him off from his own freedom, independence, and power. And that would be an accurate assessment. But it wouldn’t tell the whole story, for one vital reason:

The individual is the only person who can change his own course. Others can help, but the final decision is his.

That is bedrock.

And here is the superior principle: even if the individual determines that all is hopeless, he should launch his life anyway. Despite all the good reasons to give up, he should ignore all of them and launch his future.

Because if he does that, he soon begins to see his own view change. It’s not the same anymore.

And this is what freedom and independence and power are all about. Bottom line, these qualities are what you take hold of after you know all is hopeless. That’s the acid test.

Every individual, since the dawn of time, has thought himself into smaller and smaller boxes until there is no space left—and then certain individuals, who are spiritual and metaphysical riverboat gamblers, have shoved in all their chips on projecting action in the world anyway…and they revolutionize their destinies.

That’s what some people have called “inequality of outcome.” That’s the basis for it.

We can go even deeper. What is the ultimate purpose of thought and reflection and introspection? Is it to arrive at certain conclusions, after which the thinker (the person) serves those conclusions like a slave? Or is thought itself a process through which ideas then serve the individual and his goals?

It is the latter.

The first great philosopher of the West, Plato, followed the first path. Which is to say, he applied his mind to understand the basis of reality, and he came to the conclusion that there were immortal and pure Ideas that existed in a higher realm, and they were unchangeable. Society, therefore, could only triumph if certain wise men, who could apprehend these Ideas directly, ruled over everyone else. Thus, the freedom and independence and power of open inquiry led to totalitarianism. Freedom led to slavery.

The individual, when all is said and done, is his own ship. However much he may learn about navigation, there comes the moment when he and his ship leave the shore. He explores. He discovers. He invents.

He invents his own future. No matter what.

We would be fools if we didn’t realize that, down through human history, individuals have grasped, for themselves, all these points.

And when the American Republic was invented, these same points were “background.” What were the checks and balances and the separation of powers all about? What was the reason for the enumeration of federal powers and the granting of all other powers to the states and the people? Why was the federal government squeezed at its extremities? Because the free and independent individual was the true coin of the realm. He needed latitude. He needed legal protection, in the best way it could be provided, from arbitrary power.

Otherwise, why bother?

The Constitution was far more than an extension of independence from England. The men who wrote the Articles and the Bill of Rights, and the men who voted for them and ratified them—to now argue for or against their “deeper motives” is, in the end, a distraction from the fact that the Constitution contains ideas that aid the liberation of the free and independent individual.

The ideas still stand.

They are predicated on the notion that these individuals exist and will launch, despite all reasons not to, their own creative desires and make them fact in the world.

Give us your huddled masses yearning to be free. Masses? No. A mass can never be free. And even if a mass can successfully demand freedom, on whom does that bounty then fall? The individual. This is where the buck stops, and no one can change that truth.

There are those who believe a quiet lake is the end of all existence. And then a boat comes along, and the ripples begin spreading. An individual has arrived.

You can be the person looking at the lake, banking on no-action, or you can be in the boat, forwarding your best ideas and visions and dreams, despite all the reasons not to.

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)