Caitlin Johnstone discards the high-flown dogma around space colonization and challenges readers to accept themselves and life on planet Earth. By Caitlin Johnstone CaitlinJohnstone.com It’s rare to get a billionaire to share their grand plans for the future, which is…Read more →
Who would study and describe the living, starts /By driving the spirits out of the parts: /In the palm of his hand he holds all the sections, /Lacks nothing, except the spirit’s connections.
— Mephistopheles warning to the student in Goethe’s Faust
And how far would you like to go in?” he asked and the three kings all looked at each other. “Not too far but just far enough so’s we can say that we’ve been there.
— Liner notes to Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding album
Our capitalist elites have used propaganda, money and the marginalizing of their critics to erase the first three of philosopher John Locke’s elements of the perfect state: liberty, equality and freedom. They exclusively empower the fourth, property. Liberty and freedom in the corporate state mean the liberty and freedom of corporations and the rich to exploit and pillage without government interference or regulatory oversight.
But no matter what environmentalists do, our best efforts are insufficient. We’re losing badly, on every front. Those in power are hell-bent on destroying the planet, and most people don’t care. Frankly, I don’t have much hope. But I think that’s a good thing. Hope is what keeps us chained to the system, the conglomerate of people and ideas and ideals that is causing the destruction of the Earth.
A change in Quantity also entails a change in Quality.
― Friedrich Engels
No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, if we don’t speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.
Many things in modern life have an epicurean appeal, a flare that even the most ascetic among us may be hard done by to resist. While it is certainly true that a contemporary, urbanised life demands much of us, sometimes to the point of inducing breakage, this same life also affords us much time to indulge in activities and offerings that were proscribed to our agrarian forebearers. The homestead, with its round-the-clock duties and chores, akin to the care of an infant that a parent must provide, was no friend to a life of leisure and indulgence.
