What Does Liberation Mean in the Real World?
October 28, 2022
Liberation in the real world is the result of self-reliance and investing in our own well-being.
Liberation
has many contexts.
It can mean being freed from imprisonment or servitude,
freedom from gnawing want or oppression, or being liberated from
prisons of the mind
.
Note that the first form of liberation is external / material, the second is internal / psychological /
spiritual.
Many confuse the two, blaming an oppressive system for their unhappiness rather than their
internal acquiescence to the system's narratives and values.
For many,
liberation
depends on the actions of others.
If only we had different leaders,
a different financial financial system, a different energy system, a different constellation of media,
and so on--if only the powers that control our world were liberating rather than extractive.
The other approach is to accept responsibility for our own liberation within the system
as it is
.
Demanding those benefiting so handsomely from the system
as it is currently configured
relinquish
their wealth and power is not going to re-order the system when those benefiting from the system
1) have every incentive to devote all available resources to maintaining it
as it is
and
2) have an unshakeable belief that the system is so powerful (the state, the party, the central bank, etc.)
that nothing could possibly destabilize their comforts, conveniences, wealth and power.
In other words, their belief in the permanence and immutability of the system is equally immutable.
That their belief is nothing more than hubris pushed to extremes of denial and delusion doesn't register.
In this mindset of unbreakable faith in the god-like powers of the
system as it is
, the
faithful benefiting from the system will favor destabilizing policy extremes
rather than give up any of their perquisites and power.
They might push the system into collapse because they believe collapse is impossible.
There is
no arguing with
true believers
in any ideology or arrangement in which the self-interest of those
in power is the organizing principle of the system.
Rather than rail at the Powers That Be for being self-serving and thinking liberation is only possible
if the entire system is reset,
the alternative is to
liberate ourselves
from the
prison of
the mind
generated by the system's media, narratives and values.
Simply put, stop consuming "news" and "opinion" designed to polarize, addict and derange.
Once we
stop paying attention, we stop reacting, and our time and energy revert to our own use rather than
making somebody else money in
the Attention Economy.
My Credo of Liberation
summarizes this process of detaching oneself from the narratives and
values that support the power structure of exploitation
(from my book
Resistance, Revolution, Liberation
):
I no longer care if the power centers of our society--the distant, fortified castles of
our financial feudal system--are changed by my actions, for I am liberated by the act of resistance.
I am no longer complicit in perpetuating fraudulent feudalism and the pathology of concentrated power.
I no longer covet signifiers of membership in the Upper Caste that serves the plutocracy.
I am liberated from self-destructive consumerist-State financialization and the delusion
that debt servitude and obedience to sociopathological Elites serve my self-interests.
This self-liberation from
prisons of the mind
is only the first step of real-world liberation.
The second step is to understand how the vulnerabilities of the system
as it is
can affect
our lives, and work to decouple our well-being from the system
as it is
.
The core dynamics that deserve our careful study are 1) scale 2) dependency chains and 3) stability.
The problem with the global economy
as it is
is that it is an unstable tangle of long dependency
chains of globalization and financialization that must operate at massive scales with
just in time
perfection.
This system appears robust when everything is working perfectly, but it's actually on the edge of
instability at all times. Any disruption beyond the trivial threatens to unravel all the interconnected
dependency chains.
Path dependency
also matters.
The system
as it is
is the result of decisions made
long ago in different times and circumstances. Yet the decisions made then still define how the system
functions. Put another way, modest policy tweaks can't reduce the instability of the system.
If we reduce our dependence on the system, we decouple our own well-being from the system's
incoherence and fragility.
This decoupling is called
self-reliance
, the topic of my book
Self-Reliance in the 21st Century
.
Liberation in the real-world is not a false either-or polarity; it's a matter of degrees.
By developing local sources of essentials and
trustted personal networks
, we reduce our
dependence on long global supply chains and the debt-leverage of financialization.
Once we stop consuming and fretting over "news" and "opinions" we have no control over, we free up the
time and energy needed to invest in our own self-reliance.
The question of our own well-being boils down to: what are we buying into?
What have we bought into
in terms of
wants and needs
, in what props up our identity and self-worth, and in the sources
of inspiration, goals and purpose in our lives?
If all that boils down to making more money to buy more stuff or make even more money, that's not
decoupling, that's total dependence on an incoherent, fragile, exploitive, unstable, unsustainable
system that isn't going to change because we want it to change.
Ideologies are the walls and chains of the
prisons of the mind
.
Ideologies lead to
the idea that
if only everyone agreed with me, all our problems would be solved.
Self-reliance
doesn't need anyone's consent or "likes" on social media. Self-reliance values trust, integrity and performance,
not canned opinions spouted as "solutions"
once everyone agrees with me, or is forced to
agree with me in public.
Liberation in the real world is the result of self-reliance and investing in our own well-being.
Opinions and "news" don't create well-being, they tear it down.
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Self-Reliance in the 21st Century
.
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(43 min)
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