In Opposition to Evil

    The only risk we now face is in doing nothing.  If things stay as they are, then quite obviously, current trends will only continue.  Your standard of living will continue to worsen, and your wages will continue to stagnate.  The very basics of human life will continue increasing in cost, until even these are out of reach.  Your community will continue to deteriorate, and blight will continue to spread.  Your environment will continue to experience the natural disasters of climate catastrophe.  State violence will continue to proliferate, as it attempts to hold together a status quo that has no other option than to collapse under its own top heaviness.  Not only will these trends continue, but their current pace will only accelerate.  It is clear then that the risk is in not acting.  For in not acting, you relegate your fate to this creeping oblivion.  But in acting, you align yourself with the forces of life.

    We have been led to believe that we are powerless.  That as mere individuals there is nothing we can do against evil and the machinations of capitalistic empire.  But this is not true.  There is power in what we do, so long as we do it together.  The scientific definition of power is “energy applied over time”, and this definition certainly applies to our lives.  The course of humanity is the sum total of our collective actions.  When we act as individuals, without cooperation, it becomes a white noise of disparate wills, and inertia continues us on as it has.  But when we act in unity, our collective will manifests itself without hesitation, and a new world is realized in doing so.  We must examine power, the power we choose to exercise, and the power we allow to be exercised upon us.  Power lies both in what we do and in what we do not, and we must recognize that in each moment of our lives we exercise this power.  We must also take accountability for the power our choices have, and the power our abdication of choice has.  If you choose to fall in line with the prescribed way of living, you are allowing power to be exercised over you.  You abdicate your role as a sovereign being with free will, and fall prey to the power of collective suggestion.  In our species’ current degenerate state, this can only result in our own degeneration in turn.  We labor towards our own destruction, and sustain ourselves with the fruits of annihilation.  This is the way of death.  But you can choose something else instead, you can choose to realize the power which always lay within you.  You are that, from which power itself is made manifest, as is the world which surrounds you.  Once this is realized, you choose the way of life.  A way of living in which each moment your power is exercised, not as a form of machoism, but as a form of intentionality.  A way of living in which you uplift others rather than trample over them.  A way of living in which our planet is preserved rather than consumed.  A way of living in which we are the agents of our own destiny rather than the subjects of a world foreign to ourselves.  Each moment lived in opposition to evil, each action an act of resistance.  This is living Truth and enacting Love, and the way of life must become your way of life.

    Such a way of living is free from exchange value and commodification, it is founded in human decency which can only be fostered in community.  Community as a collective and interdependent network, not an amalgamation of separate individuals.  Organizing towards community, as education rather than coercion.  Reminding people of their own best interest, showing them the power they have to this end, and inspiring them to actualize it.  Rising above the left vs right dichotomy altogether.  Working towards a world that doesn’t degrade humanity by relegating them to mechanical beings of material inputs and outputs, but recognizing ourselves as the transcendent beings we are.  The individual – societal dialectic is sublimated in community, with the faith that material needs are met incidentally in doing so.  The economics of humanity can be put into a few questions.  Who produces what? how? for whom? and where is the surplus allocated?  In our current state of affairs, the mass of humanity makes what it is told, in the way in which it is told, are given just enough to continue doing so, and the excess is hoarded by oligarchs.  Instead, we must first ask these questions ourselves, so that we can answer them in our own communities, in a way we choose collectively.

    Think critically about your participation in a system that is failing, on a planet that is dying.  Consider in what ways you contribute to and perpetuate this.  Consider in what ways you might resist and with whom you might join in doing so.  Liberation is not something that happens to you, liberation is something you do.