Mark Gober - An End to Upside Down Liberty: Turning Traditional Political Thinking on Its Head to Break Free from Enslavement

Also by Mark Gober

AN END TO UPSIDE DOWN THINKING

Dispelling the Myth That the Brain Produces Consciousness, and the Implications for Everyday Life

AN END TO UPSIDE DOWN LIVING

Reorienting Our Consciousness to Live Better and Save the Human Species

Copyright 2021 by Mark Gober

www.markgober.com

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in articles and book reviews.

ISBN-13: 978-1-954968-88-2 print edition

ISBN-13: 978-1-954968-89-9 ebook edition

ISBN-13: 979-8-200859-27-6 audiobook edition

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To those who want to be free.

If we look at the black record of mass murder, exploitation, and tyranny levied on society by governments over the ages, we need not be loath to abandon the Leviathan State andtry freedom.

Murray Rothbard, PhD,

For a New Liberty (1973), p. 290

CONTENTS

PREFACE

CHALLENGING WORLDVIEWS

U pside down liberty is the mistaken belief that we are free when in fact we are not. Our hidden enslavement occurs on two primary levels: the metaphysical and the physical.

Metaphysically, we are enslaved because of a vast misunderstanding about the nature of reality. Our scientific establishment tells us that we are finite beings living in a random, meaningless universe. As soon as our brain shuts off, we die. Forever. Lights out. However, an abundance of credible scientific evidencecovered extensively in my previous two books and summarized later in this onesuggests otherwise. The evidence flies in the face of mainstream assumptions and instead suggests that we are infinite beings who do not die when our body does. Furthermore, were all fundamentally interconnected as part of a unified field of consciousness that our everyday senses simply dont perceive. Its as if we unknowingly live with amnesia under a blindfold.

Our inability to recognizeand live in accordance withour true nature leads to psychological imprisonment. We become like hamsters running on a wheel that we cant escape, trapped by our narrow perception of only this body, this life, and this dimension, and enslaved by our attachments to worldly desires and fears. Most of us dont even realize were on a treadmill, effectively going nowhere in spite of seemingly endless efforts and repeated patterns of suffering. The reality is that we can mentally step off at any time once we wake up to the truth.

Physically, we are enslavedto varying degreesvia the institution of government, but we dont realize it. We all know how much death and destruction governments have caused throughout history during wars, for example. They kill each others people. But here Im referring more specifically to the way in which governments can be a threat to their own people. That perspective entails viewing government not as a protector of its citizens, but rather as a predator. That makes the citizens prey. Yes, even in democracies, and yesIm sorry to say iteven in America.

The enslavement process can occur gradually over time and can be likened to a frog slowly boiling in a pot of water that doesnt realize whats happened until its too late. Freedoms are stripped bits at a time. Liberty is eroded under the guise of providing safety. Were doing this to protect you is how its marketed to the masses, but in reality its death by a thousand cuts. Theyll take liberties, and maybe offer a few back to give the appearance of being magnanimous, but they wont give them all back. Repeat that process and its a slippery slope.

Those of us who have never lived under blatantly oppressive regimes like those in North Korea, Nazi Germany, or the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, for instance, tend to think that it cant happen to usand that if it were happening to us, wed recognize the evil and stop it. Id argue that in todays world, the opposite sentiment is prevalent: some activists, who believe they are doing the right thing, condemn as dangerous or selfish those who rightfully value freedom.

Its also worth remembering that the Naziswho came to power within a democratic governmentwerent sending Jews to concentration camps on day one of their regime. Erosions to civil liberties always have a starting point and run the risk of transforming into something overtly totalitarian. Therefore, its best that citizens not rest on their laurels until their government reaches a tyrannical point of no return.

Now is an especially perilous time because of advances in technology. The potential exists for a surveillance police state in which our every move is tracked by the government. An Orwellian future is no longer fiction. Its within reach, if not already occurring in some places.

If all of this sounds like sensational paranoia, consider whats happening in modern China. As reported in a September 2020 article in The Atlantic:

China already has hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras in place. [President] Xis government hopes to soon achieve full video coverage of key public areas. Much of the footage collected by Chinas cameras is parsed by algorithms for security threats of one kind or another. In the near future, every person who enters a public space could be identified, instantly, by [artificial intelligence (AI)] matching them to an ocean of personal data, including their every text communication, and their bodys one-of-a-kind protein-construction schema. In time, algorithms will be able to string together data points from a broad range of sourcestravel records, friends and associates, reading habits, purchasesto predict political resistance before it happens. Chinas government could soon achieve an unprecedented political stranglehold on more than 1 billion people.

Artificial intelligence has applications in nearly every human domain, from the instant translation of spoken language to early viral-outbreak detection. But Xi also wants to use AIs awesome analytical powers to push China to the cutting edge of surveillance. He wants to build an all-seeing digital system of social control, patrolled byalgorithms that identify potential dissenters in real time.

Additionally, in a May 2021 interview, journalist Whitney Webb explained the troubling state of affairs she encountered in Chile:

I actually lived in Chile for about seven years. I only really recently left, and I reluctantly left.With the onset of the whole COVID-19 crisis, basically overnight pretty much everything just shut down and things became very rapidly very totalitarian. The situation now in Chile is that if quarantine is declared in the town or community where you live, you are only allowed out of your house twice a week for two hours a pop. So thats a total of four hours per week. And [in] all of that you have to have papers that are provided by police through a new police website, so you basically cannot leave your home without police permission.Those two-hour permissions include travel time, so if you dont live close to a supermarket or anything like that you have even less time to do essential shopping.There were cases of people being arrested for having incorrect papers, and this was being enforced by police.In December [of 2020], it became the military enforcing this stuff. This was going on just between even small cities. I had to go to a small town that was twenty minutes away from where I was living. I would have to pass through what was basically a military checkpoint [and] have the right papersto go to the next city.