I wanted to start this organization on my 60th. Birthday which is on the 24th January, however due to being very busy with other stuff I have not yet had a chance to do the website. Please be patient with me, the book and the website will both be forthcoming in 2018, but please regard 24.1.18 as the start date for the organization. Read on and you will find out what the hell I am going on about.
Hi, for those who don’t know me already my name is John Marrow welcome to my, soon to be, website and blog. My main aim with the website is to publish information about the book that I am writing and the organization that I am starting. It is yet to be named, and will help to provide an alternative way of living for an elite, aka the members. I love our world, but I am fed up with the way most of it has become a cesspit of pollution, corruption, waste and inequality. Our occupation of it is also unsustainable: the world population of 7.6 billion people is rising at the rate of 200,000 EVERY DAY and obviously at some point the runaway train will hit the buffers. The population has doubled since I was a young guy and life was much more pleasant in those days. I think we have already reached the tipping point of sustainability/unsustainability, but I could be wrong, we may even stagger on for another 50 years, when the population will have doubled again, and Europe will be a Caliphate, perish the thought. In view of the above there is no point in even trying to save everyone, their sheer numbers are the root of the problem, and there is not a single problem facing mankind that would not be much easier to solve if there were fewer of us. I cannot see how the world would be able to reduce the population radically enough and soon enough to allow the survival of any large numbers. Nature will take its course, and as we know nature is red in tooth and claw, there will be wars, famines and disease and nearly everyone will have a horrible death. You might want to think about that before you bring any more people into the world, we are talking about your children and grandchildren. However, I am at least trying to bring about a change in attitudes, and hopefully reduce the number of people who will inevitably suffer. The only way forward I can see is to create a two-pronged alternative; the first to allow the survival of those of us with the foresight to prepare, and for us to have a more pleasant life in the meantime. The second is to show that there is an alternative that works and provide an example for the mainstream. However, as well as useful advice about improving your life and surviving, I aim to provide a wry, entertaining, irreverent, alternative look at life and possibly recruit some of the readers to the next stage.
I definitely don’t want to create communities of vegan, tree hugging, lefties but we will grow, farm and hunt most of our own food. Partly to ensure that we eat wholesome, organic food, and partly in order to survive when it goes tits up for everyone else. I am planning to have some large cellars of good wine. These communities will have to be away from major centres of population and capable of being defended. I envisage some overt communities that will encourage visitors and be an example, and some covert that will also provide a bolt hole if necessary. Probably the covert ones, being of necessity more remote, will be occupied by those who relish this sort of lifestyle. Perhaps they would be paid to keep it ticking over by those who want a bolt hole but don’t want to live there all the time. Incidentally, I am not anti-technology but I certainly would not want to depend on it, so we would always be sure to have a back-up in case we found it was suddenly not available. One thing is for sure, and this would be written in tablets of stone, mobile phones would be restricted to specific areas, if not completely banned. I might even deliberately choose locations where there is a poor signal.
I want to keep the whole project well away from “the man”, and not be registered as a company or anything else come to that; even though we would in any case be non-profit making. I envisage an informal collection of individuals who combine some of our resources for our mutual benefit. We would never require members to invest large sums of money into anything other than land and property that they own in the right locations. It is possible we may have to have some joint investments, in that case we would always have mechanisms in place to allow individual members to get their money out if they wanted. Once we have everything up and running and things are turning from bad to worse for the mainstream what we have will be beyond price, and conventional investments and property in cities will be worthless. So, what I am proposing may well be a good, low risk, investment even in conventional terms.
We will be non-partisan; the problem with political parties is that you have to accept the whole package and there are no parties that even come close to my views. There is good and bad on both the left and the right so why not cherry pick the good from both sides? I am of course speaking of the organisation, individual members will be free to support any party they like so long as they don’t seek to inflict their attitudes on others and are fully tolerant of the views of others. Likewise, with religion, we will be purely secular, but individual members can belong to any religion they like, again so long as they are tolerant of the views of others. We will not tolerate intolerance! As an organization we may take a stance on certain issues, but our aim will be to provide an alternative and leave the mainstream to sort themselves out or not. Probably they are not capable, there has been no sign of it so far; if we lead at all, we will lead by example not by propaganda.
So, realistically how many members do we want to have or are likely to have? At the moment it is just my idea, and it is still just an idea, but I intend to continue to prepare and make provision for my loved ones and possibly some close friends, even though they may not know it yet. However, the organization will have to have several levels of membership depending on how involved individual members wish to become. I envisage a free basic membership open to all, i.e. the website, that just provides information. As well as entertaining it will cut through all the noise, ferret out the truth about everything and provide some advice and a forum for ideas about making things better and creating an alternative. It may well be that no one is interested, but at least I will have tried and you will have only your apathy to blame when all my predictions come true and you are in deep doo doo. However, if there is significant interest then I would want to have as many members as possible at that level, a million plus? It would only be worthwhile if there were enough of us to make an impact. Obviously, all this would cost money and I will not be accepting advertising, it goes against the whole ethos of what I am trying to achieve. So, the next level would involve some kind of subscription and would be a sort of alternative consumer organization, it would also provide a potential pool of members for the next level, one in ten thousand? Again, we would need to have sufficient numbers to make it work, and we could use our numbers to get good deals from companies and blacklist any that damaged the environment, treated their workers badly, were unethical or overpaid their senior managers, i.e. most of them. We will always favour small business and try to avoid big business as much as possible. Eventually, for this part of the organization, we may even start our own services, insurance, energy, etc. but I am very wary of becoming involved in all the mainstream bollox. One thing I really would like to have is our own bank and maybe even our own currency based on property in sustainable living communities. We would provide practical help with fighting the man wherever necessary and support each other; and we would expect to become involved, if required, in helping other members.
The final level is actually creating the alternative communities and this will require a quantum leap in commitment both financial and or your valuable time. This will be going ahead whatever happens with level one and two, as I said I have started already, even if it is only for me and mine. This will be an elite of survivors, but I want us to do more than just survive. We will continue to have a good life, even when it has all gone tits up for everyone else. Please regard the picture that illustrates this article as satirical! To get a few tens or even hundreds of people on board will be much easier than millions, and I have at least one recruit already. I only want those who are more or less in agreement with the basic principles, to be honest my principles, well come on it is my gig. Most people will not agree with me, fine, then don’t try to join. When there are over seven billion people and a sustainable number would be one billion, six billion have to go and if you can’t see that and want to try to save them all this is not for you. Life is not sacred or even precious; if there were only a hundred of us then it would be, but with over six billion the value of each life is much diluted. If you want to see just how cheap life is, go and live in some overtly corrupt African state, I have done it and I wouldn’t do it again. To quote Hobbes, “life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”? Their own lives are worthless and as far as they are concerned yours is worth even less. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the world population have to live like this, that’s why they all want to come here. As the effects of overpopulation bite ever harder, and Europe is destroyed by letting them in, I think my potential membership will vastly increase. In the meantime, I have some ideas to publicise and make more people aware of the organization when I get the time to do it, but may I ask that all those who agree with me share this with their friends as much as possible?
So, what qualifies me to know what is the best way forward? A lifetime of informal research, I have always questioned everything, taken nothing for granted and made sure I knew how things worked. I have taken on the man many times and mostly won. Some time ago I began to notice that a lot of people were asking me for advice, “ask John he’ll know”, is a phrase I have heard many times. I have saved people money, sometimes thousands and sometimes for making one phone call. What thanks have I had? Not even a bottle of wine. I have been happy to help especially if it meant getting one over on the man, but my philanthropy is not unlimited, and I think it is about time I began to see some reward for my knowledge and efforts. For most of my life I have felt like I was in a minority of one and this may still be the case, but over the last few years I have noticed that my ideas, some of which I have had for nearly 50 years, have become accepted by some of the mainstream. There are also several writers and organizations now who hold similar views. Just remember that no one was ever successful financially, socially, spiritually, or intellectually by following the herd, most of whom are afraid to step out of line.
I have been thinking about the best place for the communities and my first thought was the West coast of Scotland. It is spectacularly beautiful, remote and has an abundance of seafood and game. There are large estates with big houses that would be ideal for our purposes. I am thinking divide the big house into apartments if not already done, have farming and wooden lodges on the estate, which members could use as holiday homes or even let out if they didn’t want to live there permanently, and houses in the nearby villages. It wouldn’t blight or devalue anything for the locals, who we would of course do our best to integrate with. The downside is the bad weather and midges. Then there is the Lake District which I know well as I live in South Lakeland. The Lakes is expensive and, as a National Park and now a World Heritage site, may be more restrictive in what we can do planning wise. These places might be OK for people like me who have a lot of equity in property already, but we would want some younger people as well who might find them unaffordable. Then I saw a posting on Facebook, that in Spain and Italy rural villages are actually paying people to move there as all their young people have moved out to the cities. Presumably, property in those places would also be cheap to buy, there is agricultural land and they have beautiful historic properties, so that could be a possibility. The coastal areas of these countries are expensive and there is a lot of crime, most of it due to all the migrants. But as soon as you get away from the coast house prices drop like a stone and they are not places that migrants would be interested in. Only migrants like us, probably the polar opposite of economic migrants. No doubt if we had a collection of interested people they would all have their own ideas. I would love to hear them.
whaleoilbeefoct 