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We are like passengers on the Titanic ten minutes after its fatal encounter with the iceberg: though our financial system seems unsinkable, its reliance on debt and financialization has already doomed it.

We cannot know when the Central State and financial system will destabilize, we only know they will destabilize. We cannot know which of the State’s fast-rising debts and obligations will be renounced; we only know they will be renounced in one fashion or another.

The process of the unsustainable collapsing and a new, more sustainable model emerging is called revolution. In the shared imagination, the word conjures up images of violent overthrow of a political order. In this book, revolution describes a blossoming of understanding so profound that it leads to the peaceful transformation of our social order, economy and culture.

Our distance from concentrations of wealth and power does not render us powerless; we become powerful when we renounce the lies and complicity that enable the Status Quo's doomed dominance.

History is not fixed; it is in our hands. We cannot await a remote future transition to transform our lives. Revolution begins with our internal understanding and reaches fruition in our coherently directed daily actions in the lived-in world.

It’s easy to confuse faith and political ideology. We resist changing our understanding, as we experience this transition as instability. But changing our minds does not require changing our faith; rather, the firmness of our faith—in our Creator, in truth, in our ability to help others and prevail—is the bedrock that gives us the discipline and resolve to confront the brutally unwelcome facts of our circumstances and make coherent plans accordingly.

This is the basic credo of liberation:

“I no longer care if the power centers of our society—the distant, fortified castles of our financial feudal system—are changed by my actions, for I am liberated by the act of resistance. I am no longer complicit in perpetuating fraudulent feudalism and the pathology of concentrated power. I no longer covet signifiers of membership in the Upper Caste that serves the plutocracy. I am liberated from self-destructive consumerist-State financialization and the delusion that debt servitude and obedience to sociopathological Elites serve my self-interests.”

As an example, nothing is more apolitical than food, according to the Status Quo. Yet this is entirely backward; nothing is more political than food, for it either sustains us and our freedom or it indentures us to disease and dependence on the Savior State’s immensely profitable sickcare system, i.e. the abomination known as “healthcare” that profits from chronic disease, not health.

From the Status Quo perspective, the citizen who bicycles to work is either a “health nut” or some outlier who perversely refuses the obvious convenience and comfort of the auto. From the point of view of one who has experienced an inner revolution of understanding, then the simple machinery of the bicycle has freed the citizen from dependence on the oil complex and its enforcer, the State, and also from the sickcare system and its enforcer, the State.

In the consumerist mindset, riding a bicycle to work is an apolitical “personal choice” that is meaningless on the larger stage. To the citizen with a revolutionary understanding, every bicycle ride is an overtly political act of resistance against the concentrations of capital that maintain their power over the State via dependence on oil, auto-centricity, and sickcare.

To the unaware citizen burdened with multiple chronic diseases brought on by a corporate-supplied diet of packaged food and fast food and a sedentary life based on the worship of “convenience,” then buying frozen pizza and fast-food are apolitical, “personal choice” actions. To the citizen with a revolutionary understanding, then these are the actions of the indentured, and the refusal to consume packaged “food” that no caring consumer would feed their dog lest it sicken and die is a deeply and overtly political act of resistance.

There are no apolitical “personal choice” acts; there are only profoundly political acts of resistance or complicity. (pages 205-6)


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Copyright 2008-2012 Charles Hugh Smith all rights reserved in all media. No reproduction in any media in any format (text, audio, video/film, web) without written permission of the author.
 
                                                                         
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