At the individual level. The boundary of the individual. You make a good point but also demonstrate lack of understanding of the threat of authority.

I do understand. I understand that your entire position represents a simple contradiction.

One should not give ones' own authority to another (or a thing, idea, concept, system, group)

But this is precisely what you are doing. Your own prescription of rugged libertarianism is a commitment to an idea, and to an authority, namely, to yourself. I wonder why you think that millions of people obeying their own scattered authority stand any chance against an ethnically cohesive enemy which is high in social trust and united by a common belief? History has proven you wrong again, and again. In recent times, you need only look at the swift ascendency of Islam to see what unification under a common authority accomplishes.

Your American culture has been largely individualized for a century, and it has been commensurate with complete cultural collapse and granulation.

The common enemy is each other - not the Jew, not the commie NKVD officer (though they are more dangerous than others cause of the more extreme levels of brainwashing/idolatry/submission to higher 'authority') - the extent of the enemy's power is only in the authority we give them and how much we allow ourselves to be intimidated by them.

Your individual authority is weaker than their group authority. This is very straightforward. You're suggesting that a nation in which every individual claims no adherence to a common belief system, but who instead supplant God with their own Self, and who adhere to no authority but their own, are somehow supposed to collectively deflect an attack by a unified enemy? You're living in a dream.

You've even specified that we are each other's enemies. There is just clear lack of sociological and historical insight here.

the main implication is return to barter. People who refuse to believe in third party idolatry thus reject the notion of money; be it a sea shell or dollar or Bitcoin. Such a transaction involving third party represents the relinquishment of authority to said idol and those who (((control))) it. We would therefore engage in commerce based on 1:1 trade; where both parties engage on the premise of exchanging real tangible goods or combinations of goods for mutual benefit and thus no authority given away, nor siphoned to third party through use of currency.

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of what money is. Money is simply a level of abstraction away from energy. Let's imagine the sorts of goods we'd be inclined to trade in what we take to be your bartering society. We're assuming that a society absent any idols would also lack most specialized commercial interests, and so people would be living from the land, i.e. a subsistence lifestyle - after all, living for any higher ideal would imply living for an idol. Material accumulation beyond that which is necessary for survival would be idolatry.

We'd expect, then, that people would barter in basic life essentials: crops, livestock, farming tools, building materials, and hunting tools - exactly what we'd imagine barter and trade societies probably did exchange.

What unites all of these things? They are all actual stores of energy, or they represent techne for acquiring energy. Energy is the basic demand the environment places on us.

What limitations are experienced by such a lifestyle, which are not in a world with currency? Money becomes something that stores energy - to put it properly, money represents a stored quantity of other people's energy. Why is this important? Because in a subsistence society without money, everyone is fundamentally responsible for all of their life requirements. Everyone must be a jack-of-all-trades. In a world with money, people are able to specialize. Farmer John can trust Hunter Joe to get meat, while John takes care of the crops. Paul can spend his time designing a better spear tip or a better bow and arrow, while Jeff builds fences.

They are all able to do this because they can trust that the others, by virtue of their specialization, are able to do their special tasks better than any other member of the community. Therefore, each person sells his value to the others for money, and can subsequently exchange that money to mobilize the energy of the other persons.

It may not be entirely clear why money is necessary, until you understand the abstract and crucial concept of time-value. You might object to what I've said and tell me, "No money is necessary! They could all specialize in their own task and simply trade their products!" (Let's just ignore that in a system of currency, $1 is always $1, whereas the value of a bushel of corn can shift greatly during a year's time).

Time is intricately related to energy. The natural world demonstrates that most animal life spend the vast majority of their time foraging or hunting for food, or securing shelter. Take the situation with Paul, who thinks he can design a better bow and arrow that will benefit everyone in his society - perhaps even making them better able to defend themselves from human enemies. That bow and arrow doesn't yet exist. Therefore, Paul has a gamble. He can waste precious time designing the bow and arrow. Or he can give himself over to growing crops. Growing crops is going to trap him into the cycle of nature, and take up his time. To make money growing crops essentially determines his use of time.

If, however, Paul has amassed some money, he can afford to devote himself to the gamble of possibly creating something very valuable. Once he has made the new bow and arrow, he can sell that for money, and continue devoting himself to this apparent skill of invention. Money opens up the ability for the highly skilled and highly intelligent in society to apply themselves to tasks that are more sophisticated than the basic set of life-necessities that everyone must do by default in a bartering society. The money Paul has stored is always good, and not perishable (prone to devalue) like crops or meat.

This speaks to the other benefit of money: a person can exchange money for any commodity they choose. Whether a given good is valuable to Jeff or to John depends upon their own individual situation. Corn can be valuable today, but not tomorrow, whereas money stores its value indefinitely, becoming the universal storehouse of energy and accounting. This simply isn't possible in a society where each individual has a different good to offer - exchange becomes tricky...how do we settle the scuffle when I give 4 pheasants to Betty for 3 gallons of milk, but only 2 pheasants to you for your 3 bushels of corn? How easy will it be to negotiate the exchange rates as the seasons change, or when there are natural shortages?

Since it is the most common worldwide form of idolatry; one in which you likely engaged in today when you bought a cup of coffee or carton of milk - and as such is the primary enabler of the 'enemy' (ourselves; our selfish tendency to give away authority) which can motivate us to unify.

Energy is the idol, and really, power. Money is simply the guarantee to be able to utilize other people's energy.

If you did not idolize money, you'd idolize whatever the most salient need was at the time. At harvest time, you'd idolize crops. In winter, you'd idolize deer meat and hides. Food has been a substantial means of manipulating entire societies in the past. Look at Communist China or Bolshevik Russia.

what we can bring to the table to provide for the needs of others

And just what moral system is going to act as the social cement for this Brady Bunch? What is going to cause people to trust one another's word, or that your neighbor isn't out to stiff you, or that they are actually even your friend? After all, if their ultimate authority is merely themselves (that is, their own self-interest), then in a village of 50 people, the only thing your neighbor needs to do to make stealing your stuff in their self-interest, is to convince the other 48 people against you.

LASTLY: You claim that all authority is the enemy, and yet your username is BaphometWorshipper, which tells me it is either completely ironic, or you respect the authority of a pagan idol and Satan cognate.

That was way too clever for this early in the day. I've got nothing, other than to say that it isn't the masks, but some admixture of fear of the state and of abstract entities posited by the state, i.e. creeping death.

It is a mirror of religion, where the state steps in as God, and the devil remains the snake hdiing in the grass, in the form of microscopic infectious agents.

It only makes my point stronger, however. The state is mimicking the Church in every conceivable psychological facet. In fact, we might think of the predicament as one where the state has usurped the Church in its role of defining our moral predicament in the world, where the state tells us what the devil is and doles out the means of salvation.

But the key difference, and ultimately why these ploys by the state always fail, is that Catholicism was not merely the exaltation of fear, but also of beauty, truth, and goodness.

Machiavellian rule by fear can unite a people, but only in the loosest way. Joy, hope, and love must enter reality, and this is precisely what is missing from the current paradigm. Authority must transcend man, or fear will rule, which is only as unifying as the extent to which people lack hope.