➡ This article discusses how people provided for themselves before government welfare and Social Security existed, a topic often overlooked by mainstream media. The author, James Corbett, suggests that the answer lies in mutual aid, a concept explored by 19th-century Russian philosopher Peter Kropotkin. Kropotkin’s work argues against the idea of survival of the fittest, instead proposing that cooperation and mutual aid have been key to the survival and evolution of both human and animal species. The article highlights the importance of this idea, which challenges the dependency on centralized systems of control.
➡ The text discusses a book by David T. Beto, “From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State, Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967”. The book explores the history of mutual aid organizations, known as fraternal societies, that provided social aid to their members. These societies were replaced by the modern welfare state, but the book suggests that they could serve as an example of how voluntary aid can work. The text also discusses the potential for such societies to be revived in the modern context.
➡ Crowd Health is a unique health care system where members support each other financially during medical emergencies. It operates on a peer-to-peer basis, similar to how Bitcoin works. When a member has a medical bill, it’s negotiated down and then shared among the community. Members can choose to contribute directly to the individual’s account to help cover the cost. This system has proven to be more cost-effective than traditional health insurance, with members often receiving significant discounts on their medical bills.

In this time of thought, crime and hate speech laws. Here’s a dangerous how did people provide for themselves before government arose as the font of government supplied cradle to grave welfare and Social Security? It’s a very important question, an obvious question, but one that not one person in a thousand even thinks to ask, let alone answer. And why is that? Because the talking heads and the pundarati don’t tell them to ask that question. Of course. No, they’ll be happy to distract you with a thousand other issues, but not this one. Focusing on perhaps the determinative, the most important question of all, human existence.

And why don’t they tell you to focus on this question? Because their paymasters are afraid of its simple two word answer. Mutual aid. Yes, that is the topic on the table before us today, ladies and gentlemen, in this edition of Solutions Watch. I am James Corbett of CorbettReport.com so let’s dive right into it, shall we? To the extent that the question of how people survived before the state arose as the single determinative factor of our existence, let alone the font of all goodness, it was inevitably answered by recourse to Thomas Hobbes, yes, the famed 17th century English philosopher.

You all know it, you can all say it along with me. The state of nature was nasty and brutish and short because of the war of all against all. Yes, you do all know of that formulation by now, which is interesting in and of itself because. Well, how do you know it? Because it has been indoctrinated into you through the indoctrination of system. Well, that should give us a clue as to how this is in fact beneficial to the powers that shouldn’t be. But from this famous formulation from Hobbes’s Leviathan, the bellum omnium contra omnis, the war of all against all.

We get Darwin’s proponents like T.H. huxley, Darwin’s bulldog and the progenitor of the rabidly eugenical Aldous slash Julian Huxley line, formulating this struggle for existence and as a literal fight, not only between species, but within species, between each other, different members of the same species for scarce resources. How else could it be that we have survived down to the current time? It is because we have been the most ferocious in that omnium contra omnis, the bellum omnium contra omnis. The only problem with this wonderful explanatory theory, of course, is that it is bunk. And how do we know that? We know that because of this guy, namely Peter Kropotkin, the famed 19th century 20th century Russian philosopher, perhaps best known for his 1902 book Mutual A Factor in Evolution, in which, in this surprisingly detailed, surprisingly zoological and anthropological study, Kropotkin absolutely decimates that struggle for existence, war of all against all idea, and proposes an alternative factor as one of the driving forces of the evolution of human and animal species.

Mutual aid, two aspects of animal life impressed me most during the journeys which I made in my youth in eastern Siberia and northern Manchuria. One of them was the extreme severity of the struggle for existence which most species of animals have to carry on against an inclement nature, the enormous destruction of life which periodically results from natural agencies and the consequent paucity of life over the vast territory which fell under my observation. And the other was that even in those few spots where animal life teemed in abundance, I failed to find, although I was eagerly looking for it, that bitter struggle for the means of existence among animals belonging to the same species, which was considered by most Darwinists, though not always by Darwin himself, as the dominant characteristic of struggle for life and the main factor of evolution.

Wherever I saw animal life in abundance, as, for instance, on the lakes where scores of species and millions of individuals came together to rear their progeny in the colonies of rodents, in the migrations of birds which took place at that time on a truly American scale along the Ussuri, and especially in a migration of fallow deer which I witnessed on the Amur, and during which scores of thousands of these intelligent animals came together from an immense territory, flying before the coming deep snow in order to cross the Amur where it is narrowest. In all these scenes of animal life which passed before my eyes, I.

I saw mutual aid. And mutual support carried on to an extent which made me suspect in it a feature of the greatest importance for the maintenance of life, the preservation of each species and its further evolution. Now, I shouldn’t have to say this, but for the benefit of the Heart of thinking and, or those who don’t actually read books, let me just state that it is, of course, difficult for me to encapsulate the entirety of this voluminous work or to do justice to Kropotkin’s work in a few short words here. But suffice it to say that Kropotkin, in this mutual aid, a factor in evolution study, engages in an exhaustive and voluminously detailed study, zoological study across species after species on continent after continent, describing how mutual aid has been used and employed by these species as a strategy for survival across millennia of history.

And then, after those opening two chapters, he begins an equally exhaustive anthropological and historical study of humans, from savages and tribal affiliations, to the development of village communities, and ultimately to the development of the medieval cities with their guild systems, again demonstrating time and time and time again how cooperation and mutual aid has been used as a determinative factor in the flourishing of human civilization. And although, again, I cannot possibly do justice to this study in a few short words, here is just one tiny taste of that study. A passage on the Kabyles, a Berber group in Algeria.

The Carbiles know no authority whatever besides that of the djema or folkmoot of the village community. All men of age take part in it, in the open air, or in a special building provided with stone seats. And the decisions of the Jaime’ are evidently taken at unanimity. That is, the discussions continue until all present agree to accept or to submit to some decision, there being no authority in a village community to impose a decision. This system has been practiced by mankind wherever there have been village communities, and it is practiced still wherever they continue to exist, that is, by several hundred million people all over the world.

The Jumeir nominates its executive, the elder, the scribe, and the treasurer. It assesses its own taxes, and it manages the repartition of the common lands, as well as all kinds of works of public utility. A great deal of work is done in common. The roads, the mosques, the fountains, the irrigation canals, the towers erected for protection from robbers, the fences, and so on are built by the village community, while the high roads, the larger mosques, and the great marketplaces are the work of the tribe. We thus come across a custom which is familiar to the students of the medieval merchant guilds.

Every stranger who enters a carbile village has right to housing in the winter, and his horses can always graze on the communal lands for 24 hours. But in case of need, he can reckon upon an almost unlimited support. Thus, during the famine of 1867-68, the Kabyls received and fed everyone who sought refuge in their villages without distinction of origin. In the district of Delis, no more than 12,000 people who came from all parts of Algeria and even from Morocco, were fed in this way, while people died from starvation all over Algeria, there was not one single case of death due to this course.

On Kymilian soil, the Jumeirs, depriving themselves of necessaries, organized relief without ever asking any aid from the government or uttering the slightest complaint. They considered it as a natural duty. And while among the European settlers all kind of police measures were taken to prevent thefts and disorder resulting from such an influx of strangers, nothing of the kind was required on the Carbiles territory. The Gemeyas needed neither aid nor protection from without what? Self sufficiency in times of crisis? The ability to feed thousands of people during the height of a famine. Wow. Now perhaps you’re starting to understand why this idea is so dangerous to the powers that shouldn’t be that of course want to keep us dependent on their centralized systems of control.

And I think that is just one demonstration of why this is such a potentially powerful idea. And as I say, it is just one case study. In fact, it’s just one excerpt from one case study of the literally dozens and dozens of such case studies that Kropotkin undertakes in this book. So I will once again commend the entire mutual aid book to your attention. I think it is worth your time and effort if you were at all interested in this phenomenon. It’s historical, historical roots, even its zoological roots. Etc. Again, it’s an incredibly detailed study. But I understand that this might be a little bit too much of the background and the philosophical detail and some of the ancient historical examples and far flung examples of this phenomenon.

And some of the more impatient in the crowd are starting to think, well, what does this have to do with the price of tea in China? By which I mean, what does this have to do with me? Well, so for something a little closer to home, both temporally and geographically, at least for most of my listeners, we can turn to a good homegrown American example of this phenomenon from relatively recent times. And for that we will turn to another book that I would like to draw your attention to. It is called From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State, Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967.

It is by David T. Beto, and I swear that I have a a physical copy of this book somewhere, but I cannot find it on my bookshelf at the moment. So thankfully Brock can put the COVID on the screen and you can of course follow the show notes so that you can get this book for yourself. And I hope you do take the time to read it. But don’t take my word for it. Let’s take the center for stateless society@c4ss.org that had a review of this book up back when it was published decades ago. And in that review it writes through much of the 19th and 20th centuries, millions of Americans were members of mutual aid organizations known as fraternal societies.

These democratically organized groups provided their members with an assortment of social aid through voluntary means. University of Alabama Professor David Beto’s 2000 book Mutual Aid to the Welfare State, Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967 chronicles the rise and fall of these organizations as well as their eventual replacement by the modern welfare state. In doing so, he provides a glimpse of the world in which mutually beneficial voluntary interaction fills the road role currently filled by the welfare state and top down charities. In other words, a world where ordinary working people independently take care of themselves and each other without looking to assistance from above.

Beto makes it clear that this is not a comprehensive work on the subject and that it only covers a small portion of the numerous societies that existed despite this. It is an excellent introduction to the topic and one that voluntarists, decentralists and critics of the welfare functions of government should take an interest in. This is not because we should hope to replicate these societies, but rather use them as an example of what voluntary aid can do as well as avoid the pitfalls that led to their demise. Beto makes it clear that this demise largely came at the hands of the state in the forms of regulations and restrictions which greatly hampered their ability to effectively serve their members, as well as the expansion of a welfare state that shifted the provisions of many of these services to taxpayers.

Beto, however, does not place blame solely on the state, as he notes that changing values as well as competing forms of social life and entertainment undermined the societies as well. Bowling alone anyone? Yes, Fascinating. An evidence based, detailed, balanced analysis of a documentable historical phenomenon that most people by this point have forgotten about that promoted autonomy and decentralization and discouraged the reliance on top down nanny state. Well, I am sold and I would imagine that a lot of my listeners are too. So let’s dive into this and this. In this case, let’s hear from David Beto himself in a presentation that he gave on this subject back in 2010 at Libertopia.

And in the presentation, which of course I will link up in the show notes and I would suggest that you take a look at the entire presentation because he goes through a lot of this. In fact, once, once you’ve done that, then go and read the book and you can get even more detail. But he goes through this documented phenomenon of these fraternal societies, which of course take their secret society type of bent. But he is talking more about the friendly societies that have been almost completely forgotten through history, but that did function and that did provide valuable services.

Everything from healthcare to life insurance to mortuary services, orphanages you name it. It was being provided for the average worker for relative peanuts in a way that would boggle the mind of most people today. So how did that happen? How did it work? What did these societies do? Well, let’s listen to David Beto on that subject. So they doing life insurance, they do sickness insurance, which we could talk about, which is basically you get a cash stipend for every week that you’re sick. And we could talk about how that works because the societies had some fascinating ways to deal with the issue of what we call today moral hazard issues.

They were able to provide this kind of sickness insurance on a significant scale. But around the turn of the century, you’re starting to see societies expand out and do more and more services. Some of them I haven’t really mentioned, orphanages, fraternal societies, often as a benefit of membership. If the children of members were orphaned, they would provide orphanages and they would raise the children until they were 18. The Masons had orphanages in virtually every state. The Odd Fellows did. I studied one that was run by the Loyal Order of Moose, and it had one of the largest orphanages in the country called Moose Heart.

And they had homes for the elderly. They had employment bureaus, exchange bureaus, that kind of thing. But after the turn of the century, they increasingly move into the area of health care. And before I talk about this example, let me sort of give you an example of some even earlier forms of health care. One thing they start doing in the late 19th century is a system called lodge practice. And that is where the societies, some. Sometimes they’ll band together, sometimes it’s just one organization will hire doctors to provide care for the members. And usually what they did was they would pay the doctor on the basis of the size of the membership.

So if you had 1,000 members, the Dr. Would get a stipend, a flat fee, and in return would provide basic primary care, including minor surgery in many cases for the. This would include house calls, typically. So it would also include house calls. And let me see if I can give you a sense of what we’re talking about here, because I had some stats on this. Yeah. How much would you pay if you were a member for this service of lodge practice, where you could call a doctor any time of the day, have him come to your house and check you out? Typically you would pay one to two dollars a year for that.

Now, factor in inflation. What is $2 in 1910 versus $2 in 2010? Well, if you go to that inflation calculator, $45 a year. That’s typically what you would pay $45 a year for access to a private on call. Dr. I imagine that there are many people in the audience who can’t get beyond that point. And there are more, as Beethove goes on in the lecture to outline the various ways that those societies of old were providing for their members. And it is interesting that the friendly societies and that aspect of those organizations have been completely lost to history.

Whereas of course, we know all about the Freemasons and the other fraternal orders up to their secret shenanigans. We do not know about these examples because they have been precluded from our attention. So as Beto’s book goes on to document, yes, there are many, many very specific examples of ways that you can show that communities were providing, successfully providing for themselves for decades and decades, generations even, until the deliberate dismantling of that system, which he also goes on to outline in great detail in that book. So it serves as a great lesson, both a lesson of what can be done, but also of what can be done to those attempting to provide aid and support for each other without coming begging for assistance to mommy or daddy government.

And there are lessons to be learned from that history, but only if we read the history. So once again, please check out David Beto’s book if you are so inclined. At the very least, check out the rest of that lecture for much more of the historical detail surrounding this very real phenomenon that has really taken place throughout history, although you have never heard about it in your history classes. But for the purposes of today’s exploration, perhaps the most important question is can something like this be revived? Can it be done in the modern context today for people who are suffering right now? Of course, this is not a rhetorical question.

It is a very real question that has very real, real world implications for people who are trying to find answers to these questions right now. So let’s, let’s take a look at one example that is currently playing itself out in real time. So we will get to see what happens to this example. Specifically, I’m talking about something that first came to my attention via the John Bush Live podcast. He John Bush recently had on Andy Schoonover, the CEO of Crowd Health, to talk about how, quote, crowd Health is creating a parallel health care system rooted in transparency, community and personal sovereignty, with no tracking, no AI monitoring, no bureaucratic oversight, and no corporate middle layer.

It’s a model fueled by real people supporting one another. If you’re intrigued, let’s look at a Clip from that conversation. Okay, so you have an alternative to the health insurance. And it is, it’s capitalist in nature, but it’s more, it’s organized horizontally in a peer to peer way, much like bitcoin is peer to peer, people collaborating horizontally. Tell us what is crowd health, what makes it different and how does it work? Yeah, I’ll give you, I’ll walk you through an example because it’s a, it’s a recent one. And if you follow us on any of the social media platforms, you’ll, you’ll see a video of this that we just released is either this week or late last week, can’t remember, but we had a guy who was in, in Montana, he was fishing, he was in bear country.

So he had a, a gun in his holster. I, I’m not a, I don’t have a lot of guns. I don’t know. I think it was a.44. And he was fishing and, and you leaned down to get, he got a, caught a fish. He leaned down, the gun fell out of his holster, it hit a rock and went off. He doesn’t know how it happened. Usually it takes 10 pounds of force to get that, that trigger back. And for some reason this gun went off. It was an older gun. Bullet went into his calf, out the back of his calf, into his thigh, out the top of his thigh, into his chest and out the back.

So one, one bullet, six holes. And he had to get medevaced out. A helicopter had to basically land in the middle of the stream to get him out of there. He went into a coma, then he went into sepsis. So this was almost a million dollar bill. So he gets the bills in the mail, he uploads them to our app. We have a negotiations team who then negotiates those bills. We negotiated that bill down to about 225,000. We sent it out to the community. So each person in our community gets an email once a month that says, hey, we have a member in our community who needs help.

Are you willing to help them with 100 bucks? And you can say yes or no. If you say yes, then $100 goes from your account directly to his account, his or her account. And they then use that money in their account to go and pay that, that doctor or that hospital directly. And so, you know, ultimately this guy was able to get the $225,000. He paid those hospital bills directly. And because we were able to negotiate that down, he’s paying a lot less than if, you know, a health insurance plan. We’re going to pay. I mean, the crux of our system is if you pay the doctor directly, you are going to get way better rates than the big health insurance plans.

And we have seen that our members for bills greater than $2,000 are getting about 50% discounts versus what the health insurance plans pay. Why is that? Well, doctors spend about two days a week on administrative and bureaucratic bureaucracy that, you know, just get paid by health insurance companies. And if they don’t have to deal with that bureaucracy, if they rip out that middleman, then they are willing and able to give you a much, much better price. And so that’s how ultimately it happens. So We’ve done this 28,000 times over the last four and a half years.

99.9% of them have gotten funded. Most of the 0.1% that have not gotten funded are the people that when we send them bills, they say no to helping somebody else out in the community. So you can say no, but just know if you get that email and you say no to somebody else out in the community, then if you send a bill to the community, then the community will know is like, hey, this person hasn’t been willing to give to the community members, but is now asking for money from the community. And so typically within a community, any type of community, if you’re a taker and not a giver, that doesn’t.

You’re not a part of the community for very long. So these are big bills, small bills. We’ve had dozens and dozens of cancer cases. We’ve had NICU babies. We’ve had automobile accidents. We’ve had gunshot wounds. We’ve had all kinds of things that have popped up. And as a result of paying them directly in our negotiations team, our members are paying significantly less. So just as an example, I went on the Obamacare a few weeks ago and just said, what is it going to be for me and my family? And. And it was 1400 bucks a month and then a 16 or $18,000 deductible, depending upon what plan I chose.

And with crowd health, I’m paying. I paid about $500 a month last year for my family, me, my wife, and my two girls. So I’m saving 10 to $15,000 a year by going on crowd health, all because of this great community who’s willing to fund each other as opposed to having intermediaries who benefit off of these bills not getting paid. So that’s in a kind of a nutshell, who we are and how it works. Well, it’s an Intriguing idea, no doubt, and one that I’m sure that many people in my audience in particular will be interested in learning more about.

So of course I will provide a link to that conversation so you can watch it in its entirety, as well as a link to the crowd health website so you can go and check that out if you are so inclined. But. But I will put in the proviso that I do not know crowd health myself. I am not involved with them. I have never talking talked to Andy Schoonover. I know nothing about the personal experiences or details of particular people who have who have partnered with crowd health or joined as a member. So this is not an endorsement by any means.

I’m just putting it out there on the table as an experiment that is ongoing into this concept of mutual aid and how it can function in the real world today. But on that very note, if there are people in the Corporate Report audience who do have experience with crowdhealth in particular, or more generally with the concept of private member associations that are providing mutual aid in various ways, please bring that feedback. I want to hear about it, and not just myself, but everyone else. So the one and only place to leave that feedback, of course, is the Corbett Report website, CorbettReport.com Corporation Mutual Aid, where you will be able to find not only today’s episode, but the comments for today’s episode.

And if you are a Corporate Report member, please log in. Leave your your particular experience with crowd health or any other currently functioning member association, fraternal society, whatever might exist in this current day and age that is providing these types of mutual aid benefits, we want to hear about it. Not just the success stories, but also the failure stories. Because unfortunately we are living in a society that is still very much statist and status run and status governed. So we need to learn from the problems that we encounter when trying to trying to create a space where we can aid each other.

As crazy as that is, unfortunately it is a factor that we have to think about. So in that case, all feedback is valuable, both positive and negative. We want to hear it so that hopefully we can go forward in building up stronger and more resilient mutual aid organizations in the future. And if there are any particularly interesting examples, they might become fodder for future editions of the Solutions Watch series. But in the meantime, I think there’s a lot of reading for people to do. Not only Kropotkin, but also Beto, and then to think about how this is being applied in the real world today.

It’s an incredibly important subject, so I will leave this here for you. As I said, all of the notes are@corbettreport.com mutualaid. Please explore to your heart’s content and then leave your own feedback in the comments there at the Corbett Report website. I’m looking forward to hearing about it, but that’s going to do it for today’s edition of Solutions Watch. I am James Corbett of CorbettReport.com, looking forward to talking to you again in in the near future. The Corbett report is 100% listener supported. Join the Corbett Report community to become a member and log in to corbettreport.com to read the subscriber newsletter featuring my weekly editorial, recommended reading and viewing, discounts on Corbett Report merchandise, and once a month a subscriber exclus sign up today@corbettreport.com members and help support this independent.
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