Dojo Appeal

The corporate/consumer system in the United States is a soft version of military life, specifically life on a ship. Sadly, people are trained for it from the time they're a toddler. Kids get shipped off to "kindergarten" to get used to authority figures giving them orders and spending all their time on a controlled schedule inside an institutional building where their movements are controlled by institutional paperwork and orders like "hall passes". It's not even an American concept; it came from inbred Prussian lizard people.

A big component of the "midlife crisis" is the realization that life spent in this system is a waste. For many people, it's not so much a "realization", that is a conscious, well formed thought, it's more of a feeling that plays out in mute desperation and acting out. The certainty of mortality, and the corresponding preciousness of one's life collides with the absurdity of masses of people living under the thumb of a bunch of greedy cockroaches who have bamboozled the multitudes.

This realization is also why movies like They Live attain a "cult" following. It allows the audience to "externalize" this model of control, that is, the narrative of the movie allows one to be like a fish that climbs out of the fish bowl and see it for what it is.

However, once a person "can see", a possibly harsher reality is everyone now "needs" this pile of trash system because it makes almost everything including the most essential items like food and controls the distribution of everything with funny money.

That said, many of the things people do are purposely and firmly outside the corporate/consumer system. I experience one successful, very good example of that on a regular basis when I do my mountain biking hobby. I go to a public park and ride a trail that was built and maintained by volunteers who receive no compensation other than the ability to ride their bike.

After a summer storm, the trail can be impassible since it's in the woods and many branches and even whole trees or large chunks of a dying tree will fall on the trail... but they will disappear as if "by magic" over maybe a half a day. The "magic" is rando mountain bikers moving them or chopping them up. I've done it myself. A portion of the trail is only ~1200 feet away from my couch through the woods. I dragged a chainsaw over there and chopped up a log and cleared the trail because I wanted to ride the next day.

There are many other models of organization that match the mountain bike hobby and trail construction such as a dojo, which is maybe the most appealing one for free and productive people. Models like cults and religious orders maintain elements of corporate and military organizations that aren't appropriate to free men.

I never really thought about the word dojo and its inherent relationship to "the way", i.e. "do". A dojo is a place where you practice "the way" of a discipline like martial arts. The idealized dojo is organized like the mountain bike hobby, not like a corporation or military unit or public schools. If there's a hierarchy, it's a real hierarchy. The teacher is not an authority figure because of a title, but has natural authority versus a student who wants to learn "the way".

Many people have noticed this concept and tried to apply it to the tech industry or other commercial endeavors but it doesn't really work because someone is trying to get paid, which corrupts the structure and imposes a false hierarchy of "owner ship", which is the thing at the root of the corporate trash system. As observers like Jordan Maxwell pointed out, the "ship" is at the core of this thing.