How to claim the mandate of heaven

The strangest thing about talking to South Africans is how free they are. Despite their government’s Hutuist resentment and explicit racial discrimination, Afrikaners enjoy far more practical freedoms than Americans.

South African “community safety patrols” routinely use firearms to defend themselves, individually and collectively. Not only are the police not interested in stopping this — they routinely rely on community safety patrols for intelligence and tactical support against criminals.

Likewise, you would expect a community overtly segregated by European language and ancestry to face a crackdown, but Orania is thriving. The state isn’t getting any friendlier toward the white minority, but it is getting less and less competent to persecute them.

Efforts to resist the post-apartheid government with violence have been fruitless — but by quietly building capacity for pro-social ends, Afrikaners have carved out meaningful sovereignty that the South African government has neither the will nor the means to disrupt.

The decline of the state is punctuated by shocks like the 2021 riots, which reveal the incompetence of the state and allow new power structures to emerge.

Last week, Hurricane Helene exposed similar rot in USG.

After giving billions of dollars to illegal migrants, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas says FEMA is tapped — they will only provide “critical response efforts” and will not support rebuilding of the affected areas.

In the meantime, Kamala Harris says $750 checks will go to “those who truly need it”.

So Americans are left to establish their own civilian search-and-rescue and relief efforts via drone, helicopter, ATV, and donkey.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is refusing to allow civilian aid flights into Asheville, and prohibiting civilian drone reconnaissance “so that first responders can do their job” (i.e. to prevent alternative media narratives forming around the disaster).

Civilian volunteers have been threatened with arrest for making unauthorized rescue flights. FEMA has closed waste transfer stations, and told commercial garbage hauling companies to “dump [the waste] back in people’s driveways”, with the promise that FEMA will come clean it up “over the course of the next year”.

There is some evidence that military resources are being deployed to help without official sanction.

“Opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated.”

Non-state groups often win power politically, even if they are outmatched militarily, by providing services that the state will not or cannot — protecting people the state has abandoned, and punishing bureaucratic expropriation and abuse.

These institutions are almost never viewed as primarily coercive — they position themselves as providers, protectors, and guarantors of good order. Authority isn’t nakedly asserted or imposed — it flows naturally from taking credible and competent action in a power vacuum.

As the state grows increasingly incompetent (and increasingly hostile to decent people), opportunities to help are expanding, and the will to organize around parallel institutions grows.

William Gibson said, “The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.” Likewise, the collapse is already here — but it will come in localized shocks like Hurricane Helene that punctuate and accelerate a secular decline.

In some ways this is good news, because it means we will have opportunities to watch, and learn, and practice — opportunities for coordination and trust to emerge over time. The people who will thrive in this new reality will be those who learn fastest — who build a tribe and make themselves useful.

EXIT is building for our grandkids. We are connecting competent and values-aligned people to create the intelligence and resource networks that will carry our families through the decline, and equip them to build for what comes after. Join us at exitgroup.us.