Hi fellow steemians,

This is the next segment in my healthcare series, which started with my post: Socialism for the Rich: Obamacare, The Biggest Swindle Ever Pulled on the American People Since the Federal Reserve Act Of 1913; which took us through the complete jip that the American healthcare system is today. Today, I thought it might be interesting to try and get an understanding of what lead to such a grotesque system in the first place.

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In order to understand how we have been mislead into accepting such an undesirable healthcare system; even believing that such a system is necessary for lack of any better alternatives, I would like to go back in history a little bit, to around the time that the Federal Reserve was actually created, because this was incredibly important time where a lot of the problems that we now face in the Western world started, and took a significant turn for the worse…

It came to my attention from researching the history of healthcare in America that there actually was an incredibly dynamic and efficient social-safety net in place before the advent of the Fed-engineered Great Depression and the New-Deal Social-Security system that was based on the concept of Voluntary Mutual-Aid.

This was not one massive, uniform, one-size-fits-all system, but rather a variety of solutions to the many social problems that people faced back then.

The reason why I think it’s incredibly important and relevant to our day and age to explore this episode from our past is because we are once again arriving at a critical junction, where new possibilities and alternatives to the current established paradigm are popping up left-right-and-center, offering a whole new host of possible remedies to our social ills…

Today, I will be discussing the history of America’s Fraternal Lodges, a forgotten alternative to the Nanny State’s Social Security programs and the Public Health Insurance System.

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Fraternal Lodges

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How the US Government Destroyed Access to Accessible and Affordable Health Care.

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But First: A Brief History of Capitalism

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In the seventeenth century, after quite the turbulent transition from feudalism to modernism, capitalism had succeeded in taking hold of the European and American continent.

The advent of industrialization, which resulted from the emergence of new technologies and mechanized tools, the enclosure-movement, and related privatization movements, all contributed to one of the biggest mass migration episodes in Western civilization’s history.

The massive rural exodus that the landed-gentries imposed on the overwhelmingly agrarian societies of the time, where the nobility and emerging bourgeoisie conspired to displace hundreds of thousands of shepherds and farmers off of their ancestral lands-- The notorious Common’s as they were known in England-- is what led to the cramming of the future-proletariat in to the unsanitary, unsafe, cesspool-y urban settlements where the first mechanized factories of human suffering and despair were being rolled out.

These early proto-factories were so bad, they make the sweatshops of Bangladesh and China look like social progress… You were virtually guaranteed to have some kind of spring explode in your face or some kind of hacksaw chop off your arm… But I digress.

Sewing Factory in Late Victorian England, circa 1800

These changes that society was being asked to undergo did come with the promise of a future utopia (a promise that has in this day and age proven to be nothing more than a pipe dream, as only the most diluted and dogmatic among us still believe that working for wages will one day lead to a yet-to-be-discovered utopia); and the resulting explosion in market-dynamics, which gave many people hope, led to the profound social transformations that would change the very fabric of society for ever, inevitably leading to today's post-modern consumer-capitalist world.

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The Response to these Profound Socio-Economic Changes

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There is no question that life 100 years ago was much harder, especially for the working-classes of this capitalist system.
As a reaction to these profound socio-economic changes, some of the West's greatest minds set out to find solutions to many of these previously-unimagined societal ills.

This was the period in time when most of the modern revolutionary ideas really began to flourish, from nascent philosophical musings of various writers and thinkers, to full-blown social movements enacting rapid and tremendous changes in the dominant capitalist world.

Anarchism, socialism, communism, all came about as radical reactionary responses to the growing threat that capitalism represented to the fabric of society.

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An article in Le Petit Journal, a conservative daily Parisian newspaper published from 1863 to 1944. The Caption Reads:
''The Exploits of the Apaches: During the fire of a factory, the bandits attack the agents, and pierce the fire-hoses''

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Though these radical movements would all be successfully co-opted, and in time, eventually done-away with entirely; at least as radical popular social movements, at the time they represented a considerable threat to the capitalist masters and factory owners who concentrated most of the newly-created wealth in their ever-increasingly smaller numbers of hands.

Though many are familiar with the anarchist, socialist and communist movements of the late 19th and early 20th century, one seriously under-studied and underrated form of reactionary and positive set of institutions that is worthy of our consideration and contemplation was that of the Fraternal Order.

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Fraternalism and Fraternal Orders

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The Infamous Masonic Order, not to be confused with Free-masons or the Illuminaty, although there is a connection.

When people think of Fraternities, or 'Frats' as they are now called, (and for the ladies, Sororities), they think of groups of students in Universities who like to party and organize the social life of their academic playgrounds. And though the earliest Fraternities did evolve from a desire that students had to meet together in secret and discuss ideas that the school masters would not approve of, these orders had significantly developed to perform functions far beyond the University and became, in a very short space of time, a de-facto form of social mobilization for a wide host of groups and causes in Western capitalist societies.

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As recently as 1920, over one-quarter of all adult Americans were members of Fraternal Societies. (The figure was still higher in Britain and Australia.)

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As this Flintstones episode shows, Fraternal Societies became so popular that their influence could be felt throughout every strata of society

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These forms of organization were particularly popular among African-Americans and immigrants, to such an extent that it even motivated Teddy Roosevelt's famous attack on hyphenated-Americans.

Teddy Roosevelt's famous attack on "hyphenated Americans" was motivated in part by hostility to the immigrants' fraternal societies; he and other Progressives sought to "Americanize" immigrants by making them dependent for support on the democratic state, rather than on their own independent ethnic communities.

Quoting from Teddy Roosevelt's address to the Knights of Columbus at Carnegie Hall

For an American citizen to vote as a German-American, an Irish- American, or an English-American, is to be a traitor to American institutions; and those hyphenated Americans who terrorize American politicians by threats of the foreign vote are engaged in treason to the American Republic.

Another Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, would later become the biggest proponent of the Social Security system and the creation of the Nanny State. He would also preside over the confiscation of American's gold, with Executive Order 6102, in an attempt to bail out the Federal Reserve.

Just like Obama in 2008, but I digress once more...

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Fraternal Lodges

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I would now attempt to explain what kind of services and opportunities Fraternal Societies offered to the American public, but that would be a massive waste of my time, as there exists a fantastic and short article written by Roderick T. Long that explains it better than I ever could.

Stumbling upon this paper is actually what motivated me to write this article, and so instead of stealing its shine, I will instead, refer you to the article itself. For those of you who do not have the time to read it, or are simply too lazy, a wonderful YouTuber actually made a 5 minute animated video-essay about it.

So either read : How Government Solved the Health Care Crisis : Medical Insurance that Worked — Until Government "Fixed" It, or just watch the super-awesome YouTube video produced by Bitbutter, which is the essay word-for-word. Don't say I didn't make this easy.

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Direct Link :

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A Cartoon from the Late 20's depicting the Politics of Lodge Practices

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The Caption Reads: "The royal impossible potentate of the flowing purple robe, who had left the lodge rooms in rush to shut up a bunch of hootstown rowdies, came out second in the fracas."

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What to Make of This?

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What I decidedly took from this whole story was the idea that through the earnest application of the concept of voluntary mutual-aid, it has always been possible, even in capitalist societies, to introduce a coherent form of social organization that would be able to dispense relief to those most in need of it, while creating a sense of social security and well being among a community of people who decided to undertake each others' insurance, without the need for government intervention.

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Though the whole masonic paradigm, which came from an entirely different era, when merchants and travelers sought to protect their collective interests and insure the adequate availability and provision of food, lodging and guidance, did come with a whole host of weird handshakes, secret-passwords, oaths and whatever else they needed to be able to recognize and interact with each other safely and privately, this idea of voluntary mutual-aid need not be restrained to such antiquated and bizarre forms of social cohesion and organization.

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We have the internet today, and along with it encryption technology.

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Quoting from an article entitled : The Incorporation of Fraternal Societies

The incorporated and autonomous nature of fraternal organization allowed for this proliferation of life insurance programs, hospitals, and orphanages. Reacting to the acceleration of nineteenth-century social dynamics, the transformation from “passing the hat” to a highly organized mutual aid network happened remarkably fast.

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A New Life for the Concept of Voluntary Mutual-Aid

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I've only recently joined Steemit, yet in the short-time that I have been delving deeper into this new community-driven platform and era of cryptocurrency-based social media, (having joined the @MSP Discord as well as other Steemit-based communities), I see a tremendous potential for the future of this concept.

I'll just mention an example in passing to illustrate the point I'm making. This idea is still in its infant-stages, so I won't go into too much specifics, although you can expect me to write more about it in future posts.

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Building Networks Among our Various, Disparate, Diverse Communities.

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One of the Steemit Discord groups that I was invited to join will be holding a kind of Steemit-Fundraiser-Benefit to try and help one of its members with a medical problem she's so far been unable to resolve on her own. (Because our health care systems are so whacked out, I might add with just a touch of irony).

Amazingly, at least to me, this is a completely organic mirror-reflection of what past generations were doing with the concept of Fraternal Societies. Except that this is being organized and accomplished over a Steemit Discord Group.

The common thread between these two remote stories is this: Voluntary Mutual-Aid.

Our little community is going to get its gear together and try and do some good for its members, and I don't see why this idea would stop with one fundraiser.

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New Ideas

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Indeed, as these new times continue to accelerate and progress in the way that they have, I see a whole host of what may be informal little social groupings turning into incredibly efficient and precise agents of social mobilization and community-driven, immediate direct-action.

The Steemit platform, along with its niche communities and associated Discord channels, might very well become our contemporary equivalent to the 'Fraternal Lodge' (and I'm sure more alternatives and possibilities will arise as the need for them becomes apparent to more and more people)

I can see no reason why new crypto-backed initiatives to promote such ideas as the 'proliferation of life insurance programs, hospitals, and orphanages', would in this day-and-age, be unsuccessful.

This is merely the present Digital Age public's ''reaction to the acceleration of 21st century social dynamics''.

Just like the Fraternal Societies of the 19th and 20th century, I see the transformation from “passing the hat” (Delegating SP to a curator bot or some other form of Steemit based mutual-support) to a highly organized mutual aid network also happening remarkably fast.

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I just have to say that this is incredibly exhilarating for me, and I can't wait to see how all of these changes are going to unfold. It is already clear to me that the potential for great social transformations, akin to the anarchist, socialist and communist movements of the late 19th and early 20th century, already exists, and signs of this can literally be found everywhere.

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I'll conclude this post with a touch of optimism; that we are indeed already all working together towards great things which are direly needed in this present age, just by contributing to this platform and building these new networks that are key to our success here.

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Thanks for taking the time to read this lengthy piece, and upvoting, following or resteeming if you found this article compelling and interesting.

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Peace and Love,

Hae-Joo