"All the World's a Stage We Pass Through" R. Ayana

Showing posts with label cooperation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cooperation. Show all posts

Wednesday, 28 December 2016

The open source revolution is coming and it will conquer the 1%: ex CIA spy


The open source revolution is coming and it will conquer the 1%: ex CIA spy

A businessman tries to break through a line of Occupy Wall Street protesters who had blocked access to the New York Stock Exchange area in November 2011.

A businessman tries to break through a line of Occupy Wall Street protesters who had blocked access to the New York Stock Exchange area in November 2011. Photograph: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images

 

The man who trained more than 66 countries in open source methods calls for re-invention of intelligence to re-engineer Earth



Robert David Steele, former Marine, CIA case officer, and US co-founder of the US Marine Corps intelligence activity, is a man on a mission. But it’s a mission that frightens the US intelligence establishment to its core.

With 18 years experience working across the US intelligence community, followed by 20 more years in commercial intelligence and training, Steele’s exemplary career has spanned almost all areas of both the clandestine world.


Steele started off as a Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer. After four years on active duty, he joined the CIA for about a decade before co-founding the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, where he was deputy director. Widely recognised as the leader of the Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) paradigm, Steele went on to write the handbooks on OSINT for NATO, the US Defense Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Special Operations Forces. In passing, he personally trained 7,500 officers from over 66 countries.

In 1992, despite opposition from the CIA, he obtained Marine Corps permission to organise a landmark international conference on open source intelligence – the paradigm of deriving information to support policy decisions not through secret activities, but from open public sources available to all. The conference was such a success it brought in over 620 attendees from the intelligence world.

But the CIA wasn’t happy, and ensured that Steele was prohibited from running a second conference. The clash prompted him to resign from his position as second-ranking civilian in Marine Corps intelligence, and pursue the open source paradigm elsewhere. He went on to found and head up the Open Source Solutions Network Inc. and later the non-profit Earth Intelligence Network which runs the Public Intelligence Blog. 


Robert David Steele

Former CIA spy and Open Source Intelligence pioneer, Robert David Steele speaking at the Inter-American Defense Board in 2013


I first came across Steele when I discovered his Amazon review of my third book, The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism. A voracious reader, Steele is the number 1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction across 98 categories. He also reviewed my latest book, A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization, but told me I’d overlooked an important early work – ‘A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, Report of the UN High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change.’

Last month, Steele presented a startling paper at the Libtech conference in New York, sponsored by the Internet Society and Reclaim. Drawing on principles set out in his latest book, The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth and Trust, he told the audience that all the major preconditions for revolution – set out in his 1976 graduate thesis – were now present in the United States and Britain.

Steele’s book is a must-read, a powerful yet still pragmatic roadmap to a new civilisational paradigm that simultaneously offers a trenchant, unrelenting critique of the prevailing global order. His interdisciplinary ‘whole systems’ approach dramatically connects up the increasing corruption, inefficiency and unaccountability of the intelligence system and its political and financial masters with escalating inequalities and environmental crises. But he also offers a comprehensive vision of hope that activist networks like Reclaim are implementing today.

“We are at the end of a five-thousand-year-plus historical process during which human society grew in scale while it abandoned the early indigenous wisdom councils and communal decision-making,” he writes in The Open Source Everything Manifesto. “Power was centralised in the hands of increasingly specialised ‘elites’ and ‘experts’ who not only failed to achieve all they promised but used secrecy and the control of information to deceive the public into allowing them to retain power over community resources that they ultimately looted.”

Today’s capitalism, he argues, is inherently predatory and destructive:

“Over the course of the last centuries, the commons was fenced, and everything from agriculture to water was commoditised without regard to the true cost in non-renewable resources. Human beings, who had spent centuries evolving away from slavery, were re-commoditised by the Industrial Era.”

Open source everything, in this context, offers us the chance to build on what we’ve learned through industrialisation, to learn from our mistakes, and catalyse the re-opening of the commons, in the process breaking the grip of defunct power structures and enabling the possibility of prosperity for all.

“Sharing, not secrecy, is the means by which we realise such a lofty destiny as well as create infinite wealth. The wealth of networks, the wealth of knowledge, revolutionary wealth - all can create a nonzero win-win Earth that works for one hundred percent of humanity. This is the ‘utopia’ that Buckminster Fuller foresaw, now within our reach.”

The goal, he concludes, is to reject:


“... concentrated illicitly aggregated and largely phantom wealth in favor of community wealth defined by community knowledge, community sharing of information, and community definition of truth derived in transparency and authenticity, the latter being the ultimate arbiter of shared wealth.”


Despite this unabashedly radical vision, Steele is hugely respected by senior military intelligence experts across the world. As a researcher at the US Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, he has authored several monographs advocating the need for open source methods to transform the craft of intelligence. He has lectured to the US State Department and Department of Homeland Security as well as National Security Councils in various countries, and his new book has received accolades from senior intelligence officials across multiple countries including France and Turkey.

Yet he remains an outspoken critic of US intelligence practices and what he sees as their integral role in aggravating rather than ameliorating the world’s greatest threats and challenges.

This week, I had the good fortune of being able to touch base with Steele to dig deeper into his recent analysis of the future of US politics in the context of our accelerating environmental challenges. The first thing I asked him was where he sees things going over the next decade, given his holistic take.

“Properly educated people always appreciate holistic approaches to any challenge. This means that they understand both cause and effect, and intertwined complexities,” he said. “A major part of our problem in the public policy arena is the decline in intelligence with integrity among key politicians and staff at the same time that think tanks and universities and non-governmental organisations have also suffered a similar intellectual diminishment.

“My early graduate education was in the 1970’s when Limits to Growth and World Federalism were the rage. Both sought to achieve an over-view of systemic challenges, but both also suffered from the myth of top-down hubris. What was clear in the 1970s, that has been obscured by political and financial treason in the past half-century, is that everything is connected – what we do in the way of paving over wetlands, or in poisoning ground water ‘inadvertently’ because of our reliance on pesticides and fertilisers that are not subject to the integrity of the ‘Precautionary Principle,’ ultimately leads to climate catastrophes that are acts of man, not acts of god.”

He points me to his tremendous collection of reviews of books on climate change, disease, environmental degradation, peak oil, and water scarcity. “I see five major overlapping threats on the immediate horizon,” he continues. “They are all related: the collapse of complex societies, the acceleration of the Earth’s demise with changes that used to take 10,000 years now taking three or less, predatory or shock capitalism and financial crime out of the City of London and Wall Street, and political corruption at scale, to include the west supporting 42 of 44 dictators. We are close to multiple mass catastrophes.”

What about the claim that the US is on the brink of revolution? “Revolution is overthrow – the complete reversal of the status quo ante. We are at the end of centuries of what Lionel Tiger calls ‘The Manufacture of Evil,’ in which merchant banks led by the City of London have conspired with captive governments to concentrate wealth and commoditise everything including humans. What revolution means in practical terms is that balance has been lost and the status quo ante is unsustainable. There are two ‘stops’ on greed to the nth degree: the first is the carrying capacity of Earth, and the second is human sensibility. We are now at a point where both stops are activating.”


Robert Steele - preconditions for revolution

Former CIA officer’s matrix on the preconditions for revolution


It’s not just the US, he adds. “The preconditions of revolution exist in the UK, and most western countries. The number of active pre-conditions is quite stunning, from elite isolation to concentrated wealth to inadequate socialisation and education, to concentrated land holdings to loss of authority to repression of new technologies especially in relation to energy, to the atrophy of the public sector and spread of corruption, to media dishonesty, to mass unemployment of young men and on and on and on.”


So why isn’t it happening yet?



“Preconditions are not the same as precipitants. We are waiting for our Tunisian fruit seller. The public will endure great repression, especially when most media outlets and schools are actively aiding the repressive meme of ‘you are helpless, this is the order of things.’ When we have a scandal so powerful that it cannot be ignored by the average Briton or American, we will have a revolution that overturns the corrupt political systems in both countries, and perhaps puts many banks out of business. Vaclav Havel calls this ‘The Power of the Powerless.’ One spark, one massive fire.”

But we need more than revolution, in the sense of overthrow, to effect change, surely. How does your manifesto for ‘open source everything’ fit into this? “The west has pursued an industrialisation path that allows for the privatisation of wealth from the commons, along with the criminalisation of commons rights of the public, as well as the externalisation of all true costs. Never mind that fracking produces earthquakes and poisons aquifers – corrupt politicians at local, state or province, and national levels are all too happy to take money for looking the other way. Our entire commercial, diplomatic, and informational systems are now cancerous. When trade treaties have secret sections – or are entirely secret – one can be certain the public is being screwed and the secrecy is an attempt to avoid accountability. Secrecy enables corruption. So also does an inattentive public enable corruption.”

Is this a crisis of capitalism, then? Does capitalism need to end for us to resolve these problems? And if so, how? “Predatory capitalism is based on the privatisation of profit and the externalisation of cost. It is an extension of the fencing of the commons, of enclosures, along with the criminalisation of prior common customs and rights. What we need is a system that fully accounts for all costs. Whether we call that capitalism or not is irrelevant to me. But doing so would fundamentally transform the dynamic of present day capitalism, by making capital open source. For example, and as calculated by my colleague JZ Liszkiewicz, a white cotton T-shirt contains roughly 570 gallons of water, 11 to 29 gallons of fuel, and a number of toxins and emissions including pesticides, diesel exhaust, and heavy metals and other volatile compounds – it also generally includes child labor. Accounting for those costs and their real social, human and environmental impacts has totally different implications for how we should organise production and consumption than current predatory capitalism.”

So what exactly do you mean by open source everything? “We have over 5 billion human brains that are the one infinite resource available to us going forward. Crowd-sourcing and cognitive surplus are two terms of art for the changing power dynamic between those at the top that are ignorant and corrupt, and those across the bottom that are attentive and ethical. The open source ecology is made up of a wide range of opens – open farm technology, open source software, open hardware, open networks, open money, open small business technology, open patents – to name just a few. The key point is that they must all develop together, otherwise the existing system will isolate them into ineffectiveness. Open data is largely worthless unless you have open hardware and open software. Open government demands open cloud and open spectrum, or money will dominate feeds and speeds.”


Robert Steele

Robert Steele’s vision for open source systems


On 1st May, Steele sent an open letter to US vice president Joe Biden requesting him to consider establishing an Open Source Agency that would transform the operation of the intelligence community, dramatically reduce costs, increasing oversight and accountability, while increasing access to the best possible information to support holistic policy-making. To date, he has received no response.

I’m not particularly surprised. Open source everything pretty much undermines everything the national security state stands for. Why bother even asking vice president Biden to consider it? “The national security state is rooted in secrecy as a means of avoiding accountability. My first book, On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World – which by the way had a foreword from Senator David Boren, the immediate past chairman of the Senate Select Committee for Intelligence - made it quite clear that the national security state is an expensive, ineffective monstrosity that is simply not fit for purpose. In that sense, the national security state is it’s own worst enemy – it’s bound to fail.”

Given his standing as an intelligence expert, Steele’s criticisms of US intelligence excesses are beyond scathing – they are damning. “Most of what is produced through secret methods is not actually intelligence at all. It is simply secret information that is, most of the time, rather generic and therefore not actually very useful for making critical decisions at a government level. The National Security Agency (NSA) has not prevented any terrorist incidents. CIA cannot even get the population of Syria correct and provides no intelligence - decision-support - to most cabinet secretaries, assistant secretaries, and department heads. Indeed General Tony Zinni, when he was commander in chief of the US Central Command as it was at war, is on record as saying that he received, ‘at best,’ a meagre 4% of what he needed to know from secret sources and methods.”

So does open source mean you are calling for abolition of intelligence agencies as we know them, I ask. “I’m a former spy and I believe we still need spies and secrecy, but we need to redirect the vast majority of the funds now spent on secrecy toward savings and narrowly focused endeavors at home. For instance, utterly ruthless counterintelligence against corruption, or horrendous evils like paedophilia.

“Believe it or not, 95% of what we need for ethical evidence-based decision support cannot be obtained through the secret methods of standard intelligence practices. But it can be obtained quite openly and cheaply from academics, civil society, commerce, governments, law enforcement organisations, the media, all militaries, and non-governmental organisations. An Open Source Agency, as I’ve proposed it, would not just meet 95% of our intelligence requirements, it would do the same at all levels of government and carry over by enriching education, commerce, and research – it would create what I called in 1995 a ‘Smart Nation.’

“The whole point of Open Source Everything is to restore public agency. Open Source is the only form of information and information technology that is affordable to the majority, interoperable across all boundaries, and rapidly scalable from local to global without the curse of overhead that proprietary corporations impose.”


Robert Steele's graphic on open source systems thinking

Robert Steele’s graphic on open source systems thinking


It’s clear to me that when Steele talks about intelligence as ‘decision-support,’ he really does intend that we grasp “all information in all languages all the time” – that we do multidisciplinary research spanning centuries into the past as well as into the future. His most intriguing premise is that the 1% are simply not as powerful as they, and we, assume them to be. “The collective buying power of the five billion poor is four times that of the one billion rich according to the late Harvard business thinker Prof C. K. Prahalad – open source everything is about the five billion poor coming together to reclaim their collective wealth and mobilise it to transform their lives. There is zero chance of the revolution being put down. Public agency is emergent, and the ability of the public to literally put any bank or corporation out of business overnight is looming. To paraphrase Abe Lincoln, you cannot screw all of the people all of the time. We’re there. All we lack is a major precipitant – our Tunisian fruit seller. When it happens the revolution will be deep and lasting.”

The Arab spring analogy has its negatives. So far, there really isn’t much to root for. I want to know what’s to stop this revolution from turning into a violent, destructive mess. Steele is characteristically optimistic. “I have struggled with this question. What I see happening is an end to national dictat and the emergence of bottom-up clarity, diversity, integrity, and sustainability. Individual towns across the USA are now nullifying federal and state regulations - for example gag laws on animal cruelty, blanket permissions for fracking. Those such as my colleague Parag Khanna that speak to a new era of city-states are correct in my view. Top down power has failed in a most spectacular manner, and bottom-up consensus power is emergent. ‘Not in my neighborhood’ is beginning to trump ‘Because I say so.’ The one unlimited resource we have on the planet is the human brain – the current strategy of 1% capitalism is failing because it is killing the Golden Goose at multiple levels. Unfortunately, the gap between those with money and power and those who actually know what they are talking about has grown catastrophic. The rich are surrounded by sycophants and pretenders whose continued employment demands that they not question the premises. As Larry Summers lectured Elizabeth Warren, ‘insiders do not criticise insiders.’”

But how can activists actually start moving toward the open source vision now? “For starters, there are eight ‘tribes’ that among them can bring together all relevant information: academia, civil society including labor unions and religions, commerce especially small business, government especially local, law enforcement, media, military, and non-government/non-profit. At every level from local to global, across every mission area, we need to create stewardship councils integrating personalities and information from all eight tribes. We don’t need to wait around for someone else to get started. All of us who recognise the vitality of this possibility can begin creating these new grassroots structures from the bottom-up, right now.”

So how does open source everything have the potential to ‘re-engineer the Earth’? For me, this is the most important question, and Steele’s answer is inspiring. “Open Source Everything overturns top-down ‘because I say so at the point of a gun’ power. Open Source Everything makes truth rather than violence the currency of power. Open Source Everything demands that true cost economics and the indigenous concept of ‘seventh generation thinking’ – how will this affect society 200 years ahead – become central. Most of our problems today can be traced to the ascendance of unilateral militarism, virtual colonialism, and predatory capitalism, all based on force and lies and encroachment on the commons. The national security state works for the City of London and Wall Street – both are about to be toppled by a combination of Eastern alternative banking and alternative international development capabilities, and individuals who recognise that they have the power to pull their money out of the banks and not buy the consumer goods that subsidise corruption and the concentration of wealth. The opportunity to take back the commons for the benefit of humanity as a whole is open – here and now.”

For Steele, the open source revolution is inevitable, simply because the demise of the system presided over by the 1% cannot be stopped – and because the alternatives to reclaiming the commons are too dismal to contemplate. We have no choice but to step up.

“My motto, a play on the CIA motto that is disgraced every day, is ‘the truth at any cost lowers all other costs’”, he tells me. “Others wiser than I have pointed out that nature bats last. We are at the end of an era in which lies can be used to steal from the public and the commons. We are at the beginning of an era in which truth in public service can restore us all to a state of grace.”


Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an international security journalist and academic. He is the author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It, and the forthcoming science fiction thriller, ZERO POINT. ZERO POINT is set in a near future following a Fourth Iraq War. Follow Ahmed on Facebook and Twitter.




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Friday, 4 February 2011

Making A Happy World: How to create abundance

Making A Happy World
How to create abundance 
The question is not, ‘How will humanity survive?’ The real question is, ‘What kind of life do I want to live now?’
-         R. Heru Ayana    
“You believe in things you don’t understand…”
        - Superstition by Stevie Wonder 

photo

Human-type beings are dynamic, warm-blooded domesticated primate mammals attempting to fit our varied dreams and destinies into a painful straightjacket that’s not designed for us. You could be excused for thinking that our bright shiny civilization - with its nuclear family structure created to feed the maws of factories and offices – is something that’s been around for a long time.
            It hasn’t. It’s a new and temporary invention that’s impossible to sustain. A ‘family’ that’s comprised of mum, dad and the kid/s is a dangerous illusion, a pernicious superstition that is one of the biggest elephants in our cultural lounge room and the major problem that we need to resolve if we’re to learn to share and preserve the world.
            The ongoing isolation that most of us in developed countries are experiencing is the end result of a deliberate policy of divide and conquer carried through to its logical extreme. In ‘wealthier’ countries the nuclear family itself is no longer the norm; many people live almost completely separated from their loved ones and dwell at a tolerable distance from their friends. We screen out the world and live behind walls that separate us from the potential for noble, happy, healthy and integrated lives.
            And yet we must learn to share the planet Earth and to actually care about and like our fellow human beings, enjoying their company and striking a much better balance between shared space and our occasional need for privacy. There’s actually far more than enough to sustain us all – we can all live at a high ‘Western’ standard of living without destroying the ecosystem. The concept of Humanity’s huge ecological footprint being too large to sustain is only accurate when the old technological and social fixes aren’t exchanged for new ones that are already waiting in the wings for their overdue cue. People could continue leading their profligate lives with impunity - if the fuel and power sources were clean and the materials used for all our daily needs weren’t made of toxic chemical time bombs. The alternatives are all ready for us to adopt and use – when we’re allowed to. Or you can take matters into your own hands and bring about radical change in your life – where it matters most. Something far more fundamental than the props and scenery has to change – we have to write new scripts and roles for ourselves or someone else will do it for us.
            Humans live most happily in medium-sized groups that mimic the extended family structure of our nomadic ancestors, who generally stuck together in bands numbering between twelve and three dozen. Smaller groups tend to die out and larger ones fission into smaller ones. Extended families work particularly well when you have a lot of empty space to fill; they’re a recipe for species suicide in our new millennium. And yet they remain the time-tested template for a satisfying human life and the substrate of our simian minds and emotions. 
         
  The Nation of Two 
photo

The essential difference between humans and other primates (and other animals) is that we need to invest so much time and energy into our children, to fit them into our complex temporal-lobe driven societies and make them fit to fill a useful niche in our skill-based survival machine.
                 Humans bond sexually for a period of time lasting from puberty to menopause. During this time younger men and women in most nomadic human bands separate out from the group for a time – until the female is pregnant and returns to the mothers and the family fold that make pregnancy, childbirth and parenting easy – and tolerable. Human pair bonding makes it possible to grow our great big brains – but it also creates something not present in other primates, when our old tribal structures break down; a nation of two that becomes separated from the rest of the clan in the modern feudal world, left to sink or swim on their own. Parents are forced to stand alone under the meager prideful possession of a shared roof (that’s purchased at the cost of their freedom and the chance to actually live their lives together) or fracturing under the strain – and they actually pay strangers to watch their children so they can work to afford ‘childcare’.
            When couples have children they’re often radically disenfranchised of their childless friends, developing a new circle of acquaintances that exist in similarly isolating circumstances. The utterly altered lifestyle of isolated parents leaves little time or room for anyone but those who are part of a children’s support structure and they end up trapped in the hideous suburban nightmare we’ve foisted on our straining planet.
             Wage slaves inhabit rows of near-identical expensive little boxes full of isolated and exhausted people, living next door to people in identical circumstances – prisoners of time and space, with walls between their overstrained ears. They help to build a prison planet in which the inmates actually lock themselves up each night behind barred windows and double-locked doors.
             Normal, huh? Something to aspire to? Something to pass on to the kids? And so many mistake hiding in their dens and burrows as ‘getting a life’. It’d be tragic if it was an accident, or something imposed on people by a totalitarian regime - but people choose to do it to themselves and choose to ignore the pointless idiocy of their existence, so life itself is misunderstood to be a meaningless filling in of vacant time, just a joke in poor taste, like the stupid structures and ugly sterile décor people choose to live in.
       The imperial hive-like pyramid structure of our militarily-incepted civilizations serve us well - if all we want to do is grab as many of the resources we all need to share as quickly as possible; if all we want to do is expend those resources as quickly as possible amid an illusion of expansion and progress in an artificially created illusory world of ‘us’ and ‘them’.
        The structure of our modern - yet still feudal - societies is a structure built for insects trapped in an unchanging hive; its top-down pyramidal power systems are designed to stop change and evolution. All the power flows up to the top from the base, while those at the top get to shit on everyone else; like the primate tree-structure of society that this inhuman hive system’s been so easily grafted onto. We live in a civilization best suited to the needs of an insect colony.
        In the eyes of those at the top of the human totem pole, this mass of easily led and controlled Humanity is a hitherto necessary gene pool of skilled (wage) slaves whose time has come and gone; with modern automation, the ultra-wealthy can live lives of emperors and empresses without having to maintaining a horde of underlings at a living standard that makes revolution unnecessary. A few million underlings each will do, to maintain the hierarchy of illusory privilege.
        The family structures of your rulers barely resemble the nuclear template they’ve foisted on everyone else, whatever the surface appearance of their interlinked dynasties. Their children are shared in a small pool of families that are linked by ties of blood, often fathered by the related business associates of their apparent parents. With such a structure, loyalty to one’s peers is as automatic as despising the poor. If you think such a system is unlikely or impossible, consider for a moment the nature, habits and history of royalty and you’ll see that their interlinked brood of inbred despots is the template for the modern inbred gerontocracy of ‘businessmen’ and ‘CEOs’ (common enemy overlords) who preside over the patently unfair distribution of our planet’s common wealth.
        The rich know that this system can’t be sustained without radical changes and that it’s really a pyramid money scam - the newly comfortable populace will be easily shaken out of the tree’s upper branches when the coming large scale war, environmental collapse and ‘market correction’ blow away everything not securely rooted in actual, tangible resources - real wealth, real capital and real estate – and also secured with guns and hired murderers/soldiers.
        It works every time; whatever the ostensible political system that appears to prevail, we still live in a fundamentally feudal epoch - one that we finally have a real chance of transforming into something altogether more fair and just in our own lifetimes. The era of these hierarchical self-serving institutions is drawing to a close. If we’re smart and wise and quick we can claw victory from the jaws of defeat and heal ourselves, each other and the planet – if we knock down the physical and mental fences and walls that we’ve built to protect us from ourselves and to keep our children from their playmates.
        You can’t get on easily with everyone and you wouldn’t be able to share your house with many people; it’s a natural matter of chemistry and affinity. But there are people you could live with, share your life with - if you give it a chance. As humans we need to connect with the people that mean something to us - and those that can, if given the chance. Sharing and exploring the world together is a prerequisite for a healthy society of sane, free individuals.
        On the day that you die, human connexions are the only meaning you’ll divine from life; possessions and accomplishments will count for nothing. Love is the only thing you can take with you.
        Try something new with your eyes wide open (to avoid the obvious and well-mapped pitfalls of human interaction) and be ready to see and experience the unexpectedly wonderful. Let’s give the next generations of humans a better loving cradle full of friendly faces to grow up in, a place where parents and children and elders all feel needed, wanted and secure. All we have to do is open our hearts and our spare spaces and link our fractured lives and disparate, poorly designed structures together into the seamless whole they can so easily become. We only need to join the dots – the puzzle pieces are all there and most of the connexions are obvious, just waiting for us to meld them together.
        There are many people fed up to the teeth with the same old crap, in positions of wealth and power and have far more than they need. Many would share it with others who had similar aims and hopes – if only they could learn to trust them. There are many, many isolated people who spend their days wandering through empty, friendless rooms in houses too large for them to maintain or use. If we tear down our fences we can all share the commons again and children can learn to play in tribal groups that don’t have to become violent, disenfranchised gangs of semi-literate bozos.
        The standard ‘alternatives’ are commonly plain to see; if you prefer to pace through a boring existence in the same old rat run then just do nothing new and forget all this – you can be one of the self-deceiving unhappy herd, the dreaming gene-pool of potential, brooding without actualisation.
photo
        Or you can link up with people you like and try something old and new for a change, experiment with your very lives and creativity in a catalytic spirit of truth, beauty, art and love. We an create the next Enlightenment without the need of a cleansing Black Death if we play with our potential consciously instead of existing as half-living animated corpses.
         United we dance, divided we’re dead. Let’s live! Let’s party! Let’s get to know and appreciate each other, our children and grandchildren – and those of others. We have the power to achieve whatever we choose – what’s truly good for us all will come together easily. Let’s build a real civilisation that fits our actual nature. Let’s live on a happy planet!

 -         R.Ayana
       
Images - author's
For further enlightenment see –

The Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com


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