Holding the Line — A 2025 Invocation of Paul Goodman

In 1946, in the aftermath of world war and the birth of the atomic age, a poet and radical named Paul Goodman wrote a slim, uncompromising book called The May Pamphlet. Later retitled Drawing the Line, it was a meditation on how to live freely and responsibly in a world sliding toward conformity, bureaucracy, and spiritual numbness.

Goodman wasn’t a partisan or a pundit. He was a man of conscience — and Drawing the Line was his answer to a society where freedom was being swallowed by central authority, blind obedience, and institutionalized violence.

He argued, simply:

“The line is the boundary of one’s own personal responsibility.”

That is: each of us must decide what we will not do — not because a law forbids it, but because our conscience commands it.

In the 1940s, this meant refusing to participate in war, mass production of death, and the soul-crushing machinery of industrial conformity.

In 2025, it means refusing surveillance capitalism.

Refusing centralized money.

Refusing algorithmic manipulation.

Refusing to become data cattle for a dying empire.

It means choosing voluntary, open protocols over authoritarian platforms.

It means reclaiming local production, trust-based exchange, and peer-to-peer meaning.

It means Bitcoin over banks, Nostr over networks, sovereign community over managed compliance.

We don’t just draw the line.

We must hold the line — together.

Because drawing the line alone is a whisper.

Holding the line as a community is a declaration.

It tells the world: this far, no further.

We are not afraid to live in truth.

Paul Goodman’s voice was a signal from another century —

but it rings clearer now than ever.

And so to all who still burn with the flame of freedom:

Draw the line. Hold the line. Build beyond the line.

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