How Power Eats Life

It begins with its own energy and offers people a way out, a new hope to believe in. A new ideology that links all that is wrong in the world to one final cause – this one thing that humanity or society is unable to see until the ideology points it out. It creates new structures and agendas, new laws, new trends, new fashions and gadgets. It proposes new ways of seeing ourselves as men, women, parents, children, workers, managers. Ideologies such as those that serve capitalism, communism, socialism, conservatism, are the first that come to mind.

They begin with serious study, interrogation of the current model, academic discipline and then public distribution – through sophisticated broadcasting. Resources are invested and people are rewarded by learning the skills advocated within perimeters of this new truth. Those that resist are punished by being marginalised and isolated from the resources they need to survive.

As long as the majority are comfortable working within the governing system most people won’t question it. They, we, feel this is the natural way. We enjoy its benefits and become philosophical about its structural confines. We serve the model, we become the labour force, we learn the rules of the game, and we find ways to climb the ladder of influence.

By serving the ideology we make it more powerful. The system becomes the monster that we must obey. We are obliged to do what the system tells us to do, which we learn from those, who through hard work, or privilege, interpret the system’s needs. The more we serve it, the hungrier the monster becomes.

There are times when the monster demands more than labour, unquestioning obedience and unrenewable resources – it requires war, tsunami, hurricane, flood and fire. And all the while, no matter what the crisis or the threat to nations or races, or the future of the planet – it requires a numbness from its food source.

Remember the pastoral scene in (H. G. Well’s) The Time Machine, eight hundred thousand years into a seemingly leisurely future where all the young inhabitants, hypnotized by a siren, enter an underground world to feed Morlocks? Isn’t this how the masses serve power?

We might name that hungry monster Capitalism as we watch millions of jobs lost throughout the world while huge companies gain ever larger profits, and nations go bankrupt. We might call that monster Fundamentalism as culture wars are inflamed between different religions. But the monster never dies even though its name may change. And the bigger it gets, the more it eats.

What means do we have to manage this power so that it serves life? In what ways do we already negotiate with injustice, violence, change and the future?

The End of Hierarchy?

Is it possible that we will find another way of organizing ourselves, when it has become clear  our ruling elites are not capable of leading us to a sustainable future?

Now that we can easily read so many different perspectives, can we invest a little hope in the organic power of good will for the greater good? Surely the competitive, isolating ideologies around economic success now seem as believable as the existence of Santa Claus.

This is one crisis that may lead to our opportunity.  The majority of comment on the net, in the news, indicates that people have dismissed the authority of those experts invested in big institutions.  We no longer see leadership, we see a ritualized power play with the fall of intelligence and the rise of brutality. 

Our future looks like an abandoned battle field of pollution, drought, famine and guns. Who needs education or health when the resources of the whole world are saved for so few?

It's against the many bleak examples that I look to the community.

There are people organizing food banks and have been for the thirty years since corporate fascism  replaced civil society. There are organizations of volunteers who have created integral media such as rabble, The Tyee, Straight-Goods, Avaaz, etc. There are churches that have given up on doctrine in aid of support for the disenfranchised, housing the homeless on cold nights. There are theatres and musicians and artists organizing festivals still, even though their funding has been cut. And then there are parents, spouses and children who are giving continually, and blossoming in a new appreciation for what is around them and how their power is integrated in all things.

So it seems, almost, that humanity is evolving from the shallow stereotypes played out on mainstream  media, to wise new ways of being in the world, while the institutions are crumbling under the weight of greed, still stuck on oppression and exploitation.

Will humanity transcend the failing structures that have governed for centuries, and find new ways of governing ourselves through creative cooperation?

Power Bubble

A housing bubble, according to Investopedia is "A run-up in housing prices fueled by demand, speculation and the belief that recent history is an infallible forecast of the future."

A power bubble is a written or unwritten contract on a system that we invest in psychologically, socially, physically and spiritually.  We allow ourselves to be controlled by it insofar as the system offers us something in return, for example, the ideology that our quality of life depends upon a good economy.

We spend our lives learning skills and habits to participate in this system so we can, at the very least, eat and find shelter, and at the most, buy influence over others such as retail staff, servants, employees etc. Although we contribute to this system in essential ways the operating rules are written by others in a place where we have no influence, as though people without an economy cannot survive, yet the economy without people will do just fine.

So we are slaves to this god to whom we make sacrifices, mostly through wars, genocide and forced famines. Unless of course we moderate the economy through justice. However, the instrument of power doesn't know what justice is. 

According to an editorial in the latest Flying Shingle

"One of the exploits at which those who work against economic justice seem to be most shockingly proficient is to create bad conditions and then blame them on those they harm." 

And we, the labour force, mostly go along with it because if we disagree publicly we fear we will be punished.  Even to admit we are oppressed here is to take ourselves out of the comfortable pew.

Systems can only have power over us if we obey its high priests without question. This is a power bubble.  It's worth is what we contribute to it. As long we blame the victims and seek power over those who are unable to defend themselves, we prop up the system.  We say yes to its survival as we watch it destroy the planet we depend on, the people we love, the quality of life our ancestors often gave up their lives for?

It's not the next gadget or the next entertainment that will transform us into something wonderful, it is life that is wonderful.  It is life that brings love, attachment, reward and knowledge.  It is life we serve daily, yearly and eternally. All else are instruments we created and relies upon a reverence for life to sustain it.

So if we are okay knowing men, women and children are being blown up for cheaper oil, we prop up  the power bubble that will, sooner or later, do the same to our children.

If you want to see what a power bubble looks like, when it's stripped of its godlike mythology, you can see it here on this  Universal Effects video.