Seizing a free future!

A lot of interesting comment and debate has been sparked by my recent essay ‘When will the real opposition emerge?’, both here and over at Winter Oak.

So, before going any further, I would like to clarify one particular issue concerning cause and effect.

Yes, of course I am well aware that behind industrialism lies the corrupt and usurious financial mafia operating the global Great Racket.

But although we can certainly identify this criminocracy as the culprit, it is industrial development which is the actual physical act of violence with which it is carrying out the murder of our natural world and of human freedom and well-being.

And if you see a murder taking place, it’s generally a good idea to try to stop it!

Here, I would like to look at two questions which have been raised concerning the post-industrial future I am suggesting.

i. What would this future look like?
ii. How could we get there?

At the risk of disappointing, my answer to the first question is that it is impossible to tie down exactly what it would look like.

This is because it would necessarily vary enormously from place to place, with differences in environment, climate, culture and individual desires naturally resulting in diverse forms of post-industrial living.

There would no doubt be farms, hamlets, villages and, probably, small towns existing in symbiotic harmony with the surrounding hinterland.

In some places people might live in separate family groupings, coming together only to barter and exchange their surplus produce and to celebrate local festivals.

In others they might prefer communities where children are raised not just by their parents, but by a plethora of aunts, uncles, cousins and friends.

Some post-industrial humans would want to farm, others to gather, hunt and fish. Some would stay close to their crops and others would embark on seasonal wanderings, finely attuned to the cycles of nature and weather.

Some groups would be inward-looking and somewhat closed to outsiders, except perhaps for the purposes of marriage, while others would welcome travellers with open arms and benefit from the regular infusion of new blood.

Some might recycle and renovate certain fragments of the industrial age – pedal-powered electric guitars or biofuel motorbikes – some would use tools such as watermills, windmills and pumps, while others would seek out even simpler ways of living.

I would add that this new-old way of living, although inevitably more stable that the ever-accelerating downward spiral of toxic industrialism in which we are currently trapped, would not be static.

Life is not like that. Things tend to change over time. People can adapt to new circumstances, learn from experience or from their neighbours.

They may one day decide – at their local “moot” or gathering – that communal cultivation of the land isn’t working for them and that it would be better if each family looked after their own patch… or the reverse.

They may decide that they no longer need the products they were getting in trade with the folk from the next valley and decide to forge closer links with communities down on the plain.

Although people would be deeply, even spiritually, aware that the disastrous road to industrialism must never be taken again, they might sometimes introduce some new innovation, having carefully considered the implications for the natural world and the seven generations to come.

On the other hand, they might come to see their agricultural lives as being unnecessarily over-complicated and artificial and thus set off to embrace the wild.

The freedom to do what we wish, without centralised control, is essential to the future many of us yearn for.

Democracy is a corrupted word, like so much of the political language with which we try to formulate our ideas, but in its real sense it has to be the foundation of a healthy organic society.

When individuals and communities – which, after all, consist entirely of individuals! – can decide among themselves how they would like to live, this is a democracy worth having.

As those preferences and values became more deeply embedded in the collective consciousness of the community, over several generations, we would see the re-emergence of the rich tapestry of distinct rooted cultures that covered the world until the globalist bulldozers rolled in.

There would not be, and could not be, any standardised religious dogma or infrastructure, but because all humans source their wisdom and values from the same collective soul, and the same essential truth, there would be a universal metaphysical foundation underlying the multiple beliefs and customs of differing peoples, affinities, histories and geographies.

This real democracy, this self-determination, is also the key to the second question as to how we might get from where we are now (gulp!) to where we would like to be.

The initial move would be to collectively decide that we have had enough of this relentless train ride into the depths of hell and to pull the metaphorical communication cord to bring the “progress” of the machine to a halt.

The next phase would be to agree that we need to pull back from our current levels of industrial destruction and to shift the locomotive into reverse.

When we finally concluded together that we had now pulled safely away from disaster, we would get out of the train and wander off into the countryside, in various directions, to build new lives.

This would ideally be a gradual process, carried out over many decades rather than in a catastrophic collapse, thus allowing us to gently adapt to life outside of the high-tech prison. Part of this adaptation would be a natural, instinctive, adjustment of population levels to match the feeding capacity of the territory in question – most species have this ability.

There’s a major obstacle in the way of all this, though – authority.

For as long as we are trapped inside the authority of the system, we will never be allowed to determine how we live. Bear in mind that they don’t even want us to have the right to decide what to do with our own bodies, let alone with our world!

So the first thing we need to do is to break free from the grip of that authority, actively wriggle and refuse our collective way out of its control.

As part of that process and in order to encourage others to do so as well, creating a critical mass, it is important to expose the corruption behind the facade of legitimacy with which the system tricks people into going along with its domination.

We should also make it clear that we are not resisting authority just for the sake of it, but because we understand that it is blocking our right to live as we want to, in the embrace of natural order.

For this point to be reached, we – sufficient numbers of us, anyway – will need to have thought about all this and seen through the official narrative of industrialism as real progress and of “development” as both desirable and necessary.

We will have to be motivated, urged on in our resistance, by a profound and resolute desire for this post-industrial world.

The first step of the long journey towards a free future is to start saying – loudly and numerously – that it is out there waiting for us if we have the courage to go and seize it!

[Audio version]