Revolution is free

Admen wreck everything… including our language.  They take words that once had significant meaning and concepts behind them, and turn them into slogans and other useless memes.  The word revolution one of those words.  It has been used so much that the ideas behind it have been lost. 

Everything’s a revolution now, and all new products are revolutionary.  For example, Burger King’s “revolution in chicken”; what the fuck is that supposed to mean?  The revolution will NOT be televised, and it certainly won’t take place in Burger King’s slaughterhouses.

 The word revolution has two distinct definitions:

1) a drastic and far-reaching change in ways of thinking and behaving                                                2) rotation: a single complete turn (axial or orbital)

If we wanted to play with this a little, we might begin to think about the ways in which these two definitions are connected.  If a revolution is to come full circle, then perhaps the drastic change comes as the new rotation begins.  This is one way I like to think when I hear about the next Armageddon theory.  It’s not the end of the world, but the end of this axial.

Saul Alinsky believed that before that revolution can occur… that drastic change that sets us on a new rotation… there must be a general consensus among the masses that it is time for reformation.  “They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future… They don’t know what will work but they do know that the prevailing system is self-defeating, frustrating and hopeless.  They won’t act for change but won’t strongly oppose those who do…”

In “The Turning Point” Fritjof Capra theorizes about which occurrences will set the conditions for the reformation.  “The first and perhaps most profound transition is due to the slow and reluctant but inevitable decline of patriarchy… The second transition what will have a profound impact on our lives is forced upon us by the decline of the fossil fuel age…The third transition is again connected with cultural values.  It involves what is now called a “paradigm shift” – a profound change in the thoughts, perceptions, and values that form a particular vision of reality…”

But acknowledging and willingness to accept change is only the first piece of the equation. 

Abbie Hoffman said… Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit.  He also said…”Revolution is in your head.  You are the revolution” (Revolution for the Hell of It).  Therefore, widespread change can only come about through individual change.

You are the revolution when drastic and far-reaching changes occur in your own ways of thinking and behaving.  You are the revolution when you are a conscious consumer… You are the revolution when you consider how your actions affect the existence of others…  You are the revolution when you participate in your community. You are the revolution when your actions correspond with your beliefs… You are the revolution when you stop to think about why you even have those beliefs. 

You see, the masses have a great deal of influence over the big machine.  We may not be its manufacturer, but we are its maintenance worker. 

Anthony Giddens states that the individual and the structure is not separate, rather they are the two ingredients of social action and existence.  Social life is not controlled by institutional forces… or ‘the man’… unless the individuals within that society are directing it that way; social structures – the traditions, institutions, moral codes, and established ways of doing things that create our lives – can be changed when people start to ignore them, replace them, or reproduce them differently.  This process is referred to as reflexivity: “direct feedback from action to knowledge” 

Look, individually and in groups, we are consciously creating society and the nature of our own existence.  We are all reflexive beings, whether we understand what that means or not.  But, if we can begin to grasp the importance and the potential of what that means… reflexivity can be where the two definitions of revolution merge. 

Considered reflexivity has the potential to create the change necessary to start rotating on a new axis… We may still be going around in circles… but we are feeding the machine with a new energy source, we are reconfiguring its specifications to create different outputs… if the actions change, then the context changes.

We are the revolution…the revolution is us.

Are you a shifter?

Paradigm shifters is a blog dedicated to thoughts and ideas about the future directions of humanity. 

If we, as citizens of the modern post-industrial society, in all our technological and democratic glory, are able to take a step back from the daily grinds of our existence and glimpse even just a smidge of comprehension about the full and complete state of our existense… as a whole species of highly intelligent beings living on a planet… can we really convince ourselves that this is the *best* we can possibly do for ourselves? 

At Paradigm Shifters, we don’t want to live in a world which is spiralling towards the brave new future.  A future which, if we keep going along in the same circles we have been for the past 200 or so years, is *not* going to be a free and democratic and healthy society; rather the one that the critics have prophecized for the past 200 years or so; totalitarian, despotic and suicidal.  

We are people – dead and alive, real and fictious – who are commited to changing the world by changing ourselves; in re-evaluating our consumption patterns, in becoming better neighbours, in challenging tradition and the status quo, and in understanding ourselves and our behaviour. 

Because the big machine is so complex.  And everything is all so sensitive to the individual’s behaviour… especially these days, when that behaviour ebbs and flows in waves as facilitated by mass communication technologies; there is no such thing as one individual anymore.  

We believe that this manufactured world which we have created around us is, at it’s core, unhealthy, unsustainable, unstable and unfair. 

We believe that a logical way to proceed towards getting the existence that we all so badly crave… one of personal security, leisure and optimum health for as many as possible… is to start realizing that we are empowered to change what is unhealthy, unsustainable, unstable and unfair about society by changing what is unhealthy, unsustainable, unstable and unfair in our own lives.

It is time to wake up.  It is time for us, the citizens of the modern post-industrial society, in all our technological and democratic glory, to start taking personal responsibility for the consequences of our lifestyles, both in our immediate and our global neighbourhoods.  Because we *are* better than this… and we *should* demand better from those who control our lives – the government, the banks, the boss, the media, the experts…    

And we believe the best way to do that is by shedding ourselves of these parochial, patriarchial, perverted, patronizing, paradigms that have been paralysing our potential progress as a species and a society.          

Are you a shifter?  

Rules for Radicals

Excerpt from the prologue of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, 1971:

In the past the “world,” whether in its physical or intellectual terms, was much smaller, simpler, and more orderly.  It inspired credibility.  Today everything is so complex as to be inconprehensible.  What sense does it make for men to walk on the moon while other men are waiting in welfare lines, or in Vietnam killing and dying for a corrupt dictatorship in the name of freedom?  These are the days when man has his hands on the sublime while he is up to his hips in the muck of madness… (xv).

… there are no rules for revolution any more than there are rules for love or rules for happiness, but there are certain central concepts of actionin human politics that operate regardless of the scene or the time.  To know these is basic to a pragmatic attack on the system.  These rules make the difference between being a realistic radical and being a rhetorical one who uses the tired old words and slogans, calls the police “pig” or “white facist racist” or “motherfucker” and has so sterotyped himself that others react by saying ”Oh he’s one of those,”  then promptly turn off (xviii).

As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be.  That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be - it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be.  That means working in the system.

There’s another reason for working inside the system.  Dostoevski said that taking a new step is what people fear most.  Any revolutionary change must be preceeded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people.  They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future.  This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution (xix).

A reformation means that masses of our people have reached the point of dissillusionment with past ways and values.  They don’t know what will work but they do know that the prevailing system is self-defeating, frustrating and hopeless.  They won’t act for change but won’t strongly oppose those who do.  This time is then ripe for revolution (xxii).

The spirit of democracy is the idea of importance and worth in the individual, and faith in the kind of world where the individual can achieve as much of his potential as possible.

Great dangers always accompany great opportunities.  The possibility of destruction is always implicit in the act of creation.  Thus the greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.

From the beginning the weakness as well as the strength of the democratic ideal has been the people.  People cannot be free unless they are willing to sacrifice some of their interest to guarantee the freedom of others.  The price of democracy is the ongoing pursuit of the common good by all of the people (xxii-xxv).

We are not concerned here with people who profess democratic faith but yearn for the  dark security of dependency where they can be spared the burden of decisions.  Reluctant to grow up, or incapable of doing so, they want to remain children and be cared for by others.  Those who can, should be encouraged to grow; for the others, the fault lies not in the system but in themselves.

Here we are desperately concerned with the vast mass of our people who, thwarted through lack of interest or opportunity, or both, do not participate in the endless responsibilities of citizenship and are resigned to lives determined by others.  To lose your “identity” as a citizen of democracy is but a step from losing your identity as a person.  People react to this frustration by not acting at all.  The separation of the people from the routine daily functions of citizenship is a heartbreak in a democracy.

It is a grave situation when a people resign their citizenship or when a resident of a great city, though he may desire to take a hand, lacks the means to participate.  That citizen sinks further into apathy, anonymity and depesonalization.  The result is that he comes to depend on public authority and a state of civic-sclerosis sets in.

From time to time there have been external enemies at our gates; there has always been the enemy within, the hidden and malignant inertia that foreshadows more certain destruction to our life and future than any nuclear warhead.  There can be no darker or more devastating tragedy than the death of man’s faith in himself and in his power to direct his future (xxvvi).