UNSCRIPTED: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship

by M.J. DeMarco

A degree might get you in the door; performance gets you cooking in the kitchen.

By sharing only life’s highlights and cloaking the rest, we cast a pseudo reality.

Money, the world’s dominant hyperreality, is a mutually shared belief that physical money (a stack of paper bills) or virtual digital money (a number on a computer screen) is valuable and that the person possessing it is equally valuable.

Consensus fallacies are how common ideas escape critical thinking and become hyperrealities, such as Earth is the center of the universe.

The most fraudulent hyperreality running rampant in the First World is freedom itself—the perception that we come into this world free and unencumbered, a sovereign person born with inalienable rights that cannot be co-opted, confiscated, or subjugated by any laws, customs, or beliefs. Not true. Not for you, me, or anyone else. The truth is, we are livestock. Hosts for a diabolical purpose. Free-range slaves. Like free-range chickens, we roam free in our container (a country), provided the illusion of freedom, but we are still held captive for our eggs—our economic impact. If you leave, you need permission (a visa) and your leave is limited to whatever the visiting container (country) allows, usually ninety days. You see, ever since your parents signed your birth certificate, you’ve become government collateral. Corporatized by our country, we’re not sovereign individuals free from governance, we’re corporations—corporations subject to taxation, regulation, registration, licensing, and a whole host of authoritative mandates. You, the corporation, are owned by the government. Everything you own, and everything I own, is also owned by the government.

Money truly is no longer backed by gold but backed by blood—you—and the SCRIPT administrates the chattel. In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt paved the way for currency backed by human collateral over physical collateral, such as gold. When you hear the phrase, “backed by the full faith and credit of the US Government,” what you’re really hearing is, “backed by United States citizens.” Our money system is financed on our backs, and the SCRIPT keeps fish in the pond while the collateral fattens the system. And while we’re technically *free* to make choices, we’re NOT really *free* in terms of sovereignty.

In 2014, I paid cash for a house in beautiful Fountain Hills, Arizona. I own it free and clear, with no mortgage or bank involvement. Liberating, eh? But the truth is, I really don’t own it. The government has given me equitable title, which means I’m free to *use* it as long as I play by their rules. In effect, my home is leased from the government (the State of Arizona) and my yearly property taxes are the lease payment. If I refuse to pay my property taxes, the state will repossess what seemingly is mine. And the amount of the delinquency is immaterial—twenty bucks or twenty-thousand, it doesn’t matter. Don’t pay and say bye-bye to your crib.

Don’t play by the rules sustaining the SCRIPTED system, and watch freedom disappear. Sovereignty is an illusion. Liberty is free-range. Of course UNSCRIPTED is NOT about dodging taxes or driving without car insurance. We simply seek to understand and legally acknowledge the game, while learning how to avoid it.

Lost time is never found again. ~ Benjamin Franklin, Statesman

Few people explicitly work for three bucks per hour, but give them a freebie or a savings opportunity at that same rate and you’ll have tents lined around the building.

If a death clock suddenly became visible and advertised your life rations for easy viewing, say your smartphone, would you spend your time differently? Would you be OK sitting at a desk five days a week, doing a job you hated? Would you spend two days camped outside at Best Buy, hoping to save two hundred bucks on a curved television? How about buying into a financial scheme that promised freedom only after 90 percent of your life’s rations have bled dry? And more importantly, what remaining time on your death clock would deliver the much-needed head smack that screamed, “OMG, my life is too precious to be squandered on a sidewalk waiting to save ten bucks.” Six weeks? Months? Years?

Under temporal prostitution, the things you buy cost more than just money—they cost future fragments of your life, transforming FREE time into INDENTURED time.

Allow the SCRIPT to write the rules and you’ll accept the worst trade mankind has ever foisted on intelligent beings: the horrendous “sell good time today so you can buy bad time tomorrow,” where 71 percent of your adult life is routinely dismissed in favor of an elderly promise called retirement.

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosopher

The Sidewalk is the SCRIPT’s paycheck-to-paycheck, pay-for-it-later plan, promising happiness through consumption, both material acquisition and hyperrealistic assimilation. In return for temporary, short-lived comfort—the financed car, the vacation to Tahiti, the trendy wardrobe, the nights on the town in the VIP section—the future is forsaken for fleeting thrills, which must be repaid tomorrow by longer lurches of pain. The Sidewalk is much like that old drinking quote: “When you drink more than you should, you’re just borrowing happiness from tomorrow.” Unfortunately, “tomorrow” is continually postponed until the pain compounds into an inescapable work mandate.

Unrestrained spending is often justified with cutesy acronyms, such as YOLO, TGIF, or FML. Unfortunately, YOLO’s price doesn’t live once; it lives and grows on your Visa card.

Temporal prostitution is a way of life. Always needing to work and always loathing the obligation, Sidewalkers routinely waste time in superfluous hyperrealistic proxies: sports, television dramas, Internet comment wars. You see, the Sidewalker doesn’t play the game of life; he spectates. He comments. He opines. He heckles the million-dollar athlete from the cheap seats. Culturally plugged in, Sidewalkers can shoot the shit by the water cooler for hours, dispensing a wide variety of opinions: who the Dallas Cowboys should have drafted; how George R.R. Martin should have written Game of Thrones; and how dare Showtime cancel Dexter? Instead of being the best he can be, the Sidewalker aspires to be the best copy of someone else: an athlete, a famous person, a fictional character, or some other person not annexed by the SCRIPT.

Underneath the SCRIPTED delusion is the idea that success can be bought at a mall, parked in a garage, or cashed on a Friday. Few realize that every dollar owed shortens the leash and tightens the collar around their neck.

Miserly saving and investing today will lead to freedom tomorrow. In other words, incarcerate 90 percent of your adult life in a job/Wall Street scheme so you can hope to enjoy the last 10 percent.

The Slowlane is the presumption that decades of gainful employment circumscribed by thrifty living, tortuous saving, and regimented stock market investing will somehow make you a happy millionaire. The financial priesthood and the mainstream mouthpieces have made it clear: if you want a secure retirement and a millionaire portfolio by sixty-five, sacrifice now and put those sacrifices into the stock market.

While the Sidewalker is leashed and collared by consumption and debt, the Slowlaner is leashed and collared by deprivation and hope. I call it the HOPE, STOP, and WAIT plan. Sadly, changing paths does nothing but change your corporate master. Whereas a Sidewalker is broadly owned horizontally through a variety of corporations (banks, media, consumer products), the Slowlaner is vertically owned by just one corporate master. Your new corporate owner? Wall Street.

You see, whenever you put your financial future into Wall Street’s hands, you’re essentially saying, “Hope and time is my plan for financial freedom.” For the plan to actually work, think about all the stars needed to align perfectly: Hope I have a job—not just a job but a good job. Hope the economy gives me that good job for the next fifty years. Hope the stock market yields 10 percent a year and doesn’t crash. Hope the housing market doesn’t implode and erase my equity. Hope I’m alive by retirement. Hope I’m healthy. Hope the government doesn’t hyperinflate my savings or the currency in which it is denominated. Hope the government can continually fund a bankrupt Social Security program. Yes, you are collared by hope, imprisoned by time, and owned by Wall Street.

Nonetheless, the beat goes on: One hundred dollars saved every month could be worth $5 million after fifty years! Inflation? Stock market crashes? Life expectancy? Survivor biases? Zero percent interest rates? Currency devaluation? My friends, pay no attention to probable reality because, just like lotteries, probable reality plays no role in feel-good fantasies! You’re going to be rich!

Many who struggle financially have a strong work ethic—the problem is their “hard work” is being channeled in an ineffective and outdated system.

What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish. ~ W.H. Auden, Poet

Distraction is the medicating cocktail that lets us swallow our ignorant resignation that life will be ordinarily destined for a weekend and a once-a-year vacation.

As the SCRIPT’s newest manufactured M.O.D.E.L. Citizen, life is: (M)EDIOCRE: Life has regressed into an unremarkable yet comfortable ordinariness, where thriving is not an objective, but surviving. (O)BEDIENT: Free-thinking is dead; you follow popular opinion and trust your government and the news organizations fanning the flames of your biases. (D)EPENDENT: You’re a debt serf owned by an army of corporations: product and service producers, Wall Street, government—or worse, you are owned by time. (E)NTERTAINED: Your entertained and humored mind distracts the heart to the point where your soul is no longer heard. (L)IFELESS: Dead at twenty-five but not buried until seventy-five. Goals, nonexistent. Optimism, scant. Dreams, murdered.

No matter which road is taken, the outcome is the same: we’re livestock held hostage by a corporate cartel—a variety of banks, media conglomerates, product producers, Wall Street money managers, and the ultimate parental corporate duo, your job and your government.

Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants. ~ Epictetus, Philosopher

In Hollywood’s The Matrix, the world is fooled by a neural simulation while carnivorous machines feed on our life force. Similarly in our world, government feeds on our economic output, our consumptive impetuses, and our consensus ignorance. Corporations play the foot soldiers, herding the unwashed into the machine’s mouth while the hyperrealities keep us entertained and distracted.

Within the SCRIPTED OS, the holy trinity of retirement planning is tied to three unpredictable and uncontrollable markets: the job market, the stock market, and the housing market. In other words, follow the SCRIPT and your financial future is resigned to the gambles of dependence. Adopt conventional thinking in this area and I guarantee, you will live conventionally.

You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality. ~ Ayn Rand, Author

It’s like that old folktale about the lazy dog lying in a gas station. Day after day, the dog lies there whimpering and moaning. After hearing the dog whimper every visit, a customer asks the clerk, “Hey, what’s wrong with the dog?” The clerk responds, “Oh, he’s just lying on a nail and it hurts.” Confused, the customer asks, “Then why doesn’t he get up?” The clerk retorts, “I guess it just doesn’t hurt bad enough.”

It is the influence of leisure on consumption which makes the [five day workweek] so necessary. The people who consume the bulk of goods are the people who make them. That is a fact we must never forget, that is the secret of our prosperity. He continued: The people with a 5-day week will consume more goods than the people with a 6-day week. People who have more leisure must have more clothes. They must have a greater variety of food. They must have more transportation facilities. They naturally must have more service of various kinds. This increased consumption will require greater production than we now have. Instead of business being slowed up because the people are ‘off work’, it will be speeded up… This will lead to more work. And this to more profits.27

Still accepted, the modern five-day, forty-hour workweek is a SCRIPTED tool for obedience, keeping you occupied, clothed, and fed, and it’s just enough to keep weekends earmarked as a leisurely celebration officiated by consumption. As long as your head stays slightly above water, the weekend bribe continues while the red pill swirls around in your mouth like a Jolly Rancher.

The coldhearted fact is, the more responsibilities assumed, the stronger the SCRIPTED grip becomes. Responsibility can be the yoke of many things: car payments, student loans, credit cards, mortgages, alimony, children, and yes, even man’s best friend, your dog Fluffy. I know this isn’t popular, but I’m not here to balm chapped lips.

Responsibility necessitates consumption. Stack extemporaneous responsibility into life and consumption is mandated. And the SCRIPT loves consumption.

An extraordinary life will require an extraordinary story. Whenever hardships, failures, and struggles are encountered, you are simply drafting the story.

It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default. ~ J.K. Rowling, Author

They see, believe, and understand the theology, but they don’t live it. Caught in a perpetual paralysis by analysis, these wanderers consume the forum like a drug, creating progress illusions, reading book after book, posting inspirational meme after meme, while accomplishing nothing.

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own mind. ~ Franklin Roosevelt,

The reality is, your brain is the battlefield for success, more so than any actions that come later. If your brain didn’t skew results, why does the scientific method require placebos? Your mind delivers a psychological impact—so impactful that it must be scientifically accounted.

Flawed premises yield flawed results. Different results need different premises.

your brain was a separate person who spoke to you daily, would you label it a friend and an ally? Or a nay-saying enemy?

A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back to the crowd. ~ Max Lucado,

The American media is mostly controlled by six large corporations whereas thirty years ago it was diversified among several dozen, thus a handful of powerful executives control the media narrative for millions.

Common 99 percent thinking won’t get you uncommon 1 percent results.

Let the crowd do your thinking and you will indeed believe as the crowd and, unfortunately, find yourself with the results of the crowd. This systematic brainwashing is how mediocrity is born, lived, and then buried.

The shortcut scam is the idea that extraordinary results can be achieved by uncovering a secret bypass or a miracle weapon, and such can skirt the real hard work that actually creates the extraordinary results.