Our Story

My name is Dustin Swartz. I am the author of The Tao of Helping Others, forthcoming in 2026.

When I was a child, I was diagnosed with Oppositional Defiance Disorder. Where most people saw a problem kid, I see now what that diagnosis really meant: I was born unable to accept a lie just because an authority figure told it. I questioned everything — not out of spite, but because something deep inside me refused to comply with systems that didn't make sense. That instinct never left. It sharpened.

I have a love of art, nature, and animals. I study history and philosophy — not the sanitized versions they hand you in school, but the real currents that move beneath the surface of civilizations. I am a practicing Daoist, beginning my journey toward becoming a Daoist priest. The Tao teaches that the sage does not compete — he observes, he flows, he acts at the precise moment when action is required and not a moment before.

As a Daoist, I understand what is happening — the patterns, the cycles, the turning of ages that the ancient sages wrote about thousands of years ago. And as a man with Oppositional Defiance Disorder, I see every move being made. I see the chess pieces shifting on the board. Combined, these two lenses give me clarity about what my purpose is here.

I will help my community in the coming years. I will provide the guidance and wisdom of a sage when asked. I will teach everyone who wants to learn how to maneuver within a system of control that constantly fails you — a system designed to rob you of your spiritual wealth, your financial independence, and your physical health. This is not paranoia. This is pattern recognition. This is history repeating itself, and this time we have the tools to see it clearly.

We have no choice now. Assimilate and conform, or fade away into history as a number lost. Those are the options the system gives you. But there is a third way — the way of the Tao. We support each other. We network. We communicate. We build together a local system designed to withstand the storm and sustain the people around us, in the ways we each know how. That is what Swartz's Organics is. That is what Apex Electrical is. That is what everything I build will be — a node in a network of people who refuse to go quietly.

The kingdom is not in a building. It is not in a government. It is not in any institution that asks for your obedience in exchange for safety. The kingdom is within you — and paradoxically, it is also all around you, in every living thing, in every connection between people who choose to see clearly. Terence McKenna understood this. The mystics of every tradition understood this. The Tao Te Ching says: "The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao." You cannot be handed the truth. You have to go inward to find it. And when you do, you realize it was never hidden — you were just taught to look in the wrong direction.

This is why I grow plants. This is why I wire houses. This is why I write. This is why I built this website. Every single thing I do is in service of one idea: that ordinary people, working together with clear eyes and open hearts, can build something that no system of control can take from them.

If you're reading this, you already feel it. The ground is shifting. The old structures are cracking. What comes next depends entirely on whether we face it alone or face it together.

I choose together.