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The Right Revolution: Crucial Reasoning Against Human Farming

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“Revolution is based on land.  Land is the basis of all independence.  Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality.” – Malcolm X

[updated July 9th, 2021]

by Colin Denny Donoghue

“Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.” – Albert Einstein

    There is a simple reason why those seeking a better society by engaging in activism to reform social-systems find themselves in an exercise of futility.  The existing problems remain unsolved, or new problems from the same source take their place, and this is not accidental.  In order to discover the Natural Law in operation that makes sense of this reoccuring phenomenon one must look deeper into our social and historical reality, through the political & mass-media theater, to what is happening beneath the surface concerning truth and principle.

    This is just like with human psychology: if someone had experienced something traumatic as a child and the event was suppressed within their subconscious, it will most likely operate as the originator of destructive & fearful (or at the very least unproductive) behavior, and until that deeper issue is resolved, treating the symptoms of the behavior through medication and so on will never bring about a real cure; the irrational negative concept and belief created alongside the trauma must be rooted out in order for there to be real progress.  Back to the social realm, we have all in a sense been subjected to a systemic trauma early on in our lives, actually it was already waiting for us before we were born: the trauma of being forced to assimilate to unnatural social-systems.  These social-systems drastically shape our lives every day, and indoctrinate us with the belief that they are beneficial, that we need them for our survival, and so are therefore principled.  We are also indoctrinated to accept the self-concept that we are “citizens,” rather than sovereign humans, and to accept that there is no choice in the matter.  And just like within the personal realm, these irrational root beliefs and self-concepts create fearful & destructive behavior, except on a much larger scale.

    The simple reason the political process is unproductive in producing lasting peace & justice is that it is fundamentally unprincipled; it is based on aggression and exploitation, which are in turn supported by lies, and you can’t build a principled society on a foundation of violence and lies.  The unprincipled root at the foundation of social-systems will always create disturbing effects, over and over, year after year (like nonviolent men being choked to death by police on the sidewalk for not paying cigarette taxes).  We will never see a truly just and free society using a process and system that is fundamentally unjust; world peace & justice will remain allusive, and fear and destruction will remain widespread, until this crucial truth is recognized by humanity.  To ignore the root problem is to ensure the continuance of negative consequences that stem from it; constantly fighting against those consequences rather than their origin can never lead to lasting progress, more of the same negatives will karmicly follow; if you only treat the symptoms of a disease you will never be fully cured.  So when we get upset at a corrupt politician, or some uncaring CEO, we aren’t really being effective activists.  These powers-that-be are just inevitable virulent products coming from a social factory that’s origin is completely unethical.  Yelling at the output is like yelling at toxic products coming out on a conveyor belt, it’s short-sighted and a waste of energy; we need to shut down the factory, we need to eliminate the unprincipled social-system that is the real root problem that needs to be completely abandoned, rather than reformed; you can’t make evil good, it’s a Natural Law.

    Yet people may cite the existence of nuclear weapons, terrorism, poverty/hunger or industrial destruction of the environment as reasons for why we need government, but this misses the fact that government is the main means by which all of those came into being (unnatural centralization and accumulation of wealth/power/resources that allows for nuclear weapon development, etc., along with supporting the condition of monetary-slavery via taxation and other mandatory governmental fees that set up dependency on corporate goods, profit from which allows those industries to grow to immense and even more destructive size).  The key simple thing here to understand is this: the government is an evil because it’s a form of slavery.  And to think we need evil to combat evil is a fallacy; evil only combats good, that’s what makes it evil!  This gray-area moral-relativism and compromise that is considered the more “realistic” and “rational” approach (compared with the “wishful thinking” of anarchist perspective) is actually neither realistic nor rational; it’s irrational delusion, it’s the true wishful thinking, wishful thinking that good can come from slavery.  Calling on evil to combat evil is completely unproductive; most people would probably agree with that, but they don’t agree that government is an evil, they would say “It’s not that simple, government does good things too, like provide education and public services.”  This perspective, again thought to be the more realistic and rational perspective, is actually ignorant of the reality.  If someone was physically enslaving people, but also provided them with some services and education, like say what occurs in prisons, would that make the slavery “neither good or evil?”  No, it would still be evil; any form of slavery is an evil.  This is why the overall effect of statism will always be negative, it can never escape the Karmic Law connected to its foundation of aggression and slavery. This is why “progress” through modernized technological social-systems is a myth, though many are blind to it because they don’t know about or pay attention to the indicators that things are actually getting yet worse, not better.

The Myth of Progress

As the world is filled with more and more toxic chemicals, how can we call that progress? We may not see the same blatant examples of injustice as existed in the past, but that doesn’t mean things have necessarily gotten better, they can actually be worse. Increased cancer, autism, mental problems… smart-meters on people’s homes bombarding them with intense radiation daily, the 5G upgrade/intensification of radiation everywhere, aggression of privacy invasion becoming ubiquitous, (e.g., via “smart” devices” and surveillance cameras filling in more and more niches of the world and our lives… more state-sponsored terrorism, propaganda in almost all movies and TV shows, people drugged-up on pharmaceuticals more and more)… less personal freedoms (e.g., mandatory vaccinations, which can irreparably harm yourself and your children, mandatory state schooling/homeschooling outlawed, increased state gun control/confiscation, etc. ),.. artificial intelligence drones that seek out and kill whoever is deemed a threat, nanotechnology than can invade people’s bodies without them knowing… I could go on (GMO contamination of natural world and food supply), but the point is that the world is actually becoming more of a dystopia than it was before, and now it’s even less clear to most people what’s wrong than it was before, so there may be less chance of it changing (another level of how it’s actually worse).

If you look at the big picture, giving loving attention to all of Reality rather than just some narrow and irrational focus (e.g. “what about roads?”), then you can see that we can have all the good that society needs without any of the bad.  If most of humanity understood and embraced this one crucial point centuries of massive destruction and suffering could have been avoided, and we could stop the apocalyptic trajectory that modern statism is taking humanity and the rest of life on Earth today.  Good-intentioned people that support statism are some combination of ignorant and in denial; they are ignorant of the deplorable reality brought by social-systems, historically and today, and in denial that these systems are actually a form of slavery, even though they fit the very definition of slavery exactly.

    Political reformers don’t yet understand this and say the fundamental flaw is lack of democracy, that if we could just “take back the power” from the corporations, or the crown, or the federal reserve, or whoever, then we could have a better world.  There is truth to that of course, what we see growing around us is fascist globalization of power, and so it makes sense that its opposite, democratic localization of power, would be the solution to that problem.

    This reasoning is not taken to its logical conclusion by reformers however; if it were, if we were to take the ideal of democratic localization to its most pure form, we would be left with no social-system at all, we would be left with sovereign families not subject to any outside human authority.  And that’s anarchy, which the reformer believes equates to chaos (due to propaganda exposure), so that’s not a preferable option in their mind.  Therefore the conclusion of this pro-democracy reasoning is that the solution is simply a social-system that is more democratic than the one we currently have.  They may even call it, like I used to, a “true” democracy: the ideal social-system, the best that human civilization can achieve.

The Myth of Representation

Democracy, defined as government “by the people,” either directly or through representatives, is certainly a better model than a fascist dictatorship, no doubt.  The problem with this model is that it’s actually impossible to maintain on a large scale.  In fact it can’t be maintained on a moderate, or even regional scale.  Take for instance, the largest protests in American and world history in February 2003, those against the proposed invasion of Iraq by the U.S. Military.  Polls at the time confirmed the obvious: the majority of Americans were against this invasion; millions marched, and millions more wrote and called their representatives telling them not to go ahead with this violent plan.  None of it stopped the invasion; hundreds of thousands of innocent people were killed, including countless babies born dead or deformed from radiation poisoning caused by the depleted uranium weaponry used.  And why did this horror occur despite the public outcry?  Lack of democracy, yes, but if we had simply had more democracy (like through paper ballots, instant run-off voting, public financing, etc.) would that prevent the possibility of government officials making unpopular and destructive decisions, like illegally invading other nations?  Well, they don’t take national polls before making every decision now do they?  How could they?  Isn’t that an impossibility?  Since that is the case, every few years a few politicians we are allowed to choose from tell us what they will do when they are in office, we get an idea of their outlook on many issues, and then we may vote for the one we think is the lesser of the evils, and hope they will keep their word.  News-flash: they often don’t keep their word.  The list of broken campaign promises by politicians is endless.  On top of the problem of deception and betrayal, this example is assuming you vote for the winning candidate; if you vote for the candidate that loses, or you find no candidate you want to vote for, you are even more obviously not being represented.

“We frequently hear the refrain:  If you don’t vote you have no right to complain.  Such an argument makes the false assumption that an election provides real choices.  And, of course, it falsely assumes the legitimacy of the process itself:  that an individual is required to delegate authority to an arbitrarily chosen few, or that an individual is required to elect his own jailers.”

– People Without Governments: An Anthropology of Anarchy by Harold Barclay, p. 118

And also since you have to be rich to afford the costs of being a viable candidate, the lie of representation is further exemplified by the upper class always being presented as representatives of the lower class and poor that live lives and have perspectives and interests nothing like theirs.  Additionally, since voter turn-out is usually only an undersized percentage of the population, how can we possibly say those votes represent the wishes of everyone the policies and laws will effect?  And so for all these reasons we must conclude that this is not real representation, nor could it ever be.  Representation is fundamentally a lie, it is a technical impossibility.  The well known saying “No taxation without representation” is a good one, but since representation is not really possible, that means we should have no taxation.  This truth is not looked at by reformers, the blinders of indoctrination keeping the focus straight ahead on a delusional social dream.  They believe, as I used to, that “if just more people participated in the political process” then we could have proper representation of the public by government.  Reformers therefore see anarchism as the worst idea for attaining social-justice, and they look upon anarchists, as I used to, as immoral and ignorant.  This perspective is not based in reality however.  The truth about who is ultimately supporting immorality and ignorance turns out to be the opposite.

    During the Nuremburg Trials of Nazi leaders one of the Nazis (Herman Göring) actually admitted the truth that all social-systems are corrupt and immoral, and that representation is a lie, whether called “democracy” or not:

Goring:  Why, of course, the people don’t want war.  Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece.  Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany.  That is understood.  But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.
Interviewer:  There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
Goring:  Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.  That is easy.  All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.  It works the same way in any country.

— published in Gilbert’s Nuremberg Diary, (1947)

     The whole premise of representation of the masses is a sham. The truth is we are all forced to obey the few, no matter what our personal views are.  In the U.S.A. we are somewhat protected by the Bill of Rights, which was created to protect us from extreme governmental abuse, but of course those rights are still violated regularly, and they don’t give us real freedom: the fundamental right to be left alone, to not be attacked in any way or forced to do anything against our will.  The prime example of this tyranny is facing arrest if you try to live naturally and freely on the land without paying taxes for things you don’t want, and without paying for a fair share of land & water, which should be a free birthright. The story remains the same, just as with the countless old tales of poor villagers being harassed, threatened or worse by tax collectors; today’s reality is only modernized and more propagandized.

    The original colonies of the United States represented the rich land-owning class, and that’s still basically what the U.S. government, and other governments, in fact represent, even more so now in this time of corporate land grabs across the globe.  Corporate and governmental domination work hand-in-hand to undermine natural community; that is their main function, to restrict your right relationship to the Earth, thereby making you exploitable money-slaves.  Government and corporate/industrial power are really one and the same, this supposed battle between the two is really just theater to keep you complacent, to keep you in subservience, ignorant of the fundamental injustice in operation.

~~~

False Revolutions

    Today the word “revolution” is thrown around quite a bit, in advertisements for everything from beauty products to automobiles, as well as in political discourse, but even then the term is watered-down to represent events that aren’t really revolutionary. The word is misused to misguide the populace as to what a true revolution would be, lowering their standards to mere mass-demonstrations.  I’m not against mass-demonstrations at all, but I am against the exaggeration that they are revolutions.  The electronic social-media supported demonstrations that occurred in 2011 in Egypt are now referred to as the “Egyptian Revolution,” but was it really?  The sobering reality is that it was hardly that, as we can now clearly see.  While it was occurring I corrected some commentators on this, telling them that unless the demonstrators were claiming sovereign homesteading land, it would ultimately amount to little, but I was disregarded as “overly negative” (which was irrational and untrue).  Now they say “the revolution was hijacked by the elite.”  Yet, the “revolution” was never really “hijacked” because it was never a real revolution to begin with, the elite never lost their base of power, which is land control, cost and taxation.

    During the 1960’s radical movement in the U.S., the word revolution was often used as well, but the status-quo remained and grew because that crucial truth did not take center-stage.  Some did go in the right direction however, like those that were part of the large back-to-the-land movement of that time, but most of these attempts did not acknowledge the insurmountable problems with communal living (i.e. lack of personal & land sovereignty) along with land cost, control and taxation (i.e. monetary-slavery), and so were mostly doomed to failure.  A 60’s Hippie laments decades later:

“The word radical, like its etymological counterpart radicle, comes from the Latin word radix, which means root.  So were we truly radicals?  Did our roots go down into a life-giving source that could sustain us and bring about the goals of the Movement?  No!  Time and time again we went home dismayed and frustrated–our efforts to organize peace coalitions had come to nothing and the peace groups we belonged to had divided into warring factions.  Eventually we left the Movement and fell back into the same system from which we had tried to escape.

There were some successes however, like the formation of People’s Park in Berkeley, California, in which the local community claimed the land as their birthright (facing strong opposition from authorities for years), planted gardens, and successfully resisted the violence of the government and university officials using police which repeatedly tried to evict them.  Overall though the critical importance of the land was missed by the 60’s radicals; the activists were still petitioning false masters, believing in the false ideals of “democracy” & “representation”, along with being largely inundated with drug use, which served as a distraction (albeit a sometimes inspiring distraction) from the real work that needed to be done, namely claiming land.  Again, Hippie lamentations:

“We wanted to conquer the world with love and bring peace to this earth, but there was no blueprint to bring our vision into a lasting demonstration.”

But they were very right in emphasizing Love & Freedom as core principles of life, they just didn’t understand what those principles would manifest as comprehensively (i.e. the most loving (e.g. nonviolent toward animals and ecosystem) and freedom-respecting (e.g. recognizing personal sovereignty) social-structure is the “blueprint” of sovereign veganic homesteads, making up voluntary communities).

The famous philosopher Georg Hegel supported the French Revolution (1789-1799), while seeing its “Reign of Terror” (1793-1794), and later emperor Napoleon Bonaparte’s rule (1804-1815), as an inevitable consequence of the fact that it didn’t manifest true equality.  But he also thought that in order for a society to function well there must be judges, legislators and executives, there must be a State.  Hegel thought the main short-coming of the French Revolution was its inability to conceive of a notion of equality that could coincide with the “necessity” of the State.  No such notion was found then, nor has it yet been found, because none exists!  To base a society on a system that is fundamentally unequal (statist representation is always an authoritarian lie), and expect to actually develop and maintain social equality, and avoid tyranny and State terrorism, is to be caught up in a delusion, it’s to have fallen for a Big Lie, the lie that statism is necessary and legitimate.

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Part of the statue of Zapata at his tomb in Morelos, Mexico.

The Mexican revolution (1910-1920), especially as led by Emiliano Zapata, is definitely one of the the most on-target rebellions of recent times, it may in fact be the most important historical example that exists.  Zapata was a brilliant revolutionary in multiple respects, namely in his focus on land as birthright of those who worked it (i.e., those that homesteaded the land), and his rejection of political power, based on his wise mistrust of it.  As said in a short biography of him: “Back in Anencuilco, Zapata made a grave announcement to the farmers.  He said they could not trust the government to return the stolen by haceinda owners.  Instead, they must get horses and guns and retake the land by force.”  Summing up what The Right Revolution actually looks like, which necessarily and on principle has nothing to do with petitioning over replacing governments, this same biography says:

“The Zapata movement concentrated on retaking land stolen by rich hacienda owners.  Zapata’s followers knocked down the stone walls of haciendas and moved onto land which had been previously taken from them by courts.  They farmed the land while wearing rifles slung over their shoulders.  When police tried to force them off the land, gun battles broke out.  As the hacienda warfare heated up, the governor of Morelos fled his state. “These are difficult times,” the governor said.  “The peasant is now the master.”

Echoing this in more recent events, an article “speaks of “Indigenous Communities in Mexico Unite to Protect Ancestral Lands,” following the same rally cry of Zapata “Tierra y Libertad! —“Land and Liberty!”  Unfortunately Zapata still believed in the State and even draped himself in the Mexican flag when first spoke his famous
Plan de Ayala to the people in November of 1911.  He was, unsurprisingly from an anarchist/accurate view of history, later betrayed by State officials, and assassinated in 1919.  At the end of the war in the 1920s, a land redistribution program did commence, giving away large tracts of land to be farmed communally by poor Mexicans who had previously worked practically as slaves in vast haciendas (which, by the way is where Zapata was tricked into going to for the ambush that killed him).  Finally, these farmers could “work together to produce food autonomously for themselves and their communities,” but, as the renewed struggle highlighted in the article makes clear, this land redistribution didn’t last.  And why not?  Because they were still enabling a State, that’s why!  This deplorable corruption and destruction (destruction now accelerated through modern technology) is inevitable with that evil slavery foundation, yet revolutionaries and activists around the world, for centuries now, keep falling for the same aforementioned Big Lie of statism, which is the very thing that always undermines the goal of social-justice that they are seeking.

The Spanish Revolution starting in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War likewise was based on some right principles, and in many ways manifested them to a greater degree than most other revolutionary movements; a popular movie about the Revolution was also significantly called “Land and Freedom,” again encapsulating the Right Revolution in three words!  (Except they don’t include the crucial detail of sovereign homesteading land, and real freedom, i.e., anarchism, instead still believing in socialism).

Land and Freedom… recreating a momentous experiment in social revolution that, almost succeeding, found an authoritarian left [the Communists] to be as much a hindrance as outright Fascism [the forces of Francisco Franco].”

Anarchism (Reaktion Books, 2003) by Sean M. Sheehan, p. 95

Yet those principles of land equality and individual freedom weren’t followed fully, and so there were predictably disappointing results.  By not focusing on land as a birthright of all and individual sovereignty as paramount, and not being wholly anarchist but instead largely “libertarian-communist”; this collectivist/statist ideology, like any collectivist view, isn’t truly revolutionary, denying the sovereignty of individuals, thereby associating itself with tyranny.  The betrayal of the Spanish anarchist militia by the Communists, who were supposed to be fighting against fascism side-by-side with them, shows us again that real freedom (anarchism) and forms of slavery (e.g. Communism) can’t mix; they are ultimately diametrically opposed; the betrayal would have never happened if the Communists weren’t given so much direct support and affiliated with in the first place.  (The same basically goes for the Russian anarchists who were heavily suppressed by the rising Bolshevik Communists in the 1917 Russian Revolution.)  Because of their largely collectivist-industrialist doctrine that was an unstable mix of anarchism and communism, the Spanish revolutionaries didn’t each have the sovereign homesteading land and independent community-based militias (each made up of five or so men who train together regularly) to stand as a model in stark contrast against the visions of the Communists and Franco’s fascism.  In a way this actually made it easier for their collective land and factories to be re-owned by another collective, the new fascist government of Franco, because their ideologies were not distinctly opposing; the revolutionaries were actually unknowingly partly in collaboration with the greater collectivist system (the State) via the correlation of their ideologies.  They were taking part in the very evil which they were fighting against, and so lasting success was actually an impossibility.  To think that private property of any kind is unjust is false; the truth of the matter is that if you don’t have any private property, that can actually make you a slave of other people: your body needs to be respected as your private property; your home and homesteading land needs to be respected as your private property; what you need for your survival needs to be respected as your private property.  Otherwise your life is in the hands (and control) of others, and like I keep saying, that isn’t a sound foundation for harmonious communities.  The idea of private property that includes the “right” to take more than your fair share of land & water, is immoral; you would then actually be stealing from others, taking something that was given by Nature/God and keeping it from others who have a right to it just like you do.  The natural harmony that comes between people voluntarily, when slavery and aggression are absent is indeed a beautiful and real thing, however the anarcho-capitalist “free market” perspective accepts the unjust societal condition of land and water inequality upon which exploitation and oppression are based, it is a accepting a form of aggression and slavery, another form of rulership, so it’s really not “anarcho” (no rulers) as it claims to be.  They are simply believing that removing the aggression and slavery of government is enough, but it’s not, they are not acknowledging the evil that would still remain without sovereign land & water being a birthright of all, and no one having the right to own more than that.  It’s incredible to me when people object to this truth and talk about “giving” land and water to the poor who “may not know what do with it” or “how to take care of it”, etc.  First of all land & water are not yours to give, if they were given by anybody, they were given by the Creator.  Secondly, this elitist stance of “the poor are too ignorant” is the same immoral and superiority-complex mindset that totalitarianism is based on; again, activists and political commentators are often really taking part in the very evil that they claim to deplore.

Statism is naive, not anarchism

Although States may claim their goal is to “give to each according to his needs,” that’s never how it actually works out because the hierarchy of the State requires taking that what the people really need: freedom and sovereign land.  So the idea that the State is engaged in some benevolent program of generosity is self-contradictory ideology, it’s a lie.

“The object of anarchism, on the other hand, is to extend the principle of equity until it altogether supersedes statutory law.”

– Herbert Read, The Philosophy of Anarchism (Freedom Press, London, 1940), p. 19

Real universal justice and equity must be made the basis for society; not law-making institutions with a monopoly on violence that violate the higher natural/moral Law immediately, in the name of upholding morality.  Are you starting to see the crucial importance of ethical consistency?  Are you starting to see that trying to establish more peace and freedom via more violence and slavery can’t work?  And when I say “can’t work” I don’t just mean that on an emotional level if that’s what you’re currently thinking, I mean that technically;  slavery.  does.  not.  work.  Our reality actually has some integrity to it, just as there are laws of physics there are laws of morality and functionality; freedom and slavery are not compatible just as oil and water are not; we keep trying differing varieties of oil (different types of Statism) and mixing it up with water (the Natural World) over and over again, and the oil just keeps on “separating”, the social-systems just keep on going against what’s good and natural.

Back to the context of the Spanish Revolution, it may seem safer to collectivize land and communities (rather than having voluntary coalitions of sovereign homesteads) when facing opposition from the State, the rich and other controller/dominators, but this doesn’t actually turn out to be true in the long (or even short) run.

“[F]acing the task of confronting Franco’s forces while maintaining the rural collectives and other economic advances in the face of opposition from Communists and right-wing socialists, it is arguable that anarchists showed themselves to be flexible without self-destructing. … [It’s] a soul-searching dilemma for anarchists over whether to dilute fundamental principles on the grounds of a tactical postponement.  It is, essentially, the same kind of rationale used by centralized parties of the left when appealing for votes, with the conservative opposition playing the role of the common enemy.  Many socialists succumb to the same old dilemma when, knowing in their hearts that the politicians they elect will probably betray them, they still cast votes in their support, forlornly hoping that something good may come of it or that a slightly left-of-center government is better than a right-of-center one.”  – Ibid., p. 96-97

This hope is misplaced.  They were fundamentally still playing the same game as the fascists they opposed, an unnatural game that’s fixed toward tyranny, being that it’s based on the injustice of denying individual sovereignty.  The movement was also engaged in offensive violence and militarism rather than defending the birthright of all women and men, which also planted the seeds of the revolution’s failure (aggression is part of the dominator paradigm).  On the bright side they did demonstrate Stateless cooperation of individuals for a better world, and I’ve heard a plant-based diet was also widely promoted and practiced by those revolutionaries, along with the practice of nudism and domination-free relationships (just like the American “Hippies” did), all of which are in-line with a truly natural and free society.  But because their philosophy was flawed in a critical way their movement was mostly absorbed back into the system, just like what happened with the 60’s movement decades later in “The Land of the Free”.

The anarchist movement in the Mexican Revolution of 1910 was similarly undermined within by their mix of communism and anarchist philosophy, though this quote, like the Spanish revolutionary cry of “Land and Freedom!,” was right on-target:

“The people themselves–the hungry and disinherited–are they who must abolish misery, by taking into possession, as the very first step, the land which by natural right, should not be monopolized by a few but must be the property of every human being.”

– Ricardo Flores Magon, Land and Liberty!: Anarchist Influences in the Mexican Revolution (Black Rose Books, 1977), p. 62

The Right Revolution (i.e. one that would be truly revolutionary) would be comprehensively nonviolent, egalitarian (acknowledging everyone’s birthright to a fair share of land & water), and in tune with human and planetary nature (veganic); it is the way that has only been tried in part and only for short periods as far as I know, the crucial truths that support it still not fully grasped by most who strive to bring revolutionary positive change to the world.

    The present-day Egyptian demonstrators have missed these same crucial truths, so just like mass demonstrations that have occurred in North, Central & South America and elsewhere through recent decades, their end positive effect was little to nothing on the systemic level (though the increased dissent and community solidarity that have occurred are very good nonetheless).

Disempowered Humanity 

    The so-called elite let us “participate,” like let us hold big demonstrations and marches, but this is allowed because it is key to successful management of the masses, to give those under control the sense that they have real power too.  These outlets of participation, like voting and demonstrating, actually do nothing to alter the technocracy substantially (though again I’m not against demonstrating or petitioning altogether, they do raise awareness and show dissent which are very good).  But let us ponder, fundamentally why do we demonstrate?  Why do we vote?  Because people in positions of power are doing things we disagree with, and since we are in a position of powerlessness, we must resort to begging (e.g. petitioning, voting, demonstrating) that they stop doing those things, because we have no control of what our labor contributes to (i.e. what our tax dollars are used for).  We send letters to our “representatives,” saying things like “Please don’t allow this corporation to destroy this natural area”, “Please stop killing women and children in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan” or “Please don’t let this corporation contaminate our whole food supply with GMO’s,” and even if the local politician her/himself happens to be an ethical individual that somehow temporarily got in office (like the late Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota) and agrees with you, there is little they can do since the system itself is there to protect and serve corporate interest, not the public interest.  It is the social-system itself that is in control, the restrictive structure we are forced to live within, not “the people”, not even politicians.  Ultimately we have lost control of our destinies by this system, we have lost the means to a dignified, natural and free life on this planet.

“Democracy, the destin’d conqueror, yet treacherous lip-smiles everywhere,
And death and infidelity at every step.”

– Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

    This is why the American Revolution (1765-1783), which many libertarian and even anarchist activists romanticize (along with romanticizing the “Founding Fathers”), eventually led to a new empire, to new tyranny, not dissimilar to the British Empire which it was fighting against.  This revolution, even with its declarations of equality and rights for the masses, was fundamentally just the replacement of one ruling class by another, the recycling of a social-system that was still at its base a system of slavery.  The Republic turned into another Empire because both systems were on the same ideological spectrum, they are not polar opposites as many wrongly believe and claim.  And because those systems shared the same slavery-foundation, it was only a matter of time before the political train on that track moved back toward more tyranny; that is the inclination of the track, it is already pointing downward (because of its coercive violation of individual sovereignty and the birthright of those individuals) at its origination, and the “gravity” in this analogy is karmic law concerning slavery, i.e. you can’t have a society of true justice, equality and peace that’s based on the very antithesis of all those principles, slavery.

    And so what can the citizen-activist really do trying to reform such a system?  Spend every free minute of her life trying to counter the evils of statism/corporatism that karmically just keep on coming?  Is that the ideal for humanity?  Is that realizing one’s full potential as a human on the Earth?  It is rather a prescription for burnout and depression.  Though much activism, from gathering signatures for a ballot initiative to some forms of direct action, are very commendable, if it doesn’t address the root problem/cause, which is the system as a whole, it will always be ultimately unsuccessful; the system will inevitably keep producing the destruction and tyranny that is being protested against.  Actions like blocking a road used for logging or transporting toxic waste are good, but their impact is obviously very limited, usually business returns to usual shortly thereafter.  Also a General Strike can also have some impact and is going in the right direction, but it doesn’t undue to the root problem: monetary/job-dependance and being denied your individual sovereign birthright to homesteading land, water & seed.  We need a Continuous Strike, we need to be able to disconnect from this exploitative social-structure for good, through self/community-sufficiency.  In addition, activists “fighting the system” cannot even address all of the bad things that governance does, since we of course don’t, and can’t, know all of the bad things they do (i.e. “black-budget projects”).  Though some of the worst is known: CIA terrorism, School of the Americas training and funding the most evil torture and killing of women and children imaginable, as has been documented happening in Colombia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, etc..  One could spend a lifetime researching, documenting and trying to educate others about all of it, which still continues on, and that would be a life of great integrity, no doubt.  But if we really want to end these sickening acts we need to recognize that all this evil has the same root cause (social-systems which concentrate immense power in the hands of the few, who inevitably commit atrocities with that power), and that the right strategy isn’t to fight these systems, but to reject and abandon them through mass non-compliance and independent natural living.  The reason these activists don’t see much (or any) fruit for their labors is because they are not employing the right strategy; they are missing that claiming our birthright to our fair share of the land & water is the only truly effective action against the military-industrial-complex social-system of control and destruction.

“Power Corrupts, Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely.”

John Dalberg-Acton  (1887)

The Real Solution

My beautiful picture

    The only way to remove the structural capacity for this unnatural power, authoritarianism, fascism and war (i.e. mass-violence in its many forms) is to end our support for social-systems and establish sovereign homesteads, making up voluntary communities.  This may seem like an odd solution to the reformer, but it would not seem that odd to the Indigenous peoples and rural “poor” of the world, who know very well the crucial importance of having a personal connection with the land in order to be free from exploitation and tyranny.  We must embrace the true root solution (becoming free and natural women & men of the Earth), in order to effect true and lasting positive change.  And because there are systemic restraints to achieving that ultimate localization and sovereignty (namely land cost, control & taxation), the system itself needs to be rejected.

    A healthy society based on inequity and force, like the idea of a healthy and sustainable city, is an oxymoron.  There is a lot of talk nowadays of “greening” cities, but the fundamentals are not changed: cities require the importation of resources, create landfills of toxic waste and massive amounts of very harmful (e.g. causes cancer) air and water pollution, along with highly disturbing light and noise pollution; veganic homesteads can be zero-waste and produce little to none of those pollutants.  Cities, like governance, have directly caused incalculable amounts of environmental and health destruction; it’s time we stop trying to “green” something that is inherently toxic.  Governments and cities are actually intrinsically linked with one another, just as governments and war are co-dependent:

 “Urban reality is primarily about trade and commerce, with a nearly total dependence on support from external areas for continued existence.  To guarantee such an artificial subsistence, city fathers turn inevitably to war, that chronic civilizational staple.”

– John Zerzan, from his book Twilight of the Machines, p. 41

     Cities disallow a natural lifestyle living off the land, they disallow individual sovereignty, privacy and true freedom, and so they are perfectly complimentary to social-systems.  Social-systems and the cities they create are unnatural control-grids, they constitute intensive farming, of humans.  This is clearly seen with the cruel and tyrannical criminalization of sleep; homeless people are often harassed by police just for sleeping in a public place, even though they are disturbing no one.  I have seen this first-hand many times at the public library, wherein a homeless person has fallen quietly asleep in front of their book at a nearly empty large table, and a security guard always comes by and wakes them up!  As long as your eyes are open you can stay, but god forbid you should rest, or meditate for a short while!  This despotic control of natural life takes on many other forms too, like cops and security guards knocking on your window if you fall asleep in an empty parking lot in your car, etc.  Not being an active consumer, not paying someone for your time on this planet, is criminalized, just as sharing food with your neighbors has been criminalized.  We can’t have people sharing now can we?  There’s no corporate profit in that!

     Modern technology too goes hand-in-hand with this control-culture; it is the main tool of modern governance, using it for invasive surveillance and personal data collection.  And of course the latest tech always goes to the development of various forms of weaponry first; that is the priority of its use: violence, not aid.  It is also the main tool of industries that are destroying our environment through intensive resource extraction (clear-cutting forests, massive mining operations, over-fishing, etc.).

“We cannot have fast cars, computers the size of credit cards, and modern conveniences, while simultaneously having clean air, abundant rainforests, fresh drinking water, and a stable climate.  This generation can have one or the other, but not both.  Humanity must make a choice. … Gadgetry or nature?  Pick the wrong one and the next generation may have neither.”

– Mark Boyle, The Moneyless Man: A Year of Freeconomic Living, p. 196

This unnatural combination of social-systems, cities, and modern technology keeps us from realizing a natural synergy of natural-freedom, natural-living and natural-community.

~~~

    Some denounce agriculture and call it the root of all of our social problems, and yes, large-scale agriculture does coincide with hierarchy, the accumulation of wealth in few hands, environmental destruction, etc. but it is not the root source of those problems.  The key word is largescale agriculture; how did there get to be such huge farms in the first place?  Control of the land by the few is what allows for it; unjust monopolization of land and water, though denying people their birthright to sovereign land.  Today this is inequality is made even worse via government subsidies to large agribusiness corporations, furthering the unjust socioeconomic imbalance.  This is the real source of all those aforementioned problems; to think agriculture should be altogether abandoned ignores the existence of sustainable localized agriculture, i.e. veganic homesteading horticulture/permaculture.

Anti-agriculture voices seem to think hunting & gathering is a viable solution, but it’s clearly not, for multiple reasons; firstly murdering animals when we don’t need to is uncaring, and depleting the little that remains of wildness is also immoral; secondly there is not enough public lands with enough wildlife and edible plants to sustain the world population anyway; thirdly, even if there was enough animals to kill and plants to forage, where will these wandering hunter & gathers do such activity?  Wont they end up in competition with other wandering tribes over the same territory?  Doesn’t this competition inevitably lead to war?  Human subsistence that violently departs from community cooperation/solidarity and respect for other sentient life is linked to greater social and ecological disharmony;  I believe this is no coincidence, rather it shows that there is a moral fabric to our reality, there is such a thing as Karmic/Natural Law.

    Others say socialism is the answer, and that capitalism is the fundamental problem, but they seem to miss where capitalism comes from in the first place: social-systems, founded on the true root injustice: land control (i.e. land cost & monopolization of ownership, zoning restrictions, permitting restrictions, etc.) and monetary-slavery (mainly via taxation).  Socialists believe that if they elect socialist politicians they can create a just world, and though it might be better in some ways than what we have now, ignoring the faults of all social-systems and the falsehood and violence of “representation”, makes this perspective and strategy a failure from the start.  Focusing on single issues, like employment, more government funding of social programs, ending the drug war, etc. is well-intentioned, but this strategy has two major flaws: 1) It ignores the root of all of those problems, namely social-systems based on land control and monetary-slavery (e.g. we wouldn’t need jobs if we had our share of land, nor would we be restricted from growing valuable crops like industrial hemp if there was no governance), and 2) It believes that social-systems of true representation can exist, and that social-systems of control are necessary and good, when in fact they are unnecessary and unprincipled.  Social-systems, even socialist ones, have the seeds of concentrated power within them.  In the excellent essay “Anarchism: Against Capitalism, Against Socialism” by Chris Wilson, he says:

“Socialists should consider the possibility that the proposed command structure of socialism might possess certain inherent properties that necessarily lead to such ghastly forms of authoritarianism.  Every attempt to realize socialism has always resulted in a totalitarian society in which the population is used as an expendable resource for the enrichment of a handful of elites.  These failed attempts are a direct consequence of the innate hierarchy of socialist organization combined with a refusal to realize that power always corrupts, even when delegated democratically.”

    Socialists also see the harmful “privatization” (i.e. corporate control) of public resources in many countries, usually encouraged or demanded by the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and World Trade Organization as just the fault of capitalism and lack of democracy as well.  This perspective assumes that 1) if all the natural resources of the nation were under “public ownership” (i.e. government ownership) and 2) if all tax dollars were kept in the “public treasury” (i.e. centralized government control), for social programs like better health care, education and quality job-creation, then we could avoid the mass exploitation by globalist trans-national corporations which have increased poverty and environmental destruction in many “third world” countries.  The first point on corporate control of natural resources, especially water, is in response to something that is of course extremely unjust and has led to increased corporate profits at the expense of people’s health and well-being.  But simply giving the control back to the government is obviously no assurance that justice will prevail!  The costs of living may have been temporarily lower under State control in some countries, but how do you think the corporate control/corruption happened in the first place?  The fact that “public property” (like water and forests) keeps becoming corporate property goes to show that it never really did belong to “the people” in the first place.  “Public ownership” sounds good, and would be good in the sense of everyone being entitled to their fair share of natural resources as sovereign individuals, but when said in the sense of governmental ownership it is supporting a social theory which is fundamentally flawed, since government is always subject to further corruption because it is an inherently corrupt and unjust social-structure.  “Public property” and “public treasury” are lies, just as “representation” is.  Which leads to the second point: eliminating social programs that may have been helping a lot of people in order for the government to pay back loans to the IMF and adhere to their “structural adjustments” has indeed led to further unnecessary suffering and a lower quality of life for countless millions of people, but because governments are inherently unprincipled, corrupt and unstable, because representation is a lie and cannot be made true, returning to full governmental control is absolutely no assurance of economic equality, stability and justice.  When was it ever?  There is no way to have harmony, equality, personal freedom or sovereignty in a mass-society, it is inherently unjust and thereby destructive, depending on force and enslavement to varying degree for its existence.  (See also the essay “Against Mass Society” by Chris Wilson.)

“The revolutionary alternative to the status-quo today is not collectivized property administered by a “workers’ state”, whatever that means, but some kind of anarchist decentralization that will break up mass society into small communities where individuals can live together as variegated human beings instead of as impersonal units in the mass sum.”

– Dwight Macdonald, from his article Politics Past

Economists offer schemes as solutions too, and even the best among them, like the “Robin Hood Tax” (which would tax the financial sector more), and so-called “Sacred Economics” (which is basically just putting a negative interest rate on bank reserves), ignore the root problems of individuals being forced into monetary dependency and subservience to some outside imposed authority, and being denied their cost-free birthright (their fair share of land & water).  It also ignores the fact that increasing taxation for the “public treasury” doesn’t equate to greater public wealth or quality of life, because representation is a lie.  The website for the Robin Hood Tax says it can “raise hundreds of billions every year to provide funding for jobs to kickstart the economy and get America back on its feet.  It could help save the social safety net in the US and around the world.  Not complicated.  Just brilliant.” But it’s really not brilliant; again ignoring the fact that just because the government gets more money doesn’t mean the poor will, and also ignoring why we need money, jobs and a governmental social-safety net in the first place: land control, cost and taxation.  How is that more complicated or less brilliant?

    Also more people are now advocating community land trusts, and that’s not a terrible idea at all, but it is really just another petition to the rich dominators of society; the common woman or man can’t actually make or afford these economic or legal changes themselves, so it amounts to more of begging “representatives” to be less evil and give up the natural resources they have stolen; this is not only an exercise in futility but is also sadly subservient and expresses a self-concept of citizen/subject rather than sovereign human.  In a film on the injustice of real estate economics, the reformers exclaim: “We can change the way we are taxed!”  Yes, hooray for less abrasive whips!  This false solution is again just begging for better slavery, rather than rejecting it altogether, as we should and need to.

    Others, called “economist heroes” by the corporate media, “help” the poor in the “undeveloped Third World” by setting them up with small businesses through small-loans.  Is this “development”, this so-called progress, really in the best interest of these “less civilized” people?  Of course many of the people receiving this assistance today are initially thankful for it; when they aren’t able to acquire sufficient food for themselves, and a few dollars is the only apparent means to get it, that’s very understandable.  But they shouldn’t need money to survive in the first place, it is this unnatural social-system that corrupts their lives and makes that their reality.  Those that currently live in “undeveloped” areas are those that haven’t been completely corrupted yet, their assimilation is currently incomplete, they still haven’t had all of their ancestral land taken from them, they still haven’t lost most of their natural skills and livelihood, accumulated debt, and so on.  They can still live more naturally, their traditional culture is still somewhat intact; along with their natural resources, these people have not themselves been “developed” into profitable resources for the global economy (a.k.a. the global human farm), that’s where the so-called economic heroes come in to finish the job of assimilation.

~~~

    The only way to have a significant increase in freedom and sustainability and have significantly greater equality and peace, is through individual sovereignty.  That means you are a Woman of the Earth first, not the subject of a crown.  That means you are a Man of the Earth first, not the citizen of a country.  This does not mean that you wouldn’t have community available, you would actually have more of it.  Techno-industrial mass-society is anti-community and anti-family; it fragments, divides and isolates us, destroying families and natural community and replacing them with shallow and artificial substitutes like nationalism, sport teams, and electronics.  In a genuine community your relationships with your neighbors are not corrupted by monetary concerns, and your level of interaction with community is up to you, it’s completely voluntary, which further removes inter-personal friction that arises from unnatural social-systems.

    You would live on your sovereign land, alone or with family (in whatever form that takes) that all wishes to be together, and then you would interact in a gift-economy cultural relationship with others as you choose.  Your space would be private, your own “kingdom,” which means kins domain, or family land.  This avoids the common problem of inter-personal friction that comes from lack of personal space/privacy along with forced communal decision-making that arises even in eco-villages, intentional communities or other collectives.  Humans instinctively desire freedom, and one aspect of that is having your own space and privacy, and not being subject to communal-everything dynamics you’d rather not be a part of; this has been and continues to be the biggest problem at most intentional communities and collectives that is not recognized as such, and so people within that dynamic think “this is just the way life is.”  But this is just another negative belief based on ignorance of the root problem.  They deal with the constant inter-personal conflict and unnecessary drama because they think there is no other way, but there is: sovereign homesteads.  What they’re experiencing can be thought of as karmic feedback for participating in something that is ultimately not natural or principled (even though of course it’s a lot more so than the typical corporate dynamic).  What I’m pointing to is a way that harmonizes with our inner nature, as well outer nature: sovereign veganic homesteads, which minimize the disturbances we experience on both fronts drastically.  These are truly kingdoms of heaven in that they lack all the problems that come from living in less ethical, natural and sustainable ways; everything else results in hellish instead of heavenly experience.

“Mahatma Gandhi was a champion of swadeshi, or home economy. … Gandhi’s vision of a free India was not of a nation-state but a confederation of self-governing, self-reliant, self-employed people living in village communities, deriving their right livelihood from the products of their homesteads. … The British believed in centralized, industrialized, and mechanized modes of production.  Gandhi turned this principle on its head and envisioned a decentralized, homegrown, hand-crafted mode of production. In his words, “Not mass production, but production by the masses.”

– The Case Against the Global Economy and for a Turn Toward the Local, edited by Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith, p. 418-420

~~~

    Since animal domestication and farming are also based on false beliefs (like that we need animal products for optimum health), and has also been a source of major disturbance (to put it very lightly, actually the leading cause of environmental and health destruction), as well as being the vehicle for the most massive violence humans participate in, it should also be rejected.  Animal domestication was an unprincipled mistake by humanity, and until we end that practice it is unlikely we will escape domestication ourselves.  In seeking freedom from domination and exploitation, it makes perfect sense to not do the same to other species, regardless of how “natural” it supposedly is.  Taking “good care” of an animal up until the point you kill and eat him or her, is not ethical, it’s twisted.  There is no such thing as “humane” murder or enslavement.  The sound nutrition science and ethical principles of veganism should trump unprincipled tradition, so these private homesteads that ensure freedom for us should not be places of enslavement for other species, they should employ organic vegan agriculture.  This avoids the ethical hypocrisy, as well as the environmental and health damage from synthetic chemicals and corporately-controlled Genetically Modified Organisms.  The veganic component of sovereign homesteading further incorporates nonviolence into the model; not harming animals, humans or the environment is what makes a homestead, a kin’s domain (a.k.a. kingdom), heavenly, hence a true “kingdom of heaven.”  You don’t have to be religious at all to agree that violence, toxins and slavery aren’t heavenly!

     Another way the root of all the social, personal and ecological destruction that has been going on could be summed up as is: living out of harmony with Nature, through animal & human domestication.  The human domestication and farming arises through the forcible restriction from living as free natural women and men on the Earth, mainly through land control/cost/taxation.  This is the fundamental flaw of governance (and technological dependence), which has led to the Orwellian human-animal farm we now find ourselves within.  Until we can become self/community-sufficient, we will remain dependent on governments and the corporations they serve, and we will continue to face the disturbances of living in an unnatural and unprincipled way.  Even everyday disturbances of life can be perceived, with a more penetrating analysis, to be rooted in animal & human domestication as well; from foul smells of garbage, barking dogs, car alarms, construction and various machinery like leaf-blowers, to traffic jams you may drive in or plumes of exhaust you must breathe in if you’re walking or biking by them, to loud neighbors, annoying or abusive housemates you are forced to live with (because of monetary restraints), to other piercing sounds like near-continuous sirens from emergency vehicles in urban centers, it all originates in animal and human domestication, they would not exist without that domestication, they would not exist in free and natural veganic homesteads, well-spaced from one another, making up voluntary communities.  Until we claim our birthright of sovereign land and start accepting the responsibility to live truly ethically as natural humans (growing our own food, producing our own fuel, building our own homes, etc.) we will continue to be disturbed money-slaves, and we will continue to beg for corporate jobs (or join the military), no matter how unsatisfying and exploitative, just to have the basics of food, clothing and shelter, all of which the Earth provides for free.

“Having reduced the masses to a point at which they have not the means of subsistence for a month, or even for a week in advance, the few only allow the many to work on condition of themselves receiving the lion’s share.  It is because these few prevent the remainder of men from producing the things they need, and force them to produce, not the necessaries of life for all, but whatever offers the greatest profits to the monopolists.”

– Peter Kropotkin, from his book The Conquest of Bread

    Why should our destiny be so much in the hands of others?  Why can’t we have access to our fair share of natural resources that would enable us to break these chains of unjust subservience?  Being denied the ability to live naturally and self-sufficiently is the root social-injustice, all others follow from it, this is the real front-line that activists (and anyone who cares about freedom and sustainability) should be focusing the most on.  In the book Twelve by Twelve: A One Room Cabin Off the Grid and Beyond the American Dream, the author tells of people in North Carolina living in homes that are only 12 feet long and wide because that is the maximum size allowed by the State before you have to pay various taxes, and install plumbing and electric lines.  The State, being the partner of destructive and exploitative industry, has made it a requirement to have electricity, they force you to pay for something you may not want, just like with insurance; quoting one of the “poor” people trying to live off the grid:  “Do you know it’s not legal to live without electricity in North Carolina?  It’s not a choice you make.  It’ll cost us a fortune. … What does it matter to them if we live simply?”  (p. 223-4)  He then cries out “Hell is other people!” in anguish over being forced to assimilate to a way of life he does not want to live or support, and also says that he tried communal living and it wasn’t for him either (or me, or countless others who have faced the aforementioned problems of that living situation), he just wanted to be left alone (i.e. not attacked by others through taxation, arrest, etc.) as he survived and thrived through his own natural labor.  So what creates a hellish world for so many is not just “other people” (an obvious exaggeration and over-simplification), it is other people that force you to pay for your birthright, and it is the other people you are forced to be exposed to, lacking the privacy and space of that sovereign land, wherein who stays with you is your choice.  What does it matter to State officials if you live simply?  It matters a lot, though this fact is a great secret of the establishment.  The State’s existence relies on people being assimilated to this system; if there was a loophole, like living in 12X12 houses, more and more people would do that, so even that is being eliminated; now they are told they can only live that way part of the year, not year-round; if you try and live very simply and naturally it is a crime, you face fines and arrest.  So these peaceful people that want to live peaceful and good lives (in their own “kingdom of heaven”) need to return to being money-slaves, victims of the system, supporting industries and government that are opposed to their values.  Sovereign veganic homesteads are the logical antidote to this tyranny, they are the cure for empire, establishing harmony between humans, Earth and all other species on this planet.

    In the concluding “Getting There” chapter of his book Off the Grid: Inside the Movement for More Space, Less Government, and True Independence in Modern America, author Nick Rosen says: “[I]f off-the-grid building permits were easier to come by in more parts of America, hundreds of thousands would be allowed onto the property ladder, including many who have been in foreclosure or who are trapped in mortgages they cannot afford. … The solution could take the form of small, localized non-profit groups that take control of land and ensure that the original owners wishes are followed.”  Some “solution!”  Yes, if the government would just permit us to freely rise on their ladder of social-control!  Why didn’t I think to just ask?  Hang on while I call my “representative’s” office and leave a message, I’m sure they’ll give me the a-okay!  And complying with the wishes of the original owners?  What makes you think their wish won’t just be to keep their massive holdings of land?  Why do many people (like this author) say the most remarkably stupid things when it comes to solutions within the system?  Because there aren’t any, so they must resort to outright absurdity; you can’t be rational and principled while conforming your thought to irrational and unprincipled restraints.  The author goes on to say the other two functions of these nonprofits (besides following the original owners wishes) would be “to introduce landowners to land seekers” and “to provide legal advice and help draft land-use agreements.”  Again, this is more worthless nonsense, sorry Nick.  Introduce land owners to land-seekers?  Like “Hey, howya doin there Mr. Rich Land Owner, my family and I here are poor and would like some land”?  And if that doesn’t work, one can always ask for legal advice!  What a joke!  And what might these “land-use agreements” entail?  If you can’t afford to pay for the land (like most people can’t), then, if you’re lucky and Mr. Rich Land Owner is a nice man, he might say you can work for him!  What a novel idea!  You can grow food on his plantation, your wife can be his personal maid, and in exchange, he’ll give you some food and let you sleep in the barn!  Now that’s justice!

    I’ve actually had many people say very similar things to me when I expressed an interest to live naturally & freely, they’ve asked me “What about a work-exchange somewhere?” or “What about an intentional community?”  My reply is: What about freedom?  Why must I submit to false authority, collectivism, hierarchy, subservience, injustice, inequality and exploitation?  Why must I be denied my sovereignty and my sovereign land to live on by my own natural labor?  There are no good reasons why, and that’s why the world needs The Right Revolution.  I’ve done several work-exchanges and lived in communal living situations, and those experiences, and the inevitable disturbances that come with them, just reinforced the truth that the true ideal, worth repeating a hundred times, is sovereign veganic homesteads, making up voluntary gift-economy communities.

~~~

      If you were born on this planet then your fair share of the resources needed for your survival is your birthright, you are not bound to any contract you never signed, for services you never asked for.  The spiraling ripples of discontent and destruction originate at this unprincipled point, it is karmic law in action.  By sacrificing our right to live free and natural lives, for supposed greater security, we agree to the age old “Devil’s Bargain.” And how is that working out for most people?  How is it working out for the ecosystem and other species?  Stress is said to be the #1 reason people go to their doctor, so obviously we have not found personal peace in this exploitative and unnatural society, nor should we expect to.

     “You can’t separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.”

– Malcolm X, from the book Malcolm X Speaks

   And speaking of this contract we never signed, also known as a constitution, did the signers of the U.S. Constitution really have the power to contract for people other than themselves in any matter?  Legally a contract can only bind those that sign it, so how does the U.S. Constitution (or any other Nation-State’s constitution) apply to anyone besides those who sign it?  Could you write a valid contract that said everyone in your neighborhood has to give you a hundred dollars a week for some service they never asked for and never signed in agreement to?  Of course not.  And furthermore, could you make that contract binding on all their children, and their children’s children, going on forever?  That would be laughed at wouldn’t it?  Yet that’s the same thing as a constitution, it’s false authority manifest.  We are told that the constitution protects our freedoms, but it violates our most fundamental freedom, to live as sovereign natural humans in harmony with the Earth (self-sufficiently & sustainably), by forcing us to pay taxes and submit to an unjust and fear-based tyrannical social-hierarchy.

    On a simpler level, it comes down to government officials not lettings us be, they constantly invade our lives making demands upon us, they just won’t leave us alone.  As Supreme Court Justice Lousi Brandeis said in 1928, “the right to be let alone is the most comprehensive of rights and the the right most valued.”  To not be “let alone” really means to be attacked in one form or another, for violence to be initiated against you.  And that’s what government is, a group of people who won’t leave us alone, who say they have exclusive use of “justified” violence, supposedly because they only use it for good.  Thousands of years ago Lao Tzu spoke to this same absurdity when, directed to government officials, he said “Act for the people’s benefit, leave them alone.” (Tao Te Ching, verse 75)   Through propaganda indoctrination we receive starting from childhood, we are led to think that when the government initiates force, that’s not violence, just “the way society works”.  Coupled with this denial of real violence, we are taught that when government forces people to do things (like pay taxes) it leads to a harmonious society.  We are led to believe that this violence is good (along with all their military violence, etc.), but all other violence is bad.  They can steal from and kill people and that’s okay, but if you do it, then that’s a crime.

A couple more examples of how they just won’t leave us alone:

  1. Are we really free when one government official can declare a “mandatory evacuation” of our homes in the name of safety?  Aren’t we being treated like children who can’t make decisions for ourselves?  Government operates under a paternalistic superiority complex, because ultimately they consider you a child-pawn that they can move as they like on their grand chessboard, not a sovereign individual as you are.
  2. Do we really have freedom of religion?  What if I believe, as Thomas Jefferson & Benjamin Franklin reportedly said, that “resistance to tyrants is obedience to God,” and that all forms of involuntary government are forms of tyranny?  What if I also believe that God wants me to not fund wars [how crazy a belief!], and wants me to be a proper custodian of Creation [extremism!] by living as sustainably as possible (i.e. veganic homesteading, using plants like industrial hemp for food, fiber, fuel and shelter)?  Do I have the freedom to practice that religion?  Nope!  “Sorry”, say government officials, “you have freedom of religion, as long as it takes the authority and control of the State as a given; that way of life is against the law.”  That’s quite a big caveat to my so-called freedom!

    Government officials & enforcers claim they have a justified monopoly on controlling people (i.e. on violence), and many people (due to massive indoctrination) believe that this violence is indeed justified, they think that without it the world would be even more violent than it currently is.  So this is giving approval for pre-emptive attacks, on everyone, all the time, in order to prevent the possibility of some other violence occurring at some other time.  This unprincipled, irrational and deceptive premise of pre-emptive attack, of being treated guilty without any proof, is the evil seed that grows into monstrosities; I cannot overstate how important this point is!  Pre-emptive attacks must be identified and rejected wherever they are found; acceptance of this evil is why we currently have a world of about 7 billion human slaves, and billions more animal slaves; it is the philosophical underpinning for tyranny.  Government operates on the crazy notion that in order to be free we need slavery, and in order to protect us from violence they need to commit violence against us.  This is what is all boils down to, the ideology of pre-emptive attack as legitimate, which it is not.

    Here’s another way to think about this:  If someone on the street was taking a survey and simply asked you “Do you think mass-violence can lead to a harmonious society?”  You’d probably say “No”, as would most people, because it’s an absurd notion: mass-violence and harmony are not at all compatible, they are in fact opposites.  So if you accept the fact that stealing from people against their will (e.g. taxation), making wars, violating peoples bodies at airports, supporting industries that are destroying our health and environment, etc. are all acts of violence, then why do you think that will lead to a harmonious society?  Building on what I was saying in the opening paragraph, we must uproot that which is unprincipled, irrational and false, what I call the “toxic trio”, that always, in part or synergistically, constitutes the opposition, in the personal or social realm; look for them and you will begin to see these crucial elements at play, cutting through distraction & illusion.  The healthy trio to base perspective and decisions on is its opposite: principle, rationality and truth, and that is what we need if we are to progress, personally and socially.  The phrase “Give Peace A Chance” is popular, but it usually just refers to military wars based on lies, and misses that war/violence and lies are always close to home, even in “peace-time”, it is ongoing and against all of us (and the ecosystem); government never really gives peace a chance, just by its very existence.

“Violence, even well intentioned, always rebounds upon itself.”

– Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, verse 30

~~~

    Some may say: “If you don’t like this country than why don’t you just leave?”  But this is a very short-sighted perspective since there is nowhere where human farms are not, they border one another across the globe, so there is nowhere to go; it is not a matter of leaving, it is a matter of staying wherever you and your family are and wish to be, and claiming your fair share of the currently unjustly controlled land as your human right to live sustainably on.  Some might object to that as well saying: “What about the people that bought large amounts of land and worked hard to earn the money to do so, how is that fair to them?” A quote from Alexander Berkman’s book “What is Anarchism?” is a good beginning to a response:

“The first requirement of justice is equal liberty and opportunity. Under government and exploitation there can be neither equal liberty nor equal opportunity — hence all the evils and troubles of present-day society.”

    We do not have equal liberty and opportunity when we don’t have equal access to the Earth’s resources, which should belong to everyone as a birthright for being human, irrespective of whatever country they are supposedly born into.  The exploitation begins there, and then capitalism compounds the injustice through usury, unfair and highly disparate wage differences, inheritance originating in conquest, etc.  So someone who has gained large amounts of land through these means have not really gained them fairly, and once they have more than their fair-share of land it becomes the theft of the birthright of others; therefore even if you had to work hard to attain those riches, it does not justify the continuation of that theft, denying others their birthright.  All the land that is uncultivated or unjustly used (e.g., for livestock) and is kept as an investment by the rich, while millions have no place to live and are hungry, cannot be justified.

     And even those that “earned” their land can be victimized by the system; if they can no longer afford rising property taxes the land would be seized from them as well.  Moreover the government officials can at any time still claim the land for themselves as “eminent domain” or harass you with bogus “code violations”, charging you various fees and penalties until you are forced to sell the land.  These actions are often taken when the land is wanted for new corporate development, and government serves that corporate interest through an unjust legal system; this is another example revealing again that ultimately the public and private sectors are really just one sector, the fascist sector.

    For the majority of people on Earth, saving enough money to buy land, pay all the initial taxes, fees, etc. and then not have to do additional work besides their natural work to produce and maintain plant-food crops, plant-based clothing and plant/earth/stone-based shelter, is not a possibility.  Unless you are ultra-rich, you will still need to earn money to pay for mortgages, property taxes, etc. and so therefore have not achieved freedom from the monetary system of control and exploitation, your life is still compromised and corrupted.  Some system apologists might say: “Yeah people may need to earn some money on the side, maybe a small business, but whats wrong with that?  They are earning their keep.”  But this is where the corruption of the natural life begins (along with beginning of our discontent), having to sacrifice time that could be much better used towards things like creativity, spirituality and sharing pleasure; instead that time has to go towards earning money to appease other peoples conditions for living on the Earth.

    The crucial thing that many people overlook is that social-systems initiate violence over us first, supposedly to protect us from violence.  This is the fundamental philosophical premise that must be rejected; it is not okay to initiate force against people just because you say it is for their own good.  That “goodness” can never be proven (and is disproved every day), therefore, nonviolence must take precedence.  What is “good” after all?  Isn’t nonaggression good and initiation of aggression bad?  That’s the most basic morality, the universal ethic.  We have been indoctrinated to accept a completely backwards morality, and we, along with other species and the ecosystem as a whole, are paying dearly for that acceptance.

    Tellingly most people already do reject the premise that violence always prevents violence, i.e. the legitimacy of pre-emptive attacks, on the person-to-person level; for example, if someone told you they need to punch you in the face in order to help you overcome your cough, and that you have no choice about it, what would be your reaction?  You’d probably think they were a crazy control-freak right?  Yet most people believe the propaganda of governments telling them that they need to commit violence against them (force them to pay taxes and other fees for their natural birthright), for “their safety and well-being.”  Meanwhile governance has been the #1 source of violence throughout history!  Talk about a need for a wake-up call!

“Even outside war, in the 20th century alone, more than 270 million people were murdered by their governments.  Compared to the few dozen murders committed by anarchists, it is hard to see how the fantasy of the “evil anarchist” could possibly be sustained when we compare the tiny pile of anarchist bodies to the virtual Everest of the dead heaped by governments in one century alone.  Surely if we are concerned about violence, murder, theft and rape, we should focus on those who commit the most evils – political leaders – rather than those who oppose them, even misguidedly.” … “The statist looks at a population and sees an irrational and selfish horde that needs to be endlessly herded around at gunpoint – and yet looks at those who run the government as selfless, benevolent and saintly.” … “[We are led to believe] that these living man-gods [i.e. false idols] have such perfect knowledge and perfect wisdom that we should hand them weapons of mass destruction, and the endless power to tax, imprison and print money – and nothing but good, plenty and virtue will result.”

– Stefan Molyneux, Everyday Anarchy

    Anarchy is associated with destruction and violence, and yet nothing has been more destructive and violent than governments (and the corporations they foster); look at history!  Look at current reality!  Indoctrination blinds people to the root cause, knowledge of good and evil has been lost, and with it a more paradisaical world. Interestingly when I bring up the point of governments being the leading cause of mass violence, oftentimes people will agree partially saying “Yes, historically, but governments aren’t as bad as they used to be, they’ve evolved along with the rest of humanity.”  First of all, “not as bad”?  Is bringing the entire ecosystem to a point of collapse not as bad?  Is developing weaponry that could be used intentionally or accidentally to turn the entire planet into a radioactive wasteland not as bad?  Or creating a world-wide surveillance grid that corrupts human existence?  Supporting health-destroying GMO corruption of the world’s food seeds?  Militarized nanotechnology? Etc., etc., etc.?  Things have actually gotten worse, as the amount of damage that governments and their corporate partners can now do (and are doing) is far greater than ever before in history.  This belief that current government “isn’t that bad, it was all the previous ones that were so,” shows the power of indoctrination, the mind-control that creates the giant intellectual blind-spot of missing that the violence committed by government in the name of safety is wrong and unjustifiable, supports inevitable tyranny and atrocity, and can’t be evolved into something good.  There is no way to improve slavery, it needs to be altogether abolished.

    Fortunately there are growing numbers who see through this propaganda, but they also know that if they begin to practice noncompliance with this illegitimate social-system (i.e. stop paying taxes, fees. etc. and claim their birthright of sovereign homesteading land), they will likely be met with further violence (arrest/fines/imprisonment) and so they go along with the status-quo because they don’t want to face this, and that’s understandable.  That’s why at least waking up others to this crucial truth about social-systems is imperative and our responsibility; when enough people no longer believe the lies upholding the system it will be severely undermined, it relies on its mask of morality, it relies on maintaining the mass-deception.

    The fundamental issue that needs to be recognized is that there is no valid justification for why land & water should not be a human right, there is no principled reason for why we must pay some people called officials for their “services” and be automatically subjugated to citizenship (i.e. to be put under a form of slavery); the usual justification, “It’s for the greater good,” is just dogmatic opinion, (opposed by history and current reality) that does not take precedence over the fact that social-systems initiate violence on everyone every day, and one should be free and sovereign, not forced to obey life-restrictions via a social contract that they never signed.  Slavery is not justifiable!

~~~

    The massive world-wide problem of homelessness, hunger and starvation is really a problem of landlessness.  Building or acquiring a modest natural home and planting seeds of vegetable, fruit and nut trees is not a major difficulty, the main problem is not having a piece of free land to do that on.  People are homeless, hungry or starving not because they are incapable of building a natural shelter or creating a garden & orchard, they are simply restricted from living in that easier and natural way because of the monetary-slavery imposed on them by land control/cost and taxation. 

    We are led to believe by technocrats, politicians and the media that living off the land is more difficult than being a money-slave.  The anthropological record shows otherwise, along with the testimony and demonstration of people today who have abundant homestead gardens and orchards: they actually have more free time than those needing money to purchase the things the earth provides for free.  What changes this is monetary slavery, the need to pay taxes and land costs, so that if one looks at the hard life of modern farmers they don’t take that into consideration, even though that is what makes them have to work so much more than they would if they were free of such unjust debts.  I’ve heard technocrats say things like “Thank you industrialization! Now we have time to read books!”  Again this is really just propaganda, it is pushing the lie that natural living is harder than artificial living, and that you would have less free time living in harmony with Nature.  Now of course since most of us are domesticated and have lost natural skills that need to be acquired (mainly organic gardening, which is not very hard to learn the basics of, and can be very enjoyable) , along with the fact that much of the Earth is under concrete now, initially the transition to a natural way of living may be somewhat difficult, but that will only be during the initial phase as we restore the natural balance and abundance that the Earth and natural communities provide.  The more people that establish veganic homesteads, the easier it will be for everyone else, the easier it will be to voluntarily help and share with one another.  And anyway, tearing up concrete with some friends can be a lot of fun!

“2500 years is long enough for us to have learned that escape from community, and from the earth, is not a solution, but a root cause of our troubles.”

— John Zerzan, Twilight of the Machines, p. 37

    Once people have their own free land, gift-economies would flourish.  Today even with the restraints of monetary-slavery, low-wages and high costs, many people regularly give to charity, like local food banks.  There have even been cafes opening that have a “pay-what-you-can” policy, along with the common “free-box” phenomenon, community tool-libraries, organic seed libraries, etc.  All of this confirms that sharing is a natural thing for human beings to do, and of course it would be a lot more common if people didn’t have to worry about paying the rent, mortgage or taxes!  The ancient tradition of human cooperation has been corrupted by the domination/exploitation paradigm, and the foundation of that paradigm is land control and taxation; from there begins the process of siphoning the wealth and energy of the masses up to the few vampires at the top of the social pyramid.

“If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.  This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.  If the tax-gatherer, or any other public-officer, asks me, as one has done, “But what shall I do?” my answer is, “If you really wish to do any thing, resign your office.”  When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned office, then the revolution is accomplished.”

– Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

    But what about roads, security, education and healthcare?  If no one is paying taxes for them, won’t we be without them?  No, we won’t.  Why do people think that only government can provide these things?  (A rhetorical question, the answer again being indoctrination.)

“Throughout my year [of living without money], many people suggested I could only live without money because others live with it.  ‘How would you have a road to cycle on if there weren’t money and I didn’t pay my taxes?’  It’s an understandable argument, but it’s based on the underlying assumption that you need money to create things.”

– Mark Boyle, The Moneyless Man: A Year of Freeconomic Living, p. 193

To think roads, education and healthcare are only possible with government is irrational, denying history and the intelligence and skills of yourself and those within your community, it is a mindset of child-like subservience and helplessness.  Time and again natural and voluntary communities have shown that they do a very good job at taking care of one another, without the exploitation or environmental destruction.  Yes services and infrastructures like roads will be more natural without centralized governance and industry, but that’s hardly a reason to embrace artificial social-systems of control and destruction!  As Mark goes on to say:  “I’d happily sacrifice large asphalt-covered roads if it meant we could get back to a truly sustainable way of living.”  (p. 194)

    Can you imagine living on a homestead with nearby friends and family on their own homesteads, sharing and enjoying the abundance to be had by natural living, out of the grasp of the consumerist corporate world?  You would be able to pursue your creative passions alongside enjoyable and health-giving small-scale gardening, sharing the bounties of both with your friends and neighbors, a good life uncorrupted by the need for money… It would be nice wouldn’t it?  We might even call it a return to Eden.  Yet your imagination might soon drift to what might disturb that peace and satisfaction, and what, if anything, might do that?  Government officials would have us believe that if people started living this way they would be victimized by terrorists and criminals, yet isn’t it they themselves that are most likely to arrive with weapons, arresting us, taking away our homes, tearing up our gardens?  Of course the answer is yes, this is what they do today (and have done for centuries) whenever anybody tries to live separated from their social system of control and exploitation.  The worst terrorism and crimes have been, and continue to be, committed by governments.  Government is telling us that we need protection, from people just like themselves! (Speaking of which, if you look into quality sources of information on the terrorist events of 9/11/2001 in New York and 7/7/2005 in London, it’s obvious that the official stories given to us about those events are false, and that those events had to be State-sponsored, just like many others throughout history).  Government is just like the mafia by making you pay, through the threat of violence (arrest and imprisonment carried out by people with guns), for protection from themselves; except the mafia doesn’t pretend to be your friend.

    The corporatist State uses mass-media every day (yes, it’s really not a “free press”) to instill fear of our neighbors and take attention off themselves (the old divide-and-conquer strategy).  They dramatically assault our consciousness repeatedly with crimes, distorting just how common they really are, and most importantly to them, to make you feel that you need protection from it, to make you feel that you need your Big Brother to protect you from your neighbor because they are always out to get you.  Yet what they never reveal in the media is that most crime is actually a result of the system itself, most people are brought to desperation and mental illness by being forced into this unnatural and soul-suppressing consumerist/industrialist society.  The other important factor to understand is that yes, there are disturbed people out there that can be destructive, so in the interest of our safety we should minimize the amount of destruction they can yield.  Therefore we should stop supporting the formation of centralized power which produces nuclear weapons, “smart” bombs, etc. because it is very likely that a disturbed person will gain control of those weapons (just look at all of military history!); additionally false authority and hierarchy is unnatural and corrupts the human mind, and so that means anyone in positions of great power are most likely disturbed individuals!  And so, the solution to this dilemma is to eliminate those positions of false power in the first place.  A world without governance is actually safer than a world with it; on top of the aforementioned reasoning, there are the historical examples of communities without a central authority that had much less disorder and violence than those with it, this also refutes the belief that without social-systems we are doomed to destructive chaos.

    The corporate media also doesn’t mention all the violence government officials take themselves against the public, particularly those speaking and working for peace and justice.  After all, as many involved in activism are aware, there are government agents being payed to interfere with nonviolent positive activism as their sole occupation, violating people’s privacy constantly and worse, all of course in the name of “safety.”  But safety for whom?  Of course it is the preservation of the status-quo that the employers of these agents are concerned with, maintaining their power and control, and peace and justice aren’t exactly compatible with that.  The “4th Branch” of the government (the mass-media) may talk about a corrupt politician now and then, but they never question the existence of governance overall, and whether it could actually be harmful to the public; it is always portrayed as our benevolent parental overlord.  It’s fairly easy to fall for this trick and think that what we need to control all the so-called “anarchy”, as the mass-media and politicians often say, (a propagandized negative distortion of the true meaning of the word, which is simply “No government”), is more governance, more centralized control, but this omits that the whole planet now consists of one human farm (a.k.a. country) bordering another, and that has not ensured greater safety at all, it has actually brought us to the point of possible extinction through nuclear war and/or ecological collapse.  The chaos/destruction we observe around us, from wars, various physical/mental diseases, State-sponsored terrorism, oceans/rivers/air/earth filled with toxic chemicals, acid rain, forest clear-cutting, to nuclear waste/radiation/weapons, dangerous nanotechnology, GMO’s, etc., is not the result of anarchy, it is the result of its opposite: social-systemsmost of these tragedies would not exist entirely, and the others reduced dramatically, if we didn’t give the few the unnatural power to create and yield all this destruction in the first place.

    Returning to the root solution, there is definitely some recognition that very localized agriculture and trade is a crucial part of a new paradigm among activists world-wide, yet as humans born into this techno-industrial society, many have a hard time forming a clear conception of what a natural life would even look like, or consist of; they are like animals born in captivity.  Also like such animals they often become unnaturally attached to their false parents; people often feel indebted to the system, since it has allowed them to survive (no matter how feebly and unnaturally) and so they can become defenders of those that are ultimately their captors, because of a false sense of familial bond.  This can be seen often with ultra-patriotic individuals who angrily shout at and villainize anyone who questions “their” government, since subconsciously it is equivalent to questioning or criticizing their own parents.

Whether patriotic or critical of government, most people who do want to make the world a better place have been so indoctrinated into this social-system they totally miss the real solution, and the insurmountable obstacle to that sustainable vision for society: the forcible restriction to living naturally on the Earth.  Very good ideas now often surface among good-intentioned people, like “We need less waste, less transportation of energy/resources, support for biodiversity, more recycling, more localized and sustainable production of organic food, we need more self & community sufficiency, we need food sovereignty and local control of natural resources”, and all of this is very good, true and in the in the right direction, but that direction needs to be traveled to its final destination/solution, otherwise the not-so-minor detail that most people can’t afford the land (or time) to live in a truly localized and sustainable way is not addressed, nor is the ineffectiveness of partial environmental solutions.  This short-sighted, “working within the system” approach misses where the logical direction of ecological and social science is pointing to, the ultimate ideal: Sovereign Veganic Homesteads.  That model is the most local (there’s nothing more local than growing your own food and living on a homestead!), the most sustainable & healthy (veganic agriculture is the most sustainable, healthy and ethical form of agriculture!), the least wasteful (homesteads can be zero waste!), the least dependent on transportation of resources (homesteads can be completely non-dependent!) and energy (homesteads can produce their own energy, if even needed, via windmills, solar/thermal, biofuel, etc.!); veganic homesteading is the sustainability ideal to which all these good ideas are progressing toward, yet the reformer’s train of thought may not venture that far outside the systemic box (thanks again to indoctrination), and so they miss this real “kingdom of heaven” solution.  The question to ask yourself when confronted with whatever ecological or social disturbance is “Would (or could) this have occurred in a world of sovereign veganic homesteads?” Once you have that correct prescription of lens to view the world with, so to speak, the reason for why what you’re observing exists will be clear, you will have the fundamental truth that cuts through all the seemingly chaotic disharmony to its fundamental rational cause.  This ecological and social template is the only thing that can really produce the positive dramatic change the world needs, now more than ever; half-measures and false climate-change and social-justice solutions offered by industry and government will not be enough, as the facts and current reality makes very evident.  Just like the mistake of thinking a social system that is just more democratic and less corrupt will be sufficient, the idea that simply buying more local and producing less waste while still supporting the system, being a “conscious consumer,” though certainly better, is not enough to end the ecocide, mass-injustice and tyranny taking place, nor does it address the root injustice of land control that makes us need to buy (rather than freely produce) the necessities of life in the first place.  We must recognize that the whole artificial corporate/consumerist society that we are forced to live in is fundamentally wrong and cannot be reformed into goodness; there is no good form of slavery.

    Until land & water is claimed as a birthright by individuals and families, the destruction of mind, body and ecosystem will continue.  Sending a nice letter or petition to a CEO of a big company, or to some politician, asking for your fair share of the land & water, free of charge, will obviously be ineffective.  The unjust usury-based economic system that exploits the masses, the never-ending wars, the nuclear waste and bombs, and all the rest of what makes up modern “civilization,” will continue to go on until we strike at the root of the evil, as Thoreau put it.  All reforms that ignore the root problem of land control and forced taxation will not bring the drastic positive change we need and deserve.  The problem is, as Derrick Jensen said in the book Deep Green Resistance (a book I don’t recommend, but this was a good part):

“We do not question the existence of an economic and social system that is working the world to death, that is starving it to death, that is imprisoning it, that is torturing it.  We never question the logic that leads inevitably to clear-cuts, murdered oceans, loss of topsoil, damned rivers, poisoned aquifers.”

    If we each restore our sovereignty and the earth around us, we can save this planet for future generations.  If we keep waiting for someone else to give us our freedom and to restore ecological balance, we will face increasingly unpleasant social and ecological realities, like a complete dystopian police-state and possibly even extinction as a species.  We need to stop just saying we care about the Earth and the Life on it, and actually find a piece that we can take care of, and that can take care of us.  That would be gaining real traction toward restoring social and ecological balance, that would be making a real difference, being a significant change in the world that we wish to see others emulate.  We have failed to see real progress against the juggernaut of imperial/industrial civilization because we have failed to take our rightful and responsible places as women & men of the Earth.

    The Right Revolution is not complicated, it doesn’t require guerrilla warfare or even an activist group, it’s an idea not dependent on or corruptible by violence or collectivism of any sort; it is simply claiming your sovereignty and helping others do the same.  As I said before educating others about the crucial truth about social-systems is key (e.g. please share this essay), but if you and some others are willing and able to risk arrest for the greater good (like many people are and have been doing) then claim your sovereignty and birthright.  Two acres of arable land per family would be sufficient and fair.  Those that already have a house and land could just continue living there, but stop paying taxes and costs that prevent them from living freely and naturally.  Surrounding community could then support them in eviction resistance, proclaiming that a free place to live on the Earth is a birthright for all.  The first steps for those that don’t already have a house or land would be to work with family, friends and willing neighbors to occupy empty land and houses, depave empty concrete lots, and form sovereign homesteads for everyone involved.  The little wilderness that still remains should be left alone, there is plenty of land that is already mis/un-used that can be claimed.  Helping each other defend against house and land evictions (and remember evictions = the initiation of violence against nonviolent people), the mask of governance is taken off and the truth of tyranny becomes clear to see: there are people that want to live naturally, ethically and freely on the Earth, and there are other people who want them to be their slaves instead.  So these other people have men with guns go to your home and tell you that you have to pay up, otherwise they will harm you.  Again, this is exactly what the mafia does!  There really is no difference, except in appearance; the mafia doesn’t say they are your “representatives”.  And so having found this clarity of good vs. evil in the world, people can confidently defend their birthright vs. the violence of others who want to force them to pay for what should be free (i.e. their space and time on this planet).  The more people vocalize and act on the fact that sovereign homesteading land is a birthright (and realize the importance of having independent militias rather than various branches of a State military paid for by extortion and controlled by politicians),  the more successful this movement will be since there is no good counter-argument to that being a birthright and no easy way for tyrannical governments to form if they can be resisted at their origin;  the evil of governance will become more clear for everyone as the real front line of the revolution remains in the spot-light (which is well worth repeating): people trying to live natural, free and nonviolent lives, and then government employees with guns (police/military) initiating force against them under orders from officials, attempting to return the humans (whom politicians consider their property) to subservience and assimilation, attempting to return these free humans to slavery.  Then it will be clearly a battle between violence and nonviolence, and once that moral high-ground is clearly established and widely seen, the lies and propaganda of governance which has shaped human beliefs that have supported this destructive rampage through the centuries can finally be discarded for good.

local neighbor defense

Just as local communities successfully overcame the mafia in Italy through large numbers of people refusing to comply with their demands (again made easier with the existence of many independent local militias), we we can form the Beloved Community (as the great Martin Luther King, Jr. put it) across the world by claiming our birthright and refusing to comply with the demands of so-called “officials”.  And remember, this is not “reclaiming the commons” as a citizen, this is reclaiming your birthright as a human.

Gandhi was wisely insistent that Truth and Nonviolence are inseparable; it is only when they are both pure and working together that a force capable of dismantling empire is created.  This is why Gandhi was successful against the British Empire and why Martin Luther King, Jr. was successful against the American Empire; by making the good and evil of the situation very clear, by making the nonviolence vs. violence starkly obvious, their movements gained the power to succeed.  Look at all other violent revolutionary campaigns throughout history, what significant positive change did they bring?  If activism contains lies and violence it is doomed to failure, it is just another version of the evil that is being deplored.  No matter how good-intentioned activists are, fighting fire with fire, evil with evil, just doesn’t work; this is why governments hire agent-provocateurs and use many other means to either create or provoke violence, it always works in their favor.  Some so-called radical activists have a hard time accepting this, just like they have a hard time accepting the nonviolence and science of veganism, but this is basically just an expression of immaturity, a refusal to face the facts and ethical imperative of current and historical reality.  I highly recommend the book “Nonviolence: 25 Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea” by Mark Kurlansky and the documentary “A Force More Powerful” for more on this issue.

~~~

    Some final quotes and thoughts on safety, the #1 “justification” for governance:

“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

– Benjamin Franklin

“The cardinal rule of a closing or closed society is that your alignment with the regime offers no protection; in a true police-state no one is safe.”

– Naomi Wolf, Author of Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries

    Do you agree with the above quotations?  Perhaps you’re not convinced that a world without social-systems would be safer than our current reality, and perhaps you’d rather have that supposed safety in exchange for your sovereignty and liberty.  Perhaps you’re fine with being a money-slave, paying taxes for things you don’t want or agree with, and petitioning and protesting mostly in vain.  Perhaps living more freely and naturally just doesn’t sound appealing to you at this point in your life.  If so that’s fine, that’s your disposition, your preference.  But for those that don’t want to play this game why must they?  Why is their choice invalid and yours valid?  Why should your preference for supposed greater safety override another’s preference for greater freedom?  Why must someone agree to a “social contract” they never signed?  There is no principled, rational and true reason for why the choice of greater nonviolence and freedom should be opposed.  To say everyone must submit to some other human’s contrived authority, and pay them for services they never asked for, is tyrannical.  This is the despotism of all social systems, they are based on force, on violence, and so have already committed a crime before any other has.  Governance punishes us with restrictions and servitude at birth for a “pre-crime”; we are charged guilty before innocent at birth, and this is not a defensible position.  No one has the right to deny a woman or man their birthright and deny their sovereignty for a crime they’ve never committed.

    Also if despite the principled reasoning I have offered in this essay, you’re currently living a pretty comfortable life and find the call for the abolition of government to be “too extreme,” or maybe just sort of scary to you, then because of this you may also disregard the crucial truths I’ve presented.  But if you were to look beyond your bubble of comfortable existence (or even just more deeply into it) you’d see how much suffering and destruction is going on in the world around you, how our lives are in fact corrupted by tyranny, and then a call for drastic change would not seem so extreme, but rather more logical and necessary.

    There is risk in freedom.  It’s safer to never leave your house, but that’s equivalent to house-arrest, to prison.  Life can be risky, but we take the risk because the possible rewards, namely happiness and satisfying engagement with the world, creativity, others, Nature, etc. is worth going for.  Guaranteed mediocrity is worse than possible joy.  We have been denied the possibility of experiencing real freedom and right-living on this planet by social-systems, we have been disallowed from realizing our full potential for happiness.

   So don’t accept the belief that heavenly experience is only to be found in the after-life, that we have to live in an unsustainable way and be subject to pre-emptive violence, that we can’t be natural and free humans on this planet.  Lets respect the freedom of others, dominate no one and live peacefully in harmony with Nature, each other and other species, lets make Earth more heavenly (i.e. more peaceful, healthy and just) by establishing true kingdoms of heaven, sovereign veganic homesteads, making up voluntary gift-economy communities.

veganarchism

The Flag of Veganarchism

    This form of Green Anarchism (more specifically a form of Veganarchism), liberates all species on Earth from a paradigm of domination/slavery and all the negative effects that inevitably causes.  At a time when we see ecological (and possible economic) collapse, nuclear disasters and the ever-present threat of nuclear weapons, a growing worldwide-surveillance grid/police-state, further unjust exploitation and disparity of wealth, extinction of species, toxic chemical overload in the air, water, earth and our bodies, Peak Oil, GMO’s corrupting our food supply and health, and on and on, it’s a perspective and solution who’s time has definitely come.

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Adam & Eve, Jesus, and Satanic Propaganda

blue and red dress religious man illustration

Photo by Magda Ehlers on Pexels.com

by Colin Denny Donoghue
(updated March 19th, 2022)

Our culture is filled with stories, and some well-known stories are not as innocent and harmless as is commonly believed.  If we take time to think about them more deeply, and how they may influence our lives, we can discover underlying meaning and messages that actually disempower us greatly and misdirect us away from crucial truth about our Reality.  By becoming aware of this, we can free ourselves from mental ties that keep us from progress, both personally and socially.  Here I will focus on one of the most well known stories in the world, that of Adam & Eve in the Garden of Eden, and I will also analyze the mainstream teachings and beliefs concerning the salvation offered by Jesus of Nazareth (Yeshua the Messiah), to show how both have been distorted, and are thereby doing much more harm than good for society, through subliminally pushing false, irrational and immoral ideas that are disempowering.  I will give alternative positive ways (what I believe are the correct ways) to view the Garden of Eden story and the teachings of Jesus so that we can reclaim them in the interest of truth, peace, justice, and enlightenment. 

Why was it that Adam & Eve were fine with being naked before eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good & Evil?  Why is that after they ate that fruit they were “ashamed” of their naked bodies?  Is it because the naked body is actually evil?  No!  So obviously that “knowledge” of good & evil was false knowledge, it was a false morality, and that’s the key aspect of this story needed for your edification, yet this key aspect is never taught by the Church!

The traditional story of Adam & Eve defies common sense, and is even blasphemous, in multiple ways.  Firstly it says God put a special tree in Paradise with fruit that Adam & Eve were forbidden to eat, thereby supposedly forbidding woman and man from gaining the Knowledge of Good and Evil, a.k.a. morality, thus making God out to be immoral.  So as should be apparent to anyone who knows that God is perfectly good and wants us to be good too, the dominant/mainstream interpretation of this story is complete nonsense, it portrays God as an immoral, and that’s an exact description of the Devil, not God.  And yet most Christians accept this blasphemous absurdity, for no reason other than it’s what they were taught by religious “authority.”  Indoctrination to always submit to “authority” is pervasive and invasive, making false religious dogma difficult to identify and then reject for many people.  It is possible though, when truth, common sense and morality become the priorities, not dogma.  There is a lot of wisdom to be found in the Bible, but the story of Adam & Eve as interpreted by mainstream Paulinist Christianity, is definitely not an example of it.  The only way the story could make sense is if Satan had corrupted all the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge with lies, i.e. with false morality, and God, knowing this, forbade Adam & Eve from eating of it, because that false morality would take them out of Paradise.  Instead of intelligently acknowledging this, many Christians resort to rationalizations to try and make the story legitimate, like this:  “Adam and Eve, by rebelliously partaking of the tree of knowledge of good & evil, disobeyed God, and disobeying God is bad.”  While it’s true that we should obey God, without the explanation given that the reason God didn’t want Adam & Eve to eat that fruit is because if contained toxic lies, the story doesn’t make any sense at all, and as I said, it’s actually blasphemous without that clarification given, because again, why would knowing the difference between right and wrong be a bad thing?  Wouldn’t God want you to know what was Good & Evil so you could always choose the Good?  That’s obviously what the Ten Commandments were all about, as was what Jesus was all about too: “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the Devil’s work” (1 John 3:8); “Then Jesus told him, ‘I entered this world to render judgment–to give sight to the spiritually blind and to show those who think they see that they are blind’ (John 9:39).

Also hasn’t your own personal experience shown that having this Knowledge is very important in order to make your life better, avoid harm and reject injustice?  And isn’t good child-rearing mostly a matter of teaching your child the difference between right and wrong?  Plus how can we look at the horrific (and also at times beautiful) history of human civilization and not see a clear contrast between Good & Evil?  So much tragedy in people’s personal lives and on the social-scale could have been prevented if there was a clear understanding of what’s good and what’s evil, rather than confusion over it.  Examples of the latter that instantly come to my mind include: the American South’s continued insistence on maintaining slavery in the 18th & 19th centuries, 1930’s Germany, early Vietnam War, China’s Invasion into Tibet, Iraq/Afghanistan invasions by the U.S. military, the 2000 U.S. Presidential election theft by Bush/Cheney, various new environmental pollutants and bodily toxins being approved and utilized by the public, etc.  Another sociopolitical example would be the prohibition of industrial hemp farming, while hemp is the most beneficial plant available to humans (The Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden?), able to provide nutritious food, clothing, building materials, fuel and medicine

Think about it: How can we have progress without a sense of what’s right and wrong?  Isn’t that what progress always really is?  A progression from the bad to the good in varying degree?

“Those who know right as right, and know the wrong to be wrong, ascend to happy states of being, for they hold right views.”

– The Buddha, The Dhammapada, Chapter 22

The story of the “forbidden fruit,” as it is commonly told, is a centuries-old piece of misinformation used to continue the status-quo paradigm; it does not encourage the questioning of authority or the progress of humanity.  By telling us that having the Knowledge of Good and Evil is bad, this story reinforces mass disempowerment of humanity.  Without understanding of what is harmful and what is not, how can we ever act compassionately?  And so why would having this Knowledge be prohibited by a loving Creator?  To say that seeking the Knowledge of Good and Evil is wrong is equivalent to saying love is wrong, that love is a sin!  An idea couldn’t be more more backwards, and is certainly not fitting for Divinity.  Intelligent Christians must recognize on some level that this doesn’t make any sense at all, but they often turn a blind eye, giving way to the official teaching that is supposedly “the Word of God.”  And what could be more advantageous for the Devil than people believing his lies are the Word of God?  This is exactly what probably really drove Adam & Eve out of Paradise, and keeps the world in a deplorable state today, the most destructive beliefs today (namely Carnism and Statism, more on these shortly) being based on false morality.  So we shouldn’t be surprised that this was the real deception that led to the “fall of Man,” since we can see it is what has been behind all the violence and slavery ever since, through to today. 

To ignore the falsehood, irrationality, and immorality, (the Toxic Trio, always found in Evil/Satan’s ideas) of a story that makes God out to be an immoral tempter promoting an amoral/unconscientious society, and simply, as many Christians do, rationalize these major problems away by saying the whole story was just about “disobedience to God being a sin,” is wrongly ignoring the immoral, irrational and blasphemous nature of the story, and in so doing, ironically does no obedience or service to God at all, it actually serves the Enemy.  God & Jesus commanded us to love one another, and love is of course the highest Good, so we need that knowledge of Good constantly in our lives; we actually need to become experts in that Knowledge, knowing what the minute details of it are.  And likewise we need to know what is the opposite of Love/Good, which is Evil, so that we can avoid it.  The Knowledge of Good & Evil is absolutely necessary in order to be in obedience to God, yet this Devilishly corrupted story tells us the exact opposite.  This is a hallmark of Satanic thought, not only is it untrue, it’s the exact opposite of the truth, thereby doing the most damage to those that believe in it, and those that the believer effects with their misguided actions. 

“Depart from evil and do good; Seek peace and pursue it.”  (Psalm 34:14)

“Turn away from evil!  Do what is right!  Then you will enjoy lasting security.”  (Psalm 37:27)

It is certainly the Devil, not God, that doesn’t want us to have the true Knowledge of Good & Evil, because a crucial part of that Knowledge is knowing that he exists!  The Devil is most effective when people don’t think such an evil force is real; as the old saying goes, “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing people he doesn’t exist.”  Adam & Eve surely lost Paradise not because they knew the difference between right and wrong, but rather because they didn’t know any longer; they listened to the lies of the Devil who stayed on the Tree of Knowledge to corrupt the truth of Good & Evil with false morality.  (And the blame being put all on Eve/Women as it in the mainstream version of the story is another obvious distortion, this one aligned with sexism and patriarchy.)  Supporters of this backwards ideology/paradigm are clearly the authors of the Old Testament story of Adam & Eve, not a Divine and loving omniscient intelligence.  This backwards ideology has also resulted in a backwards culture; the true lifestyle of Adam & Eve matches the perspective of Anarcho-naturism (e.g. free of government and taboos against nakedness), which is basically the opposite of American society.  The world is indeed “upside down.”

Another point to make this even more obvious: Why did Adam & Eve become ashamed of their nakedness after eating of the Knowledge of Good and Evil?  If we are made in the “image of God” why would our naked bodies be something shameful??  That’s saying that God is shameful and so is His Creation!  (Again that’s Satanism, not true Christianity!)  Therefore it makes more sense that it was fruit poisoned with lies that they were eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and that’s why they became ashamed; they no longer knew our nakedness was good and natural, their sense of right and wrong had been reversed, which is exactly what the Devil’s main goal is for humanity, and what he still tries to accomplish daily through constantly deceiving people with lies.

The popular nonsense story of Adam & Eve is an example of Orwellian propaganda, saying the good is evil and the evil is good.  When we accept others claims of what’s right and wrong, especially from society’s official “authorities,” even when it defies common sense, we allow ourselves to be complicit with destructive policies, ideology and actions that cause massive harm to others and our environment.  What comes to my mind right away as big examples of that are: a) Going along with the propaganda delivered by the mass media concerning 9/11/2001 (read David Ray Griffin’s books on 9/11 for starters on that topic), b) Election fraud (read Fooled Again by Mark Crispin Miller for starters on elections), c) “Justifications” for killing countless civilians in Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan, d) GMOs being deemed “safe” (they’re not!), e) Vaccines (also definitely not safe!), f) and Radiation Exposure from modern technology.  When we allow rulers to tell us what’s right (e.g. the war) and what’s wrong (e.g. dissent), we voluntarily allow the disempowerment of our minds and bodies, we allow for lies to cloud our comprehension of the true reality, we become sheep led by wolves.

“Thieves, robbers, murderers and cheats, who commit crimes recognized by themselves and everyone else as evil, serve as an example of what ought not to be done, and deter others from similar crimes.  But those who commit the same thefts, robberies, murders, and other crimes, disguising them under all kinds of religious or scientific or humanitarian justifications, as all landowners, merchants, manufacturers, and government officials do, provoke others to imitation, and so do harm not only to those who are directly the victims of their crimes, but to thousands and millions of men whom they corrupt by obliterating their sense of the distinction between right and wrong.”

– Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You, p. 343

The Slavery of Animals & Humans; A Reality Denied, to Our Own Detriment, for Centuries

Speaking of wolves, another big example of confusion concerning Good & Evil that needs a lot more attention on the societal level is the issue of wild vs. domesticated animals; there is a huge difference between the two, and that difference isn’t most importantly concerning physical attributes, it’s concerning origins, ethics, and karmic consequence.  As for that, firstly there are the major environmental and health consequences of domesticated animals used for food; the massive exploitation of farm animals, and the coinciding mass consumption and use of animal products, a.k.a. Carnism, is a major destructive force on this planet.  Carnism brings hellish suffering and violence to billions of animals every year, along with contributing to severe environmental damage and major diseases including heart disease, diabetes and cancer.  Secondly there is another related widespread example of this lost Knowledge of Good & Evil that concerns other domesticated animals, the ones people don’t eat or otherwise exploit, but keep as pets, e.g. dogs.  The hundreds of millions of dogs people live with (or near) throughout the world create daily disturbance, distraction and dependency, but most people don’t seem to fully acknowledge that it is a negative disturbance and distraction, and don’t recognize the karmic reason for why it must be negative.  They don’t understand that all the ways they cause disturbance are forms of negative feedback from Nature, i.e. it is the operation of Natural/Karmic Law stemming from the fact that domesticated animals are unnatural and originated from man’s selfish enslavement of wild animals, which is a clear Evil.  Some may immediately object: “You think puppies are evil?!  Give me a break.  Dogs bring a lot of joy into people’s lives.”  This sort of knee-jerk response distorts what I’m pointing out, and is tremendously short-sighted.  Yes dogs do bring some comfort and laughter to people, but overall their effect is negative (and that’s because they don’t fit into Nature/Creation), and overall is what really matters.  And even the apparent good they bring is not really good because it’s an inferior substitute for natural, principled and harmless sources of comfort (e.g. God, Family, Friends, Nature, Healthy Food, etc.), and so dogs (and other pets) actually get in the way of the real good from taking place; this getting in the way of the good is another bad aspect of their existence.  Getting back to the crucial truth that coincides with that reasoning: origins matter, and if something originated from something evil, it will inevitably have harmful effects, because that’s an inherent and eternal characteristic of evil.  You may think that the fact that dogs came from enslaved wild animals is no longer relevant, just as you may think the fact that government is founded on aggression is irrelevant (that is if you will even see/admit that), but in both cases the fact remains that the presence of evil is definitely not irrelevant concerning the status of society.  For example the “good” that government does, like sometimes providing some food for the poor, is again, similarly to the “good” provided by pets, an inferior (and destructive) substitute that gets in the way of the superior natural and principled way from being dominant, in this case natural and free communities unburdened by monetary-slavery (due to the land control, cost and taxation imposed by government), voluntarily helping those in need.  There is no “necessary evil” in order to do good in the world, and no evil is ever benign, evil always undermines good, that’s why it’s evil!  If you want to make the world a better place then your mission should be to systematically eliminate all forms of evil, like aggression and slavery, which, by the way, government is based on and continually engages in.  “The tyrant calls for sweet wine from sour grapes,” but it can never happen.  What analysis like this of the slavery of animals and humans reveals is that there really is no grey area, things are ultimately either good or evil, and although good things (e.g. neighbors voluntarily sharing with one another) may occur alongside something evil (e.g. living within a social-system that is a form of slavery), that doesn’t mean that social-systems (or pets) are both Good & Evil, they are actually just evil, and some good exists despite of them, not because of them.  The Devil is indeed in the details, and keeping that in mind lets return to the issue of domesticated/enslaved animals.  Pets are in a position of dependency that brings along with it a lot of suffering generation after generation, and also brings endless disturbance and distraction to humanity (humanity, who by the way, should be focused on higher things than how cute a puppy or kitten is; wild animal babies are cute too, but they don’t bring all the problems domesticated animals do, because they are part of the original Nature/Creation/Ecology).  The fault does not lie with the individual dogs themselves, they are not evil, their origin is evil; they are actually the victims of the enslavement and genetic manipulation of their ancestors.  Because of this enslavement and manipulation, dogs are now dependent on humans, and this dependency brings with it a lot of suffering, like the daily myriad of abuses by humans, and the daily massive number of killings (a.k.a. euthanasia) at animal shelters/”control-centers” worldwide.  The real solution is to end all breeding and establish many domesticated animal sanctuaries (serving vegan dog food), to contain and minimize their disturbance/destruction, and to also give them more enjoyable lives.  Whenever we are in denial of the over-arching reality, and instead get fixated on the minor positives, we’ve lost sight of the bigger picture, we’ve fallen into thought that is untrue, irrational and unethical. 

Can you clearly discern the difference in Quality (another aspect of the Knowledge of Good & Evil) between the lovely sounds of wild birds chirping and whale calls, vs. the contrasting disturbing sounds of dogs barking, roosters crowing and chickens squawking?  It’s no coincidence that it’s the domesticated animals that have a totally downgraded presence physically and energetically compared with wild animals.  The reason the domesticated animals are of a lesser Quality and bring much more disturbance than wild animals is because their origin is an evil; and their never-ending disturbance is a manifestation of that evil foundation via Natural/Karmic Law (namely the Law that slavery disallows peace & harmony).  The crucial point that must be understood is that origins matter, and their origin is an evil one, because slavery is an evil, and slavery and evil always cause disturbances in the world.  Lacking this Knowledge of Karmic Law (i.e. of Good & Evil), people perpetuate the problem, breeding more dogs (and cats), creating more disturbance, distraction and dependency.  (They are dependent on us, but we also become enslaved in a way to them because of that dependency.)  Every day walking an animal that is the product of the enslavement of wolves on a leash down a concrete city street where you pick up their shit in your hand with a plastic bag, is a good encapsulation of just how far mankind has traveled from the gate of the Garden of Eden.  That is not what we are supposed to be doing on this Earth, it is not something we should be proud of or accept as normal; we are wasting our time entangled with the unprincipled enterprise of animal domestication, time that could be much better utilized seeking the full potential of ourselves and society.  Distractions like pets are not good or even neutral; by becoming a dominant focus in your life they are distracting you from doing what’s really important, thereby undermining your progress in becoming your full potential, and that’s not good at all.  Most people think the fact that dogs came from the enslavement of wild animals is no longer relevant, but this is completely false; the karmic disturbances we face continuously with domesticated animals is proof of this.  On the metaphysical level this disturbance must be continuous because otherwise it would make God unjust; it would make it so that this Creation can accommodate slavery in a harmonious way, which would be an evil creation.  There can’t be a time limit on how long slavery causes disturbance (e.g. only 10 years after the caging/enslaving of wolves), that would be arbitrary, irrational an lacking moral integrity.  When I make this point most people don’t really get it… I don’t know what to do other than repeat that this is no minor point at all; most of the disturbances we experience in life are actually rooted in the slavery of animals and people, you just have to have the understanding of how certain animals, industries, etc. came into being in order to see it and get the karma of it.  Most of the disturbances in life!  Therefore if we abandoned everything connected to slavery we could have world peace!  No big deal?!  And what is a lifestyle free of the slavery of animals and humans?  Sovereign veganic homesteads, making up voluntary natural communities.  You can see this for yourself; living in a home in a beautiful countryside with a beautiful garden full of the best tasting food, the best colors and scents of flowers, full of tranquility, is a way of life in stark contrast to that of the city-dweller.  And what disrupts the greater peace in the countryside?  What prevents it from being a complete return to Eden/Paradise?  Things like: a) barking dogs, b) cars/trucks/buses, c) machinery (e.g. chainsaws, weed-wackers, leaf-blowers), and ALL of these things only exist because of the enslavement of animals and humans!  Yes, I know the connection of dogs to slavery is easier to understand, but also try to see that those machines would not exist if it were not for the concentration of wealth/power/resources to the few, made possible only by non-optional social-systems of enslavement.  If you think this is far-fetched I don’t what else to tell you, it’s actually not that complicated once you understand what slavery is, and that everything that is a product of slavery must produce disturbances, forever; it’s the basic dynamic of karmic law in operation.  We need to end our spiritual blindness and recognize a life full of constant disturbances is not “just the way it is,” it’s a result of the evil of slavery entrenched in this statist and carnist society.

Freeing ourselves from the negative karma that comes with entanglement with the slavery of animals (for food, clothing, entertainment, or pets), we can then more readily begin the crucial work of freeing ourselves from the entanglement of the continued slavery of humans; this is what Veganarchism is essentially about, although State propaganda and agent-provocateuring repeatedly seek to associate it with terrorism, so as to confuse the public as to what is really Good (freedom for animals and humans), and what is really Evil (Statism, which is a form of slavery); so, people end up supporting slavery and dismissing freedom, a big victory for the Devil.  An often ignored fact: Carnism & Statism are the two largest means of violence that humans participate in.  Carnism is the means for killing hundreds of billions of animals every year, and violence by government, called democide, has killed more people than anything else in human history and continues to be a source of massive suffering to this day.  Yet indoctrinated people will quickly retort with something like “Eating animals is natural, and that was past government, today it’s not that bad,” rationalizing the massive harm that continues to take place as a result of Carnism and Statism.  Therefore it’s no wonder that these two ideologies have been indoctrinated most heavily into society, because if people accept them, then human society will be kept down in karmic bondage no matter what other good works are performed; it operates on the spiritual level like usury adding money to the Devil’s bake account every minute.

Another wrong path humanity goes on regularly worth mentioning is getting caught up with the toxic corporate “news” and the “entertainment” industry; both are absolutely filled with toxic underlying messages/worldviews/beliefs that are very disempowering, along with disturbing images, etc.  Pretty much all the content of major news outlets and every major movie and TV show nowadays is leading you away from peace, love, and truth in some way, but it takes Knowledge of Good & Evil in order to see that.  Some of the most popular TV shows nowadays (e.g. “The Walking Dead” and “Game of Thrones”) are also the most sadistic, containing some of the most disturbing situations and imagery imaginable, yet people say “Oh it’s just a show,” as if that nullifies the sadism.  Also movies more and more are presented as “kid-friendly” (e.g. “Pans Labyrinth,” “Guardians of the Galaxy,” and “Hot Tub Time Machine 2”) but also contain extremely disturbing violent imagery, and even throw in patriotic propaganda to boot.  And of course there is the more blatantly sadistic horror movies for those that have really gone off the deep end… Why do people watch sadistic violence as “entertainment?”  Only because their sense of Good & Evil has been so warped that they see nothing really wrong with it; only because they have become more thoroughly deceived by the Devil, and have been taken even further away from a pathway to peace and salvation.  If you think there’s nothing really evil in mass-media/entertainment, and that it doesn’t have a majorly negative effect on your life when you take it in, you’re just plain wrong; a very good place to start looking more deeply is the work of Lenon Honor

Additionally, if you spend much of your time also thinking of cultural pop icons, luxury consumer goods, etc., you are allowing yourself in those ways to also be distracted from where real meaning and satisfaction can be found in life (namely through harmony with inner & outer Nature).  By watching this toxic media you are allowing yourself to be disempowered by those who seek greater control over humanity, those who are much happier if you are an unaware. disturbed, alcohol/pharmaceutical-taking consumer who never questions societal norms, or speaks out against unjust authority or the lies in mainstream religion.

Jesus & Salvation

“To worship the Lord is to hate evil.  I hate pride, arrogance and every wicked way, and fraudulent speech.”  (Proverbs 8:13)

“Behold, the Lord is coming with myriads of His holy ones to execute judgment on everyone, and to convict all the ungodly of every ungodly act of wickedness and every harsh word spoken against Him by ungodly sinners.”  (Jude 1:14-15)

“Then the LORD spoke to Moses, saying:Speak to all the congregation of the sons of Israel and say to them, ‘You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy.'”  (Leviticus 19:1-2)

“Then Jesus said, ‘I tell you the truth, unless you turn from your sins and become like little children, you will never get into the Kingdom of Heaven.'”  (Matthew 18:3)

This intentional misdirection of our understanding of Truth has also been accomplished through the distortion of the teachings of Jesus.  Many Christians today spread the idea that by simply saying a magical prayer (The “Sinner’s Prayer“) of allegiance to Jesus, we will be “saved.”  Not only is this teaching amoral, it’s ironically more Pagan/Wiccan, even more Satanic, than Christian.  This misguided “Pauline Christianity” actually directly contradicts the teachings of Jesus.  Jesus himself spoke against this exact practice when he said: “Not everyone who calls out to me, ‘Lord! Lord!’ will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.  Only those who actually do the will of my Father in heaven will enter” (Matthew 7:21).  So why is it that the numerous aforementioned Christians overlook this?  Could it be because it’s a lot easier to recite a prayer than do the will of God?  Jesus made it clear multiple times that it is much more difficult than just reciting a prayer in order to be saved: “You can enter God’s Kingdom only through the narrow gate.  The highway to hell is broad, and its gate is wide for the many who choose that way” (Matthew 7:13).  Complimenting this, he also said: “I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved… I have come that they may have life, and have it in all its fullness” (John 10:9-10).  And how do we enter through that “narrow gate”?  By saying a magical prayer that’s in a pamphlet that someone gave us on the street?  No, sorry, it’s not that easy, hence the “narrow.”  To pass through this narrow gate requires that we love Jesus and what he represented, and he said we love him when we follow his commandments (John 14:21), namely his “Greatest Commandments” to: Love God, Others and Ourselves equally.  This is no easy task, it’s calling for our full spiritual maturation and perfection.  We are here “for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works” (2 Timothy 3:16-17).  Jesus said “Unless your righteousness is better than the righteousness of the teachers of religious law, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven!” (Matthew  5:20) and, in concluding his Sermon on the Mount, said “Be ye therefore perfect” (Matthew 5:48).  “Be perfect” means following his Greatest Commandments perfectly, which means being in full alignment with comprehensive love. No one who lives in him keeps on sinning.  No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him.” (1 John 3:6)  [More on this practice of comprehensive love here].  This is a far cry from just reading a magical prayer or having a blood sacrifice be your ticket to Heaven, and it is what getting in real right relationship with Jesus is about, a.k.a. “being in Jesus” (2 Corinthians 5:17), and eating of the “living bread of life” (John 6:51), that is still with us.  This is also experienced as a saving Kairos window of opportunity (a.k.a. a Kairos Moment, “God Moment,” or “Nexus Point“), that opens repeatedly in our lives as a form of Grace, that again actually requires something more from us than the ability to read (surprised?) in order to realize its “fullness” (i.e. its great potential for good in our lives and the lives of others), it again requires that we follow the Greatest Commandments perfectly.  This is being in right relationship with Jesus, and God: “Loving God means keeping his commandments, and his commandments are not burdensome” (1 John 5:3).  Another problem with this magical incantation “Christianity” is that it, like with the distorted Adam & Eve story, makes God out to be amoral, this Pauline doctrine also says love doesn’t matter to God!  Again this is false, blasphemous and even satanic.  In contrast, here’s some real truth, rationality and morality in the Bible:

“Therefore, listen to me, you men of understanding.  Far be it from God to do wickedness, and from the Almighty to do wrong.  For He pays a man according to his work, and makes him find it according to his way.  Surely, God will not act wickedly, and the Almighty will not pervert justice.”  (Job 34:10-12)

Just as the story of Adam & Eve was Devilishly distorted to actually prevent people from finding their way back to Paradise/Eden, so has Christianity been distorted to turn people in the opposite direction from the true path of spiritual salvation.  Most Christians have been so heavily conditioned and indoctrinated that they just accept the nonsense of magical-incantation-salvation, and then try to rationalize it and make it legitimate, but always unsuccessfully, by reverting to dogmatic sayings detached from everyday reality.  By making salvation all about a magical prayer to Jesus, and not at all about your actions on Earth, the real way to salvation has been covered up, resulting in many good-hearted people who are seeking to be good Christians being misled by Devilish doctrine.  Magical-incantation/blood-sacrifice “Christianity,” along with bizarre and disturbing spiritual/demonic-possession “Christianity,” is unfortunately very pervasive and influential, yet most don’t recognize that it would actually be more fitting to call it a form of Satanism, based on lies, serving disempowerment/slavery more than empowerment/salvation. 

Additionally, the popularity of comic-book characters like Superman show also how American Christian culture subconsciously accepts the idea that being saved (or combating injustice) doesn’t involve good works and serious maturation, so we might as well remain apathetic consumers.  In the movie “Superman Returns” (2006), the references to Jesus are blatantly obvious, even the title brings to mind the Second Coming of Jesus, but these references serve to distort and steer people away from what Jesus’ teachings were actually about.  Subliminally implanting the false association between Superman and Jesus, at one point in the movie Superman flies over the Earth in a clearly crucified position, and elsewhere in the movie he is also referred to as “My only son, sent to save humanity” by his other-worldly Father, and even refers to himself at one point as a savior when talking to Lois Lane: “You wrote that the world doesn’t need a savior, but every day I hear people crying for one.”  And what is humanity’s role in the story of Superman?  Mainly a bystander, which is the key subliminal take-away prepared for the propagandized viewer/consumer.  Superman isn’t telling people that their salvation is dependent on their alignment with the Greatest Commandments as Jesus did, no, the theme of Superman comic-books, video-games and movies is more subliminally making humanity out to be a bunch of worthless sinners who’s actions are pretty much irrelevant, which is exactly what the distorted story of Adam & Eve also does with its nonsense about “original sin” that we can’t escape from and the Knowledge of Good of Evil being of such no consequence that it is even forbidden.  Are you clearly seeing the hidden core content of these nonsense stories now?  Anti-loveLies.  Guess who that’s a trademark of?  The Devil.  We absolutely need the Knowledge of Good & Evil in order to restore Paradise on Earth, and we absolutely need to be comprehensively loving in order to find spiritual salvation, and so the teachings have been Devilishly altered to subliminally say the exact opposite, both stories fundamentally/subliminally saying that love doesn’t matter.  This irrational and unloving belief that has corrupted Christianity is a prime example of a “house divided upon itself,” and a house (or mind) that is conflicted with itself does not progress.

Also consider, does making the crucifix the main symbol of Christianity make sense?  We have Christians today kneeling before giant life-sized crucifixes in Church, and wearing necklaces that have a miniature crucifix with Jesus nailed to it, dying a slow and painful death, and this is supposed to inspire you to walk in his footsteps?  Modern Christians meditate upon this image of torture day in and day out, and guess what?  They don’t feel too motivated to go out and try to change the world, instead they feel disempowered, and revert to saying a magical incantation prayer for salvation.  They forget about restoring Eden, forget about bringing Heaven to Earth, even though it is part of the Lord’s Prayer, the main way Jesus said we should pray, seeking to embody God’s Will.  The subliminal message being spread by making the crucifix the point of focus is: If you are compassionate and resist injustice, this is what will happen to you, you will be persecuted, suffer and die.  And yet Christians today, as they’ve been taught, say that it symbolizes “How he died for our sins,” again giving a magical get-out-jail-free-card, this time through blood sacrifice, that doesn’t require your own perfection in love.  Blood sacrifice; do you know what that practice is a main tenant of, as is magical incantationSatanism.  Mainstream Christianity revolves around the two main practices of Satanism!  That shows how powerful indoctrination/propaganda is, supported by strong belief in “authority” being the holders of Truth, it can have Christians practicing Satanism and not even think twice about it!  Making this backwardness even more clear, the day Jesus was tortured and died is bizarrely called “Good Friday,” which subliminally praises the cruelty of that day, just as making an idol of the crucifix does.  The fact that he was tortured and killed was not good, it was revealing the evil of Statism, the evil of humans ruling over other humans.  That exposing of evil, that condemning of evil, is good, but what happened to him was not good, to think so is to miss the whole point of his sacrifice!  Exposing evil is good, but in doing so that doesn’t make the evil good; this common sense crucial point is unfortunately lost today on most Christians; the Devil is once again in the details.  Not making this crucial distinction allows the Devil to misuse the whole event for his purposes, turning the death of Jesus into a blood sacrifice, which is a completely worthless and immoral practice.  Many Christians are supporting the equivalent of the ignorant barbarism of animal sacrifice that has been done to “appease the gods and atone for sins,” and that’s the exact kind of bunk religion that Jesus, and Samuel (below), was pointing humanity away from! 

Samuel replied, “What is more pleasing to the LORD: your burnt offerings and sacrifices or your obedience to his voice?  Listen!  Obedience is better than sacrifice, and submission is better than offering the fat of rams.”  (1 Samuel 15:22)

And making this point even more clear:

For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.”  (Hebrews 10:4)

“’What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?’ says the Lord; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of well-fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats.”  (Isaiah 1:11)

Again what has happened is actually Devilish distortion of Divine truth, distortion that, not coincidentally, once again is anti-Love, and pro-lies (in this case the lie that by killing an innocent person or animal you will please God and be forgiven of any sins you committed).  This blood sacrifice perspective is not at all what Jesus was about, and it should not at all be promoted by Christina churches, it is evil doctrine that has undermined the good/true teachings, and there is no compatibility between the two; the evil needs to be full purged in order for Christianity to be realigned with its purely good origin.  What was empowering was not the torture and death of Jesus, but his resurrection, showing us that although these evil principalities and powers may harm us, they can not harm our soul, there is life after death.  And what did Jesus say and show concerning those powers, those official “authority” figures that slandered him constantly and then called for his crucifixion?  He showed the evil of the ruling class who “hated him without reason” (John 15:25) to the point of torturing and murdering him, a death he went to willingly so that the needed clarifying and liberating crucial Truth for humanity could be made: “The prince of this world [i.e. Caesar and his subordinates then, States altogether today] now stands condemned” (John 16:11).  How often those words are ignored!  And why?  Indoctrination by the State, its schooling and mass-media propaganda outlets.

The whole dialogue transcribed in John 18:28 – 19:16 between the Jewish High Priests and Pilate shows democracy in action, it shows that majority rule is no assurance of righteousness at all, that in fact it could choose to even murder the very embodiment of pure Love, of Divinity; perhaps the worst crime imaginable!  This obvious and profound demonstration by Jesus (and God who directed him) of how governance is wickedness at its core has been lost on most Christians who have been heavily indoctrinated to believe Statism is necessary and good, when it is in fact an evil (a form of slavery) that has been corrupting human society for centuries, the leading cause of mass-murder and destruction throughout history.  Jesus, through sacrificing his own bodily life, was actually pointing to the crucial truth that having no rulers, i.e. anarchism, would be the good that could prevent such an evil as his own crucifixion.  Remember Moses led the Hebrews out of the bondage of the Egyptian State (Exodus 3:7, 10), and the freed people lived without a ruler/king for three centuries, i.e. they were an anarchist society, until later corruption set in.  “In those days there was no king in Israel.  As for everybody, what was right in his own eyes [i.e. what their conscience said] he was accustomed to do” (Judges 17:6, 21:25).  Likewise, Jesus opposed the social-system of the world he lived in, a system that was, and evidently still is, ultimately controlled by Satan; that’s why Satan was able to offer it to Jesus as a temptation (Matthew 4:8-9).  Jesus said he had come “to proclaim to the captives a release, and sight to the blind [i.e. awareness to the indoctrinated], to set at liberty the oppressed” (Luke 4:19).  He was clearly against human rulership (Matthew 23:8-12), and as already mentioned he refused the Devil’s temptation to be made a ruler himself (Matthew 4:8-10), and also refused as well to be made a king by his followers (John 6:15).  Additionally Christian scholars have identified State/political power as “the Beast” spoken of in the Book of Revelation.  Christian Anarchism actually makes perfect sense, though the indoctrinated will immediately object; if you find yourself objecting to this idea now reconsider the crucial referenced points I’ve made above, and perhaps also read Christian Anarchist books like That Holy Anarchist by Mark Van Steenwyk and the many articles on the subject that can be found online to get a better understanding of why it’s not at all the “crazy talk” it is slandered to be.  To think anarchism is an evil is a big example of how the true Knowledge of Good & Evil has been lost; once again what is truly good and of crucial importance (e.g. freedom and equality, a.k.a. egalitarian anarchism), is deemed terrible and is continually marginalized.

Yeshua of Nazareth showed the way that humanity could be saved within and without, but he did not save it for us, which is obvious, since there was not worldwide revolutionary positive change after his death.  Liberation Theology has been exceptional in recognizing this, as has the perspectives expressed in books like Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11: A Call to Reflection and Action by David Ray Griffin & Saving Christianity from Empire by Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer.  Rather than Christians focusing on the bunk dogma of useless magical prayers and blood sacrifice, the world needs people furthering real positive change, resisting tyranny, hypocrisy, corruption, within and without, in numbers that would be great enough so that Earth would actually become Heavenly.  The tyrants of the world cannot crucify every rebel, and the Devil can not fully posses every seeker; the only reason that evil/injustice/fascism/tyranny continues is because not enough people recognize it firstly, and become active in resisting it secondly.  A  Liberation Theology view of the world recognizes the slavery that continues to exist, a perspective mirrored in the book 7th Seal: Hidden Wisdom Unveiled:

Are the Romans in actuality alive and well today, continuing to suppress the greater truths, effecting the prevention of the resurgence of a spiritually aware and soul aligned civilization?”

The Disempowerment Agenda

Basically, it has always been the few oppressing the many, therefore it can be seen as a problem of actualizing, or empowering, the masses (that means you, unless you support oppression/destruction), who have been tricked into believing false mythology and ideology that deliberately disempowers them, along with being subject to more direct physical tools of disempowerment like poverty/overworking/lack of free time, hunger, sickness and injustice.  All of this serves the destructive status-quo paradigm, it gives it the power to continue on. 

An ultra-clear example of this was with the Bush Administration telling us that they will protect us from the “evildoers,” and hoped we wouldn’t do any critical thinking, or care that they were violating the Bill of Rights, rigging the elections, etc.  Bush, Inc. hoped we wouldn’t take the next step after seeing through their deceptions, actually resisting their assault on our freedoms, environment, health and society.  They sent the message “Just trust Big Brother and everything will be okay…”  In this way evil men make themselves as a savior figure, disempower and misleading anyone who believes in them; they are false gods doing the work of the Devil.  In the book Jesus and Empire the author Richard Horsley writes: “In the Roman imperial world, the ‘gospel’ was the good news of Caesar having established peace and security for the world.  Caesar was the ‘savior’ who had brought ‘salvation’ to the whole world.”  The parallel between the Roman and American Empire is very poignant in this sense: Bush/Cheney claimed (and now Obama/Biden) to be saving us from the terrorists; we must recognize when history repeats in this destructive and deceptive way.  Chris Hedges, author of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America described the modern American Fundamentalist Christianity that is aligned with the Neo-conservative movement as “essentially about disempowermentin an interview with Amy Goodman on her Democracy Now! radio program (democracynow.org 02/19/07).  This is a key point, as I previously stated; both empire, and religion serving empire, function mostly to disempower the populace through various means so resistance is kept to minimal levels.  Gloria Steinem writes in her book Revolution from Within that self-help/new age books often have “an important message about the worth of each human being, but with little mention of the external structures that undermine this worth in order to assure their own authority.”  These external structures that disempower people in order to insure the continued dominance of the status-quo are too often overlooked as somehow separate from the issue of personal liberation, instead of being recognized and named as the barriers that they are.

In the book Great Mystics & Social Justice: Walking on the Two Feet of Love, Susan Rakoczy unsheathes the false dichotomy between personal and social transformation that many modern Christians, Buddhists, philosophers, spiritual people, etc. unfortunately accept:

“Two temptations are enticing.  One is to plunge into activism without a spiritual grounding. The other, especially insidious, is to take a deep breath, close the doors of the churches on the problems of society, and focus on a private experience of religion.  For some, a “Jesus and me” religiosity is very satisfying since it allows them to seek personal holiness without attention to those outside their religious circle.  This, however, is a corruption of the gospel, whose basic principle is love of God and love of neighbor.”

Back to Eden

We are told heaven is the joyful and peaceful place in which woman and man live in harmony with Nature and are immersed in God’s presence; and this presence is that of the best of friends, and so doing the Divine Will is not oppressive at all, it is in fact continually supportive and liberating.  Speaking of God’s Will, what would this Will be?  Would it be for Adam & Eve to carry out trivial assignments and duties, like a king’s servant?  Or would it make more sense that it would be to bring peace, love and justice to their life and surroundings?  God’s Will would certainly consist of the latter if we are to remain consistent with belief in a loving God, who doesn’t tempt us to do evil as the Devil does, but guides and encourages us to do Good.  We can discover even today that God’s Will, love, peace, and justice are all inseparable, and are inseparable from human happiness. And in order to align with this righteous Will we need to know the difference between Good & Evil, we need to eat the pure “apple.”

Martin Luther King Jr. ate the apple when he declared segregation to be an evil, Gandhi ate the pure “apple” when he declared the British occupation of India to be an evil, along with countless other examples of people declaring and facing real evil, and by their so doing, humanity progressed.  So the pure “apple” is in reality our inner conscience given to us by the Creator, which we discover through bringing our attention inward and having empathy and compassion for what we see externally.  This practice, which is best summed up by the Greatest Commandments of Jesus, is disrupted by countless distractions and disturbances like corporate news, advertising and “entertainment;” we are being constantly turned away from Divine principles and Flow, which serves the status-quo paradigm, which itself serves the malevolent force called the Devil, or Mara, in the Buddhist tradition.

The Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path also perfectly compliments and expounds on this practice of aligning with the Good and rejecting the Evil, it describes further what is means to be eating the metaphorical apple.  Yet, like Christianity, Buddhism has also been corrupted; modern Buddhism is full of post-modern nihilism with a completely unjustified emphasis on the doctrine of Emptiness/no-Self, that the Buddha himself warned would lead one astray if taken as ultimate truth.  Modern “Buddhists” have done exactly what was warned against, and have strayed into a non-dualist, non-judgmental perspective on the world.  I see this self-contradiction constantly in Zen teachings for example; there will be a saying about how there is no good or bad in the world, followed by a passage praising kindness and compassion as the most important things in the world.  This is contradictory; if compassion is good, than hate is bad, and therefore there is Good and Bad in the world!  This is so obvious I’m surprised I even have to explain/argue it to anybody!  This is the same contradiction found in mainstream Christianity that tells us good works are meaningless, and only by saying a certain prayer and attending church regularly will one find salvation, and even then only in the afterlife (the current life being regarded as a “lost-cause”).  Again the same distortions are at play, the same disempowering subliminal messages that are anti-Love, anti-Truth, and anti-Revolution.  These wicked manipulations of the minds of women and men undermine the work that needs to be done, the actions necessary in the real world to ensure our freedom, peace and happiness. 

Eating the (pure) Apple Prevents the Disease of Becoming a Toxic Personality

When someone’s consciousness is dominantly possessed by the malevolent force, they become a “toxic personalty”; their behavior is then consistently anti-Love, anti-Truth and anti-Progress/Revolution, and so they become diametrically opposed to the Divine Will/Flow, because the evil energy (the Devil) that has taken them over is diametrically opposed to that Will/Flow.  Someone who is dominantly possessed by it may seem fine if you only interact with them briefly, but if you spend more time with them you’ll begin to notice, especially concerning things that actually matter (because that’s what can do the most harm), they will fall into a negative mindset that spouts lies, irrationality and unkindness (again, the Toxic Trio that is the trademark of Evil thought) in various forms, over and over, and will never really acknowledge having harmed anyone for doing so; they will do things that disempower, disturb and dishearten people, all while doing so “innocently,” because to acknowledge the evil done equates to the Devil outing himself, which he never wants to do, because that would undermine his work and goal of doing the most damage possible.  In other words when you’re interacting with a toxic personality you are interacting with Evil (what M. Scott Peck calls “People of the Lie”), which is comprehensively bad-natured, the complete opposite of being comprehensively loving, which is what the Divine is, that thankfully we can also interact with and align with instead.  But in order to align with the good we also have to be aware of the evil, so that we don’t engage with the latter.  Remember it’s the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.  If you won’t acknowledge that there is a malevolent force that can influence you (usually using mental/emotional stress/tension to support that influence), then you’re sure to become an unwitting tool of the Devil, which will undermine your life and be a negative influence on all those you interact with as well.  We have to get into a healthy stress-free state of mind, and then eat the true/pure apple, i.e. make decisions based on the Healthy Trio of Truth, Rationality and Morality, and then we can become fully aligned with the supportive, loving and empowering Divine Will.

Truth & Propaganda

Most people naturally behave in decent ways in everyday life, despite the strong influences discouraging that; our inner nature is Good and is always with us, despite the negativity that usually covers and surrounds it.  This is why propaganda and misinformation is the main tool of the supporters of any destructive system/paradigm; they have to mislead people into doing wrong, because wrong-doing isn’t what people would naturally tend to do on their own, if they weren’t being manipulated/misled.  So in dealing with this “Age of Manipulation” that we live in, our focus in activism and personal life needs to be on what the full truth is, truth that includes the right or wrong of what’s being evaluated.  In order to eat the pure “apple” in the real world, to act knowledgeably using our conscience, we need the most factual crucial information we can find, so we can know what’s Good, align with that, and also know what’s Evil, so we can reject that (the same process that we need to do internally concerning ideas that come to our mind, which can be either Good or Evil).  The main purpose of propaganda is to mix fact with fiction in order to undermine people’s ability to act on their conscience rightly.  Propaganda, of the external or internal variety, is designed to use our own conscience against us by instilling belief in lies concerning what’s good; examples include appealing to our compassionate nature through Orwellian slogans like “Support Our Troops,” “The War on Terror,” “No Child Left Behind,” etc.  The crucial information we need to evaluate external phenomena with our conscience is not coming from government or the mass media, so where do we find it?  How do we see through the lies and misinformation and find crucial truth?  For the political/social truth, the short and practical answer is truthful independent media/books/documentaries/speakers, etc. and one’s personal investigation.  For the spiritual truth, whatever your personal practice may be, your own personal investigation and experience should be the authority.  Aligned with this, the Buddha said repeatedly to trust your own experience to see if his Noble Eightfold Path is effective (basically a path of Comprehensive Loving Attention, just like what the Greatest Commandments are about), and to not take his word for it, but to try it and see for yourself.

Inner & Outer Revolution

Truth has great power; when it is revealed it is a force in itself, because it activates our compassionate inner nature.  Satyagraha, a term Gandhi coined for his overall activist strategy, is translated as “truth-force” and/or “insistence upon the truth.”  Satya (the truth), + Agraha (to insist upon), = Satyagraha.  We must each become a Satyagrahi (a practitioner of Satyagraha), in our personal lives as well in our sociopolitical reality, in order for there to be genuine and lasting progress.

I believe it is a 50/50 effort, internal and external revolution is needed; rejecting the destructive status-quo while practicing a path to enlightenment simultaneously.  Because life is both personal and ecological, the inner and the outer, and we need to work for the progress of both to find satisfaction, and reduce our own suffering, while we help reduce the suffering of others simultaneously.  Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Jesus, and the Buddha all emphasized non-violence as the wisest and most practically beneficial behavior to adopt for the personal and the environmental.  We need to center our personal lives and our society around non-violence/Ahimsa.  Bush/Cheney, and all other statists throughout history, represent the exact opposite, the foundation of their power resting on aggression and slavery, producing never-ending harmful and destructive policies, furthering suffering, anguish and disharmony on Earth, as well as sabotaging our spiritual journey towards peace, wisdom and happiness.

This so-called “elite” sometimes use more direct methods than mythology and propaganda to disempower the masses, like sickness/disease being spread intentionally, or even assassination of social-justice leaders; this is a matter of historical fact.  However we can abandon worry and fear over any of this through a firm belief, based on real experiences, that there is life after death, that the Creator is Good, and that saving Grace is real.  That said, we should give attention and energy toward the things concerning our well-being that we do have a lot of control over usually, like our health.  Ill-health is extremely disempowering of course, so physical fitness and health is a necessary component of the path to empowerment/peace/happiness; good health is also needed for active resistance to fascism, oppression, etc.  Not taking care of your body is another type of behavior that supports the continuation of the status-quo; there will be no revolution if all the revolutionaries are sick and tired.  Maybe that’s part of the reason why the powers-that-be have really done nothing to improve healthcare in America, and instead support backward medical treatments (like chemotherapy), and also support industries that put toxins/radiation in out air, water and food. 

On top of this there is the criminal monetary system run by the corporate-run Federal Reserve that is allowed to stay in place, driving us further and further into stress-inducing debt (see the film Money Masters for more on that), and the official story on the events of 9/11/01 used as an excuse for illegal occupations which have killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, and for the torture, the illegal detentions, etc.  That bullshit story has been used as “justification” to label dissenters of statist policy “terrorists” as well, once again flipping what’s truly Good and what’s truly Evil (and that’s why 9/11 Truth is so important!).  This false labeling of individuals as terrorists has unsurprisingly been expanded to include environmental and animal rights activists, and this phenomenon has even been given a name by activists: “The Green Scare.”  This title is of course referring to the “Red Scare” fear mongering police-state measures of the 1950’s which the current politicians/officials are repeating in the 21st century in a new form.  What is of extra concern here is that environmentalism and animal rights happen to be the most important issues concerning the saving of our planet’s ecosystem, and hence, us, since the livestock and fishing industries are the top contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, ocean ecology collapse and fresh-water pollution.  So we are told those working for true good are evil people, again a reversed morality, designed again to turn us away from the true Knowledge of Good and Evil that can prevent us from departing Paradise and allowing the Earth to become a wasteland instead.

We need to stand against wickedness when we become aware of it, we need to “eat the apple,” or “the red pill” (to use Matrix terminology), and share it with others.  We must hold some conviction in order to do this however and have factual knowledge to base our convictions on.  Because of massive conditioning, especially through false “new-age” teachings (e.g. “There is no such thing as evil,”  “You can’t have the good without the bad”) today it is very unpopular to speak of right and wrong, it is very uncool especially among young Americans.  And in academic circles, non-dualism, or post-modern moral-relativism, is the fall-back position for many “intellectuals” who deconstruct every argument and then stand for nothing, certainly not social justice.  I have found that if you hold any convictions (even very altruistic ones) oftentimes status-quo supporters will immediately (and absurdly) compare you to those who hold convictions that are clearly wrong, like serial-killers or nazis.  This is really dumb; pointing out a crazy view doesn’t mean there isn’t any sane one.

Conscientiousness

“Learn to me guided by your conscience, the divine discriminative power within you.”

– Paramahansa Yogananda, Where There Is Light, p.53

So if ultimately it is our conscience that shows us the difference between right and wrong, some might say then, that morality is completely subjective and relative, different for each individual.  If this were completely true however, how would we progress together as a society?  Aren’t there actually some “core values” that most sane individuals would agree are right, like slavery and aggression are bad, and freedom and compassion are good?  Concerning personal interaction, some actions are necessarily always bad, but it depends on the circumstance (e.g. Lying is usually bad, but lying to a nazi about the location of a Jew is of course not bad).  That does not mean that morality is always relative however; the truth is one should hold a Relative Absolutism, that is, certain actions, in certain situations, are either 100% right or wrong, like the examples highlighted in this essay.  We must consult our conscience and the truth of the situation on a continual basis (eat the pure “apple”), through mindful awareness, and decide what is the least harmful and most just action (or non-action) to make.  The Buddha called such action that leads to Liberation “skillful” or “wholesome.”  Some actions in certain situations are certainly more positive and skillful than others, and there is indeed a way for consistent discernment, that does not accept a completely “non-dualist” perspective on human behavior:

Skillful actions are those that create the causes for happiness, such as actions motivated by loving-friendliness and compassion. Any action that comes from a mind not currently filled with greed, hatred, or delusion brings happiness to the doer and to the receiver. Such an action is therefore skillful or right.”

Eight Mindful Steps to Happiness by Bhante H. Gunaratana,  p. 28

Our conscience is most clearly perceived when we are fully in the present moment; being fully in the Now also removes us from the disempowering/negative/false thought (a.k.a. the influence of “Mara” & “the Pain Body”), allowing us to be “aware of our awareness” which allows our peaceful (even blissful) inner nature to be experienced and followed. There really is Power in the Now (as explained well by Ekhart Tolle in his books The Power of Now and Stillness Speaks), which can counter all the disempowerment I’ve been discussing, this is explained in more depth in my Liberation Practice page.

And if the pure apple/conscience reveals the differentiation between violence and nonviolence in all acts and behavior, then ceasing from harm is the first stage in becoming skilled in the ways of the opposite of harming: healing and giving pleasure.  Practices such as massage therapy, nutrition/natural medicine/disease prevention, tantra, yoga, etc. then all become areas of utmost importance and significance.  With more time to focus on healing and pleasure in a post-backwards society, we can learn more about our bodies and Nature, diagnose and treat health problems naturally and more effectively, and realize our full potential for health and happiness.

Another crucial component to becoming aware of your conscience is to slow down with your everyday activities.  Rushing through life causes stress as well as greatly decreasing the chances you will notice or take care of any growing problems in your life.  This could mean letting your home become filthy to the point where it is unhealthy, or not maintaining your car and then one day it breaks down and leaves you stranded, or never flossing and then your teeth fall out in old age, or you don’t stretch and exercise regularly and so suffer the consequences, etc.  We often neglect that which needs attention just as we neglect our conscience, and so problems and irritations inevitably arise.

Consulting one’s conscience on everyday relations with family, friends, co-workers, etc. is certainly very important; our personal interaction with others has a direct effect on their lives, in varying degrees of positivity or negativity.  Countless people have ignored/denied the crucial truth of harm and/or exploitation being committed (in a relationship, at the workplace, animal neglect/abuse, etc.) and by ignoring it, allowed the harm to continue and possibly get worse.

Of course the Practice is difficult and we will make mistakes often, but with discipline we can rise to a higher level of being.  For example, personally I have not been living by all the ideals presented in this essay due to my negative habits, etc., but I continue to strive towards them because I believe in their benefits, for myself and others.  First we must clarify and refine the direction, or the Way, before we can make progress. That is my intention with presenting these ideas here.

Yet shouldn’t consulting our conscience on the actions, policies, and messages given by our dominant “authority” figures and mass-media, that effect far more people than we do in our personal lives, also be given priority?  Isn’t that in fact what we are told Jesus did, when he denounced the hypocrisy and violence of the dominant religion and political empire of his day?  So today we must be aware of those same destructive forces that live on in the current destructive status-quo paradigm.  If you can see the blatant truth of the evil of Statism, act on it.  Reject social-systems based on aggression and slavery.  Every person does make a difference.  If the truth about the elections (and social-systems as a whole) and then the truth about 9/11 was also known by all, would we might not have had the “war” (i.e. invasion) in Iraq with its sickening use of depleted uranium weaponry and everything else that has continued to follow in the “war on terror.”  If every good-intentioned person in the world had been “eating the apple” and was 100% clear on what is Good & what is Evil, then all the destruction, injustice, and massive suffering could have been met with incredible resistance that could bring it to an end.

Here is another quote that uses the terms “soul’ and “inner compass” in place of conscience or “apple,” but the message is really the same:

The major threat to external control is our internal guidance system — our souls. To us, our souls are our best friends and most trusted guides.  But to the control paradigm, they’re the enemy — what has to be removed in order for external control to work.  Only when we’re sufficiently disconnected from our inner compass will we follow outer demands.”

The Paradigm Conspiracy, by C. Largent and D. Brenton , p. 9

When we are connected to our conscience/soul/spirit/higher-self, in other words when we are aligned with God’s Will, we also become connected to an outside world that becomes much more interactive, through synchronicity/guidance and positive circumstances that follow an inner transformation. When we become happier, healthier, and more at peace through a “Joyful Rebellion” against the destructive status-quo, we also may discover our passion for Life that had been covered in negativity and inner/outer oppression.  Kenneth MacLean, author of The Vibrational Universe, in an interview in Evolve! magazine said: “[P]assion is discouraged simply because it is such a high vibration/emotion relative to the society at large, and there is a genuine fear [by authority figures] that a passionate person is a dangerous person.  There is a concern that our society would be turned upside down if people were allowed to find their own way without direction from the authorities.”  Indeed, and a society that is Orwellian/backwards should be turned upside down!  When our “leaders” are taking us in the opposite direction to where we should be headed, revolutionary change is needed.

Conclusion

Eating the pure apple (as taught by Jesus the Christ, a teaching that corresponds with our God-given conscience), is only the first step of course, action is the second.  Knowledge is only valuable if acted upon, our Salvation is not automatic after reciting some words, we actually need to align with Love & Truth, i.e. with the Good.  We must every day eat the pure apple of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, so that we can then act on that Knowledge and always choose the right over the wrong; by doing so, we can find our way back to Paradise, back to the Kingdom of Heaven, gladly doing God’s Will.  So again, Adam & Eve, in a rational, true and moral perspective, would have stayed in Paradise by always choosing the positive action over the negative; by acting in accordance with the Knowledge of what’s truly Good, experiencing that it was always to their own benefit, bringing them continued happiness.  The same holds true in the real world, right here, right now.

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The most destructive Myth of the early 21st century, the 9/11 Myth: