Survive

Author

Cato Centinel Farmer

Cato the Elder rose from modest rural origins to become a soldier, consul, and censor, championing traditional Roman values of frugality, hard work, and moral rigor. He believed Rome’s strength came from the character of its citizens and famously warned against decadence and foreign luxury that might weaken the Republic. His relentless insistence that “Carthage must be destroyed” reflected not only geopolitical caution but also his belief that Rome had to defend its civilization with vigilance.

His great-grandson, Cato the Younger, carried that moral severity into the final crisis of the Roman Republic. A committed Stoic, he believed virtue and justice were higher than personal survival or political convenience. As Rome slid toward dictatorship under Julius Caesar, Cato became the most famous defender of republican liberty and constitutional government. Refusing compromise with tyranny, he chose death rather than submission after Caesar’s victory, turning his life into a lasting symbol of principled resistance.

The two Catos embody the clearest symbols of Roman virtue: discipline, civic duty, and resistance to corruption; rooted in Stoic virtue, republican liberty, and moral austerity. They believed that a healthy society depends on citizens who value duty above comfort, integrity above wealth, and freedom above power. Those who stand firm for principle even when the world around them yields to ambition and decay.

Centinel writing as part of the Anti-Federalists, he warned that concentrating power in a strong national government could erode the liberties the American Revolution had just secured. Centinel argued that republics survive only when political authority remains close to the people and when citizens maintain constant vigilance against elites who might consolidate power. His essays emphasized local self-government, a broad and representative legislature, and protections for individuals that helped shape the later adoption of the United States Bill of Rights.

Farmers are the quiet backbone and feet of civilization, turning soil, sunlight, and rain into the steady food supply that allows cities to exist, knowledge to flourish, and every other profession to survive.

The author is a veteran of the USMC reserves with 8 years’ service in military intelligence. Separately he was the primary analyst who calculated the gross domestic product by state and by industry. He also created his own financial management firm where he built a robo-trader using hypergame theory and artificial intelligence to recognize and react to changing behaviors of adversaries and emerging patterns in financial markets.

The rest of his career has focused on broader data analysis in the Intelligence Community where he has connected non-traditional data sources into a holistic picture that has been used for predictive analytics and advanced the kill chain with AI. He has sworn to defend the constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. Then tragedy struck, yet he is still committed to protecting stable civilization. He will arm his fellows with the information to help them survive, revive and thrive both in their families and after tragedy.

The tragedy has propelled me to write a three-book series on how to rebuild civilization with a community based constitutional government I call a Limitocracy. It is not like any government ever seen or theorized. I wrote down the concept for a political science theoretical paper that no one was intended to read. Now I am crafting it into a compelling story with the heroes of a tragedy forming the Limitocracy so that they will not suffer under foreign rule (be that human or AI).

In the future, the plan is to launch a book of fables to help people out of prison, both mental and physical ones. And if I still have energy after that, and WWIII has not made it impossible, then I will write a series of children’s stories teaching them how to read with an experimental phonetics type.