Our Quest for Freedom: Preparing and Boycotting

[This is from my latest book Our Quest for Freedom and other essays]

Preparing

Modern life is designed to be congested and complicated.

The ruling rip-off merchants have sold us so much surplus material on the basis of the “needs” they have manufactured that many people are quite lost.

They do not think they could live without the devices and infrastructures built purely to disempower, exploit and control them.

Ridding ourselves of these attachments is a key part of our preparation for the battle to come and the free world that it will deliver.

The best way to fulfil all your needs is to reduce them to the bare minimum.

Simplifying your life is hacking off one of the ropes that keeps you bound to the system.

What do we really need in life? We need food, water, shelter, heat in winter. We need each other – friendship, co-operation, culture, warmth and love.

I would say that we also need meaning in our existence, in order to be fully human.

But beyond that? Do we really need all their glittery junk, all the empty artifice of Guy Debord’s Spectacle, all the hypocritical gaudiness of Mike Driver’s Carousel?*

Or is it rather that they need us to need all of that, to keep our heads turned away from truth and spirit?

All their industry – their economic growth and technological “progress” – is a prison in which they have trapped us.

It is, at the same time, the physical process by which their usury becomes real, by which they gobble up our lives and our world to further expand the global cyst of their sustainable greed.

Investment requires return. Money is debt. Debt bears interest. On and on turn what William Blake called the “cogs tyrannic” of their dark satanic industrial-financial mills, grinding our children’s flesh into the pulp of their profit.

If we can’t see beyond their world, if we can’t rediscover our real needs, if our imagined future is nothing but a reformed version of their future, then we will never escape their tyranny.

If we try to build our own future using their tools, according to their designs, based on their assumptions, then we will simply build an alternative prison which they can easily come back and take over.

Their world is the physical manifestation of their outlook, that negation of true meaning and value that stands in such stark contrast to the vision that we all cherish in our hearts.

We will need to forget that evil world, shake ourselves free of its black spell.

We start anew. We start from the bottom. We imagine a world that corresponds to our inner notion of what is right and proper and natural and beautiful and then we work out together how that might come to be.

Boycotting

In La Belle Verte, the remarkable 1996 film by Coline Serreau, visitors from another (green) planet explain to their Earthling friends that they exited their own industrial phase by means of a great boycotting of the system’s products.

What happens if we refuse to work for the global mafia, refuse to spend their money, pay their bills?

What happens if we turn our backs on their toxic medicines, their devious distractions, their little luxuries, their carefully cultivated habits and dependencies?

What happens if we refuse to listen to them, acknowledge them, speak their language, play their game?

What happens if we stop co-operating, believing, submitting, obeying – if we finally stop accepting the utterly unacceptable?

[Audio version]

Mike Driver’s essay can also now be found here:

The Carousel

Our Quest for Freedom and other essays can be downloaded for free here or purchased here.