Our Quest for Freedom: Building
[This is from my latest book Our Quest for Freedom and other essays]
You don’t necessarily need to have a written plan before you start building something, but ideally you should have a general idea of what you are planning to do and what the end product should look like!
Our building for a free future therefore necessarily starts with imagining it.
By coming together to discuss this, by exchanging ideas, we are in fact creating a culture.
Because this culture stands outside all the thinking of the current system, and bases its outlook on completely different, even opposite, principles, it is a counterculture.
Fellow freedom fighter Crow Qu’appelle has called for “a strategy of cultural inversion (creating a counterculture by consciously rejecting the values of the dominant culture), exodus (exiting mainstream society), and ethnogenesis (turning a counterculture into a permanent culture)”.
From this, it is clear that a sense of purpose forms as much a part of this counterculture as it does of the individual who devotes his or her life to spirit, truth and freedom.
It is a conscious rejection of current society – an “inversion” that is, in truth, merely the reversal of this society’s inversion of natural order.
Our rejection has the conscious purpose of exiting this society and creating something real and long-standing outside its control.
This kind of idea has been around for a long time of course, but I have noticed that it is one that has been seriously revived in the 2020s.
There has been a reaction in the human soul against the grim future presented to us by the Covid-pretexted Great Reset, a strongly-felt yearning to live otherwise.
In practical terms this means seeking a simple, self-sufficient life beyond the urban matrix of control.
We can all take immediate steps in that general direction – I thought some useful suggestions in this respect were made by a now-disappeared blog, At the Grassroots.
It quoted Bill Mollison in pointing out: “To let people arrange their own food, energy and shelter is to lose economic and political control over them.
“We should cease to look to power structures, hierarchical systems, or governments to help us, and devise ways to help ourselves”.
It also quoted Jules Dervaes of urbanhomestead.org: “Growing food yourself has become the most radical of acts.
“It is truly the only effective protest: one that can – and will – overturn the corporate powers that be.
“By the process of directly working in harmony with nature, we do the one thing most essential to change the world – we change ourselves”.
So the psychological change that we need in order to revolt goes hand in hand with a physical change, the embracing of the need for simplicity and self-sufficiency as the purposeful foundation of a counterculture that aims to cut itself free from the system.
Our Quest for Freedom and other essays can be downloaded for free here or purchased here.
Well said, prisoner 1141183891920!
Thoughtcrime — it's a beautiful thing.
This is one of the underlying reasons we came to live here in la France profonde, armed with our copy of John Seymour (aka 'big boys book of self-sufficiency'; well, big girls too, obviously).
This is a village of around 230 people, with half the houses apparently empty. We've been daydreaming for years now about getting a whole load of anarchist/creative/artist/artisan types to come in and occupy all these houses. We would soon outnumber the locals. Except that kind of thing needs a start-up fund - we'd need things like solar panels on all the roofs. But we have noticed how pretty much everyone here grows their own. We have a lot of forest around here as well so everyone seems to also have wood-burners.
But I totally agree about a simple first step is to grow your own. It's one of the most spiritually satisfying feelings, and quite revelatory, in a way. Having schoolchildren learning how to grow food should be on the curriculum. No prizes for understanding why the bad guys don't do that.
Well, now that I mention all of that, given that it's spring and the weather is clement, I really should stop sitting in front of this digital cage and go and, excuse my Anglo-Saxon (and don't tell the neighbours - they're French), fuck some shit into our veggie patches, followed by some seeding...