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

Sunday, October 14, 2018

Beyond Democracy [the best post of the past 30 days]

Click here to access article by Eric Schechter from The Greanville Post

This senior editor of The Greanville Post tells it like it is for those deluded individuals who still believe so many myths spread by our masters throughout their institutions.
“We’re in danger of losing our democracy!” is a warning cry I hear often. A variant is that “we lost our democracy gradually over the last few decades.” They’re both wrong. The truth is that we never had a democracy; we’re in danger of losing our illusion of democracy.
It's not hard to understand why, and he does in very simple terms. The sad fact is that so many of us naively believed what we were told by adults in elementary schools and Sunday schools, and by our parents who were also steeped in capitalist propaganda since they were born. Later we were subject to this same indoctrination in movies and TV. Now many people find it hard to believe otherwise, to believe their own eyes and ears as our masters crank up their propaganda to new heights of deception and engage in censorship of information that counters their self-serving propaganda. A major problem for activists and independent thinkers is that those who uncritically accept this indoctrination are well rewarded by career opportunities in our master's corporations, government, academia, etc.