Friday, June 7, 2013

How to resign from government

Are there options for citizens?

You can resign from a job, including a government job, you can resign from your family, you can resign from a friendship, or from life itself.

But can you resign from your mandated position as a citizen? We are not talking about whether you might want to, or whether you should.

Is it impossible or is it like the resignation of the pope, meaning: just because no one has done it in 700 years does not make it impossible?

Let's limit our scope to the "Western" countries. The K-landnews folks have no idea about how countries outside of this group really function beyond the generic ways of human self-organization.

The problem with our Western countries is that they basically all say government is "of the people, by the people, for the people", and the right to bear arms or same sex marriage are, if you will, just variations on the theme from the level of this executive summary.

There is an officially recognized version of resigning as a citizen. Handing in a passport, renouncing citizenship. Of course, if you become a citizen of another country, you are again a citizen. If you stay stateless, you just put yourself in the worst position because you lost all the benefits but almost all the obligations still apply to you.

If your country is big enough, you may be able to find a remote place for a decent life without the constant barrage of government and corporate demands. But if that becomes too popular or someone needs you as a political stepping stone or cultural scapegoat, well, you know how that tends to end.
There are a few known examples of people moving out into the wilderness with some success, like the family discovered in 1978 in the vast Russian Taiga. They had lived there since the 1930s when the father packed up and fled Stalinist persecution of orthodox Russians. It's a hard life, though.

So, that does not work for many people. A much better option seems to be to transcend individual states by getting as many passports as you can. It can be time consuming and expensive but, given the vocal opposition to multiple citizenship in much of Europe, there must be something to it. Now you can move around if things get too unpleasant in one country.

One more thing:
The traditional open letter to your country's head of state and the return of medals or awards is not recommended. It is a symbolic one time thing and will only land you on the government wingnut list.

One more one more thing:
This post has been sitting in the draft section for months as a filler post, a harmless, sooooo not funny post. It escaped the delete button more often than someone leaked something to the Guardian.
But the past two days have been a good day for this draft post.
Under our definition, a blogger and the person who was sick and tired of all those Powerpoint presentations would fall into the category "resigned from government".


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