Life During Wartime
This article was first published in the September issue of Conscious Choice magazine.
Since my early memories of watching the Watergate hearings on my grandmother’s couch when I was a kid, I always felt alienated and disenfranchised from the political process. Although I participated in the occasional protest, even that activity seemed like a meaningless and almost nostalgic gesture to me. My impression of politics was of a rigged spectacle of manufactured consent, a system that only allowed for compromise or capitulation to the corporate and financial interests that pulled the puppet strings of power. From this perspective, the rise of George Bush seemed natural and inevitable.
After the dissolution — by many accounts, the targeted destruction — of the Radical Left in the early 1970s, many progressives abandoned any hope of transforming the system and turned to other pursuits, from Buddhism to academia to business to literary and creative endeavors. Younger people like myself followed in their footsteps. Despite our uneasy awareness of the destructive effects of U.S. policies across the world, many of us felt that the most meaningful and important work we could do was to change ourselves and actualize our individual potential. Seeking personal and spiritual fulfillment, we abandoned the sphere of politics to the bureaucrats, PR flacks and corrupt sycophants who seemed to thrive in it.
In recent years, we have witnessed an accelerating degeneration of the U.S. political system, from rule of law to rule by force. Most of us have avoided confronting the shocking meaning of this change. As Al Gore writes in The Assault on Reason, the executive branch, with the complicity of the legislative and judiciary branches, has dismantled much of the separation of powers carefully guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution. At the same time, we have embarked on a “War on Terrorism” that can never be won since our enemy is not a state but potentially anyone who chooses violent means of resistance, along with seemingly unending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We are facing a new situation, and it is critical we understand the full parameters of what is taking place. The bestselling Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, offers a valuable analysis of current sociopolitical trends. Negri and Hardt are bidding to be the Marx and Engels of our time. Beneath the current crisis of political legitimacy, they see an enormous potential for liberation: the possibility of constituting a global democracy, a planetary “society without a state,” with a new set of institutions, legal codes, and social systems.
Hardt and Negri base their analysis on a number of factors. Following Marx, they believe that changing forms of material production shape human consciousness. In recent times, there has been a shift in emphasis from industrial goods — cars, food, clothing, etc. — to the “immaterial production” of software, media, ideas, images and affective relationships. Immaterial production tends to be a collaborative and communal process, and one that directly impacts and reshapes our social reality. For instance, a software advance in computer networks or mobile phones gives us new ways to connect with each other, while a popular new film might imprint a new style of interacting. Realizing that conditions have changed since Marx’s vision of class struggle and a revolutionary proletariat, Hardt and Negri postulate a global multitude of individuals that communicate through the shared space of the commons and could organize themselves through distributed networks.
Our increasingly networked society points toward a new global orchestration that would eliminate the need for a centralized state apparatus. For this to happen, the multitude would have to realize a shared political project — not just demonstrating against the powers-that-be, as in the massive international protests against the Iraq war, but self-organizing into a truly constitutive body. Although they admit they do not know how this takes place, Negri and Hardt theorize that “insurrectional activity” is no longer divided into successive stages, as in the revolutions of the modern era, but “develops simultaneously.” They note, “Resistance, exodus, the emptying out of the enemy’s power and the multitude’s construction of a new society are one and the same process.”
The sudden fall of the Berlin Wall showed that power structures collapse when the multitude swarms against them. Unfortunately, without advanced planning, such opportunities do not lead to positive outcomes. If we are approaching a similar breakthrough in the West, we require an alternative vision and practical systems that support a shift to a healthier way of life. Some stirrings in this direction include movements like Transition Town in the UK, where local communities are preparing themselves for the effects of peak oil and climate change.
Many of us cut ourselves off from participating in a hypocritical society’s power games in order to seek spiritual or creative fulfillment. However, at a time when war has become a “permanent social relation,” and the planet’s life support systems are in jeopardy, we need to rethink our priorities. Ultimately, our commitment to self-knowledge and our responsibility to society cannot be separated. Reinventing politics through human connections and community actions is a true spiritual path.
Image by MShades, used through a Creative Commons license.
Tweet- 10-8-07
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Indeed...
Yep. For a long time I ranted on just this subject at all the progressive blogs I could find, about how it wasn't enough to catalog the sins of the war party and its enablers, that the power of the blogosphere wasn't being used in the way you describe. It still isn't!
We can't be spiritually or creatively fulfilled in a vacuum where wars and repression don't exist. The pain of the larger society as a whole is inseparable from the emotional energy expended in our individual struggles.
The Vacuum
how to do it?
Hi John,
If you have some creative ideas about how to make this change from negative critique to active organizational infrastructure using the Internet, you should write an essay on it for Reality Sandwich.
The best option I have heard is use of Identity Commons or I-Names, which includes User-Centric Profiling that could allow organizations to recognize individuals according to their affiliations with intermeshed groups and projects, so there would be no redundancy in reaching people.
"Will the transformation."-Rilke
Are we more effective now?
Many of us seem to have been snookered into the idea that we are powerless. I think your suggestion that we recognize the connection between personal journeys and national/cultural/planetary ones just might be the only way to break ourselves of the "but I'm just one person" habit.
With the sense that the barrier between the physical and the mental is thinning, do you think that changes an individual's ability to enact change? Is one person's psychic "voice" louder now than it used to be, so smaller groups of people can enact greater change?
A Noospheric society based on Love
Very interesting..... I am particularly taken by the idea of a “society without a state”. With the global emergence of the Internet, something like a truely legitimate one-vote-per-citizen democracy is now possible. But of course, the current status quo is not going to willingly reliquish power to the people.... some "deus ex machina" catalyst is probably required. Or a global awakening (which actually could be the same thing.)
Some people have been imagining this scenario quite articulately for many years. When I try to imagine the possibility of an earthly utopia, the social organization I concieve of would more closely resemble a religious/spiritual organization than a governmental one. In order for this to happen, I think the social concepts that most urgently need to be re-visioned are the crime and punishment system, and the current distribution of wealth among the people. We have some serious problems in these areas in our society.
From my experiences having discussions and participating in rituals at Burning Man and in various "counter-culture" circles it seems like the future we are trying to imagine is a society based on artistic values of compassion, understanding, and intuitive knowledge and wisdom. I think the noosphere will also play an integral part in this drama, if indeed our global consciousness is crystallizing in a collective telepathic mind as it appears to be.
The lyrics from John Lennon's song "Imagine" (which, by the way, since 9-11 is now banned on Clear Channel radio) still ring true for me...
"Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace"
noospheric organization
hi tristan,
interesting idea that the future organization would resemble a "spiritual" rather than a "governmental" system.
whether democracy is what people actually want is an interesting question. I heard my friend the raw foodist David Wolfe say recently that he thought "enlightened monarchy" was the only workable form of government.
ken and i are interested in the "smartocracy" concept of Brad DeGraf (a websearch should turn it up) where people nominate those people they have trust in to make decisions in different areas. I think the main thing that is needed is a system that is based on trust and transparency, which would be the opposite of the present one.
as for inequity, we may be on the verge of a mass realization of the nature of "fictitious capital," and how the global financial system has worked to hoodwink the multitudes from seeing the systems of privilege that protect the small oligarchic class. The great gift of the Bush administration is how transparent it has made the machinations of power - things weren't that different under Clinton/Gore, they were still selling NAFTA and the World Bank across the planet, and avoiding confronting the reality of eco-destruction, but they were doing it in the costumes of nice, compassionate, liberal guys.
"Will the transformation."-Rilke
No "enlihtened monarch"
It ultimately comes down to an issue of democracy. "We came to see that the conflicts over water are really about fundamental questions of democracy itself: Who will make the decisions that affect our future, and who will be excluded?" wrote Alan Snitow, Deborah Kaufman and Michael Fox in their recent book Thirst. "And if citizens no longer control their most basic resource, their water, do they really control anything at all?"
"In an age when man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs for survival, water has become the victim of his indifference," Rachel Carson wrote.
Our Drinkable Water Supply Is Vanishing
By Tara Lohan, AlterNet
October 11, 2007
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, the Hungarian biochemist and Nobel Prize winner for medicine once said, "Water is life's matter and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water."
We depend on water for survival. It circulates through our bodies and the land, replenishing nutrients and carrying away waste. It is passed down like stories over generations -- from ice-capped mountains to rivers to oceans.
Historically water has been a facet of ritual, a place of gathering and the backbone of community.
But times have changed. "In an age when man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs for survival, water has become the victim of his indifference," Rachel Carson wrote.
As a result, today, 35 years since the passage of the Clean Water Act, we find ourselves are teetering on the edge of a global crisis that is being exacerbated by climate change, which is shrinking glaciers and raising sea levels.
We are faced with thoughtless development that paves flood plains and destroys wetlands; dams that displace native people and scar watersheds; unchecked industrial growth that pollutes water sources; and rising rates of consumption that nature can't match. Increasingly, we are also threatened by the wave of privatization that is sweeping across the world, turning water from a precious public resource into a commodity for economic gain.
The problems extend from the global north to the south and are as pervasive as water itself. Equally encompassing are the politics of water. Discussions about our water crisis include issues like poverty, trade, community and privatization. In talking about water, we must also talk about indigenous rights, environmental justice, education, corporate accountability, and democracy. In this mix of terms are not only the causes of our crisis but also the solutions.
What's gone wrong?
As our world heats up, as pollution increases, as population grows and as our globe's resources of fresh water are tapped, we are faced with an environmental and humanitarian problem of mammoth proportions.
Demand for water is doubling every 20 years, outpacing population growth twice as fast. Currently 1.3 billion people don't have access to clean water and 2.5 billion lack proper sewage and sanitation. In less than 20 years, it is estimated that demand for fresh water will exceed the world's supply by over 50 percent.
The biggest drain on our water sources is agriculture, which accounts for 70 percent of the water used worldwide -- much of which is subsidized in the industrial world, providing little incentive for agribusiness to use conservation measures or less water-intensive crops.
This number is also likely to increase as we struggle to feed a growing world. Population is expected to rise from 6 billion to 8 billion by 2050.
Water scarcity is not just an issue of the developing world. "Twenty-one percent of irrigation in the United States is achieved by pumping groundwater at rates that exceed the water's ability to recharge," wrote water experts Tony Clarke of the Polaris Institute and Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians in their landmark water book Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World's Water.
The Ogallala aquifer -- the largest in the North America and a major source for agriculture stretching from Texas to South Dakota -- is currently being pumped at a rate 14 times greater than it can be replenished, they wrote. And, across the country, "California's Department of Water Resources predicts that, by 2020, if more supplies are not found, the state will face a shortfall of fresh water nearly as great as the amount that all of its cities and towns together are consuming today," add Clarke and Barlow.
Demand is outstripping supply from the rainy Seattle area to desert cities like Tucson and Albuquerque. And from Midwest farming regions to East Coast cities.
The crisis is also worldwide, most noticeable in Mexico, the Middle East, China and Africa.
As population growth, development, consumption and pollution take its toll on our water resources, the ability to fight this problem has been further complicated by the spread of neoliberalism. The same ideas that have resulted in the booty of private contracts being doled out in Iraq also have contributed greatly to our water crisis. Neoliberalism is the belief in "economic liberalism," which espoused that government control over the economy was bad. It opened up the commons to commodification and let corporations privatize what once belonged to the public.
In 2000 Fortune magazine printed this telling statement: "Water promises to be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th century; the precious commodity that determines the wealth of nations."
It has oft been expressed that the next resource wars will not be over oil -- or energy at all -- but over water. As the idea of neoliberalism, proliferated by institutions like the World Bank and the IMF, spread, the public sector has become dangerously privatized. And it may not be the wealth of nations on the line -- but the wealth of corporations.
A senior executive at a subsidiary of Vivendi, the world's largest water controller summed it up, "Water is a critical and necessary ingredient to the daily life of every human being, and it is an equally powerful ingredient for profitable manufacturing companies."
But when private companies control water resources, people's needs for survival are pushed aside in place of the bottom line. In Africa, an estimated 5 million people die each year for lack of safe drinking water. And yet Africa, with its many cash-strapped countries, is targeted by multinationals that force governments to turn over their public water systems in exchange for promises of debt relief.
When corporations control water, rates go up, services go down, and those who can't afford to pay are forced to drink unsafe water, risking their lives. This has happened across the world -- in South Africa, in Bolivia, in the United States.
This same philosophy of corporate control drives the construction of dams, which have displaced an estimated 80 million people worldwide. In India alone, over 4,000 dams have submerged 37,500 square kilometers of land and forced 42 million people from their homes.
Multinationals looking to cash in on the water business have also made giant inroads in selling bottled water in richer countries. Expensive marketing campaigns convince people that their tap water is unsafe to drink. Then, companies like Coke and Pepsi bottle municipal tap water and others like Nestle pilfer spring water from rural communities and resell it at huge profits.
The water crisis may be growing, but so is resistance to privatization as communities are fighting back against the corporate control of the world's most vital resource.
How we can fix it
We need water to survive, not just as individuals, but as communities. Author John Thorson put it perfectly when he said, "Water links us to our neighbor in a way more profound and complex than any other."
Just ask the people of the Klamath Basin of Southern Oregon and Northern California. They've experienced water wars for the last hundred years that have pitted neighbor against neighbor and tribal member against farmer.
Native American tribes in the region -- the Klamath, Hoopa, Karuk, and Yaruk -- with priority rights to water, have struggled with farmers over limited water resources. Nature has been unable to deliver as much water as the government has promised to farmers and tribal members, as well as downstream fishermen. With not enough water in the river, either crops have failed or fish have died, creating community strife and economic hardship.
But in the last year, things have begun to change. These groups have formed a coalition to save the river they all depend on for survival. They are sitting at the same table and finally beginning to hear from each other about the needs of farmers, the value of subsistence economies, the history of families on the river, the ceremony that comes with the salmon runs, the rights of nature.
Together, this unlikely alliance is taking on PacifiCorp, one of the largest multinational power companies, whose out-of-date dams are threatening the ecosystem and the economy of the region.
And just over the peak of Mount Shasta another community and tribe are battling to save their spring water from Nestle, which hopes to tap the community's greatest asset for its own wealth.
The people of the small town of McCloud and the Winnemem Wintu tribe are fighting back, and they are not alone. Across the country a backlash to the bottled-water business is gaining steam. Fancy restaurants like California's Chez Panisse, Incanto, and Poggio and New York's Del Posto have gotten on board. San Francisco has also led the way among municipalities that are beginning to cancel their bottled water contracts, understanding the great harm the industry does to the environment and communities.
It is not just bottled water that has posed a problem, but private companies buying out municipal water systems and then raising rates and lowering services. One the best examples is Stockton, Calif., which went private in the largest "public-private partnership" in the West. Since 2001 the people of Stockton have been fighting for control of their water against a multinational consortium.
The case gained international attention when it was featured in the film and book Thirst: Fighting the Corporate Theft of Our Water. The public finally won out in July, when the city council voted to get rid of the 20-year contract and send the corporation packing.
The citizen groups that have been working to defend their communities are being supported by many national and international groups pushing back against corporate control and empowering people -- groups like Tony Clarke's Polaris Institute in Canada, which has focused on public education and research around issues like the privatization of water services, bulk water exports, water security and bottled water.
In the United States, Corporate Accountability International is encouraging people to drink tap water over bottled water with their "Think Outside the Bottle Campaign." They are working to educate the public, as well as city governments and businesses, with great success.
And today, on the 35th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, Food & Water Watch, is sponsoring a National Call-In Day for action on clean water to urge representatives to support the creation of a clean water trust fund, "which is a long-term, sustainable, and reliable source of funding to upgrade and improve our public water systems." The organization has been working to protect public water systems from private takeover and to help fund municipal water so that all residents have clean, safe and affordable water.
The movement extends across the country and the world as people are also rebelling against the corporate takeover of their municipal water systems -- in California, in Ghana, in Brazil, in Canada, in France, in Indonesia -- and the list goes on.
Opposition to corporate control is rooted in the belief that water is part of the commons. Everyone should have access to clean water, regardless of their level of income or their country's international standing.
In order to ensure that all people have access to clean, affordable water, we need to make some changes.
Some see technology as the necessary fix -- or at least a step in the right direction. As the BBC reports:
New technology can help, however, especially by cleaning up pollution and so making more water useable, and in agriculture, where water use can be made far more efficient. Drought-resistant plants can also help.
Drip irrigation drastically cuts the amount of water needed, low-pressure sprinklers are an improvement, and even building simple earth walls to trap rainfall is helpful.
Some countries are now treating waste water so that it can be used -- and drunk -- several times over.
Desalinization makes sea water available, but takes huge quantities of energy and leaves vast amounts of brine.
But many warn against relying on a "techno-fix" to solve our problems.
Water experts argue that we need to reduce consumption on individual and community levels. Author Tony Clarke advises working with those closest to the problems, such as helping farmers to develop a more sustainable agriculture system. And the same goes for industry. Looking to the folks who have been on the land longest, like indigenous and traditional cultures, will also help us learn how an ecosystem works.
And experts say that we also need to start developing a comprehensive water policy that goes from the regional to international level. The World Bank and United Nations have the capability to change the designation of water from a human need to a human right, ensuring that corporations can't exploit this resource for economic gain, as Clarke and Barlow advocate for in Blue Gold.
Governments should be investing in their people, in conservation and in the infrastructure that we depend on to access clean, affordable water.
It ultimately comes down to an issue of democracy. "We came to see that the conflicts over water are really about fundamental questions of democracy itself: Who will make the decisions that affect our future, and who will be excluded?" wrote Alan Snitow, Deborah Kaufman and Michael Fox in their recent book Thirst. "And if citizens no longer control their most basic resource, their water, do they really control anything at all?"
Tara Lohan is a managing editor at AlterNet.
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/64948
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
T. S. Eliot
Imagine Clarification
After 9/11, Clear Channel issued a long list of songs that its programmers were encouraged to avoid because they might upset listeners in the weeks following the attacks. That was the company's official rationale, tho they seemed to ban nearly any song that could be construed as anti-war. "Imagine" was on that list. Its inclusion attracted a lot of criticism and was a public embarassment for Clear Channel. The list was eventually dropped -- not sure when exactly, but within a year. So "Imagine" does play on Clear Channel stations, as it plays in football stadiums and in the aisles of Wal-Mart. But I'm not sure how much CC airtime my personal Lennon fave "Cold Turkey" gets, not to mention the classic shit stirrer "Woman is the Nigger of the World" or... the original version of "Give Peace A Chance."
Not-so-Clear Channel?
Thanks for clearing that up, Ken. I was under the impression that the list was permanent. They must have gotten enough angry feedback from people that they changed their policy.
It's interesting to me to think about the possible stated or unstated political motivations of Clear Channel in making a ban like that. What was their justification? Something like, After 9-11 we no longer have the stomach to face challenging and potentially unpatriotic lyrics from songs like "Imagine" and Rage Against the Machine songs?
How absurd.
Redirecting Our Actualizing Selves
Here's an interesting passage I found in an interview of Timothy Leary by Marianne Schnall (1995) which also deals with the juxtaposition of self realization against that of social, institutional and/or political rules and order:
http://www.ecomall.com/greenshopping/tim.htm
Timothy Leary: My profession is I’m a dissident philosopher. I’m from the school of Socrates – it’s humanism – the Socratic methods which appeared in Greece over 2,000 years ago, it reappeared as the romantic movement in the eighteenth century – it’s the same movement. It’s called humanism, and its motto is “Think for yourself,” “Question authority” and, as Socrates said, “Know thyself.” The aim of human life is to develop yourself as a philosopher, and it goes along with what’s known as paganism or pantheism or polytheism – that divinity, the divine intelligence – is found within, and is not to be found in institutions. I have one further thing to say about this. This philosophy, which is over 5,000 years old, was assimilated and streamed through the Ganges 4,000 years ago and is the basis of Buddhism, it’s the basis of Taoism in China, it’s the basis of mystical Christianity and Islam – it’s that basically, the interest is Chaos. From the standpoint of a human being, you can’t figure it out and you should avoid people who try to give you rules and regulations and laws, because the laws they’re imposing on you are simply local ordinances to benefit themselves. So that this school of philosophy has always been irreverent, it’s always been outsider, it’s always been dissident and in my life I’ve been lucky enough to have lived through four stages of humanism all based on new media, new forms of communication which have changed our culture. Now we’ve set up this background of what I’m doing in the context that it’s been done throughout all of human history. And it’s called humanism.
* * * * *
I can't (well then again, yes I can) believe that Clear Channel radio has banned John Lennon's Imagine. The tide constantly rises.
I agree with John H. Farr (from his reply below) that, "We can't be spiritually or creatively fulfilled in a vacuum where wars and repression don't exist. The pain of the larger society as a whole is inseparable from the emotional energy expended in our individual struggles."
I find myself looking for ways in which my consciousness, my creativity and my concerted energetic focus can contribute to something other––greater––than Consumerism, the Merchant Society, dictated politics, the War Machine and further disillusionment and betrayal of our own selves here on Planet Earth.
I feel this situation encroaching, often burdoning––which I'd like to transform into a more positively formated encounter. We do have work ahead in our concerted effort in shifting mass human consciousness toward a more humane, healthy and proactive position in co-participation––one of consciousness (thus avoiding the "Will to Ignorance" which Daniel refers to in his 2012 ) . . . one with a truly livable, functionable and sustainable future.
I enjoyed and can appreciate Tristan Gulliford's thoughts on the "'deus ex machina' catalyst" and the integral role of the noosphere (below).What governs spirit, spirits government, no?
Reed Burkhart (just one reed among many :-)
Perhaps, paying attention to what governs our spirits (individually or collectively) may be the best way to evolve what spirits our governments.
This discussion seems close to the collective heartbeat of humanity: the evolving alignment or misalignment between the spirits of individuals and the collective spirit of humanity.
If money and its culture tend to define the collective spirit of humanity, is it perhaps true that humanity's spirit tends to be "governed" today by whatever particular capitalist culture (American capitalism, Chinese capitalism, etc.) each of us finds ourself living in?
Everyone would probably agree that our current governing capitalist culture/s (which some have termed the corporatocracy) are still evolving, no? Perhaps to smartocracy? democracy? autocracy? anarchy? monarchy? ____-cracy?
Shoshana Zuboff has researched and written on the historical evolution of capitalism from what she calls Mercantile Capitalism (spirited by valuing trading) to Proprietary Capitalism (spirited by small-scale manufacturing) to the current Managerial Capitalism (spirited by mass-scale manufacturing) -- pointing out capitalism's robustness due to its inherent adaptability to address problems of the day.
The great question I see is the following: "if capitalism has grown to itself represent perhaps the greatest (underlying) problem of the day, is capitalism adaptable enough to fix itself?" I wonder if Joseph Schumpeter (or Morihei Ueshiba, for that matter) ever asked himself this self-Schumpeterian question.
Recasting the same question with terms such as government and spirit, "is the entrepreneurial spirit of mankind sufficient to excite reform of our popular-culture-governing contemporary capitalist culture?"
Can we capitalists (viewing us all as somewhat warranting -- albeit to lesser or greater degrees -- the moniker "capitalist" rather by default, living as we are in a capitalist age in a capitalist society) see far enough, deeply enough and cleverly enough to proactively evolve contemporary culture (including evolving our policies and practices of corporatocratic government especially evolving its relationship to truth, i.e., spirituality) to realign our spirits as individuals so that our efforts are more strategically working towards a global realignment of individual spirits and the collective spirit of humanity?
I hold great optimism for such spiritual realignment, sensing the immense power born of the inherent spiritual connection between the individual and humanity as a whole ... a power surely more than sufficient to enable such a shift -- a spirited renaissance that evolves our governing capitalist culture -- to occur.
After all, the power of common interest enabled the evolution of capitalism from proprietary to managerial form: via subversion of the former by the latter in the market through spirited strategies of mass scale, high-volume, low unit cost (with byproducts of monoculturalization, high-growth, and sometimes the depletion of human and natural resources).
Is it not possible that the next stage evolution of capitalism could be innovated to respond to a step change realization of truth in commerce: shape-shifting amoral capitalism -- by consciously leveraging any sublimely-spirited "invisible hand"-like forces spiriting or governing the universe? Say for example the invisible one-two punch that we can't keep pumping up the CO2 forever? Or other?
How does the spirit that governs each of us -- perhaps telling us that we need to change things somehow -- get into that influential sphere of the spirit governing government: to engage in some type of Aikido, perhaps, with the spirit of the corporatocracy?
How? Any ideas? Is it possible that this transformation is already occuring, or beginning to occur?
Parallel Government
{The attempt was to have this posted in reply to 'Noospheric Organization', below}
Several months ago I listened to a lecture by Thomas Homer-Dixon, author of "The Ingenuity Gap", and more recently "The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization". He mentioned the idea of Parallel Government as a means to prepare for the coming inadequacies of our current governmental system.
For example, a constituency might begin operating an Open-Tech Forum for decision-making, voluntary and experimental. People would begin to experience and adapt with this form of social organization, without being an opposing political force. Then, when various crises arise, there would be these networks within our society who could fill in to those niches where they have experience and a working model. As I understood it, we start creating our networks and operating our structures parallel to what is going on, in contrast to being a resistive or competitive force.
So, Lord David can Father an ancestral line of Cacao Kings, Good Brother Daniel and friends can begin electing their Smartocrats, and I will join in with whomever is dancing the most. When the bureaucrats of our 18th Century Governments face-up to our 21st Century Crises, we will already be living the solutions and waiting to help...