The world out of kilter: reclaim our lives!

I would love to have been born into a stable society – a calm, healthy, wise society – rather than one rattling chaotically downhill at an ever-accelerating rate towards a doom that is increasingly impossible to ignore.

For me, real progress would not be the replacement of human beings by machines, but the nurturing of human beings so as to release their full potential, the patient fine-tuning of our outlooks and habits so that we can live better together.

The community to which I would like to belong would not look like any other community.

It would have evolved in harmony with the specific qualities of its place, its history, the tastes and desires of the people who made it up.

It would be through this rooted belonging that the community could achieve its flowering – its myths, its music, its crafts, its food, its drink, its festivals, its ethos.

In such a society, people would decide for themselves, among themselves, how they wanted to live.

There would be no remote central “authority” demanding data and taxes, imposing its rigid requirements, ensuring that everything and everybody conformed to its mechanical model of what life should look like.

People would grow up to feel free and instinctively resistant to outside interference.

They simply would not go along with demands issued from strangers justified only by the rules and jargon these strangers have themselves invented.

They would not tolerate the destruction of a much-loved meadow or forest because of targets or plans or the institutionally-enshrined priority afforded the steamroller of “development” and “economic growth”.

And, because they lived simply, healthily, naturally, collaboratively, they would not have to waste the greater part of their time and energy on toiling for somebody else’s gain, just to have the bare right to food and shelter.

Instead, everyone would contribute to the well-being of their community in whatever way they could.

Such a world would only be perfect in the sense that human imperfection forms part of the overall perfection of the organism we call nature, Earth, the cosmos.

But it would be a living world, a warm world, a kind world, a real world.

And it can be ours, if we truly want it.

It is time for us to grab back our future from the greed-soaked hands of the lying robber-tyrants who have, for so long now, pushed our world out of kilter.

It is time for us to reclaim our lives.

[Audio version]

See also: The world out of kilter: occupation and zombification

and: The world out of kilter: being modern