Hello people. How
ya? I haven’t posted in a while. And by a while I mean 505 days. Crazy huh?
What the hell happened?
I’ll tell you what happened.
What happened was, is that I acquired a new coach. I’ve tried this “life-coach” thing a couple
of times before but I made a fundamental error both times. I agreed to act as a guinea pig for a really
good friend of mine and for my wife.
They both needed a lab rat during the time of their coaching
accreditation. They say you shouldn’t do
this and in this particular case they, the generalized other, is absolutely
right. That ol’objectivety thing can
really be tough ya know.
I've done it properly this time and the new guy is a real ball-buster. Can you imagine, he makes me make commitments
and things? You know what I mean, the
kind of commitments that he expects you to know enough to meet??? Man, I hate those types of commitments. Couldn’t I just make commitments that I
didn’t really have to commit too? The
guy is obviously a madman.
Anyway, this madman made me, in some moment of weakness,
commit to posting on my blog again by November 04, 2013. This would have made it 503 days since my
last post but I fucked up and didn’t meet the commitment of course, so here I
am three days later.
So what have I been doing these last 505 days you ask? Well I’ve been doing what most of you have
been doing. Wasting my life on the
Internet of course. (Don’t you love how
Word makes you capitalize the word Internet, like it’s God or something).
Here’s something I watched on the internet…er I mean
Internet a week or so ago. I’m sure lots
of people have seen this by now. It’s a Russell
Brand interview that was sent to me. http://gawker.com/russell-brand-may-have-started-a-revolution-last-night-1451318185. Oh and if you have a lot of time to burn,
here’s the wee 4,500 word article he wrote for the New Statesman that spurred
the interview. http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/10/russell-brand-on-revolution Russell makes me seem brief.
For the longest time I thought that Russell Brand was some
kind of vacuous media personality with nothing but self-promotion as his key
objective. Boy have I been proven
wrong. I’ve been watching and reading
some of the things he’s put out there over the last number of months. Tune him in, this dude has a lot to say and
the link above exemplifies it perfectly.
Under all the self-aggrandizing, spastic body movements and
narcissistic tendencies this is a guy of substance in the mere guise of a media
personality. I think he’s worthy of a
listen and what he’s saying, although extremely radical in the eyes of many I’m
sure, has real merit.
His premise is nothing new really. It’s simple and it’s as true and as real as
this apple emblazoned box that I’m working on.
Democracy as our present paradigm is obsolete. Its last standing socio-economic system –
capitalism, in its present form, is now a ship packed and ready to sail. It may have started valiantly as a way to
give voice to the majority but it has been beaten into a corner where it now
only serves the political and corporate elite.
I haven’t changed much in 504 days so here we go with a
little rant. Let’s make no mistake;
capitalism still does a few things really well.
It is perfectly efficient at getting the rich richer and exponentially
driving the divide between rich and poor.
It has also learned to hone its technical ability to extract and exploit
our natural resources, driving us directly toward our eventual demise. If you question this last one just take a
second to think about how the Harper government is monetizing the science being
done at the NRC here in Canada.
I’m with Russell on this.
We as a people have allowed ourselves to be brainwashed to believe that
our votes count. Unfortunately while we
were patting ourselves on the back for getting out and doing our civic duty and
being seen as responsible citizens, somehow the system was corrupted.
We’ve been sold this idea that regionalized economic benefit
is of utmost importance. That this will
somehow make us all stronger and all those pesky little details like dealing
with those that can’t feed or house themselves, the development of strong and
effective social programs, finding peace where war now exists and environmental
integrity, will magically be worked out because of the benefits of such a strong
economic situation.
This is sooooo wrong!
A strong economic position benefits the greed capitalists, their puppet
politician and their affiliated oligarchical regimes only. Oh sure, some funds still pour through the
buffoonery of parliamentary process and an ineffective public bureaucracy and
eventually drip down to some lucky people in need. But the deceptive grand design will
eventually squeeze this to a mere dribble before it stops completely and the
main emphasis will remain on exploitation of the worlds natural resources and
making the 1% richer.
We’re nipple-deep in the eleventh hour for this orbiting
mass were riding atop and the fact that the ruling elite will go down with us
is no consolation!
I think we need to stop considering the comments of RB and
those like-minded but not so popular, as frivolous radical-speak. In my simple mind this is the truth people
and we all better start listening and working to find a solution before we’re immersed
in a dystopian science fiction based reality.
Russell has been chastised and criticized by some for what
he’s written because he has not presented a hypothesis on the manifestation of
his revolutionary ideas.
One of my favourite authors is John Steinbeck and if he
isn’t one of yours he should be. In 1962
he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
At the time the choice was scoffed at. The cold war was burgeoning and he was a radical thinker and
considered by many to be a socialist.
During his acceptance speech that night he said some incredible
things. The resonance of some of what he
said has only grown stronger in these last fifty-one years. He said that “Humanity has been passing
through a grey and desolate time of confusion” and he quoted William Faulkner
when he stated, “That only the human heart and conflict within itself seemed
worth writing about." But the key thing
that he said in my mind was, “the writer is delegated to declare and to
celebrate man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit – for
gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and
despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not believe in
the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature."
Please don’t take this to mean that in any way do I ascribe
the term literature to these ramblings but to me what Steinbeck said that night
was that in order for anything written to bear even a hint of credibility it
needs to offer up a sense of hope. And
that means there must be at least the idea of a solution.
In my mind there has never been a more grey and desolate a time of confusion as right now. In saying this though we have assumed an incredible technological advance over the last ten years or so that has allowed
us, as a species, to communicate like we have never been able to before. Somehow I see the internet (or as I love to refer to it as to Amelia – the
dubya dubya) being at the center of snapping us out of this confusion. The ability to disseminate and find new information in the blink of an eye and then for some of it to hit an exponential tipping point and go viral, gives me great hope.
Take the concept presented by Radical Social Entrepreneurs
and their idea of conscious capitalism. http://www.radicalsocialentreps.org/theory/conscious-capitalism/. This descriptor is pulled directly off their
site. “….much of what is written about
business has created a false divide between achieving social good and running a
profitable, sustainable enterprise.
Conscious Capitalism is a new paradigm which shows that a prosperous
business need not sacrifice its social mission.
Rather, maintaining an allegiance to a deeper mission in the world is a
key component to succeeding in the marketplace”.
Wholesale revolution tends to be messy. Ask anyone who’s lived through a coupe. I don’t actually know anyone who’s
lived through a coupe but I hear they can be pretty messy. Maybe Conscious Capitalism could be what we need now, a kind of Revolution 2.0. Some violence-less conduit that we understand and can easily initiate.
We
as a species have invested a lot into this thing we call capitalism and like a
sailor on furlough, we just happened to be spending too much time at the bar
distracted to notice how grey and desolate we let it get. Maybe this is the answer or interim step that
helps us out of the mire and maybe the Internet is the delivery system.
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