The government today increasingly resembles an insane, impotent king: draped in ceremony, convinced of his own grandeur, barking decrees at a world that quietly routes around him. He rants from a gilded balcony. Courtiers clap on cue. Scribes record the pronouncements as if they were holy writ. But beyond the palace walls, the roads are cracked, the granaries are thin, and the villagers have learned a hard truth—whatever the king says, their survival depends on what *they* do.
This is not a call for apathy. It’s a call for realism.
An impotent monarch is most dangerous not because he is powerful, but because he is desperate to *appear* powerful. When he can’t build, he compensates by declaring. When he can’t solve, he substitutes spectacle. When he can’t protect, he demands loyalty. And because he cannot actually deliver stability, he sells a story: that stability is always one edict away—one election, one bill, one agency reorganization, one emergency order. The court insists salvation is imminent, provided the peasants only obey, pay, and wait.
Waiting is the trap.
In the modern version, the palace is federal: massive, sprawling, expensive, perpetually “working on it.” Its voice is everywhere—briefings, press conferences, policy announcements, executive orders, hearings designed for cameras. Yet ordinary people experience less competence where it counts: affordability, local resilience, predictable rules, workable institutions, and basic trust. The throne issues proclamations, but the lived reality is drift.
So what do you do with an insane, impotent king?
You don’t storm the palace every morning. You don’t spend your whole life staring at the balcony. You don’t let your household rise and fall with the king’s moods. You keep him busy with his own echoes—and you build your life in ways that don’t require his permission to remain intact.
There’s a parable here: imagine a dictator so petty and delusional that he’s obsessed with hearing himself rant—so obsessed that if you simply leave him alone in a room with mirrors, he will talk himself hoarse while everyone else gets on with living. Let him thunder at the walls. Let him declare new holidays. Let him threaten the furniture with sanctions. The point is not admiration; it’s containment. His noise becomes background. His theatrics become self-consuming. His power shrinks to the size of the audience that indulges him.
That’s the posture citizens should take toward federal dysfunction: not obedience, not fixation, not constant fear—but strategic distance.
Because the truth is: your stability is personal before it is political.
A self-supporting life—financially, socially, practically—is the most peaceful form of dissent and the most reliable form of insurance. It reduces the government’s leverage over your choices, and it reduces your exposure to the regime’s incompetence. When the king can’t deliver bread, the household that learned to bake is less afraid. When the court debases the coin, the family with skills, savings, and relationships still has value. When the capital changes its mind every news cycle, the community that can rely on itself becomes harder to bully.
What does “independent steps” actually mean? Not fantasies. Not cosplay. Not isolation. It means boring, durable things:
- **Lower your dependency footprint.** Avoid building a life that collapses if a program changes, a regulation shifts, or a bureaucracy misfires. Diversify income. Know what you can cut fast. Keep fixed costs from becoming chains.
- **Build real skills.** Credentials are fragile; competence travels. Learn trades, repair, basic accounting, cooking, gardening, first aid, negotiation—skills that function under any flag.
- **Strengthen local ties.** The federal government is an abstraction; your neighbors are not. Mutual aid, community groups, local business networks, faith communities—these are stability machines when institutions wobble.
- **Own more of your necessities.** Not hoarding, not paranoia—just prudence. Keep a buffer: food, water, medical basics, cash reserves. Maintain your vehicle. Know how to heat your home. Keep backups for what you truly need.
- **Treat politics like weather, not religion.** Pay attention, prepare, then move on with your day. Don’t let outrage become entertainment that drains your capacity to act.
The palace thrives on an exhausted population—people trained to believe the only meaningful action is to argue about the king’s latest rant. It’s the oldest trick in authoritarian history: keep citizens emotionally tethered to the throne, whether through love or hatred, and they will neglect their own sovereignty.
There is a difference between civic engagement and civic dependence. The former is a duty; the latter is a vulnerability.
None of this requires pretending government doesn’t matter. It does. Bad policy hurts. Corruption corrodes. Rights must be defended. But the modern state’s most corrosive achievement is convincing people that their *personal* stability must be mediated by distant authorities. That’s how an impotent king keeps his relevance: he can’t rule effectively, so he makes himself unavoidable.
You don’t have to accept that arrangement.
Let the ruby-throned dictator rant—let him exhaust himself on declarations and dramas. Let the palace scribes file their proclamations. Let the cable-news heralds trumpet each new royal mood swing. Meanwhile, you should be doing what free people have always done when the crown becomes a circus: plant roots, build capacity, cultivate trust, and make your household harder to shake.
Because when the king is insane and impotent, the most radical thing you can do is stop organizing your life around his delusions—and start organizing it around your own resilience.
With thanks to #btcsessions #jackspirko #tsp #bensessions
