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For the individual and household, self-reliance starts with a realistic appraisal of risks, vulnerabilities, and assets/capital that can be leveraged to reduce risk and increase production of value and surplus. Networks of reciprocal benefit (families, neighborhoods, guilds, communities, enterprises, etc.) are critical assets: To look out for Number One, take care of Numbers Two through Nine (or 19 or 99).

7. Reciprocity

Traditional societies did not have Central State fractional lending or printing presses to create money and credit out of thin air, so they actually had to create surpluses and increase security via sharing, cooperation, pooling of assets and trade.

As described in Item 10 below, there are four basic types of capital: natural capital (fresh water, arable soil, oil. minerals, etc.), built capital (tools, roads, etc.) social capital (networks, guilds, cooperatives, etc.) and Individual capital (skills, experience, health, etc.).

In an ontological (as opposed to financial or legal) understanding, there are only two ways humans can interact with natural capital: either "own/control" it for exploitative purposes (i.e. keeping the gains/benefits for oneself or one's Empire to the exclusion of others), or share it cooperatively. In terms of "profit potential," nothing beats complete ownership of scarce resources that can then be traded/sold for far more than the extraction costs.

This enriches the Elites who own/control the natural capital at the expense of non-owners.

The inherent "profit potential" of this control has powered Elites, Empires, colonialism and imperialism from the beginnings of formal institutions.

This desire to corral or control scarce resources is of a piece with the natural-selection drives observed within any primate social group: the competition for more food, better reproductive opportunities, etc.

But as the study of sociobiology and animal behavior has revealed, cooperation also offers enormous natural-selection/survival benefits. Hence the social primates (the animals which share much of our genetic code) such as chimpanzees and bonobo combine social hierarchies and stratifications ("alpha" males and females at the top rungs of leadership, ownership of food and reproductive advantages) with complex cooperative networks.

To the degree that Elites are fundamentally parasitic, then once "ownership" becomes too concentrated and/or exploitative, then the rest of the troop either rebels and installs a new Elite leadership or abandons the old Elite to their own devices, depriving them of the population they need to maintain their exploitative extraction of wealth.

This is called "opting out," "walking away" or "voting with your feet."

Thus Elites and the larger social community are also bound in a structural reciprocity: if the leadership is sound and enables stability, security and prosperity for the entire group, their consumption/extraction of an outsized share of the group income/wealth is tolerated as a reasonable trade-off/exchange.

But once the leadership/Elite over-reaches (i.e. grabs most of the food, attractive females, portable wealth, scarce resources, etc.) or fails to secure the common good in a sustainable fashion (what the Chinese term "The Mandate of Heaven"), then the community/city/Empire revolts and replaces the old Elite with a new Elite.

In these basic terms, the Power Elites controlling most of the wealth and income of the U.S. (the State fiefdoms and the rentier-financial Elites) have over-reached and failed to provide for the common good in a sustainable fashion, and hence their days in control of the American Empire are numbered.

Both traditional societies and modern social innovations offer numerous blueprints for reciprocity.

In many traditional cultures, the "common area resources" such as land and water were conceived as community-owned or controlled assets. Such assets can also be combined with private property--that is, a "commons" open to all is owned or managed by the community as a whole.

This is