Fellow earthlings [Yes, I was just kidding about being an extraterrestrial anthropologist. Forgive me though if I adopt my extraterrestrial position again.] I would like to take this opportunity to neglect to apologize for, or attempt to excuse, my likening of your freely chosen benign public servant and protector to an evil overlord. I will excuse him though. I am his slave. You are his slave. That would make him entirely and contemptibly evil, if not for the fact that he is someone’s slave. Who the ultimate slave-master, or slave-masters, is I do not know—being so far down on the ladder of servitude as I am. We might also thank him for being the first chief executive of this people-farming plantation to admit to his tyranny—albeit for our own quibbling good—thus facilitating the premise for this discussion.

Here, at the head of this article, I would like to state that O’Sauron is my Master, and I will not defy him or his minions, only the other slaves with whom I find myself penned. I am thus not an opponent of this great plantation, and would like to remain free to quibble about my plight. I have no political aspirations, do not believe in freedom, for anyone other than my master, and simply seek to cling to my tiny sliver of surrogate freedom; my delusion of humanity; my Fractional Autonomy…

I was told, as a child, that I had been born free, in the land of the brave, in possession of certain inalienable rights. Like every other slave born to this and every other slave nation on the planet, I was lied to as the centerpiece of my cultural conditioning; lied to by those who fervently believed the lie. I was more fortunate than most though. On my first day into the world at age six, as I walked to school—as soon as I arrived in fact—I was beaten by three older children. This was the first crack in the happy exterior of my psychological prison wall, painted in my mind by the masters of the masters of those who owned my parents; the senior cellmates in the soul-crushing hell I was born to.

I now thank the three boys who beat me, the teachers who beat and abused me, and the older males who humiliated, picked on, beat and tormented me. By making me pay the price for being different until I reached defiant predatory adolescence, these cultural functionaries—my horizontal disciplinarians—made me susceptible to absorbing alternative beliefs contrary to my cultural conditioning. As a teen I found an ethics system far superior to any taught by church, state or parent. Hence, the tormentors of my childhood did me deep innumerable favors.

That ethics system I adopted at age 14 was the blood-drenched reactionary fantasy of Robert Erwin Howard, a long dead writer who hated the world as intensely as I had long before I was dragged—kicking and screaming I am told, by the poor woman charged with my early indoctrination—into it. For I emerged into the world not as a witless slave of the mind extolling his masters’ virtues and believing he had rights that could not be revoked; but as a defiant, hate-filled, dynamic, testosterone-sodden half-wit; largely resilient to brain-washing.

This primitive state-of-being took me down many blind alleys, and nearly to a life of actual physical [rather than just mental and spiritual] incarceration, on many occasions. But somehow, I survived the world’s evil, the guilt and blind expectations foisted upon me by those to whom I was chained by circumstance, and my own idiocy, long enough to have lived enough sorrows and read enough books, to lose the hate, but not the defiance—and to somehow attain a state of literacy sufficient to permit me to communicate with others, who might secretly harbor their own defiance: to you, my readers.

Eventually, in 2006, after turning down 13 offers of promotion within a regional mid-sized retail food corporation, and thus remaining on the very lowest of 10 corporate rungs, I seemed to join with the world I had for so long rejected. I accepted a general manager position for an independent food market, ascending 8 rungs on the ladder, and landing perilously below the final rung, where resided the hate-filled ownership, who feared and despised the 104 wage-slaves they had hired me to rule in their name. I was my own little O’Sauran, making the owners in this analogy the international banks who in fact own the American President and all other heads of state.

Briefly, to the people who have contacted me concerning their disenchantment with our world order being radically and obscenely different from what they are told it is, I only have one piece of advice, one tool I have used to preserve my identity and humanity. This is what I call Fractional Autonomy. Suppose you do not want to join the brainwashed hordes of consumer puppets, yet fear resistance will break you mentally or legally?

How I have dealt with this is to cut myself off from the compulsive economic machine as much as possible. I still want a voice, so I can’t do so completely, like a homeless person—this being the state that is often the last refuge of those driven insane by our evil world order. This austerity just minimizes your social pressures, still rendering you impotent. To feel alive, to be able to express enough of your humanity to not feel run over and trampled, stake out an ‘autonomous zone’ a portion of your life where you are free for the moment.

My mobile autonomous zone is the space I require to walk. That is it, and I’m not a bully about it. I will and do walk around—but I do not do so when threatened. I know, in my mind, in my every fiber, that I will not permit another person to block my passage to my destination. Anyone who tries to prevent me from getting to the gym, to work, home, must kill me. This may seem insane to you. But I know, when I walk, that I am free, freer than you have ever been, until I die. My fixed zone is my room. No one enters my room—the private space I pay for with my labor—without permission. In all other areas of life—outside of sport combat and writing—I am passive and just float along the line of least resistance.

This is all very minimalistic, even simplistic. The key is minimizing it. Two areas where people often seek autonomy—since most of us naturally seek a sense of autonomy, even the vast number of us who wish to be enslaved—is automobiles and intoxication. Driving and drinking, or even both together, seem to offer a great euphoric sense of power over the environment. They are, however, points of convergence for the powerful and evil social forces that surround us. Stop and think about your car, and all of the corporate and government leverage applied to it, to the road, to the tunnel you drive through, by the cop who stops you because you are a young man. That car is not your power, but someone else’s, and you are literally strapped into it—by law! The same is true with drugs: the cops, the DEA, the courts, the dealer, his supplier, the home invaders.

Our economies—the legal and illegal ones—are in fact the expressions of evil in human society. If you want peace-of-mind you need to get to the fringe. If you would rather have material possessions—then welcome to paradise; you can have it all, no peace-of-mind or dignity required.

The more minimalistic your autonomous zone is the less it exposes you to the greed and evil of others, and the harder the enemy has to work to root you out.

After four years as the parish priest for The God of Things, after inflicting economic death on scores of pathetic employees in the name of the greater good, of being the overseer of one tiny slice of planation squalor, I walked away. I held my cell phone up to my co-manager, turned it off, and said, “It’s all your problem now.”

I had managed to make enough money to get my youngest son through school. Done now with the task of raising a family, and weary of the complexity of female companionship, I took myself back down to the bottom rung of the economy and began a subsistence-level literary life-style. I have various people to thank for this. My landlord permits me to live cheaply beneath the economic horizon, as does my indulgent employer, who thinks I suffered a psychic break and has kindly put me out to pasture as the bottom man on his team. This has left me as a recluse, giving me the mental energy to hurry up and write out all of the demons crowding my brain as I race against the shadow of boxing dementia, which has already begun to impinge upon my speech.

I embarked on this odd literary life of leisure largely to pursue the writing of fiction and history. Oddly enough I have been sought out by a number of readers as something of an advisor, a sounding board—the old shaman in the cave, whose kooky eccentricities are forgiven by those who beseech him for an alternative view of a life that perplexes them. For this reason, the indulgence and trust of those readers who care about the here and now, I have dedicated this blog page primarily to their concerns.

Socially, I have already committed suicide. Therefore the content of this article and much of what appears on this page, has been suggested to me by those of you who care, who yet seek to live out your lives as I am ending mine. Below are some thoughts of mine concerning this dilemma of living meaningfully in a world that all of a sudden seems so hideously corrupt to so many. This is the first part of two concerning my observations and advice for living a life as free from coercion as possible, given the circumstances; of living as freely and meaningfully as possible as a real whole human, a spirit immune to the ostracism that is the cornerstone of this Alienation Nation. Thus I begin by discussing some of the circumstances faced by those who have inquired of me. But first, let's take a time out for your well-considered objections and reservations...

Look LaFond, excuse me, but I can’t live on canned beans. I have IBS! Besides, you old recluse, I have two young children, a cat, and a wife who hates me to provide for. I would really prefer not living like a caveman until after the North Koreans invade. In the meantime, what can I do about my situation, without having to live like well, you, you deranged maniac?

That, my friends, is the subject of the next installment. I will finish this series by using a sampling of individual human predicaments to illustrate the sensible application of my crackpot caveman ethics discussed above. The people whose plight I shall discuss in Part Three are those whose letters have inspired me to write this piece.

I will conclude this piece, O’Sauron willing, as soon as I conduct my upcoming meeting with ‘Dan’ a former military intelligence officer who claims to have tortured undeclared Vietnamese POWs; with Alienation Nation: Part Three—Surviving Cultural Free-Fall by Ducking Below the Political Horizon

The bookmarks for Part Three include: The Sensibles; Miss Gerd’s Piss Test; When Pigs Fly; Criminal Minds; and Machete Ricardo’s Freedom Home.