Thursday, Nov. 04, 2004 - 1:46 a.m.

Put On Your Thinking Cap

Here are my answers responding to Tom Atlee's set
of questions about the election and its implications for social change.

1. What, if anything, puzzles or frustrates you about the 2004 election process?

That so many people were willing to sell out their beliefs out of fear of Bush. That MoveOn.org and Michael Moore and others were able to take people's dissent and frustration and transubstantiate it into enthusiastic support for the ruling elite: the billionaire, cousin of Bush, and fellow Skull and Bones member, John Forbes Kerry.

2. In this campaign season, what do you think we can be proud of?

The 9/11 Truth Movement, and very little else.

3. What lessons might we learn from this election experience that could help us in what we do next?

1. Elections are an opportunity to work hard and sacrifice with nothing to show for it when you lose.
2. Voting is the quintessentially alienating experience: your hopes, dreams, thoughts, beliefs, and opinions become nothing more than a number in a machine--and that's if you're lucky enough to use a machine that's not rigged.
3. Co-intelligence cannot emerge within the system as it is today.
4. The ruling elite can successfully play a game of good cop, bad cop.
5. Compromise has a snowballing effect.
6. Voting is a game in which one of the conditions for playing is that you must accept it if your opponent wins. If a Bush win was unacceptable to you, why were you voting?
7. No matter who you vote for, the government wins every time.

4. What impact do you think this election's outcome will have on long term social change and transformation?

Very little, because the only other likely outcome was a Kerry victory, and a Kerry administration would only have been superficially different than the Bush administraton. They serve the same masters and have most of the same goals.

5. If you were able to mobilize millions of people, what would you want them to realize and do?

1. One person mobilizing millions to all do the same thing is a classic example of what's pathological (and not co-intelligent) about our civilization.
2. Coercion is the fundamental social ill of the human race.
3. Government, no matter how enlightened, progressive, or benevolent, is always and everywhere an institution intrinsically based on coercion backed up by a credible capacity for violence. Any institution not possessing this trait is not a government.
4. Peace is an illusion wherever governments persist.
5. Nations, leaders, and citizenship are all collective hallucinations. They have no real existence outside our belief in them. The only real things are objects, people, and other living organisms.
6. Obedience and obligation are voluntary. There is a choice behind every human action, whether that choice is acknowledged or not. No one can make anybody do anything, unless they actually move that person's body.

6. Given what is happening, what changes are you, personally, eager to play a role in?

1. Discrediting the idea of the military. Discouraging recruitment efforts, while encouraging desertion and mutiny.
2. Encouraging tax resistance.
3. Helping children leave institutional education, unless they actually want it.
4. Exposing the people, organizations, and motives behind corrupt activies, e.g. Skull and Bones.
5. Fostering a culture of compassion, authenticity, clarity, and co-intelligence.
6. Extricating ourselves from the global economy and petroleum dependence through local self-sufficiency.

7. What other questions should we be considering here?

Comment on these

Since we're stuck in this system for now, how much sense does it make to compromise and work within it?

What are some ways to work within the system while compromising the least while gaining the most?

If we're ever to be free of this oppressive system, how much sense does it make to extricate onself from it, and to try to live autonomously from it?

What are some ways to get free (or at least, more free) in the near-term?

Given that the system is self-perpetuating, that it co-opts as much of its opposition as it can, and does not like to permit escape, how much sense does it make to focus on the destruction of this system?

What are some ways to tear down this system without hurting ourselves in the process?

What are some ways we help make society jump into a better paradigm?

How far outside of the proverbial box must we think?

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