The Pillars of Exit

“If you don’t like it, you can leave!”

Have you ever publicly expressed a desire to reform or even abolish your local political system, only to be met with this common refrain?

Numerous times throughout my career, when criticizing some characteristic or action of government, I have encountered some variant of that response. (Somalia is frequently mentioned as a place to which I can relocate.) As one might expect, my reply has been to argue that human beings should not be required to flee in order to prevent our rights from being trampled. Unfortunately, though my arguments were solid, they did not persuade many people.

Some libertarians are now realizing that arguing with others online and trying to reason with them is a waste of time and a drain on glucose. And yet in some ways, ironically, the “don’t like it, leave” bromide I argued against also turns out to be true.

People are indeed leaving!

Modern arguments for leaving bad governance or corporate systems are actually old ones. In 1970, economist Albert O. Hirschman published Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, claiming that dissatisfied members of any institution or society face a choice: exit, voice, or loyalty. His key insight was that a voice without exit is powerless. When people cannot leave, organizations can simply do what they want; they do not have to listen and can run roughshod over their employees or citizens.

But leaving need not only be territorial. So-called “jurisdictional arbitrage” is valuable, but it is not the only way people turn away from systems they dislike. The idea of exit encompasses three pillars: physical, technological, and spiritual. Exiting systems means liberating the whole person from the yoke of broken systems. Let us start with the first pillar.

Physical Exit

The most obvious form of exit is physical relocation, which may be the oldest. For most of human history, our ancestors were nomadic. They moved with the seasons, following game and foraging, rarely staying long in one place. As James C. Scott argues in Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, this mobility was itself a form of political freedom. In order to tax and control, states require a sedentary population. According to Scott, the early agrarian states of Mesopotamia could only emerge once populations became reliant on the land and tied to grain cultivation that could be measured, stored, and appropriated. Nomads could simply walk away from the political elite who tried to expropriate them.

This pattern of exit persists throughout history. The Pilgrims left England seeking shelter from religious turmoil. European Jews and intellectuals fled the Nazis and communists. Dissidents have crossed borders since time immemorial to escape persecution. The underlying logic remains the same everywhere: when conditions become intolerable, people uproot. They go elsewhere.

Modern relocation takes many forms. Expatriation involves obtaining residency or citizenship in countries with more favorable tax regimes, stronger property rights, or greater personal freedom. Portugal, Mexico, South America, and various Southeast Asian nations have become popular destinations and hubs for wanderers, vagabonds, and others practicing exit philosophy. The special economic zone model takes this concept further, with aligned communities purchasing land and establishing experimental governance structures.

Próspera in Honduras represents one of the most ambitious attempts to date. Operating as a ZEDE (Zone for Employment and Economic Development), Próspera functions as a semi-autonomous jurisdiction where businesses can select their own regulatory frameworks, taxes run as low as 1 percent on business revenue, and Bitcoin is recognized as legal tender. By 2024, the zone had attracted over 200 registered companies and approximately 1,800 residents.

Remote work has amplified these possibilities. “Digital nomads” now circulate through dozens of countries, optimizing for climate, tax regime, cost of living, community, and freedom. Some never settle, treating jurisdictional arbitrage as a way of life. The old assumption that you must live where you work has dissolved for a growing segment of knowledge workers and remote professionals.

Physical exit does have limitations. Not everyone can relocate due to family obligations, career constraints, or financial realities. Some countries also curtail the ability to leave. The US taxes citizens regardless of where they live, and FATCA regulations make it difficult for Americans abroad to access basic banking. The physical escape hatch is narrow for some, which is precisely why technological and spiritual exits have also become vital.

Technological Exit

The second pillar is technological. This means using systems and technologies that route around centralized control. You do not have to physically leave a jurisdiction to exit its monetary system, surveillance regime, or information control scheme. You can remain geographically present while operating in parallel networks beyond the reach of traditional institutions.

The cypherpunks knew this decades ago. They leveraged cryptography and its anonymity-enhancing guarantees to exit the established order and its controls. Cryptography, when done well, is a form of mathematical wizardry that even the most powerful governments cannot assail. When you hold your own private keys, your communications are end-to-end encrypted, and your transactions occur on permissionless networks, you have denied certain aspects of state control without crossing a single border.

Consider what technological exit looks like in practice. You store your wealth in a self-custodied Monero wallet that cannot be frozen by any government, inflated away by central banks, or seized without access to the keys. You protect your communication by using encryption that surveillance agencies cannot scrutinize.

You opt in to a DeFi (decentralized finance) network, giving you the ability to engage in the same activities over which institutions and high-powered financiers previously exercised a total monopoly. With this control, you can create your own custom assets, lend funds, engage in leverage trading, coordinate resources, and make collective decisions if you are part of a network’s DAO (decentralized autonomous organization).

None of this is hypothetical or futuristic. Billions of dollars flow through decentralized networks daily. People have already exited, technologically and financially, in droves. Parallel financial infrastructure already exists. The gates and gatekeepers are being dismantled piecemeal by these subversive innovations.

Spiritual Exit

The third pillar is the least discussed but critically essential: spiritual exit. It means withdrawing inner consent from systems that claim authority over you. Much of what holds legacy governments together is not physical force but belief. The state exists because people believe it exists, and its laws carry weight because people presume they do.

Psychologist Charles Tart called this phenomenon a “consensus trance”—the idea that what we consider normal waking consciousness is actually a kind of hypnotic state. From birth, we are inducted into this collective trance. Parents, teachers, media figures, and political leaders reinforce particular views until they become inculcated assumptions. We believe what we are told rather than discovering the truth for ourselves. Morpheus expresses this sentiment in The Matrix:

The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.

Luckily, you do not have to fight anyone. Breaking out of the Matrix only requires recognizing that we have been living programmed lives, ones disconnected from our needs, values, and mental well-being. In this sense, spiritual exit must involve refusing to internalize modern algorithmic brain rot.

The current “attention economy” treats people’s minds as harvestable resources. Billions of dollars fund machine learning models to exploit psychological vulnerabilities, using variable reward schedules to trigger dopamine spikes that keep people scrolling online. The engineers leverage infinite feeds, autoplay, and other gimmicks to induce a suggestible, quasi-hallucinatory state. Much online content ends up being a tool of mental extraction—from cortisol-ramping death scenes to pornographic clickbait to outright political ragebait.

The result is a population in a constant state of low-grade amnesia, or the waking-daydream of the default mode network. The algorithms prime unwitting recipients to consume rather than build, create, or truly live. Reclaiming this mental space means recognizing that the information ecosystem has been manipulated to hijack our reward circuitry and shape our beliefs.

If spiritual exit means anything, it means liberating oneself from these toxic systems that have eaten away at body and soul. What is the answer to dealing with these control mechanisms? Self-improvement and technological self-restraint become both forms of resistance and exit in this environment.

There are more people than ever critiquing technology, reconnecting with nature, and practicing mindfulness. To exit spiritually, sometimes it is enough to understand that many of the tools given to you are meant to control you. In this regard, simply ceasing their use is a form of radical exit. It is through these practices, and others like them, that people learn to “spiritually” leave failing institutions.

Finally, once the system loses its grip on body and mind, everyone will stop expecting to “reform” it. People will stop wasting energy on political theater that, as Noam Chomsky observed, is designed to manufacture consent—allowing lively dissent, but only within an “acceptable” range.

Conclusion

I should not have been so upset about my encounters with the “don’t like it, leave” folks. As it turns out, they were really onto something.

Exit is critical, but it takes many forms. It is not just about crossing an imaginary boundary. Certainly, physical exit is invaluable, but it is not for everyone. People can exit technologically by using infrastructure beyond institutional reach. They can also exit spiritually by cultivating inner awareness to snap out of the consensus trance and stop supporting extractive cultures.

Each pillar is a piece of the puzzle. Practiced together and adapted to individual circumstances, they constitute a complete renunciation of old ways. This is how paradigm shifts happen, and new cultures emerge: through the incremental accumulation of people who understand the idea of abandoning bad ideas and broken systems.

It is high time we reclaim our bodies and minds.

Terrence McKenna said it best: “Reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.“