Being in the public domain exposes and obligates you to the state. Being in the private domain separates and protects you from the state.
To be sovereign is to be self governing. The Sovereign Beings circle of friends formed itself organically at the invitation of Marcelle, a natural community organizer. Over the past year of monthly potlucks and weekly zoom calls, we’ve formed a cohesive group that shares knowledge, trades services and gathers for spiritual ceremonies and seasonal celebrations. We network with other like-minded groups and have formed a supportive extended community where we help each other with holistic healthcare, farming, food and nutritional advice, spiritual life coaching, and much more. It’s a loose network of individuals that wanted to organize and expand, so we did our research on how to establish ourselves in a structured way so that even more people could join us and benefit.
Before I can tell you what we’re building or when, why and how we’re doing it, I have to bring you up to speed on what we’ve learned. For context, some of us watched in dismay as holistic healthcare providers, churches and credentialed experts in a variety of fields got censored, sanctioned or shut down over the past three years. How is this possible? How is this legal? Is this how our “free” country really operates? We realized that we had gaps in our knowledge about the role of government in our lives and what factors led to federal, state and local officials usurping our inalienable rights. Many of us are busy and pay little attention to government policy, but that leaves us vulnerable to having our private lives interfered with in a way that’s hard to walk back. We researched how we could exercise our sovereignty while remaining aligned with our spiritual values, our integrity and compliant with the laws of the land.
What I’m about to share with you is not something new. It was once well understood among people with a high school degree, but today you have to undertake a fair amount of research to uncover it. Two generations ago we all would have learned this essential information in a ninth grade Civics class, where the curriculum would have covered our rights and responsibilities as US citizens. Since civics classes have gone the way of home economics and shop class, we need to start at the beginning and establish definitions before what follows will make any sense.
Public v. Private Domain
The first important concept to understand is the distinction between public and private. According to Black's Law Dictionary, Public is a term that is applied strictly to that which concerns all the citizens and every member of the state, while Private means affecting or belonging to private individuals, as distinct from the public generally. Not official; not clothed with office. Legally speaking then, the public refers to the nation as a whole and the government’s relationship to it, while private refers to individuals who are not public office holders.
Public Law v Private Law
Just as there’s a distinction between the public and private domains, there are distinct and separate laws which govern each domain. According to Black's Law Dictionary Public Law refers to the laws that cover administration, constitution and criminal acts. It controls the actions between the citizens of the state and the state itself. It deals with the government's operation and structure.
Private Law, as used in contradistinction to public law, is the part of the law which is administered between citizen and citizen, or which is concerned with the definition, regulation, and enforcement of rights in cases where both the person in whom the right inheres (is inherent) and the person upon whom the obligation is incident (who owes) are private Individuals.
There are two distinct domains, with two distinct sets of laws: In the public domain, we’re subject to any and all laws imposed by the government; in the private domain, we’re bound by the contracts we make with each other, private person to private person.
You can think of the private domain as an extension of your living room: as long as you’re not breaking criminal laws, harming people or infringing on the rights of another individual, you can do as you please and the government is not a party to your activities or agreements. For example, health department officials can’t come and check the temperature of your refrigerator as a private individual, but if you operate a restaurant that’s a corporation licensed by the state within the public domain, the state retains the right to inspect your facility. Being in the public domain exposes and obligates you to the state. Being in the private domain separates and protects you from the state.
Since it is the Sovereign Beings’ intention to practice holistic wellbeing and a smorgasbord of spiritual practice based on a gifting economy, we do not want any “official” to dictate how we may do that. We assert our right to freely assemble, to exercise free speech, the freedom to practice religion as determined by our conscience and the right to make our own health care decisions. We’ve learned from the events of the last three years that we need to establish and protect that right. By formalizing our organization in the private domain, we can remain sovereign over our decision making and remain outside the jurisdiction of the state.
Incorporated or unincorporated? That is the next question.
To be incorporated is to function as a corporation. Contrast that with the term unincorporated association, which is applied to a group of people who act together in a common enterprise for a common purpose. Most organizations automatically seek to incorporate in some form. But if the Sovereign Beings group incorporated, we would be seeking permission from the state to create our entity. If that permission were granted, we would then become a creature of the state. Under threat of penalty, we would have to become 100% statutory compliant. We’d have to give up the rights inherent to private individuals and surrender important decisions to the state. By applying to the state, we would be allowing it to rule over our organization, as we waived our right to self govern when we made application and paid the filing fee. If instead we craft founding documents that establish our organization as unincorporated, we are subject only to our lawful contracts and our association’s charter and bylaws.
Once we learned the distinction between public and private and incorporated and unincorporated, we decided to form a private membership organization or PMA. As an unincorporated association, established in the private domain, we can be more sovereign over our activities and free from outside interference from the state. A PMA is a private association where the right of association is exercised to provide benefits and/or services that are outside of the jurisdiction, venue or authority of any state agencies. It includes any kind of business or group where services are limited to members only and not open to members of the public.
Shh…Members Only
Over the past few weeks we’ve been working hard on crafting the founding documents that will establish a PMA for our Sovereign Beings circle. In the next post I’ll share more of what we learned about PMA’s and discuss the various types, how they’re established, and what kinds of organizations may benefit from establishing a PMA. Please tell me in the comments if you knew about the public/private, incorporated/unincorporated distinctions and how you learned it. I always welcome your questions, comments or corrections, as we’re all learning from each other on the path to preserving our sovereignty and honoring that which is most sacred.
Thank you❤️Filled with gratitude for your efforts on our behalf and looking forward to what’s next.🙏
Katie, normally this subject matter would not be something I would gravitate toward, but given the way you presented it, I actually found this article really interesting. I recently came across something written by Paul Levy about our economic system which made me think of your article. He said that once you realize how our economic system is a grand financial illusion built on ever-shifting sand, and a pervasive fraud as a business model, "it is then our responsibility to re-create and re-dream a different set of agreements regarding how to be in relationship with each other...setting the stage to re-engineer the system." It seems that this is just what you are attempting to do with the PMA model. Very exciting! More power to you!