Yes, I agree that humans are actually a staggeringly beautiful and thrilling animal when you can see them with fresh eyes.
Every so often I go on what I call a news and social media diet and stay strictly offline for a few weeks or even a month (yes, even off your newsletter too).
This also cuts off a large part of the tsunami of advertising and corporate/ wealthy-worship that infects our society. I read books, listen to music, and go for walks instead of watching tv and surfing the web and when I get back online, I find that I've missed nothing. After my last blackout I learned that the big news "story" in the US, inexplicably, was some wealthy guys who took a sub down to the bottom of the ocean to see the Titanic.
After a week or two of a blackout, I've often found that my mood lifts and I'm less angry and despairing.
Come to think of it, I'm probably about due for another diet! :)
I bought a farm as my fortress of solitude, no internet, very little phones service, spend time with the animals and the trees. I do have to return to the modern working world even though its paid for, government taxes demand cash.
Not yet, I dont have a crop coming in this year, have to pay the taxes somehow so back to the treadmill. Frankly I love the trees too much to process them into lumber to pay taxes.
Well, trees take 30-50 years to mature. I was thinking more about raising bees for honey or growing herbs and selling them to local restaurants. Things like that.
Seed some logs with mushroom spores (you can buy them from seed catalogues) and sell the mushrooms. They take absolutely no work. Just seed them, keep them damp, and wait.
We and everything else are nature, and we need to develop fulfilling relationships with all of it.
I consider money a tool, so use it as ethically and frugally as possible. And it's fun! Thrifting is like a continual treasure hunt, especially when there's nothing I desperately need, so I settle only for the treasures. My bills are paid on the day they're due, so I give them as little energy as possible.
Yesterday I tabled at a community event for our regional climate hub. It was so nice to see what other groups are doing, meet people in the community and catch up with movement friends. Today I'll be singing in our community choir.
Little things, but they make life wonderful. Luckily there is still caring and community that wants better than the dehumanizing corporate world.
" In the 1930’s when Western corporate investors funded Hitler’s war machine, it was a bonanza of profiteering for them. Hitler’s Third Reich was a dress rehearsal for what we are living now as corporations dominate Western governments leading them and us into world war— their world war for corporate profiteering and further savagery directed at Earth’s ecosystems and their sustainability."--- from blog draft in progress. That they did so is testimony to how sociopath corporations are and the existential threat they represent.
We are also suffering a pandemic of Stockholm Syndrome where we have become passive accomplices to our hostage takers, whether it is one person, like Patty Hearst, or civilizational.
I have to disagree this time out, Caitlin. Civilization is NOT "nature." Human civilization has been inflicted upon nature. If it disappeared tomorrow, I don't think the rest of nature would miss it. In fact, I think the plants and animals would breathe a sigh of relief.
I have spent time around, watching and interacting with the 0.1% and can tell you without a doubt, I wouldn't trade my values, perceptions and experience of life for whatever their OCD, avarice and lowered empathy, in service of justifying the inequities they wallow in leaves them with. Wealth beyond the adequate and equitable ability to be assured existential needs are secure and intrinsic talents can be explored, becomes an mirage that consumes and leaves decimation in it's wake, for it can never acknowledge either the absurdity of excess or the consequences of elevating material adornment without end. And sadly, the majority of humanity seems incapable of both acknowledging that fact, or controlling those who have led it to the most precarious state our species and unfortunately many others with no choice in the matter, now confront.
I agree with you about the wealthy. It took me many years, but now I see what a sorry bunch of losers they are. Seriously! 99% of them are so preoccupied with their manufactured world and all these unimportant externalities that they can successfully avoid contemplation of all important topics- love, hate, empathy, the soul, the conscience, etc.
However, you can't avoid something completely, and what they're avoiding is the obvious fact that their lives are based on the exploitation of everyone around them. And no it's not right, and yes, they should be afraid. It's not that we workers want to be like them, we simply want enough to breathe. Endless stress about how we pay this or that- it's not asking for much to pay humanity a living wage.
It's funny too- many many years ago I had a personal slogan, "reject the culture." And perhaps I got busy, perhaps I smoked too many bowls in the interim, but this post here has me remembering that slogan and loving it all over again.
I have actually experienced the known lowering of empathy which elevated income and power has been written about and studied. Perhaps because it happened very suddenly, perhaps because I'm very empathetic and not of the smaller amygdala psychopathic, who accumulate huge wealth. But more to the practical side, my personality would never allow me to accumulate so much more than all of those whose deprivations empower the status of so many others. I'd be transferring that flow of excess to others before it could ever get there. Long before I set up some "foundation" and endowed ornate buildings with my surname.
I gave up the street address, rent, mortgage, property tax, utility payments, and insurance to save the majority of what I make instead of spending it on things that own people like you.
I have experienced homelessness. I don't know if it makes what's now seeming like trolling, less gratifying to you. And it occured after I experienced that elevated status for several years. If you read my original comment, I say the security of existential needs met (which in today's economy would still be a huge challenge on my SS) and beyond that, the opportunity to express innate talents are my standard, for myself and all others. So no, reducing my situation below that is not my goal. And I still provide assistance to others less fortunate and without the level of mutual support I am fortunate to have.
I have been legally homeless since 1985, when I moved into the first of three vans that I have lived in (sometimes down by a river:-) since, with the exception of 50 months in a truck sleeper.
I used to save 10 to 15 percent of what Social Security gives me, until Bidenomics made it impossible.
Unless that was by choice, I would hope for better circumstances for you. Where there were once places and opportunities in this country with far greater latitude to achieve that, my own financial situation, would now only be able to find those in places I'd dread spending my life. I've been in similar areas before. And even many of those are now insanely expensive. I wish you the best.
It went from being a stopgap to being normal as I worked out how to continue to reduce my cost of living while everyone else was manically trying to increase their incomes.
Out of debt with a little cushion today is an envious position these days, considering that most Americans have conflated their NEEDS WITH WANTS, and fallen prey to easy credit.
I sold it all, liquidated the big house, the boat, the benz and more. Bought a farm and eliminated debt, I am technically financially free but I still have to pay taxes on the farm. the villain demanding money for my existence is not corporations but government.
A farm of any appreciable size is completely capable of earning more in agricultural sales than its probable property tax. I own no other taxable property than the van that is my daily driver and my nightly sleeper, and that comes to $115 a year. It will get a new engine next week, estimated at $5800 and including a 3 year/100,000 mile warranty from Jasper.
While that is very true it takes a great deal of money and labor invested and all kinds of regulatory compliance to make a commercial farm. Mine is an intentionally declared homestead not a commercial farm.
The Wyoming legislature passed a law several years ago that allows the producer of raw milk to sell it to its final consumer without any regulation. The same thing has long been true about so-called truck patches, where small family farms take their goods to farmers markets. Such arrangements fed large numbers of Americans before grocery stores existed and could easily continue to do so after their shelves are empty, as they are slowly becoming.
Its really more at the federal level, the state and county are fine, low regulations, they don't care. The county literally has zero regulations, no zoning laws, no building permits required etc. The nearby small city has more laws but still fairly low regulations. i only really care about selling my produce to the neighbors anyway.
Please learn Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) because you sound foolish when you say these things.
You can find it on The Rogue Scholar, MMT Mondays, Macro'n'Cheese, or Real Progressives on YouTube. Stephanie Kelton also has several great videos on YouTube about it.
I guess that is one way to let everyone here know that you have never heard of, let alone read, lewrockwell.com. It also lets me know that I can ignore your future ad hominem attacks.
And you, on the other hand, know nothing about MMT (except what gossip you may have heard about it) so I can ignore your suggestion as you want to ignore mine.
The government doesn't buy debt from all comers.
MMT looks at sectoral balances, and they predict that if the government doesn't keep enough of a deficit (and they can never go broke because they create the currency), the burden of debt will be borne by the private sector, who don't create the currency. That's why the people are indebted TO BANKS with mortgages, car loans, and student loans, and credit card debt.
The Fed buys debt from all comers but it is a private bank owned by private banks that has masqueraded as a government agency since its incorporation in 1913. This was easy to prove before telephone books disappeared, as it was always listed in the business pages instead of the government pages. The currency is created by the Bureau of Engraving and sold to the Fed for the cost of production. The Fed then lends it to the government at face value plus interest.
I personally have no interest in acclimating to the norms of a civilization which appears to be headed in the direction of attempting to turn this living Earth we live on into some kind of dead Ecumenopolis ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecumenopolis ).
"a busy office full of chattering humans is not experientially much different from a busy forest full of chattering birds and insects — it’s just two different expressions of nature." This is true in the same sense that 'a busy organ full of chattering cancer cells is not experientially much different from a busy organ full of chattering neurons and red blood cells — it’s just two different expressions of nature.'. A busy office full of chattering humans in a modern day city, is a structure that represents a chain of events that constitute the violent rape, pillaging and then suffocation of the land it is built on. The city it is a part of represents a larger fractal expression of that same chain of raping, pillaging and suffocating of the land.
The continuing choices made by the humans within it which are as you say "pour(ing) more of (their) energy into generating corporate profits throughout our lives than the most pious monk pours into worshipping any deity." are what enables the continuing pillaging, raping and suffocation of the living earth, the transformation of that which is living and diverse, into that which is dead, uniform and able to generate fiat currency.
Rather than acclimatizing to the normalized raping, pillaging and suffocating of the living Earth by redefining that behavior (and the structures and ways of living it enables to continue) I choose to sever my dependence on those centralized systems, one step at a time. I intend on undermining the foundations of the corporation and bankster dominated governments by withdrawing my support from their centralized systems (and helping others do the same) until they collapse under their own top heavy weight. I aim to starve the beast and plant the seeds for something more aligned with integrity, equality, compassion and abundance to grow in its place.
I will work to help others who are interested in doing the same through focusing on initiatives like this:
The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a great book, but one totally overlooked is Kingdom Come by JG Ballard. This is what is happening to us, Capitalism is destroying our souls. Great article.
I think the hardest part of breaking free from the narrative, for most people, is admitting they have a problem, sort of like treating any other addiction. It's that first step that is the most difficult for them, IMO.
Americans have been told as adults never to knock the system. The MSM daily feeds them about freedom and democracy even as those precious rights are pulled from under their noses. The modern surveillance state (in cahoots with the corporate world) does not need jackboots on the pavement. It puts the squeeze surreptitiously until one day you wake up in a full-blown Fascist state.
Great article Caitlin, it resonates. This financialization and corporatization of America is why my family, and many others, are seeking to opt-out and unplug into an off-grid lifestyle. We are trying to rebuild local community. Create affordable homes (barndominiums / tiny homes / yurts), use much less, raise regenerative livestock, grow permaculture gardens, use some solar, biomass, permaculture methods... Opting out is the most powerful vote away from a corporate world, and then helping somebody else opt out and join you. I just wrote about our view on this issue about the fading American dream: https://articles.acornlandlabs.com/p/farewell-american-dream
I was born in 1992... so I would have been -30 years old in the 1960s ;) Had to be born first!
All joking aside, permaculture and off-grid methods have been a focus for me since I was in my late teens /early 20s. It's always felt like a path to freedom. The 1960s back to the land movement was a good example, but many of those folks gave up in the end as the economy was still growing.
Perhaps it's not so much "catching up" as realizing just how broken the world today around me is, and looking for solutions from authors online (some of whom had lived through the 70s or so).
Since I was 20 years old I've felt like things were terribly wrong in society. The systems just didn't feel solid or make sense. Financially, morally, ecologically, etc.
After COVID I think many people are waking up to how broken most large systems are.
The Reckoning
America
I am redeeming all my tickets you hold
in your Pawnshop of my soul.
The ticket of all the Indians and Japs and Nazis I killed
in the backyards of my boyhood.
The ticket of the church service on the day
JFK had his head blown open and
was sainted on the spot.
The ticket of Kent State
and
the ticket of Jonestown
and
the ticket of nine eleven.
The ticket of the National Debt
that you tell
I owe personally.
The ticket of the innocence you said I lost
that you never had any claim to
in the first place.
America
I am redeeming all my tickets you hold
in your Pawnshop of my soul.
The ticket of the Holy Materialism,
the tickets of Big Greed.
The tickets of addiction . . .
o yeah,
you hooked me alright America.
Those tickets I gave you
in return for putting all hope and dreams
behind your counter.
America
I am redeeming all my tickets you hold
in your Pawnshop of my soul.
America, you lied.
And I was too dumb and too young
to know you didn’t own my soul.
I accepted your tickets in trust of your promise
that of course I could redeem them
Someday.
America, you lied
and you still lie,
Only bigger, more arrogant.
America
I have redeemed all my tickets you held
in your Pawnshop of my soul.
Your glass cases stand open and barren.
Your locks are broken.
Your shelves are empty.
Your counters are bare.
Your wage-slaves are quitting.
The weeds are shattering your blacktop.
Even the Crows avoid your bones.
© Salskov Iversen 2012
Very thought provoking. Thanks for sharing.
Bravo!👏✍️
Yes, I agree that humans are actually a staggeringly beautiful and thrilling animal when you can see them with fresh eyes.
Every so often I go on what I call a news and social media diet and stay strictly offline for a few weeks or even a month (yes, even off your newsletter too).
This also cuts off a large part of the tsunami of advertising and corporate/ wealthy-worship that infects our society. I read books, listen to music, and go for walks instead of watching tv and surfing the web and when I get back online, I find that I've missed nothing. After my last blackout I learned that the big news "story" in the US, inexplicably, was some wealthy guys who took a sub down to the bottom of the ocean to see the Titanic.
After a week or two of a blackout, I've often found that my mood lifts and I'm less angry and despairing.
Come to think of it, I'm probably about due for another diet! :)
I bought a farm as my fortress of solitude, no internet, very little phones service, spend time with the animals and the trees. I do have to return to the modern working world even though its paid for, government taxes demand cash.
Can't you sell something from the farm to pay the taxes?
Not yet, I dont have a crop coming in this year, have to pay the taxes somehow so back to the treadmill. Frankly I love the trees too much to process them into lumber to pay taxes.
Well, trees take 30-50 years to mature. I was thinking more about raising bees for honey or growing herbs and selling them to local restaurants. Things like that.
Seed some logs with mushroom spores (you can buy them from seed catalogues) and sell the mushrooms. They take absolutely no work. Just seed them, keep them damp, and wait.
Thanks for the advice but its unnecessary.
I’ll go with you. Cut the cable
I believe you wrote a typo! "with dead eyes"...
We and everything else are nature, and we need to develop fulfilling relationships with all of it.
I consider money a tool, so use it as ethically and frugally as possible. And it's fun! Thrifting is like a continual treasure hunt, especially when there's nothing I desperately need, so I settle only for the treasures. My bills are paid on the day they're due, so I give them as little energy as possible.
Yesterday I tabled at a community event for our regional climate hub. It was so nice to see what other groups are doing, meet people in the community and catch up with movement friends. Today I'll be singing in our community choir.
Little things, but they make life wonderful. Luckily there is still caring and community that wants better than the dehumanizing corporate world.
Well done! Good for you! And for everyone else as well.
" In the 1930’s when Western corporate investors funded Hitler’s war machine, it was a bonanza of profiteering for them. Hitler’s Third Reich was a dress rehearsal for what we are living now as corporations dominate Western governments leading them and us into world war— their world war for corporate profiteering and further savagery directed at Earth’s ecosystems and their sustainability."--- from blog draft in progress. That they did so is testimony to how sociopath corporations are and the existential threat they represent.
We are also suffering a pandemic of Stockholm Syndrome where we have become passive accomplices to our hostage takers, whether it is one person, like Patty Hearst, or civilizational.
I have to disagree this time out, Caitlin. Civilization is NOT "nature." Human civilization has been inflicted upon nature. If it disappeared tomorrow, I don't think the rest of nature would miss it. In fact, I think the plants and animals would breathe a sigh of relief.
So much better to be a cat.
Good Kitty agrees completely. He thinks humans are insane.
Good Kitty for pres '24!
Fulfillment is easier to find if one is wealthy.
No... no it isn't. A monk or Saddhu leads more fulfilling lives than a Gates, Bezos or Soros.
Soul-crushing poverty is ONLY created and enforced by other people. Normal poverty is entirely relative.
The mental sickness that is greed is never fulfilled, never can be. If there's one lesson the world can learn from our period, it's that.
How does a period become yours?
You spend one of your incarnations in it.
How many incarnations can you exist in simultaneously?
According to Swami Yogananda existing in simultaneous incarnations is a highly advanced skill.
I would make that more complex, and say being AWARE of it was an advanced skill.
Is Swami Yogananda related to Vivek Ramaswamy?
Personally, I would say infinite, but others have different opinions, naturally.
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein
I have spent time around, watching and interacting with the 0.1% and can tell you without a doubt, I wouldn't trade my values, perceptions and experience of life for whatever their OCD, avarice and lowered empathy, in service of justifying the inequities they wallow in leaves them with. Wealth beyond the adequate and equitable ability to be assured existential needs are secure and intrinsic talents can be explored, becomes an mirage that consumes and leaves decimation in it's wake, for it can never acknowledge either the absurdity of excess or the consequences of elevating material adornment without end. And sadly, the majority of humanity seems incapable of both acknowledging that fact, or controlling those who have led it to the most precarious state our species and unfortunately many others with no choice in the matter, now confront.
You might like to read The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen.
I agree with you about the wealthy. It took me many years, but now I see what a sorry bunch of losers they are. Seriously! 99% of them are so preoccupied with their manufactured world and all these unimportant externalities that they can successfully avoid contemplation of all important topics- love, hate, empathy, the soul, the conscience, etc.
However, you can't avoid something completely, and what they're avoiding is the obvious fact that their lives are based on the exploitation of everyone around them. And no it's not right, and yes, they should be afraid. It's not that we workers want to be like them, we simply want enough to breathe. Endless stress about how we pay this or that- it's not asking for much to pay humanity a living wage.
It's funny too- many many years ago I had a personal slogan, "reject the culture." And perhaps I got busy, perhaps I smoked too many bowls in the interim, but this post here has me remembering that slogan and loving it all over again.
Solidarity!
You don't think you could avoid acting like them while having their advantages?
I have actually experienced the known lowering of empathy which elevated income and power has been written about and studied. Perhaps because it happened very suddenly, perhaps because I'm very empathetic and not of the smaller amygdala psychopathic, who accumulate huge wealth. But more to the practical side, my personality would never allow me to accumulate so much more than all of those whose deprivations empower the status of so many others. I'd be transferring that flow of excess to others before it could ever get there. Long before I set up some "foundation" and endowed ornate buildings with my surname.
You gave away the elevated income and power and became homeless?
I gave up the street address, rent, mortgage, property tax, utility payments, and insurance to save the majority of what I make instead of spending it on things that own people like you.
I have experienced homelessness. I don't know if it makes what's now seeming like trolling, less gratifying to you. And it occured after I experienced that elevated status for several years. If you read my original comment, I say the security of existential needs met (which in today's economy would still be a huge challenge on my SS) and beyond that, the opportunity to express innate talents are my standard, for myself and all others. So no, reducing my situation below that is not my goal. And I still provide assistance to others less fortunate and without the level of mutual support I am fortunate to have.
I have been legally homeless since 1985, when I moved into the first of three vans that I have lived in (sometimes down by a river:-) since, with the exception of 50 months in a truck sleeper.
I used to save 10 to 15 percent of what Social Security gives me, until Bidenomics made it impossible.
Unless that was by choice, I would hope for better circumstances for you. Where there were once places and opportunities in this country with far greater latitude to achieve that, my own financial situation, would now only be able to find those in places I'd dread spending my life. I've been in similar areas before. And even many of those are now insanely expensive. I wish you the best.
It went from being a stopgap to being normal as I worked out how to continue to reduce my cost of living while everyone else was manically trying to increase their incomes.
Out of debt with a little cushion today is an envious position these days, considering that most Americans have conflated their NEEDS WITH WANTS, and fallen prey to easy credit.
I sold it all, liquidated the big house, the boat, the benz and more. Bought a farm and eliminated debt, I am technically financially free but I still have to pay taxes on the farm. the villain demanding money for my existence is not corporations but government.
A farm of any appreciable size is completely capable of earning more in agricultural sales than its probable property tax. I own no other taxable property than the van that is my daily driver and my nightly sleeper, and that comes to $115 a year. It will get a new engine next week, estimated at $5800 and including a 3 year/100,000 mile warranty from Jasper.
While that is very true it takes a great deal of money and labor invested and all kinds of regulatory compliance to make a commercial farm. Mine is an intentionally declared homestead not a commercial farm.
It all depends on how commercialized you make it.
The Wyoming legislature passed a law several years ago that allows the producer of raw milk to sell it to its final consumer without any regulation. The same thing has long been true about so-called truck patches, where small family farms take their goods to farmers markets. Such arrangements fed large numbers of Americans before grocery stores existed and could easily continue to do so after their shelves are empty, as they are slowly becoming.
Its really more at the federal level, the state and county are fine, low regulations, they don't care. The county literally has zero regulations, no zoning laws, no building permits required etc. The nearby small city has more laws but still fairly low regulations. i only really care about selling my produce to the neighbors anyway.
The Fed has always made consumers look like pikers, especially since they started buying debt from all comers.
Please learn Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) because you sound foolish when you say these things.
You can find it on The Rogue Scholar, MMT Mondays, Macro'n'Cheese, or Real Progressives on YouTube. Stephanie Kelton also has several great videos on YouTube about it.
I guess that is one way to let everyone here know that you have never heard of, let alone read, lewrockwell.com. It also lets me know that I can ignore your future ad hominem attacks.
And you, on the other hand, know nothing about MMT (except what gossip you may have heard about it) so I can ignore your suggestion as you want to ignore mine.
The government doesn't buy debt from all comers.
MMT looks at sectoral balances, and they predict that if the government doesn't keep enough of a deficit (and they can never go broke because they create the currency), the burden of debt will be borne by the private sector, who don't create the currency. That's why the people are indebted TO BANKS with mortgages, car loans, and student loans, and credit card debt.
The Fed buys debt from all comers but it is a private bank owned by private banks that has masqueraded as a government agency since its incorporation in 1913. This was easy to prove before telephone books disappeared, as it was always listed in the business pages instead of the government pages. The currency is created by the Bureau of Engraving and sold to the Fed for the cost of production. The Fed then lends it to the government at face value plus interest.
I personally have no interest in acclimating to the norms of a civilization which appears to be headed in the direction of attempting to turn this living Earth we live on into some kind of dead Ecumenopolis ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecumenopolis ).
"a busy office full of chattering humans is not experientially much different from a busy forest full of chattering birds and insects — it’s just two different expressions of nature." This is true in the same sense that 'a busy organ full of chattering cancer cells is not experientially much different from a busy organ full of chattering neurons and red blood cells — it’s just two different expressions of nature.'. A busy office full of chattering humans in a modern day city, is a structure that represents a chain of events that constitute the violent rape, pillaging and then suffocation of the land it is built on. The city it is a part of represents a larger fractal expression of that same chain of raping, pillaging and suffocating of the land.
The continuing choices made by the humans within it which are as you say "pour(ing) more of (their) energy into generating corporate profits throughout our lives than the most pious monk pours into worshipping any deity." are what enables the continuing pillaging, raping and suffocation of the living earth, the transformation of that which is living and diverse, into that which is dead, uniform and able to generate fiat currency.
Rather than acclimatizing to the normalized raping, pillaging and suffocating of the living Earth by redefining that behavior (and the structures and ways of living it enables to continue) I choose to sever my dependence on those centralized systems, one step at a time. I intend on undermining the foundations of the corporation and bankster dominated governments by withdrawing my support from their centralized systems (and helping others do the same) until they collapse under their own top heavy weight. I aim to starve the beast and plant the seeds for something more aligned with integrity, equality, compassion and abundance to grow in its place.
I will work to help others who are interested in doing the same through focusing on initiatives like this:
https://gavinmounsey.substack.com/p/23-reasons-to-start-a-garden-in-2023
More on that mission and one pathway of how to begin to accomplish it here: https://gavinmounsey.substack.com/p/in-pursuit-of-an-antidote-for-parasites
The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a great book, but one totally overlooked is Kingdom Come by JG Ballard. This is what is happening to us, Capitalism is destroying our souls. Great article.
I think the hardest part of breaking free from the narrative, for most people, is admitting they have a problem, sort of like treating any other addiction. It's that first step that is the most difficult for them, IMO.
Thank you Caitlin🙏
Here's 1½ minutes of quality viewing to help. You'll soon be alright. https://youtu.be/Bf5TgVRGND4
Americans have been told as adults never to knock the system. The MSM daily feeds them about freedom and democracy even as those precious rights are pulled from under their noses. The modern surveillance state (in cahoots with the corporate world) does not need jackboots on the pavement. It puts the squeeze surreptitiously until one day you wake up in a full-blown Fascist state.
Accounts from 1930's Deutschland say it was done the same gradual way.
The modern surveillance state and the corporate world are one and the same.
Caitlin wrote some articles about this back in 2021. September, I believe.
Great article Caitlin, it resonates. This financialization and corporatization of America is why my family, and many others, are seeking to opt-out and unplug into an off-grid lifestyle. We are trying to rebuild local community. Create affordable homes (barndominiums / tiny homes / yurts), use much less, raise regenerative livestock, grow permaculture gardens, use some solar, biomass, permaculture methods... Opting out is the most powerful vote away from a corporate world, and then helping somebody else opt out and join you. I just wrote about our view on this issue about the fading American dream: https://articles.acornlandlabs.com/p/farewell-american-dream
Back in the 60s, we were called hippies.
Everyone was taught to laugh at us.
Finally catching up, are you?
I was born in 1992... so I would have been -30 years old in the 1960s ;) Had to be born first!
All joking aside, permaculture and off-grid methods have been a focus for me since I was in my late teens /early 20s. It's always felt like a path to freedom. The 1960s back to the land movement was a good example, but many of those folks gave up in the end as the economy was still growing.
Perhaps it's not so much "catching up" as realizing just how broken the world today around me is, and looking for solutions from authors online (some of whom had lived through the 70s or so).
Since I was 20 years old I've felt like things were terribly wrong in society. The systems just didn't feel solid or make sense. Financially, morally, ecologically, etc.
After COVID I think many people are waking up to how broken most large systems are.
One must step outside of the established order of things. Back out of the "system".
That old idea of "conquering" nature -- as if it's our nemesis.
We are quickly discovering that it's much more interconnected with us than we think.
It's propagated by the Judeo-Christian bible.