For the past year now, I have been writing about the importance of not only avoiding group think and greatly increasing one’s ability to think critically but also of the necessity to get one’s finances in order. These two achievements are inextricably linked and cannot be separated from one another. However, my observations, over the last 18-months, of blind compliance of the masses to tyrannical lockdown mandates issued all over the world, but specifically to tyranny of an elevated nature in the Pacific Rim nations, has convinced me that very few among us, ever spend a single minute per month cultivating the ability to think clearly, reason intellectually, and to formulate conclusions based upon facts. This ability will be essential to financial survival in the next few years.
When I write about these subjects, the overwhelming percentage of people that read these articles believe that the primary reason I am writing such articles is to warn people about a coming global financial crises that will dwarf the 2008 global financial crisis in both magnitude and level of global devastation. While surely this event is coming, and is a very close secondary reason to ensure one’s finances are in order, it is not the primary reason to prepare.
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I have witnessed hundreds of millions of people cower in blind obedience to tyrants, without questioning the often completely faulty scientific basis of authoritative mandates. I have observed how easily hundreds of millions of people fell for the disingenuous tyrant ruse that their mandates must be obeyed because they were for “the good of society”, even long after such rationalizations for their mandates had been indisputable proven as false by those in the scientific community still interested in facts, truth and science. I observed billions of people subjected to tyrannical orders not to leave their homes for any reason at all, not even to buy food or to engage in activities necessary for survival, such as engaging in work and labor necessary to earn enough income to feed oneself and their families.
During this period of tyranny, I have witnessed dozens of restaurants and businesses permanently close and shutter in heartbreaking fashion in the neighborhoods in which I resided, left to wonder how the owners were able to feed their families, or if they were able to feed them at all? In fact, during such periods, often extending for many weeks at a time, in which this author was subjected to such tyranny, this author violated such mandates multiple times at the risk of thousands of dollars in fines, simply in an effort to preserve mental health and clarity, as being subject to house arrest through mandated lockdowns for many continuous weeks is sufficient to significantly degrade one’s mental health. Exercising outdoors and getting some fresh air is a basic tenet of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, a basic human right, and not a “privilege” granted to us by tyrants for compliance to their tyranny. Unfortunately, during the past 18 months, I observed hundreds of millions acquiesce to tyranny and succumb to the belief that basic human rights or not rights at all but that it is now necessary to ask our overlords for permission to exercise the right to be free.
Consequently, I believe that the greatest threat to our freedom in the future, beyond another inevitable global financial collapse (that is coming because Central Bankers have executed the exact same policies since the 2008 global financial collapse in the past 14 years that gave rise to the 2008 crisis), firmly lies within the realm of expanded worldwide State tyranny against basic human liberties and rights. Thus, the reason to get one’s ducks in a row financially now is to ensure our ability to outlast and outwit this tyranny so we may ensure we retain our liberties and God given rights to a free life.
Though my entanglement in this tyranny has delayed the launch of my Academy by more than 18 months, now that I have finally extricated myself from this situation, the launch of my Academy, that reinforces real world applied information regarding how to build sustainable wealth outside of the matrix of tyranny, is coming soon.
The Necessity of Avoiding Group Think in Planning Your Financial Life
In addition, I have also witnessed instances too numerous to count, in which people, incapable of independent critical thought, have merely adopted the consensus, faulty view of the majority, when it comes to financial topics – views that may very well sentence their financial life to doom in the near future. I have personally observed in direct conversations, dozens of instances during the past year-and-a-half, the inability of people to understand inherent financial risk in their investments simply due to faulty consensus narratives embraced that dismiss real risks and an unwillingness to consider dissenting much more critically robust views that diverge from “group think”. In this sense, there is little difference between those of us that adopt financial messages with little critical circumspection and those of us that blindly comply with authoritarian mandates with zero regard for the scientific robustness and validity of such mandates, as long as they are accompanied by declarations that they are for “the greater good of society.”
I recall when the two major NYSE traded precious metal ETFs, the GLD and SLV, were respectively launched in 2004 and 2006. I was probably one of a very minute percentage of people that read their quite lengthy prospectuses in their entirety. In doing so, I discovered numerous red flags that brought into heavy question the claims made be custodians HSBC and JP Morgan banks that 100% of all monies invested in GLD and SLV were fully backed by allocated physical gold and silver. Due to the verbiage contained in the prospectuses, I determined that there was zero way to prove this claim, an indisputable fact that should always bring a claim into doubt (furthermore, recall a commandment of a critical thinker is always to question unsubstantiated claims made by authority). I consequently immediately penned articles on my blog that questioned the veracity of these unprovable claims, advised all that desired to listen that there was no substitute to buying physical gold and silver other than to purchase it and take possession, and warned that no one should ever consider purchases of the GLD and SLV ETFs as proxies for real physical gold and silver purchases. I further opined that a strong possibility existed that the banking cartel would funnel the monies invested in these two ETFs to short gold and silver in the futures markets and thereby successfully redirect monies that should elevate gold and silver prices into suppressing them.
Though every single one of my claims were strongly divergent from the consensus beliefs held by GLD and SLV investors back then, analyzed under the framework of critical thought, they were all, and still remain more than a decade later, perfectly reasonable, viable, and likely true. However, back then, that did not stop many members of the consensus belief community from smearing my character as a “conspiracy theorist” for considering probable possibilities beyond the edge of the group think narrative.
Today, I continue to apply the same level of critical robustness to all my opinions regarding financial/investment assets that will most likely provide the most protection against increasing State tyranny leveled against us in the future. If we are to maintain the wealth and savings that we work so hard to build, especially that of the last eighteen months that for some of us, was ten times harder than normal to build due to waves of economic lockdowns, then we must understand what types of assets to own and which to avoid. Even though, since 2008, I have repeatedly levied warnings of increasing State tyranny, my discussions with people today repeatedly and shockingly reveal that most people still remained unconcerned about this inevitability and how this inevitability, if unaccounted for in our financial planning, may severely squash our daily happiness in the future. If you are one of those that cavalierly dismiss this possibility and suffer from the “it can’t happen to me syndrome”, then click on the above link in this article to be reminded that if you asked me two years ago, “Do you believe that during your lifetime, you will ever have to traverse across six cities, three nations and two continents by foot, car and plane over 145 hours just to exit a nation and not even be able to return home after that journey?” I would have emphatically answered, “No.” However, we live in a different world now, and planning for such obstacles should be expected moving forward.
Consequently, I believe that one should store their financial wealth and savings outside the global financial system to the greatest extent possible. And in this belief, the manner in which this should be accomplished, just as my beliefs about the GLD and SLV ETFs strongly diverged with most of the gold and silver community back in 2006, strongly diverge with most (but not all) of the cryptocurrency community. While the cryptocurrency community believes that holding BTC and ETH is holding assets outside of the global financial system, I strongly believe that holding assets in this manner is still holding assets inside the global financial system. Only future exposition of whether or not BTC has been a very clever Trojan horse invention of Central Bankers will clarify who is correct. I have always believed that ownership of purely digital assets leaves one extremely vulnerable to the imposition of future tyranny by Central Banking cartels whereas the vast majority of the cryptocurrency community possess the exact opposite belief, that heavy ownership in cryptocurrencies protects them from future Central Banker tyranny.
Our divergent beliefs lies in our differing views about the risks of holding a 100% digital currency. The vast majority of the cryptocurrency community holds the view that the only manner by which the banking cartel can confiscate BTC, ETH and other cryptocurrencies is to shut down the internet. This false belief is the reason why the belief that BTC and ETH is immune from State confiscation exists. My argument is that legislation in which BTC and ETH is deemed illegal will have the tantamount effect of confiscation because if the currency cannot be used to purchase any goods and societies in a nation, then of what utility is its possession? I will deconstruct the most common arguments against this line of thought now.
To begin, the counter to this objection to hold crytpocurrencies as a major source of one’s wealth is that if “confiscation” by outlawing legality of BTC and ETH can happen, then this can also happen with gold. So this caution is misplaced. While this objection is true, it is much less likely to happen with gold than with BTC and ETH simply due to the massive support for gold in dozens of nations around the world in which it is highly unlikely that citizen possession of gold will be outlawed by every nation. Consequently, many nations in which one can spend gold as money, even if the most tyrannical of nations outlawed gold possession, will likely exist. Secondly, with the market cap of gold today about 11.4 times the market cap of BTC, the much larger global market cap for gold is due to gold’s current status as king of reserves in the global monetary system (as all Central Banks except for Canada’s possess physical gold but none possess BTC). Thus banishment of gold from the world’s monetary system would be a much more difficult undertaking for Central Bankers, and if they did so, it will expose their true beliefs about gold, when it comes to their own personal wealth, versus their publicly avowed stances.
Secondly, the argument that State tyrants would have to abolish the internet to stop cryptocurrency use is just silly though it is a pervasive belief of the cryptocurrency community. For all intents and purposes, all fiat currencies have been digital for decades now, with only a tiny fraction of all major global fiat currencies owned by citizens and institutions today existing in the form of cash. The majority of people in the majority of nations are increasingly spending only digital fiat currencies, using credit cards, debit cards, and even digital smartphone applications to pay for nearly everything today. However regardless if a nation’s economy is nearly entirely digital (i.e. Sweden), or at one point was nearly a 100% cash economy (i.e. India a few years ago), the oligarchs don’t need to ban the internet or physically confiscate all cash to render fiat currencies useless.
Indian prime minister Narendra Modi demonstrated a few years ago, in a cash-based dominant economy, the easy by which a single authoritative tyrant can render a fiat currency used by nearly one out of every five people in the entire world, the Indian rupee, near worthless overnight by legislative decree. In 8 November 2016, India PM Modi provided only four hours of warning before rendering 86% of the cash in his nation worthless by deeming that use of the 500 and 1000 Indian rupees within domestic borders was illegal.
Past banker history has informed us that indeed, mere legislative decrees can cause massive chaos in what assets can be used to buy goods and services and which cannot. We should additionally realize by now that legislative decrees can be used to strip us of our wealth if our wealth is held inside the global financial system. Just recall, on the island of Cyprus, how bankers at two banks, the Bank of Laika and the Bank of Cyprus, literally stole more than 50% of savings from all account holders with deposits greater than 100,000 euros in their banks eight years ago. Only the most naïve of naïve, and most trusting of authoritative figures, would not have taken steps over the past few years to find alternative solutions to storing savings as bank deposits within the global banking system. This is necessary not only to avoid possible, inevitable theft in similar declarations in the future, but also to avoid the constant purchasing power rot and decay we suffer by storing our savings in fiat.
Written by J. Kim for Maalamalama ~ October 13, 2021
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