by Eleutheros of http://milesfrombabylon.blogspot.com/

This is from the comments of the previous post: Question: what advice
could/would you give someone who truly has the desire and the will to
walk away from Babylon?

I don't know. I don't know your circumstances, proclivity, resources,
history, etc. It would be all too easy to suggest something or begin
a diatribe that would be completely moot. So I must reduce the answer
to the most basic tenet of the freeman's way of things.

The above photo is a view down the cathedral-like corridor formed by
the 14' high stalks in one of the patches of corn. On the left side
and about midway from top to bottom you will see one ear of corn
still upright and several others behind it drooping over. When the
corn is completely finished for the season, the stalk begins to turn
brown and the ears droop over so that the husks form a raincoat to
allow the corn to dry in the October sun. Very soon we will begin
harvesting the corn, allow to to finish drying, then shell it from
the cobs and put it way for kitchen use.

We actually have enough of this kitchen corn left over from last year
to do us for the current year. You never know when there is going to
be as bad year, so we will put most of this aside against the
possibility. During the year the corn will be ground into meal as
needed to make our staple food, cornbread. A variation of that is to
soak the corn in lime water to make masa for tortillas and tamales.
But the natural food staple of our culture is Appalachian style
cornbread which along with the dried beans we also grow gives a
balance of starch, protein, and fat.

These corn patches, this year one for white corn and one for red
corn, are tucked away on a rather narrow shoulder, maybe 70' wide, on
the hillside above the mountain hollow in a place few would deem as a
place for agriculture in these modern times. The seed has been saved
from crop to crop for many years now. The ground is prepared with a
horse and a 100 year old plow. The ground is kept fertile by
application of stable manure and leaf mold. In other words, if we
padlocked the gate to this farmstead and never had any trafficking
with Babylon ever again, we could still grow corn and beans in
perpetuity, worlds without end, amen.

Now many of the people who read this blog, or other writings like it,
turn away in horror and disgust and what they perceive as a call to
recluse oneself in some remote niche of the world and subsist on a
mirthless bowl of corn meal gruel all of one's days. Said people miss
the point entirely.

What is this low tech, low input, subsistence economy all about, what
does it mean to us? It is much like Jack Sparrow's remark to
Elizabeth Swann when they were marooned on the island and he told her
what the Black Pearl really was, it was freedom. Like that to us our
centuries old agriculture represents for us a choice. And having a
choice is the very essence and foundation of our escape from Babylon.

So this is my answer to the anonymous commenter, To walk away from
Babylon, you must have choices. Alas, it is likely you don't even if
you most certainly think you do. Babylon, as with any exploitative
and controlling system, can only exist by limiting and eliminating
your choices. After all, if you actually have choices, you may in
fact choose the things that benefit and enhance you and your family
rather than things that benefit Babylon.

Babylon must eliminate your ability to choose. It does so with the
help of two effective ploys. First it will offer you false choices in
order to distract you from the fact that you have no real choices at
all. A desperate maneuver of failed parenting is when a child is
adamant that he does not want to go somewhere, you say, "We need to
get ready to go now, do you want to wear the blue shirt or the red
one?" The hope being that the child will become absorbed in choosing
which color shirt to choose and forget for the moment all his
objections about going in the first place. The Nazis used this tactic
to control the Jews they intended to exterminate and it is hardly
less dishonorable when anyone uses it. Yet this is part and parcel
the essential operations of Babylon.

For example, people are always asking us what sort of alternate
electrical energy we are using, because, after all, if you are going
to escape from Babylon, you surely don't want to be connected to the
grid! It's a false choice to choose, say, solar electric or grid
electric. If you "escape" being tied down to a monthly electric bill,
you are saddled with the expense of a depreciating and deteriorating
electric system you own. What is more, the amount of electricity you
can feasibly realize with a home solar set up is so small that you
must curtail your electric use severely if that's all you use. You
will not, for example be running an electric range, electric hot
water heater, electric clothes dryer, and electric furnace or heat
pump on a home solar electric system. So if you are willing to live
within the limits of the amount of electricity you can generate with
such a system, it is such a tiny bit that it is not much expense or
dependence to get it from the grid to begin with. It's a false
choice. Our household is set up so that it is not dependent on
electricity at all. Make no mistake, we enjoy our electricity. We
like watching DVD's, using the computer, listening to the radio,
running the electric dehydrator, and the convenience of early morning
and late evening activities because of the electric lights. But we
also are equipped to live without it. Which we have done. Ours is a
true choice, it is to use electricity or not as is prudent by the
circumstances. Switching from being dependent on the grid to being
dependent on the makers of batteries and solar panels is not a true
choice since either way you are dependent.

The second way in which Babylon enforces its no-choice policy is when
there really is a choice you might make, Babylon convinces you that
you really don't have that choice at all. To be able to raise any of
our own food we have to borrow money for land, right! You have to go
to college, right? Gotta have wheels, gotta have a credit card,
right?

Wrong. Those, and many more, are all things Babylon chants over and
over until the idea that you could do without them entirely is just
beyond belief.

So I bring up my corn field in way of illustration of what a real
choice looks like. We produce (and even prepare, grind and bake) our
staple bread with no input at all from Babylon. So we always have the
choice to eat that instead of what Babylon offers. We also buy wheat
in bulk and make wheat bread sometimes, but if (when, as it happened
this year) the transportation cost or scarcity of wheat makes the
price beyond the pale, we can look at it and say, "No, not going
there, we will just go home and have our cornbread and beans."
Likewise we sometimes buy food from stands and stores, and on a few
occasions we eat out. But we always have the choice, and if we need
to, we can enforce that choice for months on end. We've heard many a
Babylonian say, "A person has to eat, so no matter what we've got to
get money to buy food, or else use the credit card!" No choice.

Your escape from Babylon begins when you can say, "No, I have a
choice. Oh, I can dine around Babylon's table if I choose, but if the
Babyonian terms and conditions are odious, then I don't have to."

That's what my cornfield means.

It's just an example. Your choices may vary. So let's go back to the
beginning. What can you do? Examine the verities and realities of
your existence and ask yourself plainly and honestly where you are
devoid of choices. This and this alone tells you exactly where you
stand. Is it the gas pump and car payment or else you are destitute
with no way of earning your livelihood? Is it the Mart and
agribusiness or you starve? Is it the mortgage company and real
estate agent or you'd have to live under a bridge? Is it the
University and its degree else no one has the least bit of
credibility in you? Etc. etc. Then you are devoid of choices and this
defines your thralldom to Babylon. Its policy of eliminating your
choices has been most effective.

There is another curious aspect of this matter of choice. To the
untutored it might appear as if it is a continuum, a matter of
degrees, and so it is all a matter of balance. But it most certainly
is not. There is a trigger point, a breaking point, where you are
free of the stranglehold of Babylon.

I recall a conversation some years ago that was the inspiration for a
post on this blog. Like so many who employ the "matter of degrees"
argument, my disputant insisted that we both alike were dependent on
trafficking in Babylon's coin, that ultimately I could not escape it
any more than he could. The difference, which he never understood,
was that the need for it controlled what he did the next morning. He
had no choice. He had to put gas in the car on the morrow and go to
the job or else the disaster of his personal world loomed. I on the
other hand had a choice of whether I attended to the matter of
Babylon's money that day, or that week, or even that year for that
matter. Babylon's hold was broken. Just as I could decide to go home
and eat cornbread and beans or else buy something at Babylon's
markets, I could choose to bestir myself to do Babylon's dance for a
few of its coins ... or not. Oh, eventually I would have to pay the
property tax and and buy some kerosene. But I had weeks or years to
decide how I'd like to do it. In that time many things change, many
opportunities arise, and many circumstances come and go. I don't have
to do it right now, you can't rush me, you can't dictate to me, you
can't write the rules for me to follow. It is not a continuum or
matter of degrees, it is a matter of having to do it right now under
someone else's conditions and to someone else's advantage, or rather
to do it in my own time, under my conditions, and to my advantage.
That's what it means to live in a world of real choices. It is what
it means to live free.

So, my anonymous friend, the thing you must do is provide yourself
with choices. Look at your situation cold in the eye and tell where
you have been backed into a choiceless corner. Then see beyond
Babylon's false choices and blather that you have no choice and step
to a place in each instance where you an say to Babylon, "No, not
this time, I don't have to."

And most of all, don't look at the lives of the really free and see
us as hulking down on a dark mountainside swilling down a bowl of
mirthless gruel. No indeed. When we choose to have it, our humble
fare is a feast unrivaled. It is partaken with a fine and savory
sauce far beyond anything offered in Babylon's finest. That sauce is
choice.

http://milesfrombabylon.blogspot.com/2008/10/choice-best-sauce.html