Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Is the next threat too many 'them' in a resource-scarce future?

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Saturday, June 13, 2015

Is the next threat too many 'them' in a resource-scarce future?

Click here to access article by Nafeez Ahmed from Middle East Eye.

Read the article to see how Ahmed comes to this conclusion:

The uncanny alignment here between the bigoted rhetoric of far-right extremists, and the calculated strategic planning of the Western and Israel security elite, speaks to a fundamental problem: the extremism of the far-right is being fuelled by the paranoia of an interlocking security elite.

Their ideologically driven response to global systemic crises springs from the same false, narcissistic diagnosis: this system is pretty much the best there is; there’s no alternative, and therefore, we must maintain business-as-usual (and concomitantly, our privilege) as long as possible, while fending off “threats” to the system from those who fail to understand this. It so happens that those who fail to understand this comprise most of the world’s population.