Be the Change is Chump Change

why individual solutions don't work

This launches my series on socio-spiritual solutions. I’ll be looking at different problems and asking how you’d solve them for your community using the system described in my book How to Dismantle an Empire. Together, this will initiate the sequel, How to Build a Commonwealth.

In this episode, however, I give my reasons that any change you can make as an individual without changing the system is chump change, a tweak that won’t last. I contrast that to James Corbett's Solutions Watch that looks at what you can do right now to make a difference.

Corbett’s recent episode on How to Be Happy makes the valid point that we don’t need psychology studies to tell us what makes us happy and why it’s important. He shows how an “all-star group of previous Solutions Watch guests answer those questions.” These are four men and someone’s partner, not that I’m counting.

I mistakenly said my ideas would sound better in Neil Oliver’s Irish brogue but he is, of course, Scottish. The point still stands.

How To Be Happy - #SolutionsWatch

All five interviewees state that helping others has made them happy. My perspective is that taking responsibility for our own happiness, whether growing food or shopping on Amazon, is better than judging others or sacrificing our happiness—a common trap of couples. I tell a personal story that cured me of the urge to judge. In line with my New Year Resolution to Do Less, the rest is in the video.

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To start this exciting year of imagining how you would apply my system to the changes you want to see, here’s Build a New Model and How to Be Czar of Your Own Fiefdom:

Buckminster Fuller said that to change things, you can’t fight the existing reality. You have to build a new model that makes the old model obsolete. This episode outlines ten universal principles of a new model, including the purpose of government, how to measure its success or failure, what community wealth really is, how to protect and proliferate it, the intergenerational transfer of wealth, and paying your debt to society backwards and forwards. I begin by talking about the spiritual and metaphysical obstacles that keep us from imagining a new model and how to remove them in your own psyche. Based on my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, I end with the three powers that communities require in order to control their own labor: debt, tax & cash.

I talk about Julian Assange and RFK, the Porcupine Freedom Festival, Larken Rose and "If You Were King" and the authority problem. I look at money as a means of organizing labor and YOUR job as czar to design a self-organizing system of distributing the wealth to enable the best for families and communities—as they define it. I reinvent police and homeowner's insurance in my fiefdom.