If you’re relaxing in a treehouse somewhere in Los Angeles, stop what you’re doing immediately: the Department of Building and Safety is charging you with a felony and coming to remove your treehouse at once. It is dangerous, and you cannot be trusted to play on your own.

You will not have time to pack your belongings because your treehouse is the scene of a crime. You are being charged with: Modern-Day Self Reliance.

According to one city employee who wishes not to be named, hundreds of treehouses in and around Los Angeles have been busted down in the last 10 years alone, and more calls to the code enforcement division all the time. There is one direct explanation for this: neighbors literally acting as spies on behalf of the LADBS, a police organization that has the authority to remove you (by force) from your property.

The issue of neighbors acting as spies on behalf of law enforcement from any level of government should be disturbing. When a father from Clinton, Mississippi built a treehouse for his children and 25 other kids on his block, 5 years passed before an anonymous complaint from a neighbor spurred the city attorney and mayor to order the treehouse taken down even though it violated no city code, and city code says nothing about restrictions on building in trees. When the father appealed to the mayor and her city board, they compared their duty to remove the treehouse to Worldcom and Watergate. Fortunately, the father in Clinton was able to afford extensive two-year litigation to appeal his case in the Mississippi Supreme Court and won.

When a family in Los Angeles built a treehouse in their backyard, an adjacent registered sex-offender neighbor claimed the treehouse ruined his view into their backyard and called the LADBS to report on his neighbor’s treehouse. This treehouse, the one pictured above, no longer stands.

Spying on Your Neighbors:

Governments and law enforcement arms around the world are now openly calling for people to spy on their neighbors. Britain, Australia, and the US are training kids to be Eco cops, low level power brokers who are bound to get-off on writing citations. There is an iPhone app from ecosnoop.com that you use to go around spying and tattling on your neighbors and small businesses in the community. So, if there is light on at night at a business – an auto repair shop, a karate studio, a law firm, a production company – it could not possibly mean that there is someone there, working late. Why would any person work past dark? Have you even been to an office at night? The winners are there.

The issue is they call it an offense, a crime. Aluminum and glass in the wrong bin? Garden not watered? Treehouse in your trees? Your neighbors are actually in the best position to catch you making these violations, therefore law enforcement would like to have you (and your neighbors) as their eyes and ears. It means less work for them and more accurate reportage. Neighbors, the people with whom you might traditionally have had the most solidarity, can no longer be trusted.

Government does not trust you either. From chemtrails to gmo foods to prescription drugs, vaccines, and fluoride in our water, it is no wonder we are corrupted, lethargic, and barely able to function. We are literally being trained like dogs to react to meaningless stimuli like Tiger Woods, Lindsay Lohan, and LeBron James. What if Americans got as upset when a neighbor’s constitutional property rights were violated as when they found out Barry Bonds took steroids? In the US, government and big business’s interests are served when the people are passive and self-reliance is at a minimum.

One way of reinforcing passivity among the people is infantalizing them. Infants cannot build their own treehouses. Infants cannot be trusted to recycle. Parents are infantalized by social workers from child and family services. Government in conjunction with BP infantalized thousands of fishermen with boats willing to help the gulf cleanup when they were forbidden to do anything. Starbucks infantalizes you when you buy coffee with a sippy top. “Don’t spill, baby.”

The point is we know what authoritarianism looks like and it is here. What everyone needs to do is stop passively “getting entertained” and do something to restore a sense of self-reliance.

Story by Joel Kort