Seven Resolutions

Freedom is not a mood. It is not a preference or a political affiliation. It is a practice, and practice requires commitment.

What follows are seven resolutions. Not the kind that expire when enthusiasm fades, but the kind that define who you are and what you will and will not do. They are not original. They draw on principles articulated by those who came before: the natural law tradition, the Austrian economists, the cypherpunks who understood that privacy must be built rather than requested. These resolutions simply make explicit what that inheritance requires of anyone who would claim it.

Adopt them or not. But understand that freedom without commitment is just talk.

I. Do Not Steal

This is the foundation. Everything else rests on it.

To steal is to take what belongs to another without consent. This includes the obvious forms: theft, robbery, burglary. It also includes the forms that respectable society pretends are something else. When you vote to take your neighbor's property and redistribute it, you are stealing. When you lobby for regulations that hamper your competitors, you are stealing. When you accept subsidies extracted from others under threat of imprisonment, you are receiving stolen goods.

The political process does not launder theft into legitimacy. A majority vote does not transform extraction into contribution. If you would not personally take your neighbor's money at gunpoint, you cannot delegate that act to others and remain innocent.

This is not a prohibition against earning, trading, or receiving gifts. It is a prohibition against force and the fruits of force. The line is clear to anyone willing to see it.

II. Keep Your Commitments

A voluntary society runs on trust. Trust runs on integrity. Integrity means your word binds you.

When you make a promise, keep it. When you sign a contract, honor it. When you take on an obligation, fulfill it. This is not negotiable and admits no convenient exceptions. The person who breaks commitments when keeping them becomes costly is not unlucky but unreliable, and unreliable people cannot build anything that lasts.

Keeping commitments is harder than it sounds. It means saying no to opportunities that would require breaking prior obligations. It means accepting losses when circumstances change but your word does not. It means being someone others can depend on absolutely.

Societies that abandon this principle do not remain societies for long. They dissolve into collections of strangers who cannot cooperate because cooperation requires trust and trust requires people who do what they say they will do.

III. Own Yourself

Self-sovereignty is not a slogan. It is a responsibility.

You own your body, your mind, your labor, and the consequences of your choices. No one else has a rightful claim to direct your life, and you cannot transfer that ownership to another without abdicating your humanity. This means you do not outsource your judgment to experts, your security to institutions, or your agency to leaders.

In practice: hold your own keys. Form your own opinions. Make your own decisions and live with the results. Do not ask permission to speak, to build, to trade, to live. You were born with jurisdiction over yourself, and no document or decree has revoked it.

This is harder than compliance. There is comfort in letting others decide, in following rather than choosing. But those who surrender self-ownership become instruments of purposes not their own. They live as tools, and tools do not build free societies.

IV. Defend the Victims of Aggression

Non-aggression is not pacifism. The commitment to refrain from initiating force does not mean standing idle while others are victimized.

When predators attack the innocent, defense is legitimate. When thieves operate under color of law, opposing them is not aggression but justice. When systems extract and oppress, those who resist on behalf of victims are not violating the peace but restoring it.

This resolution requires judgment. Not every battle is yours to fight. Not every victim can be saved. Martyrdom helps no one. But within your capacity and your context, you do not look away. You do not pretend that what is happening is not happening. You extend what protection you can to those who face aggression, whether that protection takes the form of sanctuary, resources, information, or tools.

Those who would prey on the peaceful should know that their victims are not alone.

V. Build Tools of Freedom

Talk is cheap. Manifestos are plentiful. What is scarce is work.

The cypherpunks understood this: "Cypherpunks write code." They did not wait for permission. They did not petition governments to respect privacy. They built cryptographic tools that made privacy possible regardless of what any authority permitted. They understood that freedom must be constructed, not requested.

The same applies now. Censorship-resistant communication requires relays that someone must run. Sound money requires infrastructure that someone must maintain. Private exchange requires protocols that someone must develop. Every tool that enables exit from predatory systems is a tool that someone built because they resolved to build rather than merely wish.

If you can write code, write code. If you can run servers, run servers. If you can design, design. If you can document, document. The specific contribution matters less than the commitment to produce rather than consume, to build rather than complain.

VI. Use What You Build

Building tools you do not use is theater.

If you advocate for self-custody, hold your own keys. If you build privacy tools, conduct your affairs privately. If you develop censorship-resistant platforms, publish on them. Hypocrisy is corrosive. It signals that even the builders do not believe their tools are ready, necessary, or worth the inconvenience.

Using what you build also makes it better. Developers who rely on their own software discover its weaknesses. Communities that use their own protocols understand what users need. Dogfooding is not vanity but quality assurance.

This extends beyond the technical. If you believe in voluntary exchange, trade. If you believe in keeping commitments, be scrupulously reliable. If you believe in defending victims, actually defend them. The principles must be lived to be credible, and credibility is what attracts others to the work.

VII. Withdraw from Systems of Extraction

Where you can, stop feeding what you oppose.

This is not a call to martyrdom. It is a recognition that predatory systems survive on compliance. Every tax paid under protest still funds the machinery. Every interaction through surveilled channels still generates data for those who would control. Every use of captured money still legitimizes the capture.

Complete withdrawal is impossible for most. Partial withdrawal is possible for nearly everyone. Use money that cannot be debased. Communicate through channels that cannot be censored. Trade with those who respect consent. Reduce the surface area of your life that passes through institutions designed to extract and control.

Each act of withdrawal is small. Cumulatively, they matter. Systems that lose participants lose power. The goal is not purity but direction: less compliant this year than last, more independent tomorrow than today.

These seven resolutions are not easy. They are not meant to be. Easy commitments require no commitment at all.

They are also not comprehensive. There are many ways to live a good life, and these resolutions do not address most of them. What they address is specific: the ethical minimum for those who would build a society based on consent rather than coercion.

You may adopt them formally or simply let them guide your choices. You may announce them or hold them privately. What matters is whether you act on them when acting is costly, when no one is watching, when it would be easier to make an exception.

Those who do become something more than observers of the idea of freedom. They become its builders.