What Are Boundaries, and Why Don’t I Have Any?

Societal Abuse and Governance by Enmeshment

In December of 2021, I received three items in the mail of a kind I had never received before. Two of them were notices informing me my car had passed over a toll bridge. Apparently, weeks earlier, my vehicle had been filmed by cameras posted at these bridges, my license plate scanned, and the video fed into an AI device that generated a report. This report was then used to ascertain my identity and address according to the vehicle registration information on file in my state of residence. An invoice was then issued and sent to me informing me of the money I was required to pay. I had no knowledge of being filmed, or even that I had been crossing a toll bridge until the bill came in the mail.

The third notice was similar in that I had been filmed by the government while driving, without my knowledge or consent. Again, an AI device must have processed the information recorded by the government camera, and an AI bot must have determined that I had been exceeding the speed limit. This generated an automatic citation that I had no knowledge of until it arrived in the mail. In addition, the camera had taken a picture of me sitting in the driver’s seat of my vehicle. I was provided with a printout of the photo taken of me, accompanied by a letter instructing me to provide proof that I was not the person in the picture or else submit to the citation.

If I didn’t have any boundaries, none of this would bother me. I would accept that the government has the right to trace my movements and film me at all times, to use this information to track down my identity and place of residence, and to impose consequences on my life by way of this technology. I would regard all of this as justified simply by the fact that they were able to do it, and had decided to do it. It would not seem intrusive. If I didn’t have any boundaries, it also wouldn’t bother me if my neighbor decided to follow me around and film me with secret cameras, or to take pictures of me and send the pictures to my address with a threatening letter and a list of attached demands .

Since I do have boundaries, this new practice of being recorded, tracked, and fined by AI-powered government institutions does indeed bother me. My impression is that I am in the minority regarding my insistence on appropriate boundaries vis-à-vis the government. Although many people would be bothered by their neighbor taking these kinds of actions, they are not bothered if the government does so. Many people simply have no boundaries when it comes to government. They do not understand the need for privacy, nor the importance of it. They do not understand the need for limits on government searches, seizures, or data collection. They do not understand that limiting the government’s enforcement power is also an important boundary that preserves right relationship between the people and the state.

In most cases, those who have no boundaries regarding the government also have no boundaries regarding companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, or Microsoft. They see no reason why these companies shouldn’t have total access to every word they send or receive via email and text—no reason why these companies should not claim ownership over the words and pictures their users post—why they should not scan their faces to teach their AI bots to identify them by facial features—why they should not be able to track their location wherever they go, or track their activities on the internet. They see no reason why they should not record every word they say at home through their Alexa device—why they should not be able to create personality profiles and targeted advertising based on this collected information—or why they should not censor their speech or block them from viewing online content the companies do not want them to see.

Most of those who do not have boundaries when it comes to the government or megacorporations still have boundaries when it comes to actual human beings. They would not wish their neighbor to film and record everything they do, track their movements and internet activities, keep their emails and texts on file and scan them for useful information, or sell the results of everything learned to the highest bidder. Most of us would not consent to this from anyone in our lives, not even our spouse, let alone a stranger. If we were to consent to it with a spouse or other intimate loved one, we would insist the arrangement be reciprocal—not one-sided.

Why in Heaven’s name would we draw boundaries around our privacy when it comes to people in our personal lives or with strangers, but we would not draw that boundary when it comes to the most powerful companies and governments in the world?

I propose that most of us do not draw this line because we have been systematically abused on a psychological level to devalue ourselves and abandon our boundaries. We are in an abusive relationship with our governments, and we are in an abusive relationship with the largest, richest companies in the world. Like many who have been abused, gaslit, and demeaned, most of us have little to no comprehension of the abuse. We have Stockholm Syndrome, identifying with our role as a captive and victim. We are perpetual children, ruled over by our captors, who only hurt us when we deserve it—who set limits when we need it—who protect us from dangerous freedom, keeping us safe, disciplining us when necessary—who rule us as needed, and do it for our own good.

Boundaries are the key element in all this. A person with self-respect has boundaries. A person with no self-respect has no boundaries. A person with no respect for others has no respect for the boundaries of others. We need boundaries because we need respect. I deserve respect, and so do you. Let’s act like it.

And yet we barely even know how to talk about boundaries. If someone asked you what boundaries were, how would you answer them? If someone asked you how to set and keep healthy boundaries, how would you advise them? If someone asked you why boundaries were important, how would you explain it? If someone asked you what would become of us without boundaries, what would you predict?

Perhaps immediate and easy answers to these questions came to you as you read them. But I doubt it.

There is a reason why most of us don’t know how to talk about or explain boundaries. When boundaries are not understood and agreed upon as a concept, the powerful are able to manipulate and abuse the weak with impunity. Many of the weak will have no idea their boundaries are even being violated. Instead, they will simply accept that might makes right, judge themselves as lacking might, and submit to power.

The evidence for this is all around us. We bear witness to a world of boundaryless people. Is it any wonder that throughout the globe, those in positions of power have declared the right to dictate the state of every single human being’s body? Is it any wonder that they have declared the right to revoke the natural rights of any human being who does not comply with their demands? Is it any wonder that millions upon millions of people go along with this without a thought, or else vociferously approve? The rising zeitgeist proclaims that no human being shall be permitted to exist in a body unmodified by select pharmaceutical products. Each person shall be told exactly how often to modify their body in this way, how many times to do it, and at what dose. No person shall have the right to breathe free air or display their face to the world. At any time, in any location, for every person on the planet, the powerful shall be the ones to dictate the state of that person’s face, breath, and body.

In a world in which human beings have no rights to set boundaries for their own bodies, they also have no right to conduct activities of any kind. They have no rights regarding the state of their bodies, and are not allowed to decide what to do with their bodies either. The powerful announce which activities are permitted and forbidden. It might or might not be permitted to buy, sell, write, speak, gather, work, run, walk, dance, or sing. The powerful will decide for each person.

Some of these dictates will apply to every person as a blanket provision, but some of them will be tailored to the individual, or to classes of individuals. In particular, individual human beings who have not agreed to surrender their boundaries to the powerful shall be subject to greater restrictions regarding what can be done with their bodies. The right to welcome such a person into one’s business or into a public space shall also be abolished. No person shall have the right to welcome any person into their space. The powerful will decide.

In our Craven New World, the powerful compile massive databases on every single person in the world. Every person’s demographic information and personal history is mined and recorded. All their monetary transactions are to be tracked, traced, and subject to prohibition. Every text and email they send is collected. Their voices are recorded at all times by devices they enable themselves. These devices analyze their speech with AI algorithms and perform requested computing tasks—while also sending the transcript of everything else that’s said to the database. Other devices are attached to the body or carried, monitoring internal functions and tracking the individual’s location at all times. This information is also sent to the powerful and stored in the database. Cameras and microphones are installed in public and private locations, collecting more data and transmitting it to the powerful.

People with no boundaries have no need for privacy. They won’t even know what privacy is—or what it’s good for. Only the powerful will have privacy.

Perhaps the world we’ve arrived at is the one we’ve been striving for all along. Perhaps we’ve finally arrived. After centuries and millennia attempting to navigate and respect boundaries, we finally found the solution: Do away with boundaries entirely. Those with power and influence will announce what will happen. Those with less power and influence will be subject to these pronouncements and enforce them. Simple. Clean. Honest. Safe. Absolute.

But just in case we’ve missed something—just in case we’ve made a mistake somehow—I’d like to take a closer look at boundaries, what they do for us, and what it costs to lose them. We might decide we don’t want to live in an enmeshed society after all.

Enmeshment

When two people have no boundaries, or have poor boundaries between each other, we can describe them as enmeshed. The edges of the one bleed over into the other. The two people overlap, and things become very confused. You can’t tell where one person begins and the other one ends. If Person A (Andrea) gets angry, it becomes the responsibility of Person B (Beverly) to fix it, or to take the blame. If Beverly wants something, it becomes the responsibility of Andrea to supply it—or to be disciplined and punished. If Andrea thinks something, it must become true for Beverly. If Beverly denies the truth of what Andrea believes to be true, Beverly has betrayed her and must be full of lies and deceit. If Beverly’s feelings get hurt, it’s Andrea’s fault. Andrea is cruel and heartless. She is supposed to feel the same way Beverly feels. She is supposed to choose the things Beverly wants her to choose. And she’s supposed to commit to those choices and follow up on them.

It gets clear pretty quickly how much trouble we’ve just gotten into. As a result of their enmeshment, Beverly and Andrea will almost always be quarrelling. They are likely to have a dramatic relationship full of screaming fights, bitter sulking, wild accusations, condemnatory declarations, passive-aggressive retaliation, and mental and emotional manipulation. This is true whether they are mother and daughter, or whether they are sisters, friends, lovers, or spouses. There may be cheating, lying, addiction, and abuse. More than anything else, there is going to be a lot of shame. Toxic shame is the currency of enmeshment.

A person who grew up in a family system with enmeshed boundaries is likely to have a fractured sense of self. If the enmeshment was extreme, they may have no sense of self at all. They will either be dogged by a relentless shame that torments them with suicidal ambition, or they will wall off their shame entirely behind a narcissistic construction of a false self. They will project their manifested reality onto the psyches of others with confidence, charisma, and righteous rage—or they will be vulnerable to gaslighting and chronic self-doubt, always ready to distrust their own thoughts, beliefs, and feelings. They may find temporary solace in addictions, chasing after the numb bliss of no-feeling, desperate for even a few minutes of relief from their agonizing emotional pain—the pit in the stomach, the heavy collapsed heart, the swirling brain fog, the buzz of trauma in the limbs and torso, the clenching throat, the flutter of panic in the breath and heartbeat. Behind it all sits the intolerable toxic shame—the knowledge that all of this is somehow their own fault.

This is what enmeshment teaches us. A child with an abusive, neglectful, or otherwise enmeshed parent learns that she is responsible for the needs and feelings of the parent. If the parent is unhappy, it is because the child is a burden—it is because she is ungrateful, selfish, lazy, or cruel. Because the enmeshed parent has no boundaries (usually a carryover from his own enmeshed childhood), he is almost never happy. The child is constantly reminded of her own failure and inadequacy. In order to become worthy of love, the child is supposed to become the parent of her parent—to supply her parent with emotional nourishment, to validate his narcissistic fantasies, to succor him through his failures and wounds, to become the image of who the parent needs her to be. Since the child can never succeed, she can never be worthy of love. She comes to understand that she is fatally flawed at a soul level. There is something about her that is rotten, something to be despised forever. She can develop in two primary directions: construct a solipsistic internal fantasy world and become a narcissist—or become a self-sacrificing martyr, always attempting to purchase love through service and obeisance as a codependent. She can also become both of these at once.

One way to achieve enmeshment is by violating the boundaries of the body. The parent may sexually abuse the child, creating massive amounts of shame and confusion, teaching the child that the purpose of her body is to provide the parent with sexual gratification. The parent may physically abuse the child. Her body is an object into which the parent gets to insert his aggression—another stress-relief device. On the level of the psyche, enmeshment is achieved through gaslighting, guilt-tripping, threats, emotional neglect, and false mirroring. The parent convinces the child, “I know you better than you know yourself.” The child’s personality is what the parent says it is. The child likes and hates what the parent says she likes and hates. The child needs what the parent needs, and only what the parent needs. The child tries to achieve what the parent demands the child to achieve. Or perhaps the parent wants the child to disappear—the child is to leave the parent alone, to play alone in a corner, to sit quietly in her room reading a book or staring at a screen. The child has no idea who she is. Her internal sense of what is true for her or the world around her is always invalidated by her parent, who reflects back a false or distorted image.

The Elements of Societal Abuse

By substituting the figure of the parent with the figure of the governing state in this dynamic, it is possible to identify the correlation between enmeshment and abuse on the personal, micro level and enmeshment and abuse as it exists on the macro level, writ large in society. When society becomes abusive, when the powerful in society become agents of that abuse, we are taught to ignore our boundaries at best, and despise them at worst.

Indeed, in contemporary American mainstream society, the rising zeitgeist tells us that individual, inalienable rights were a mistake. These rights are to be considered privileges only. The privileges are fully alienable—they are no longer rights at all. The greater good and the needs of the collective (whether in the realm of social justice, public health, ecology, or anything at all) are to have veto power over any individual’s so-called rights and (even worse) freedoms.

Who gets to decide what will serve the greater good? Funny you should ask—that job will rest on the shoulders of rich and powerful technocrats. Their pronouncements will be administered by their servants in corporate board rooms and the government. The only problem is that certain cadres of selfish, ignorant, and ungrateful throwbacks refuse to accept the truths that have been proclaimed by the powerful. But those who hold power are wise enough to recognize that freedom is too dangerous to be possessed by people who won’t do exactly what they are told. Consequently, these dissidents have been censored and deplatformed. Good, obedient citizens will never have to hear their unhinged perspectives about what the greater good might or might not be—or whether a society that respects individual boundaries and freedoms might actually lead to a greater good than authoritarian technocracy.

In an abusive society, the state is transformed into the primary instrument of abuse, cast in the role of a narcissistic parent. The abused children are in this case the citizenry. They are subject to continual gaslighting, threats, and shaming, and they are not aware they are abused. The state tells the citizenry what they should want and what their needs should be. Invariably, the citizens are instructed to believe they want a society and a system that empowers the powerful. They are told they want a government that lies to them and keeps secrets in the interests of “national security.” They are told they want a government whose number one job is to “keep them safe.” They are told the government needs to save them from themselves (and from each other). The people are told they can’t be trusted to make their own decisions, or to have sovereignty over their lives and bodies. The people need to be micromanaged and placed under total surveillance.

The abusive state then projects the following narrative about the true nature of humanity: Human beings are fundamentally greedy, petty, stupid, simple, lazy, and cruel. Fortunately, the powerful few who rule society are possessed of limitless largesse, and they take pity on these unwashed masses. That’s why they’ve assumed the burden of ruling them and telling them what to believe. It is a mark of deep ingratitude that some of the little people refuse to acknowledge the gift they’ve received in being ruled over and having their boundaries erased. The path to redemption is for the masses to rise above their base nature and become good by doing exactly what they are told to do, and by never—ever—thinking independently. They are to receive instructions from media institutions, governments, and corporate giants, and they are to think and perform exactly as instructed.

These are precisely the types of messages a victim of narcissistic abuse will receive from their abuser, and they are precisely the messages we are receiving in the current tyrannical regime of New Normal Covid Governance. We are entrained to codependency—finding our narcissistic match in the state and the corporate media. We have no self-esteem; we are laden with toxic shame. We have learned that we have no special talents, gifts, or ideas—we are not beautiful or special, and we cannot be creators—we can only be workers. We are fit for nothing other than obedience and passive consumption.

By way of example, consider how few people are emotionally willing or able to dance or to sing. We have been instructed that dancing and singing are elite crafts that should only be performed by the most talented among us. The corporate media will select these people, pluck them from obscurity, and transform them into demigods. The powerful will have the right to bestow full personhood and humanity on the worthy. It is shameful for the rest of us to move our bodies through dance, or to open our mouths and sing. Who do we think we are?

Let me ask that again, but with shifted context: Who do we think we are?

Do we think we are the mere afterthoughts of a meaningless, random evolutionary process? The leavings of combined protoplasm programmed to procreate and survive? Just another mouth for society to feed? Perhaps we are no use to anyone—no use to the world—not unless we make ourselves useful and pay back the debt created by the burden of our existence.

Or do we think we think we are divine sovereign beings—incarnated into this immaculate human form to consciously evolve our awareness and unique expression of self? Or perhaps, under a different spiritual inflection, we are souls bestowed by our creator with free will—meant to become who we are through choice. Our freedom may be our most precious divine gift, the most essential part of our very being. To abrogate our freedom would negate the very purpose of our existence.

There are many religions and philosophies capable of supporting the importance of our sovereignty. Any of them will do. I propose that sovereignty is the framework that best fits the truth of who we are. I propose that we can sense the truth of this when we are at peace, when we open up to trust in Love as the guiding light of our being. Freedom and creatorship are the very essence of our being. Dancing and singing are both our birthrights as human beings. They are the direct expressions of our bodies that communicate our unique creative imprint to the world—that channel our joy in being through a spirit of praise and gratitude. To betray any of this, to give away our freedom, our sovereignty, our dignity, our boundaries—represents a sacrilege, a betrayal of love itself—a betrayal of what is true.

Yet here we are. We are facing a global consortium of states backed up by a technocratic oligarchy, demanding the end of our sovereignty—insisting that we have no boundaries relative to them. They will be provided complete and total access to our bodies, minds, and beliefs. This access will not be reciprocal of course. They get all of us, and we get none of them. We simply obey. They are in the parental role of narcissistic abuser, and we occupy the role of codependent child victim. We are to remain children forever. We are to remain victims forever. The entire thrust of culture has moved in that direction. We are encouraged to celebrate our victimhood, to gain our entire sense of self-worth from how much we’ve been victimized. We scramble for intersectional identities, scrutinizing our race, gender, ethnicity, orientation, disabilities—anything we can find to enhance our victim status. Victims are to be honored and worshiped. They are the best people.

Why are victims the best people? Because victims are exactly who our narcissistic abusers want us to be, and we have all been gaslit. We are to remain broken, unhealed—forever incapable, forever infants. Even if we gain awareness of how deeply we’ve been gaslit, shamed, abused, and deceived, we will be dependent on our abusers. We might grow to hate them, but we will hate ourselves more. Others among us will become the servants of our narcissistic and psychopathic overlords, and propagate their abuse themselves. Narcissism expert Sam Vaknin coined the term “flying monkeys” to describe this phenomenon, referencing the servants of the Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz. In codependent service to our abusive rulers, we will channel our inner narcissist. We will target, mock, shame, and demonize the unvaccinated, the free thinkers, the non-compliant, the ones who resist and speak out against the abuse. Those who refuse to be victims will be victimized. As flying monkeys, we will drive them out of society, we will make bitter jokes about how they should die, how we wish they were dead. We will deny them medical care, health insurance, and access to work, money, food, and shelter.

Such is the legacy of an enmeshed society with no boundaries: a population of demoralized, vanquished people—bereft of individuality, creativity, self-respect, or agency. We shall be turned ferociously against ourselves in an orgy of self-hatred, or else turned against each other in vicious contempt and condemnation, primed to commit atrocities when the word is finally given. Meanwhile, the psychopathic ruling elite dispassionately collate the continued stream of data pouring in through Facebook, Gmail, Google Maps, Apple, Alexa, Instagram, Twitter, Android, and all the rest of it. They use this data to grind out new formulas for obedience and behavior prediction. They roll out their plans for universal digital IDs and vaccine passports, merged with central bank digital currency, linked to a social credit score, all conducted through universal real time surveillance via 5G and 6G interfacing. The total erasure of boundaries will soon be complete.

With privacy and individual rights abolished, the privileges granted by tech, pharma, and the state will be based on the sum total of every action ever taken by each target individual. Access to money, work, speech, movement, internet, and even family will be in the complete control of the societal rulers. No abuser ever had a wilder, more complete fantasy of satisfaction and domination over their victims. And this is the world we are building.

It is not necessary or recommended to hate or despise those fulfilling the role of abuser. They may be narcissistic, psychopathic, or sociopathic, but in most cases, they are just functionaries of a sociopathic system. Such functionaries have become entrained as codependent flying monkeys, carrying out the abusive precepts of that system, just as many of us in the role of victim have become. The system itself is sociopathic because the system itself is a machine. By definition, machines are amoral, lacking empathy or compassion. For those powerful people who are truly psychopaths, it misses the point to condemn them as evil and hate them. If anything, a psychopath is to be pitied as lacking access to humanity, the greatest gift of being anyone can receive.

Our task is not to despise, dethrone, and defeat the abusive system or the abusive people running it. Our task is simply to exit that system. Our task is to reclaim our sovereignty, our freedom, and our boundaries.  The system of abuse and control vanishes when we stop participating in its narrative.

Reclaiming Boundaries

How do we get our boundaries back? How do we reinstate a free world for a free people? How do we build a world suited for people of dignity and self-respect? How do we create a world in which we respect each other as people, and respect each other’s natural rights?

We start at the beginning. At the core level, boundaries start with the body. In order to live in a world with boundaries, the body must be inviolable. The body must be the domain of sovereignty for the individual in that body. Any intrusions into the body require consent. Without consent, those intrusions constitute a boundary violation. This is the bedrock principle.

Why is rape wrong? Because it is a boundary violation of the body, in contravention of consent. Let us not forget that rape does not require physically restraining the victim. Most of the time, rape is achieved through threat and coercion. The perpetrator violates the victim’s rights by threatening to commit an additional boundary violation if the first one is not achieved. The perpetrator could hold a gun to the head of the victim and demand sex, for instance. The victim could then agree to provide sex. But this is not consent. The perpetrator’s threat need not be as direct as a gun to the head, it can be any threat to that person’s sovereign rights.

Sex is a beautiful thing. It’s because sex is so sacred and so beautiful that rape is such a terrible violation. Sex is beautiful when freely given and fully consensual. It is an atrocity and a boundary violation when sex is achieved by force, threat, or coercion.

Medicine is also a beautiful and sacred thing—when freely given and fully consensual. Medicine also becomes an atrocity and a boundary violation when achieved by force, threat, or coercion.

This is the thing to really get through our heads when it comes to boundaries. Vaccine mandates and vaccine passports are wrong. They are violations of the sacred boundaries of the body. I might be convinced that vaccine mandates are going to save the world, make everything better for everyone, and save millions of lives projected into the future. But I cannot see forever into the future and predict all ends. I can never be fully sure of the science I believe in, or in the accuracy of my predictions. Show me the person or AI algorithm that was ever able to predict the future infallibly. When we violate someone’s sacred boundaries in order to achieve a future prediction, the only thing we can be sure of is that we have violated someone’s sacred boundaries.

In a world of sacred boundaries, it doesn’t matter how well someone rationalizes the violation. It doesn’t matter if someone says it’s going to save the world. It makes no more difference than any of the reasons a rapist offers about why it’s okay to violate their victim’s consent. When medicine is administered by force, threat, deception, pressure, or coercion, it is a boundary violation and a betrayal of all that is sacred. This is something to be very clear about.

The body can be violated in other ways. When the body is injured through unwanted touching or penetration, this is known as assault. When the assault results in death, it is known as murder. According to the United States Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) there have been 19,886 deaths from the covid vaccines through December 3, 2021, with 946,461 total reports of adverse events. These adverse events include 102,857 hospitalizations, 8,432 cases of anaphylaxis, 11,896 cases of Bell’s Palsy, 3,230 miscarriages, 9,977 heart attacks, 16,918 cases of myocarditis, 32,644 cases of permanent disability, and more.

If every single covid vaccine was taken voluntarily, with full informed consent, and with no pressure, no coercion, no threat, and no deception, then there would be nothing wrong with any of the numbers listed above. They would represent the free choices of sovereign people regarding what is best for their bodies based on the totality of circumstances. Sometimes those choices work out well, and sometimes they do not.

But if any of those deaths, or any of those injuries happened because somebody was pressured into taking the vaccine, because their job was threatened, because their schooling was threatened, because their friends and family members threatened to shun them, because they received false information about the risks and benefits of the shots, because they were discriminated against in places of public accommodation for not taking the vaccine, because political leaders and media figures lambasted and vilified them—if any of those deaths or injuries happened for one or more of those reasons—then we are instead talking about murder and assault. We are talking about the violation of the sacred.

When a person does not have sovereignty over her own body, this is called slavery. There are different forms of slavery: chattel slavery is the term used to describe a system in which human beings are bought and sold as objects to be owned. But even if a slave is not legally owned as chattel, a human being who is denied her natural and inalienable right to sovereignty over her own body is in a condition of slavery. She must be raped when called for. She must work when told to, no matter what the work is. She can be killed at the whim of those in power. Like cattle, she can be injected with pharmaceuticals and subjected to other medical treatments without her consent. She is not allowed to have consent. This is what makes her a slave.

A slave can also be treated well. She can be given privileges and liberties. These privileges might be conditional on the consistency of her obedience. In this way a vaccine passport regime is not different from slavery. We are given our human rights only if we obey—only if we submit to our master’s orders regarding what goes into our body—only if we have no boundaries. Under such a regime, every person is like a soldier. Not every soldier will die when marched into combat. But some of them will. Any soldier involuntarily drafted into military service has been enslaved. He has no choice, no boundaries, no sovereignty of any kind. He may be required to maim and kill. He may be required to surrender his life.

Likewise, some of the people forced or coerced into taking the covid vaccine will die. We don’t know who will have to die and who won’t. We don’t know who will have to live with Bell’s Palsy or other permanent disabilities. But some of them will. Under a system of enmeshed governance, this doesn’t matter. The ruling technocrat believes (or claims to believe) more lives will be saved then lost if everyone is forced to take the vaccine. We have no way of knowing whether that technocrat is correct or not, but that is irrelevant. We have no boundaries, and ultimately no rights. I might be a person who would never have died from covid, but would have died from the vaccine. I am thus required to relinquish my life for the greater good, as defined by my owner, master, or commanding officer—like a solider or a slave.

Under what principle is this permissible? It is permissible under the principle of Might Makes Right. It is permissible under the principle of The Law of the Jungle. It might also be permissible under the principle of Utilitarianism. Utilitarianism says that as long as I can make a convincing argument that Action X will lead to a world in which there are more units of pleasure (hedons) and fewer units of displeasure (dolars) then would otherwise occur, Action X can and should be taken, no matter what that action is.

I propose that Utilitarianism is the Road to Hell. On this road, literally anything can be justified. Nothing is sacred. Boundaries are meaningless. The entire world is reduced to objects to be acted upon. Utilitarianism represents the morality of the sociopath, or of the computer. It is amorality. Under the principle of Amorality a vaccine can most certainly be forced. If my utilitarian calculus requires any person to lose their life, to perform any task, to lose any right, to suffer any injury, then it must be done. And it will be done—provided I have the unchecked power to impose my will on others.

One might argue that vaccination is a special case—that it is unlike all other things. One might argue that society will be able to hold onto every other sacred right cherished by free and sovereign people. Only the right to refuse government-mandated vaccination must be relinquished.

But this view is not supported by recent developments. The argument for mandatory vaccination used to be that it would stop the spread of disease—that the disease would only be eliminated if every person submitted to vaccination. In a world in which the sacred boundaries of the body are set at naught, this might be rational as a utilitarian argument. But we have already passed that threshold.

It is now widely understood that the covid vaccines do not stop transmission and do not stop infection. The new argument is that mandates must occur in order to reduce rates of hospitalization. If that rationale were adopted and supported by the facts, there is no reason why it would not also apply to any activity or behavior that could impact hospitalization rates. For instance, higher rates of obesity result in higher death rates and higher levels of hospitalization. Why not mandate Body-Mass-Index passports? Why not outlaw soda pop, pizza, and alcohol? Why not subject people to daily blood and urine tests to measure their sugar levels in order to go to work or ride the bus? Don’t forget to segregate against those who are too skinny as well. Being too thin could also increase your risk of hospitalization.

Without boundaries, any and every part of life can (and will) be regulated, monitored, outlawed, or mandated. This puts the state, and those with the power to control the state, in totalitarian control over the people. I began the article by describing the innocuous rise of surveillance video cameras and AI enforcement of traffic. If this paradigm is established as a norm, it can then be expanded to incorporate the social credit system that has already arrived in China. There, video surveillance cameras increasingly line the city streets, using facial recognition algorithms to identify each and every person, and to monitor their actions. Behaviors such as jaywalking or smoking cigarettes are recorded and tabulated, lowering that individual’s social credit score. So are online behaviors, including visiting certain websites, playing too many video games, or speaking forbidden ideas. The social credit score determines each person’s access to travel, public transportation, work, promotions, loans, education, and any aspect of life that can be regulated. It is a totalitarian system. It is only possible because boundaries were not drawn in China to limit the power of government, to hold individual rights as inviolable, and to protect privacy.

Healthy boundaries between the people and their governments are informed through knowledge of appropriate boundaries between individuals. Enmeshments are untangled by way of certain understandings:

1.       A person’s body is her temple. Touching is welcomed only with consent. Sexual and intimate touching are particularly observed in relation to sacred boundaries. We are allowed to ask for space and take space. We are free in our movements and shall not be taken hostage, kidnapped, or confined.

2.       Medicine and healing are sacred arts that must be conducted with great respect. The famous principle of “First, do no harm” from the Hippocratic Oath is is held with particular reverence in the act of healing. It recognizes the sacred trust required between the healer and the healed. The person seeking healing opens his body, his temple, to the healer, vulnerable to the potential of abuse if this principle is violated. The complimentary sacred healing principle, set forth in the Nuremburg Code, is that of informed consent. This is not just another buzzword to be checked off as healers go through the motions. It requires full transparency from the healer about the potential risks and benefits of the proffered medicine. Medicine refers to action taken through any healing modality, not just the introduction of herbs or pharmaceuticals into the body.

3.       We are free to speak with and meet with whom we choose. We respect the sacred rights of free association—to choose our friends, our lovers, our communities, and to gather together.

4.       We are afforded the sacred space of privacy. We are not to stalk others when they do not wish our company. We are not to eavesdrop or spy on each other. We are not to peer through others’ windows. We are not to photograph, film, or record others without their permission. We are not to read someone’s diary, journal, mail, or other private communications without permission. We do not enter another’s home without permission.

5.       We have the right to our beliefs, our ideas, and our own conscience. We have the right to define ourselves. Others do not have the right to define who we are, what we are, how we are, what we want, what we believe, how we feel, or what is true for us. This is the sacred right that is demeaned through gaslighting. The gaslighter says: “You don’t know who you are. I know who you are.” We have the right to our needs, feelings, and emotions. They are our own responsibility. Others have no claims on what they believe we ought to feel. In return, none of us have any claims on what we would like others to feel.

6.       We have the right of free speech. We can say what we like. We can communicate what is true for us. Certain kinds of speech, such as lying, condemning, vilifying, or the above-mentioned gaslighting, represent boundary pushes and breaches of trust.  But because our word is sacred, others cannot constrain our ability to sanctify or debase our word. Likewise, we are each responsible to draw our own firm boundaries when others attempt to push our boundaries with words of enmeshment.

All of these natural rights come down to our freedom of choice as sovereign beings of divine origin. We are meant to develop through childhood and come of age as agents of free will and free choice. Our own bodies, minds, hearts, and spirits lie within our own domain. As a people, our freedom meets its limits when our choices cross the boundaries of others, limiting their freedom.

Applying Boundaries on a Societal Level

Various covid mandates and orders have been imposed by governments in different jurisdictions across the world. These run the gamut from US states like Florida, where lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine mandates have been rejected—to fully authoritarian regimes such as Austria, where digital identity passports and submission to government surveillance are required for every aspect of life, and where it is now a crime punishable by imprisonment to be unvaccinated.

Such brutality would not have been possible had societal boundaries been in effect from the beginning. While there is a case to be made for involuntary quarantine if a person is currently infectious with a dangerous transmissible pathogen (provided that due process and protection from overbroad enforcement are ensured), the mandates that first swept the world in March 2020 have never observed this standard. These lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine mandates do not apply to the infectious, but to all people based on the possibility that they might be infectious or might become infectious at some future time.

Benjamin Franklin wrote the following words in 1785: “That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved.” This principle is as succinct a statement of appropriate boundaries between the individual and the government as any that can be derived. In contrast, the principle adopted by New Normal Covid Governance would read as follows: “It is better that every innocent person in society should suffer so that every guilty person in society will also suffer.”

Under New Normal Governance, it is not only a crime to be sick, the potential to become sick at some point in the future is also a crime, justifying preemptive enforcement against this speculative future crime. Since any person who exists could potentially become sick at some point in the future, every person is to be treated as a convicted criminal—without rights to their own bodily boundaries—deprived of the personal sovereignty, choice, and agency that are the natural birthrights of every human being on this good earth.

Another famous aphorism that correctly describes healthy boundaries reads as follows: “The freedom for you to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.” But under New Normal Covid Governance, our enmeshed and confused boundaries are so distorted, we are to regard a person’s very existence as a breathing, biological entity as a fist hitting our nose. Lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine mandates are severe boundary violations. They are comparable to a law that would require every person to wear a straitjacket to prevent against the possibility that any person with the freedom to move his arms might punch someone in the nose.

Earlier, I cited the US state of Florida as an example of a jurisdiction that has chosen to respect appropriate and healthy boundaries between the people and the government’s police power. A host of other US states have joined Florida in rejecting governmental enmeshment and abuse, and these states are among the few remaining bastions of freedom left in what was once called the Free World.

The values set forth by Ben Franklin and his peers 250 years ago remain part of the deep cultural legacy in the United States, and I believe this is why some areas of the US have been successful in resisting the global push to erase boundaries and fully enmesh individuals with their societal abusers. As an American, I feel very fortunate to have inherited such a rich legacy of healthy boundaries and respect for the natural rights of man. Despite a long history of the United States not living up to the values and boundaries stated in documents like the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence, these values have always remained with us as a guiding conscience. At this time, more than ever before in her history, America is called to lead the world by example—to remind the world what a society of free people looks like, and what it means to have healthy and appropriate boundaries.

The US Constitution itself provides a well-designed set of boundaries that establish checks on the accumulation and exercise of power. These include the separation of powers, checks and balances on those powers, and limited, defined powers of government. These boundaries also recognize natural rights reserved to the people, which protect individual and minority rights and also serve as a further check against organized power. All of these principles are expressions of good, strong, healthy boundaries. These divisions of power enable states like Florida to preserve liberty while states like New York descend deep into tyranny, a fate that would befall the entire nation if these boundaries were not in place.

If power can be divided between the people and the government, between individuals and groups among the people, between the states and the federal government, and between the executive, judicial, and legislative branches within the various governmental bodies—all of these entities, each with their own boundaries, serve as checks on the others. It reduces the likelihood of any of these entities getting abusive. When such an entity does become abusive, it contains the abuse within the boundaries of that entity. Without a monopoly of power, each entity must get along with the others and reckon with one another’s boundaries. As Robert Frost once put it, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

In addition to the role good structural boundaries play in preserving liberty and freedom, the values expressed in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution have been adopted and integrated into the cultural fabric of the nation over the course of centuries. The US Bill of Rights supports many of the sacred interpersonal boundaries I laid out earlier in this article, transposed onto the relationship between the government and the people. These boundaries include rights to speech, belief, conscience, press, assembly, and free association, protected in the First Amendment. They include privacy boundaries and the sanctity of the home, addressed in the Third and Fourth Amendments. The sacred rights of due process, addressed in amendments Five through Eight, recognize the serious potential for abuse in the police power. They stipulate that when the use of force (which is a boundary violation) is used by the state, it must be constrained to ensure that it only be used to protect against other boundary violations, must be proportionate to the violation, must be subject to a public trial to prove that the initial violation indeed occurred, and must not violate additional boundaries through the process of enforcement.

In recent times, I have commonly heard people speak of the state having a monopoly on violence. The Bill of Rights begs to differ, and includes the Second Amendment as a check on such a monopoly. Good boundaries recognize that great disparities in power invite corruption and abuse. Under the Second Amendment, the people have the right to hold weapons in defense of their boundaries. This serves to balance the power differential and prevent a state monopoly on violence, which would represent an incredibly dangerous accumulation of power. Finally, the Bill of Rights is supplemented by amendments Thirteen and Fourteen, which expressly forbid the primary boundary violation of slavery and involuntary servitude, as well as establishing the rights of all people to equal protection under these laws, forming the basis for a society free of institutionalized discrimination and segregation.

Identifying Boundary Violations, Enmeshment, and Abuse

To some readers, it may seem naïve, cornball, or sentimental to devote space in this article to the eloquent delineation of boundaries present in the US Constitution. After all, the United States has a legacy of racial oppression, discrimination, and genocide. The American military and American intelligence agencies have also violated the boundaries of scores of nations and countless individuals over the course of years, seeking profit and power via deception, theft, and murder. But this history is not an indictment of the sacred boundaries expressed in America’s founding documents. Likewise, the gross violations of the Hippocratic Oath and Nuremburg Code we now see in the response to covid do not render those principles invalid. Nor do these gross violations render profane the sacred practice of medicine and the healing arts.

Boundaries are expressions of values, and healthy boundaries exist only when set, maintained, and honored. All of the benefits and dignity that flow from healthy interpersonal and societal boundaries can only arise when we live them and keep them. Almost every aspect of the global covid response represents contempt for such boundaries, betraying an ethos of narcissistic abuse in service of a totalitarian future. My articles What to Make of Covid and the Lockdowns and Why Are They Doing This provide in-depth analysis of these violations. All of it began with the very inception of covid itself—the reckless, gross negligence of an unaccountable military bioweapons regime, operating in the shadows of the Chinese and American governments, aided and abetted by the complacence, corruption and moral bankruptcy of the United Nations and her partner organizations and member states.

This primary boundary violation created a pathogen that should never have existed by means of genetic manipulation, synthetic gene editing, and animal torture. The people of this world never consented to invite this chimeric poison into our lives, but hundreds of millions of us, perhaps billions of us, have had to endure its nefarious intrusion into our bodies. I refer to the confluence of intertwined governments, nongovernmental governing institutions, billionaire investors, corporate media entities and technocratic oligarchs cooperating on this agenda as “The Network” for the sake of convenience. Please refer to my article Understanding Technocracy for a full exploration of this network and how it operates. The guilty Network that brought this plague upon us responded in classic form as any narcissistic abuser would have done, and as millions of narcissistic abusers have done time and time again. The formula for this response is captured in the acronym DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse, Victim, Offender. I offer the following narrative as a demonstration of the method, and as an antidote to the gaslighting narrative heretofore promulgated by the Network.

Deny: The abusive Network, having methodically and deliberately created the pathogen over the course of 20 years in progressive “gain-of-function” experiments (evidenced by a voluminous patent record), denied having done so at all, shirking all responsibility for its abusive behavior. Instead, the abuser invented an absurd story about a bat biting a pangolin, which then spontaneously created SarsCov2 in its body and passed it to human beings at a meat market.

Attack: Next, the abusive Network promulgated authoritarian controls, abrogating the natural rights and boundaries of citizens around the world, ordering them to stay confined in their homes, lose their jobs, livelihoods, and businesses, isolate themselves from their friends and communities, and wear humiliating masks that obstructed their breathing, unique human facial features, and individuality. None of these measures had any scientific basis in disease prevention. Indeed, after almost two years since their implementation, the record clearly demonstrates their abject failure to do so. These measures accomplished nothing but to terrorize, dominate, impoverish, and psychologically attack the public. Speaking only for myself, I find it difficult to see any other purpose in their adoption.

Reverse: Having deflected responsibility for the abuse and then compounding the abuse through further attacks on the victim citizenry, the abusive Network next shifted to blaming the people themselves for the problem. All of the disease and death caused by the abusive Network’s genetic experimentation and biological warfare was declared the fault of the people themselves. How so? Because the people did not submit completely to the Network’s abusive attack measures. Too many people refused to comply, spoke out against the abuse, and took a stand for their own dignity and self-respect. In response, the abusive Network launched a vicious propaganda campaign against the common people, turned them against each other, and enacted draconian censorship and deplatforming regimes through their proxies in the corporate press and social media.

Victim: Next, the abuser claimed the status of heroic victim. The same abusive Network that created the bioweapon in the first place launched a series of gene therapies through their corporate pharmaceutical partners, calling them vaccines. These experimental pharmaceutical products contained mRNA programming to force the body to produce the very same bioengineered pathogenic spike proteins that constituted the initial boundary violation of SarsCov2 to begin with. But the abusive Network obfuscated the nature of these therapies, disingenuously appropriating the term “vaccine” to deceive the citizenry and capitalize on the trust gained in previous decades by vaccines that had actually prevented infection and the spread of disease. These new therapies did neither, causing massive levels of death and injury in the process, orders of magnitude greater than any actual vaccine ever had in the past. But the abusers blamed the people for not taking these products, claiming that all of the harm from covid somehow resulted from this failure. At the same time, the Network took steps to prevent knowledge and access to safe and effective early treatments for covid such as vitamins C and D3, zinc, Quercetin, Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine, and others. All the while, mandarins like Joe Biden lamented about how they were “running out of patience” with the people for failing to obey their orders, while Tony Fauci cried crocodile tears about how anyone who criticized him was attacking science itself. The heroic Network was the true victim, not the people it had deceived and assaulted.

Offender: The next step was a full frontal assault on the abused public. The Network was never the abuser. The people were always the abusers. Public enemy number one was the public itself. Any citizens who failed to comply without question to the Network’s dictates about what must be put into their body, or who failed to faithfully present evidence of this compliance at Network checkpoints were to be considered subhuman. They were declared unfit for any consideration previously offered to humans, such as the rights to free movement, free association, or free speech. They were barred from conducting business or accessing places of public accommodation, and are increasingly barred even from accessing medical care. In places under the deepest Network control, such as Australia and Austria, they are now literally subject to imprisonment for the crime of bodily sovereignty. Germany, France, Italy, New Zealand, Canada, Greece, and others are not far behind.

This is the legacy of abuse the world is currently caught in the grip of. Like so many abuse victims, the people of the world have been gaslit, blaming themselves, blaming each other, blaming anyone but the abusers themselves for what has happened. Many people have become the flying monkeys of the Network, spying on their neighbors and colleagues, reporting their transgressions to Network authorities. We have become a people without boundaries. The Network has full rights to dictate every aspect of what can be done, what must be done, and what cannot be done with our bodies. Large swathes of the populace accept, submit to, and even welcome this loss of boundaries, this deep toxic enmeshment with the Network. It is suddenly everyone’s business what personal choices other people make regarding their bodies. It is suddenly everyone’s business to demand evidence that other people have submitted to the Network’s demands and mandates—all in order to save the world from the pathogen the same Network created and lied about.


Living Boundaries for a Living People

What is to be done? In order to regain our boundaries and become a free people with sovereign agency, we must first understand what boundaries are, why they are important, why we need them, why they enrich our lives, and what it costs to lose them. I have endeavored to do so in this article.

The next step is to identify abuse with clear eyes. Once boundaries are known, understood, and adopted, abuse becomes easy to spot. We become immune to gaslighting, we put down our monkey’s wings, and we refrain from further enabling. There is no need to hate the abusers, to condemn them, or even to fight against them. We simply walk out of the dynamic. We stop supplying them. We stop complying. We exit the story. We withdraw our belief.

Once this is accomplished, we are able to walk away from the role of victim. A free person with boundaries can never truly be a victim. A free person can be assaulted, caged, tortured, and abused, but her dignity can never be taken away. It can only be given away. It is in dignity, in self-respect, where freedom is found. Boundaries represent the deepest expression of love and respect we can give. Our abusers tell us to never love ourselves. We must be ashamed, we must despise ourselves, we must consider ourselves to be weak, lazy, selfish, and petty. To love ourselves is the greatest sin. In true DARVO fashion, the presence of self-love is used as evidence that we are actually the narcissists, not our abusers.

This is all part of the gaslighting. We don’t have to agree. It’s true that it’s hard to disagree when our enmeshment wounds go deep to the core of the self. But it can be done. It must be done. There’s really no other way to go—no other road that makes sense—no other path forward. We take the leap of courage and agree to love and respect ourselves unconditionally as divine miracles, here to grace this planet with free agency and sovereign consciousness. We support this love for who we are by cherishing and respecting our boundaries. And we offer the same respect and care to others.

This is our awakening bell. The sun is shining bright just outside our window. Let’s go meet the day.