In The Beginning Was the Purpose
the prelude to my book, How to Dismantle an Empire
I’ve decided to post some chapters and excerpts from my book, How to Dismantle an Empire. This is the introduction followed by my video on Naomi Klein, called The Utopian Imagination, and one called Are YOU Ready Yet to Save the World? It’s not too soon to start making pragmatic, localized plans for the world we want. What else are we going to do as the empire dismantles itself!
Because the thing about a crisis this big, this all-encompassing,
is that it changes everything. It changes what we can do,
what we can hope for, what we can demand
from ourselves and our leaders.
It means there is a whole lot of stuff
that we have been told is inevitable
that simply cannot stand.
And it means that a whole lot of stuff
we have been told is impossible
has to start happening right away.
—Naomi Klein, This Changes EverythingI have one advantage in my life: I’m not trained as an economist. So it is so much easier to see reality. When you have to see it through the kind of crazy training these guys get, it becomes very difficult. I admire any economist who nevertheless could talk sense— there’s not many of them, but it happens. —Johan Galtung, founder of Peace and Conflict Studies
I never had a gift but one,
to know when the great wheel
gives to a touch, to know and act ...
A great delight it was
to feel that certainty again,
to know that I could steer
my fortune and the world’s chance
like a bobsled down the steep, dangerous hour.
—Estraven in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness In the Beginning Was the Purpose
The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn wrote that in a true dialogue, both sides are willing to change. The engaged mind is always looking for a reason to change, not willy-nilly back to the starting point but to build up from a solid structure based on prior facts and logic. It’s not gullible but is persuadable if a new fact or a new way of looking at the facts is presented.
In this volume, I'll introduce you to some of the authors who changed my mind, and gave me a valuable clue that suddenly made sense of something that had puzzled me for decades. These books became cornerstones of my structure—places where I took a 90-degree turn into new and uncharted territory. Of course, I brought the last revelation with me, so I could map out all the interesting intersections within this new plane of thinking. And then yet another writer would shoot my imagination into thin air, and I'd have three dimensions in which to consider the implications.
These books were a revolution-in-a-box for me. If I could encapsulate their revelations in a few paragraphs, there would have been no need for them to write hundreds of pages compiling mountains of research and experience. Moreover, the points I’m making are in the valleys between these mountains, so that even the authors might not agree with my conclusions. At the end of chapters, I’ve put in questions so you can try on the paradigm shifts, like a new pair of glasses, and see if they make things more clear or more blurry for you.
What’s my point? The gist of my argument is that we, citizens of the first world, unwittingly collaborate in the enslavement of others through our taxes, our rents and mortgages, our jobs, our insurances, our educations, and especially through money itself. In order for our labor to serve the market (a euphemism for investor profits) other people’s labor needs to serve us. They need to grow and process our food, make our clothes and goods, and mine our oil and minerals at the expense of their environments, health, and safety.
At the same time, the high cost of living robs us of our time and the satisfaction of producing for ourselves. Gardening, sewing, and woodworking are expensive weekend hobbies for those who live in suburbs with lawns, spare rooms, and garages. Cooking is a gourmet luxury with raw ingredients costing more than processed meals, if you can call them that. Our creativity has been channeled into consumerism so that when someone compliments our clothing or decor, we thank them even though we've merely paid for it.
The pride and joy of craftsmanship has been turned into making trinkets from how-to videos on the internet, with no mentors or apprentices from the community. The thrill of finding your strength and endurance is reserved for the gym, while "work" is wiggling our phalanges over a keyboard. Most importantly, the family has become an accessory to the market, not the heart and the hearth of life. Children aren't eager to learn what their parents have to teach and the self-confidence that comes naturally from taking on responsibility has been replaced with something called self-esteem.
The official history of civilization is a story of heroes and villains, winners and losers, good vs. evil, right vs. wrong. In the history I’m exploring, there are no villains, just a crazy idea someone once had about how to get other people to do their dirty work. It turned out to be wildly effective and here we are. The assessment of blame is an obstacle to changing the system. It divides us and paralyzes us before we begin. But even those at the top are merely winning at a game that none of them created and none of us, individually, have the power to change. Even the winners may be looking for a way out, one that enables a secure and happy life for their children.
Having respect for everyone is the most radical idea in the book, and the one from which every world-shifting paradigm follows. Trusting in the fundamental kindness of human nature changes the potential solutions by changing how we define the problem. We no longer need to force other people to behave in a particular way, we merely need a system that allows them to be themselves, their true selves. And one that gently and gradually restores our power to do our own work while removing the power to control others.
Changing a paradigm, which is how we think before we start thinking, requires a temporary suspension of judgment. It’s like rearranging the furniture in your mind and trying it out long enough to get over the novelty. It requires upending the prior assumptions that are the places from which we've viewed the world—the armchair stuck in the corner where it’s always been. It helps to postpone your discomfort until you can see the whole new decluttered space.
Many disagreements come from words being used with different meanings for the speaker and listener. Each chapter has its own lexicon to clarify how I’m using a word. If it has too much baggage, feel free to apply a different word or phrase that better describes the concept and substitute that word or phrase throughout the book. What matters is that we have a way of talking about and thinking about concepts when the words to describe them have been corrupted and often turned into their opposites, not by accident.
For many people, changing the system feels too big so why bother with things we can’t do anything about? In fact, without changing the system, changing any one thing is impossible. The forces stacked against it are insurmountable. By the end of the book, if I've done my job right, you will abandon hope that you, of all people in history, can alone make free and moral choices for your own life. But you’ll also consider whether all of us would choose kindness if the system got out of the way.
I hope that you will stay with me through the whole journey and apply your powers of critical thinking through the paradigm shifts in anthropology, colonial history, foreign policy, and economics. I'm looking forward to having the conversation that’s only possible on the other side. At that point you’ll be asking different questions than other people around you. You’ll be seeing things in a way that’s hard to communicate. You may end up like me, talking to yourself when no one else gets it.
Instead of a common enemy to rally against, there are practical questions, assessments, and calculations. Instead of marching with a list of demands, you’ll be examining our own role in systemic slavery. Instead of wasting time feeling guilty, you’ll have compassion for everyone, no matter their position.
In a world without systemic slavery, what you consume would roughly equal what you produce. In the first world, we consume almost everything and produce almost nothing. This is a problem of logistics rather than politics. To control our own labor requires the tools of banking, taxation, and credit creation in the hands of communities, the power of which few people understand enough to want.
However, a handful of individuals with deep understanding and forward-thinking imaginations could show what could be built with these tools in their communities. These acts of imagination and strategy could be tested against predictable outcomes and objectives, and honed with like-minded groups in different communities. Developing these solutions together is the purpose of the next book, How to Build a Commonwealth.
While you read, I encourage you to stay with the trouble and give yourself permission to do nothing. Relax your activism for the time being. This problem has been 3000 years in the making and will last a few more. In the meantime, take care of yourself. As the fulcrum on which the scale is tipping, you’re under a lot of pressure! Feed yourself and those around you. Love each other. Make the places where you find yourself beautiful. Get your hands in the dirt. Dance! The world will wait.
The Utopian Imagination on Naomi Klein
Are YOU Ready Yet to Save the World?