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By Matthew P. Holbert
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.~ Jiddu
Krishnamurti
In the previous article, the author described an alternative paradigm, which, if followed,
may have the potential to set humanity absolutely, unconditionally free. The Sickness of our
society, as Jiddu Krishnamurti, a modern day sage indicated, must be something we deadjust ourselves to.
Transcending this disorder of perpetual growth could be the equivalent of going from
hunter gatherers to small scale agrarians. Indeed, modern life resembles more the survivalbased wilderness than it does any civilized form of human activity. Even a cursory
understanding of history will show that our current society is in a dark age; stagnant,
disordered, and corrupt. At this point the problem is not merely in the politicians, but in the
culture which spawns them; not the transnational corporations in themselves, but their
influence over the very character of our laws and government, to the point where the only
way to solve this dilemma is by abolishing the entire system, and starting over.
If we can agree to this principle of fundamental reconstruction, we can start building on our
previous description of an alternative paradigm; we will explore ways in which we can create
this brighter future, as well as the daily lives of the citizens themselves. It is not enough to
simply project a model of reality, nor simply to communicate that idea on social media, or
by word of mouth. To transform our world from a consumerist, materialistic, narcissistic
cult, to a holistic, ecological, we cultureplanetary in scope, and universal in principlea
fundamental transformation must take place (of thought and consciousness within the
individuals, populations, and cultures of the planet).
For this to occur, a major shift in the behaviors and activities of common, every-day people
must emerge; their emotions and conscience affected by truth towards a shining light of
hope, beyond this Rothschild death trap, I mean debt trap; indeed, beyond even the glowing
box in our living rooms. Dare I say it our phones and computers too? Turning off the
television, picking up a shovel, a book, or a pen and peering into the hearts and minds of
fellow human beings; in that lies the simple answer: non-participation in the current
paradigm, and participation in the new one. This is not impossible, impossible is perpetual
petroleum-based industrial growth. Simple isn't easy, but nothing worthwhile ever is.
Therefore, let us consider our present situation for a moment: globally, banks have taken
over the world, governments are corrupted by money, and the people (you and I) have no
voice beyond local municipalities if they are lucky. Privilege, when it is not earned, is like
theft, and indeed exaltation, and sovereignty without merit is a kind of enslavement and
mastery over a people--all manifested by lies. Truth, and truth alone will set us free. The
truth is that we are all divine, sovereign, and capable of living without the imposed will of
those in power over top of us.
To discover is to know. Therefore, it is not my intention to convince the audience that their
government is corrupt, that is for them to discover on their own; my intent is to describe an
alternative paradigm, and convince the reader that it is worthwhile, and perhaps even more
advantageous than the current paradigm; but in order to do that one must make clear the
reasons for that separation. Our species is headed, like the Titanic, strait for extinction. But
in more ways than a few there needs to be change. Culturally, Americans live in a vacuum of
titillation, conveniences, and consumption.
Breaking people out of the zombie trance of modern culture is like injecting the anti-virus
directly into their brain. Yes they are going to fight you, try to bite you, maybe even spit on
you, but when the truth finally hits their brain, they will come to their senses and start
helping. The world is not full of insane psychopaths, its full of uninformed children. And if
we are ever to be adults of this universe, we must overcome, take the power back from the
psychopaths, and inform the children so as to create wise adults capable and truly worthy of
living in this magnificent universe. The solution is education.
Non-violent revolution, being a manifestation of conscience and organization, represents an
evolution of human awareness; and depending upon the depth of those conscious
individuals that compose that evolution, as well as the sophistication and complexity of their
organization, a fundamental shift in first principles may occur, resulting in the kind of
alternative paradigm we explored in the first article. To do so, we may want to examine and
retrospectively analyze the work of Gene Sharp; his book: From Dictatorship to
Democracy, lists 198 methods of non-violent action to overthrow a dictatorial government.
Natural law states that just governments derive their powers from the consent of the
governed. And it is when government becomes destructive of human rights, the
environmentwhat it should be protectingthat it is the right and duty of every person
with the wherewithal to realize it, to throw off such government, and provide new guards
for their future security. To quote the Declaration of Independence:
Prudence indeed, shall dictate, that governments long established should not be changed
for light, or transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are
more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing
the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations
evinces a design, of invariably the same object, to reduce them under absolute despotism, it
is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and provide new guards for their
future security
.
In the spirit of this declaration; in the spirit of natural law, and the legacy of human
endeavor, it is our divine right to alter or to abolishwith something equal to or betterour
forms of governance when they become largess or corruptand it shall always be our right.
When government goes malign, belligerent, shadowed, and insecure, seeking to monitor
and control all human activity, its existence, its concept must be disintegrated! When the
prison complex becomes privatized and profit-based, and the populations of prisons
seems as if the Monarchs of the world have let their powers combine, to create a great dark
deity, and we shall call him Moloch.
Say hello to your new God, good god, good, god, Moloch! And what is his religion all about?
Pop Music! Rock and Roll! Blue Jeans! Going to the Mall! Going to school and getting a
house, a T.V., and a X-Box! The American dream has resigned itself to a weekend stupor,
with all the conveniences and distractions that corporations bring to deliver us from reality.
Indeed we have a new religion in this country: the mall is our church, the television our
preacher; the federal reserve note our cross; taxes are our collecting plate; corporations are
our celestial bodies; and video games represent a vicarious proxy reality; which you play to
feel what you do not in real life: alive! In reality, you are not free, and you have no life, and
that is why you play video games, which is why you seek entertainments: to fill that void of
genuine love for life that you have lost through conformity to a system that is profoundly
sick. What you are seeking, in truth, is enlightenment.
This is why play in nature at a young age is so important: to realize the magnificence and
complexity of reality. But beyond even this, populations of critical thinking people, welleducated and with abundant time, is without a doubt preferable to dull witted mobs, poorly
educated for a republic, let alone a democracy. Yet the media, for this reason, is of
maximum importance-- really a limb of the organism we call civilization. What we ingest
mentally is what we are.
Our government's hidden hand is propaganda through the media. In the first lines in his
book Propaganda (1928),(nephew of world renown psychologist, Sigmund Freud) Edward
Bernays claims, THE conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and
opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who
manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is
the true ruling power of our country.
Indeed war and propaganda go together like peanut butter and jelly, and there is no
shortage of films, advertisements, and staged events worldwide to perpetuate it indefinitely.
It is a statist religion, and cannot be destroyed with more of the same diplomacy within the
framework of a boundary-based society: nations, states, sexes, genders, beliefs, fears, and
ego, all is vanity. We are star stuff to quote Carl Sagan. Consciousness imbued with
matter, matter imbued with consciousness. We are beyond these boundaries. To love, and
live beyond the boundaries means being open to adaptation, to change, and really a kind of
death.
Because the new world, which is coming whether we know it or not, or whether we want it
or not-- by conquest or consent--will cause a fundamental shift in human activity, our only
recourse is to negotiate and further enact this alternative paradigm, thus saving humanity
from debt enslavement. Because this alternative paradigm, which we will call World Citizen,
can and will reciprocate back to its citizens the collective value of human production and
activity, as well as robotic, it is potentially adequate to usher in the new age. However, it
must be recognized that this idea is against the so called New World Order, neo-feudalism
cult, created by the world elite; in fact this alternative paradigm has the potential to make
those powers irrelevant.
However, what this switch requires of the reader, is the conceptualization of the daily life of
a citizen within this system. What laws are there? How do you get paid? What to do with the
time? We shall explore all of these questions and more as we move forward in this article.
Below, we will come to a correlation between the above, and our actions here and now; we
will discover that only through cooperation, collaboration, and union with the great teacher
we call reality, will we ever hope to transcend the limitations of our current systems.
Such a shift means a rebuilding, pretty much from scratch, to form locally governed,
participatory democracies, and a redefinition of what it means to be a citizen. Such a shift,
however, requires more than a mere civics lesson. What it takes is us learning how to play
the role of participant, rather than spectator in our government, radically shifting the
structure of power. Especially when the government, top to bottom, becomes corrupt, the
only safe and honest depository of power is in the hands of the people.
Therefore, let us imagine that we have non-violently revolted against the corporate state,
and psychologically recovered from the psychopathic culture, inculcated from the top of the
pyramid down from media propaganda; and rather than Neo-Feudalism, with
internationalist oligarchs administering authority down to the peons below, an anarchon
(rulerless) democracy would distribute power as equally, and as fairly as possible through
council-based systems of polity.
This is a story of Citizen _. We could put any letter of the alphabet in that space to represent
the different forms of beneficial contributions humans can make: a is for artist, b for
business, c for craft, d for design, e for engineering, all the way up to Citizen X, which is the
undefined and unknown possibilities of human invention and endeavor. Therefore, for now,
perhaps we can say that Citizen X represents a kind of combination of all, hence we shall
name the character of our story, describing our alternative paradigm, Citizen X.
When X wakes up from a night of deep sleep, she does so because her circadian rhythms are
in natural harmony with the sun. This is made possible because of the integration of new
technology with cutting edge design; without the constraints of a profit motive that
encourages designed obsolescence, its incentives reversed to create the best products for the
least cost to non-renewable resources; X's home, whether rural or urban, has a natural flow
with natureboth inwardly and outwardly, to reflect the inward and outward relationship
within the human psyche.
Although X has a primarily plant-based diet, she does eat eggs, which are grown locally on
community land, and she goes hunting with her friends every once in a while. Because the
food industry was one of the industries to collapse, and subsequently be dismantled, the
necessity to survive became all that mattered. This, however, was not a tragedy, but a
blessing. The resultant world from that sacrifice became the place of abundance X now takes
for granted. For breakfast, X has three eggs, half an onion, two cloves of garlic, some thyme,
half a green pepper, and she eats an apple on the sideall locally grown in green houses and
To attain a level of civilization greater than the previous form, the people of our citizen X's
region determined that socialization of transportation should be included in the universal
basic income of all citizens. However, when one has attained a level of contribution
compatible with acquiring a private vehicle, that person can indeed own a car, a boat, a jet,
etc. privately. For this reason there are far fewer cars on the road, and less sprawl than in
the 20th century. Also, because bikes have been socialized as well, far fewer people need or
want vehicular transportation. For this reason, however, our citizen arrives to work on
time.
Because the impetus of poverty has been reversed, due in part to the altered economic
premise described in the previous article, the desire to live in the city increases with every
opportunity to be a benefit to society. However, those who choose to be of benefit to the
environment still do so by being either an urban farm planner, or a rural farmer. Our citizen
has the occupation of being an urban farm planner, and has chosen to describe her plans for
a wheat grass project for the coming animal restoration concept that she has been working
on for years.
Her plan is to allow certain animals to be free to roam in the city, with natural bridges and
other methods to keep them and us from human activities. The idea comes with the advent
of a mass outcry for more natural urban environments. There has also been a suggestion
that in times of need, these animals could become food, and that because they will be
normalized around humans, they will be an easy way to access needed nutrients if
something like a blight or a famine were to somehow happen.
Because the economy of this new paradigm has become totally localized, the issue at hand is
to be self-sufficient. For this reason, our citizens plan has the potential to improve the selfsufficiency of the city areas, and to improve the overall aesthetic by allowing animals to have
a place in the urban environmentwithin certain limits of course. Allowing animals to be in
cities improves the lives of citizens by having an available food source, and one which
requires no industrial effort to maintain, and no transportation.
For the above reason, the city that our citizen has been traveling through looks more like a
garden than a modern city (commercial prison). The ground is covered in different grasses,
herbs, weeds, and vegetation. Because the flow of traffic has been spaced out between riding
bikes, free taxi, and light rail more area on the pathways of the city have been widened for
walking. The lush forest floor of the city resembles the local ecology of what existed prior to
the existence of western influence.
Arriving to work with a small pot of lemon grass, our citizens occupation consists of
planning and creating the new city landscape described above. The pot of lemon grass was
purchased to suggest a new direction for the rooftop gardensusing lemon grass instead of
or alongside of wheat grass.
The day of work starts with an hour of getting settled, and a group meeting for an hour.
Council-based approaches to decision making, and grouped pay gradation ensures
everyone's best interest is being served by serving excellently. That is, if the business or
organization has a grade of B, all of its workers are graded B as well, meaning that the CEO
and the janitor have the same grade of luxury allowance. Certain occupations, like teaching
young children, will grant higher gradation of luxury based on their effort and objective
performance. However, the consumption of an individual can and will be influenced by the
will of the surrounding public, depending upon the degree to which the surrounding lives
are affected by said consumption (for instance buying spotlights for your front lawn, or loud
speakers).
Citizen X is off to her group meeting, her pot of lemon grass in hand. At the meeting she
suggests the new grass for next season, suggesting that it might also attract new wild life on
the ground level. The group unanimously approves of the notion, and submits the idea to
the public forums (including an engineering and design forum, which plays a hand in
decision making in engineering and design councils, which were formed by interested
citizens of the society in an emergent, self-governing body). If the idea gets approved by the
community, the motion will be passed to the next stage. After its approval, the new seeds
will be purchased by the consumption councils of that area, and dispersed among the
participating regions subdivisions.
On the ground, the people have the freedom to cultivate the city floor however they like
within the context of the neighborhood council structure of decision making, and flexible
natural law, natural rights principles (meaning you can pretty much do whatever you want
within reason: you cant burn all the crops on a city block without consulting the
neighborhood council first).
The neighborhood where cultivation takes place has a commons atmosphere, and everyone
works together and individually to create a more livable area. Breaking down the boundaries
of the previous age, the people of this civilization have a cultural condition magnificently
different from western paradigms. Theirs is a more cooperative endeavor, evenly paced with
the notion of prioritizing the journey, rather than the destination, and recognizing that with
a worthy goal in mind at heart, that is the destinationour civilization a success. The use of
fluid chaos and rigid order, rather than just rigid order, manifests the dream of a Garden of
Eden.
Creating an order that is alive with activity, change, and productivity means the paradigm
can finally be rectified, requiring the dutiful self-sacrifice that every person on earth
dreads... at first. It is only because of the conveniences which modern culture and
consumption capitalism create, that we forget about self-sacrifice, and the great mystery of
existence. Only an alive mind can create an alive world; the world is merely a reflection of
the aggregate human being. Therefore, once a person is done work, if their life ends there,
so too does the whole of humanity; in truth their life does not end, nor their work.
After worka four hour day todayour citizen goes home to her apartment, not far from
where she works. When she gets home, she equips herself for gardening, and joins her local
community in tending to the permaculture landscape. Other citizens are creating art,
playing music, and sharing knowledge; all of the above reciprocated with universal
necessities: food, clothing, shelter, transportation, medical care, information, etc. In this
way, everyone can be said to be equal, but their actual level of contribution can be recorded
and reciprocated through a luxury or investment allowance as well. [By investment the
and realize that the only limitations upon us are those that have been self-imposed.
Speaking of self-imposed limitations, laws reflect the civilization that contrives them. It has
been written in the esoteric spiritual text, the Tao Te Ching, that the more laws you have,
the more criminals you will have. This is common sense, and yet look at the prison
population in America. It's Huge! What are we going to do about this? I have some ideas,
but that is for another article. Suffice to say, federal laws will be abolished. Federal
governments in general will be abolished, but for the emergent council-based structures,
answerable to the public. [Reminder, council members are subject to total transparency,
their lives recorded to ensure the most possible scrutiny]
Having developed an alternative comprehensive enough to get us beyond neo-feudalism, all
it takes now is the actions and vocalized dissent of those who recognize the cultural
disorder, and demand for a new system beyond the mainstream's ability to cover up or deny
its legitimacy. Indeed, it has been said that the cure to 1984 is 1776, and indeed the spirit of
revolution, the green revolution must, within our time, come to fruition! Doing so
peacefully, however, lends far more credibility, and ensures that the outcome will be without
secrets, debt, or infrastructural degradation.
The outcome of a peaceful revolution has implications for transparency, as well as the
disintegration of debt via Jubilee, and as we have seen in Iceland and other places, the
nullification of banking cartels and the installation of a more integrated democracy is
possible. To not act at this point would seem nothing more than cultural suicide. The choice
is yours, and always it has been; standing by while everything worthwhile is being raped and
plundered, and not trying to impede the slaughter only makes the problem that much
worse. Remember this if nothing else: heaven and hell exist here and now, depending upon
the choices we make and the perspectives we take. The changes you want to see in the world
will always come from within to without.
The way to start this evolution, other than the obvious activism and vocalized dissent, is to
start creating communities based on the principles expressed above: cashless, reciprocitybased economy, participatory, council-based systems of economy and polity, natural law,
and self-sufficiency. Many of these principles are already in place in communities under the
School of Living umbrella. Indeed, it is the authors intent to call the School of Living into
action, not only as a catalyst for community, but to act as an entity for the full spectrum of
education within or without the communities. It is time for the school of living to enter into
a new century, taking on a new role as the facilitator of the first ever developmental
education process as described in the previous article. This, I believe, would have been
approved by Ralph Borsodi, as his list of universal problems of humanity would suggest.
In conclusion, to summarize the above, our non-violent green revolution has begun with
this article and hundreds if not thousands of others like it. The potential outcome of this
shift will be determined by the actions of you, me, and everyone in cooperation with one
another, or in dysfunction. The question that I-I will leave you with is this, how long will you
cooperate with this profoundly sick society before you get wise and really start doing
something about it?