Safe Harbour

Sailboat pulling into harbour by sunset/moonrise

If the world is as scary and dangerous as portrayed in the media, why do I keep meeting such darn good people? Without fail, the people that I meet and talk to in the community garden, parks, on sidewalks downtown, and here on NBA, are curious, friendly, and peaceful folks trying to do the right thing.

I thought about that this evening after spending a couple of hours at our raised bed garden, meeting other gardeners, sharing the bounty, and comparing notes. On our way home we stopped by one of our favourite beaches to watch the sun set and the moon rise. A sailboat silently glided past through moonlit waters, returning to the safety of the harbour. Home and hearth beckoned.

There are a lot of compassionate, right-living people in the world, and I have had the distinct pleasure of meeting many of them. Rather than greed and self-interest, what I have found in my experience is unfailing generosity and cooperation. It gives me a profound sense of safety knowing that so much love exists in this wild experiment we call humanity.

In 2008 - about 500 posts ago - Linda and I started Not Buying Anything as an antidote to the system that brought the world crappy jobs, widespread mental illness, ecocide, perpetual indebtedness, and The Great Depression II. We hoped that this blog would become a refuge for those seeking safety from the waves of discontent that are still growing.

Little did we know that our blog would become a refuge for us, and a place we go to in order to see how simplicity and cooperation are providing safety for others who have escaped the storm.

Pull into harbour. Enjoy the warmth of our shared hearth. Together we are going to do this thing.

Money Madness

I don't want to buy stuff because I don't want to participate in the whole money business. Money makes people do things in unskillful, unthoughtful ways.

Most of the time the colossal waste of money in the world is rather tragic. Funding for global militarism, for example.

Every once in a while the scurrying after the almighty buck is so insane that it becomes temporarily amusing before the full implications sink in.

A case in point is the Canadian copyright group that seeks to collect their fee every time you play one of your CDs for a group of people, like at a wedding.

If you take a CD you own and play it at a birthday, you owe a fee. What's next? How about, any time you grab your guitar, hit the street for some summertime jamming, and gather a crowd, you owe a fee.

You owe the person that wrote the song, the artist that performed it, and the recording industry. If people dance, the fee is doubled.

I thought about the ridiculousness of this desperate money grab as Linda and I performed a few songs in our living room, and listened to music on the radio.

What if several of my neighbours could hear the music? Do we owe a copyright fee? If we perform a song really well and our neighbours end up dancing in their living rooms, do we owe double the fee?

How much for toe tapping, or head bobbing?

Money makes people do insane things.

"I Want" Monday

Orange Happiness by Aidez, DeviantArt

"I want happiness", a man told Buddha.

Buddha said to the man:

"First remove 'I' - that is ego.

Next remove 'want' - that is desire.

See, now you are left with only 'happiness'."

Ego vs. Eco

Ego and hubris vs. Eco and humility

Ego and pride have lead to a dangerous level of hubris in the world which is endangering the irreplaceable ecosystem upon which we all depend. If we fail to recognize our true place in this world - as only one species among millions of others - we will perish due to a lack of humility.

"Man" has been demoted, removed from a perch he never deserved in the first place.

Humans are not the only species to possess language. We are not the only creatures that play. We do have the largest brain-body-mass ratio, but dolphins are a very close second. Although we are smart, most of our best ideas come from mimicking things in nature.

What humans have that no other life form does, as far as we know, is ego. The ego is especially powerful in western cultures. Competition, success, achievements and potential are things we are programmed for since birth. We’re taught to achieve more endlessly, and it has burned us out, as well as our environment.

Not all cultures are like this, and ours wasn't either before money and commerce came to dominate our lives. Since then we have gone from an 'eco' focus to an all out indulgence of 'ego'.

We have left behind cooperation and public, and have embraced competition and private. We thought we could step out of our responsibilities and relationships with no negative consequences, but we can't.

Ram Dass thought that, "Indians live like they are their souls (eco), and Americans live like they are their egos." So how do we overcome ego so we can shift back to an eco-focused life? The following tips are adapted from Dr. Wayne Dyer. The full article can be read here.

7 Steps For Overcoming Ego

1. Stop being offended. The behavior of others isn’t a reason to be immobilized. That which offends you only weakens you. If you’re looking for occasions to be offended, you’ll find them at every turn. This is your ego at work convincing you that the world shouldn't be the way it is.
2. Let go of your need to win. Ego loves to divide us up into winners and losers, but there are no losers in a world where we all share the same energy source.
3. Let go of your need to be right. Ego is the source of a lot of conflict and dissension because it pushes you in the direction of making other people wrong. Stop yourself in the middle of an argument and ask, "Do I want to be right, or do I want to be happy?"
4. Let go of your need to be superior. True nobility isn’t about being better than someone else. It’s about being better than you used to be. Stay focused on your growth, with a constant awareness that no one on this planet is any better than anyone else. We all emanate from the same creative life force.
5. Let go of your need to have more. The mantra of ego is more - it’s never satisfied. No matter how much you achieve or acquire, your ego will insist that it isn’t enough. When you stop needing more, more of what you desire seems to arrive in your life. Since you’re detached from the need for it, you find it easier to pass it along to others, because you realize how little you need in order to be satisfied and at peace.
6. Let go of identifying yourself on the basis of your achievements. This may be a difficult concept if you think you are your achievements.  It’s when you attach yourself to those achievements and believe that you alone are doing all of those things that you leave behind peace and gratitude.
7. Let go of your reputation. Your reputation is not located in you. It resides in the minds of others. Therefore, you have no control over it at all. If you speak to 30 people, you will have 30 reputations. If you’re overly concerned with how you’re going to be perceived by everyone, then you’ve disconnected yourself from your own plan, and allowed the opinions of others to guide you. This is your ego at work.

Eco must win over ego if we are to survive and flourish, but it will be an epic battle for each and every one of us. It is a battle worth fighting. Victory means freedom for us, and good health for the planet.

Then we can let go of our victory and get on with life.

Holding On, Letting Go

Things To Keep

1. Freedom
2. Cooperation
3. Music
4. Nature
5. Reason

Things To Release

1. Greed
2. The status quo
3. Inequality
4. Ego
5. Hate

Is Money Hoarding A Debilitating Mental Illness?

Past a certain, fairly modest amount, collecting more money serves no actual purpose. It will not increase your ability to survive, and may actually impede it. The super rich still get sick, and they still die. Just like the rest of us.

Then what is all the cash for? If it serves no purpose over a certain threshold due to diminishing returns, what is the drive that feeds this illness that is spreading like a cat hoarder's kittens?

2011 broke records, reports Forbes Magazine, for the number of billionaires. 1210 individuals were diagnosed this year with an extreme form of cash hoarding. Mental health experts should be looking into this before we are all affected by the fallout of this debilitating mental illness.

World's Biggest Hoarders of Cash

1. Carlos Slim Helu, Mexico
2. Bill Gates, USA
3. Warren Buffett, USA
4. Bernard Arnault, France
5. Larry Ellison, USA

Collectively these patients have hoarded 261 Billion dollars. That is enough cash to stuff the average bungalow to the ceilings with filthy lucre.

These individuals are often resistant to treatment, and should be closely monitored.

No Taking From The Poor And Giving To The Rich Monday

In the US, the Congressional Budget Office released a major report recently, showing that average household income for the top 1 percent of earners increased 275% from 1979 to 2007 while increasing just 18% for the bottom 20 percent of earners. - source

Massive income inequality has a corrosive effect. However, the methods used to build and maintain income inequality among a population are damaging to more than the social fabric of a nation.

The methods used by the top 1% exploit workers and the environment to the point of exhaustion. It is not sustainable.

It is even worse when the people we vote to represent us take the side of the exploiters, creating a near-impenetrable wall of power and influence. But it can not go on for ever.

Our economies, along with the exploitation by the top 1%, depend on infinite growth within a finite system. It has become obvious that the people and the environment, being finite and only able to take so much, have reached their functional limits.

The nefarious ways of the One Percent are doomed to failure, and will end eventually.

Fortunately, for the benefit of the planet and the majority of its inhabitants, it is looking like that will be sooner rather than later.

Need Not Greed

Whether you call it reducing your ecological footprint, sustainable/green living, or living simply, all directly or indirectly address the problem of greed. Gandhi, a simple living advocate, knew that the earth could provide for everyone's need, but not their greed. And yet our whole system is based on the premise that humans are basically greedy, and that this greed can be used for good.

Another Indian thinker, Rabindranath Tagore, stated very clearly the dangers of basing an economic system on greed.

"The greed of gain has no time or limit to its capaciousness. Its one object is to produce and consume. It has pity neither for beautiful nature nor for living human beings. It is ruthlessly ready without a moment's hesitation to crush beauty and life out of them, molding them into money."

Had Tagore lived past 1941 to the present era, he might have been shocked and disappointed by the flagrant and institutionalized greed. All over the world people are fighting back, and I am sure he would have joined them. People are tired of the cruel effects of harsh, heartless systems that crush all the beauty out of life while trying to turn the greatest profit.

E.F. Schumacher, in Small is Beautiful, reminded us of how we can do battle with the ever-present enemy, greed. He suggested we could disarm greed and envy "by being much less greedy and envious ourselves; perhaps by resisting the temptation of letting our luxuries become needs; and perhaps by even scrutinizing our needs to see if they cannot be simplified and reduced."

The ideas and attitudes referred to by these wonderful teachers are reflected in my life through the practice of low-impact, (more) sustainable, simple living. By living a lifestyle guided by my needs, I reduce the amount of damage being done on my behalf.

I want to create and sustain beauty, not crush it for selfish personal gain. I can do this by resisting temptations to give in to luxury and excess, and by living simply.

Join The Simple Living Revolution

Simple living - its time has come around, again.

Revolution is coming. The time is ripe for a peaceful overthrow of a system rife with built-in waste and corruption. Thousands of Occupy Wall Street participants are evidence of a growing dissatisfaction with corporate infiltration of our governments, and the global economic terrorism being waged for the benefit of the few.

In these times of monumental vanity and greed living with less can be seen as a revolutionary act. When we are being encouraged to want more everything, living simply is taking a stand against the status quo.

Critics may say voluntary simplicity is a throw-back in time. It is. A throw-back to a time when we were satisfied with the basics, and weren't using more than the planet could provide sustainably. This is evidence of revolving, not devolving.

Remember that revolution also means 'motion in a circular course'. Life is not linear, it is cyclical, and simple living is a way of living whose time is coming around again.

Most of the planet's inhabitants still live simply. We used to live simply (and happily), too, and we will again. Our survival depends on it.

Join the simple living revolution.

What Happened To The Boomers?

These are the ex-Flower Children?

The 1960s was the last time there was a popular mass movement that espoused simple living. The counter-culture movement, made up of early baby boomers, had an ethos of working with nature, communal living, creative expression, and questioning authority. But the movement quickly devolved into a pathos of shattered dreams and missed opportunities.

After a good start in the 60s, by the 70s the peace-loving, anti-authority generation had tuned out, turned off, and dropped in to the "narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism". Clear eyed idealists of this huge group were overcome by the more populous section of their contemporaries that eventually turned into bleary-eyed consumer zombies.

What of the ideals of the movement?

"A 1967 article in Time Magazine asserted that the hippie movement has a historical precedent in the counterculture of the Ancient Greeks, espoused by philosophers like Diogenes of Sinope and the Cynics. The article also claimed that the Hippies were influenced by the ideas of Jesus Christ, Hillel the Elder, Buddha, St. Francis of Assisi, Henry David Thoreau, Gandhi, and others." - wikipedia

This is a major Who's Who of the great teachers of simplicity. Diogenes lived in a barrel in a public square, and preferred enjoying a warm, sunny day to meeting with influential politicians. He was all about living freer and better, unencumbered by things and the inequality of social classes.

The 1960s emphasis on living more satisfying, sustainable lives was an important movement in the right direction. People were seeing the dehumanizing, ecologically damaging effects of putting money as the bottom line for decision making. But then the mighty cultural pendulum began to swing, often aided by riot squad tear gas, billy clubs, and bullets.

Communes and cooperation (almost a million people lived in more than 10,000 cooperatives across the US in the early 70s) gave way to McMansions in gated communities. By the 1980s geodesic domes looked like quaint playthings when compared to 2500 square foot starter homes in 'architecturally controlled' neighbourhoods. It was the beginning of the era of 'Greed is Good'.


Bicycles and VW Beetles were replaced with bulldozing Hummers and BMWs. Mind-expanding drugs were set aside for the mind-numbing high of buying enough stuff to fill billions of homes and garages and storage lockers and garden sheds and drawers and closets, and...

It was a race with the Joneses, even though no one knew who they were (or that they were financing the whole lifestyle with loans). Purchasing power formed the new ethos - it was survival of the most privileged, connected, and wealthy. The counter-culture was gutted, and reduced to a fashion trend.

Flower power and universal love were seen as subversive and weak. The most competitively minded and ethically challenged among us began to take over, often using hate and divisiveness to separate and control us. 

By the 2000s we had forgotten all the lessons of the counter-culture, and had succeeded in soiling our nest to the point of looking for extra-solar planets to move to when this one is done.

Wow. What happened to the boomers? Does a glimmer of the freedom of the counter-culture still burn in their cold, consumeristic hearts, and can they rediscover the peace and love that will be required to kick the high-consumption habit?

It would be groovy if they could.

No Greed, No Waste Monday

The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war, but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy, and less wasteful. - Wendell Berry (click to enlarge)

Greed Is Curable

"My life philosophy is simple: 

If I can afford it,

I consume it."

Greed is a highly destructive, highly contagious disease. It is spread by viral marketing campaigns, television, glossy magazines, and by coveting your neighbour's stuff. It is difficult to get rid of, and gets worse when you throw more money at it. It is spreading fast because we have been told it is good. But it is not.

Just because we can consume several times our fair share of the world's resources, doesn't mean we should. A study titled Money Giveth, Money Taketh Away: the dual effect of wealth on happiness, found that having access to the best things in life may actually undercut people's ability to reap enjoyment from life's small pleasures.

Greed is counterproductive. We think it will bring us more, but what we get is less.

We have no long term plan for maintaining our current level of consumption. If we did, we would have to involve procuring resources from off-Earth. One planet will not be enough. As Gandhi said, "There is enough for everyone's need, but not everyone's greed."

Greed can be cured by its opposite - generosity. When we think and act with generosity, we can control our desires in order to secure our children's future. When our actions are guided by unselfishness, we can share so everyone has enough. We make sacrifices so that our environment does not suffer, for we know that without a healthy environment none of us will make it.

Just because we can afford to consume, doesn't mean we should. Don't let greed infect your life - keep it at bay with acts and thoughts of enormous generosity. Everything, including your own life, will benefit.

No Mischief Monday

"Earth to Humanity: I can manage your need, but not your greed."

Make 2011 the Year of Living More Simply and Sustainably.

No Mischief Monday

from RadicalGraphics.org

Is Greed Still Good?

"Greed is right. Greed works."
- Gordon Gekko, in the movie Wall Street (1987)

In Star Trek the ultimate aggressive aliens are The Borg. They fly around space in big intimidating black cubes relentlessly consuming other cultures in order to enhance their own. While going about their ruthless business they repeat a tag line to their cowering prey - "Resistance is futile". The Borg are wickedly efficient at what they do, and are hard to stop. Just like capitalism and its proponents.

Knowing Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, he meant the all-powerful Borg to represent the culture of the 'free market' system. I was reminded of that today when I flipped through one of my old journals and found a quote from a great book I read two years ago. I can see why I wrote the quote down as it sums up my feelings toward societal conventions very well.

The quotation is from Greed Inc. by Wade Rowland. In it he argues that capitalism, as outlined by Adam Smith in The Wealth Of Nations, is founded on an erroneous basis. In his book Smith states that self-interested behavior can be accepted and applauded if it leads to the betterment of society as a whole. Therefore, as Wall Street boasted in the 1980s, "Greed is good" because a rising tide lifts all boats. Or that is what they would like us to think.

Wade Rowland disagrees about the supposed universal benefits of greed in a capitalistic system, and points out that we do not always act with our own selfish interests in mind. Our current economic system is not as natural as its proponents would like us to think:

"The training to obey the work and consumer ethic has taken place against the grain and in the face of enormous resistance. We now look upon that resistance as not just futile, but immoral. The Luddites are dismissed as criminally obtuse, and anyone who confesses to being content with what is sufficient and unwilling to work and earn and consume beyond that level of sustenance is dangerously antisocial and morally impaired by Sloth."

Rowland goes on to say, "Our economic system was designed to institutionalize and rationalize the vice of avarice, and it does this with wicked efficiency". Avarice is one of the original deadly sins. It means "reprehensible acquisitiveness". It is something to be avoided, not something to base an entire global culture on. Our current system leaves billions behind. Not all boats are rising, and many people are drowning.

Even Adam Smith himself admits that if egoistic behavior does not lend itself to the public good, then it ought to be stopped. Our current system, then, ought to be stopped.

The Borg are wrong, as are the Wall Street suits - resistance is not futile. In the end, I side with philosopher David Hume and his belief that powerful moral sentiments will guide us as we act together for the greater good. The ideals that he says are the antidotes to greed? Love, friendship, compassion, and gratitude.

Is greed still good? Was it ever? If we focus on love, friendship, compassion, and gratitude, everything else will take care of itself. They will overpower greed and change our world. Competition is yesterday's brutal game that manufactured winners and losers. I see us evolving toward a better, more cooperative future in which all can win. Good riddance greed.

More And More People Got Them Ol' Blues

Do we have the blues? Well, so many people are peeing Prozac that it is in water supplies now in trace quantities. Yes, more and more so-called regular people are learning what Old Man Blues is all about. Once the music of the cotton fields on the Mississippi Delta, the blues haunting tunes, and that old gitchy feeling that goes with them, seem to be on the move.

Alan Lomax, folk historian extraordinaire, in his book The Land Where The Blues Began describes this feeling as a "melancholy dissatisfaction" resulting from "the sense of being a commodity rather than a person". If you doubt this applies to all of us today, remember - you ceased being a citizen a long time ago.

You are a consumer now, and your function is obvious. "Resistance is Futile", Borg-like capitalists and the governments that support them tell us. No wonder we are increasingly bummed out. We are promised everything, but end up with nothing.

In the age of MicroSerfs and falling wages, unemployment and unregulated greed, things are feeling more and more like a small southern county with a Big Daddy sheriff making sure all his marshmallowy "boys" are getting what they think they deserve. The other 90% of us don't say anything... until the good ol' boys drive away, that is. Not only are we getting bummed out, we are getting pissed off, too.

Lomax goes on in his preface:

Our times today are similarly out of joint, similarly terrorized. Technology has made the species rich and resourceful as never before, but the wealth and the resources rest with a few individuals, corporations, and favored nations. Most earthlings, most nations, are distanced from technological luxury, and that imbalance is presided over by armed forces capable of destroying the planet itself. Rage and anxiety pervade the emotions and the actions of both the haves and the have nots. And the sound of the worried blues of the old Delta is heard in back alleys and palaces, alike.

Alan Lomax spent years touring the south recording music and meeting the people. He knew of their hardships. Any yet, while touring around a bustling, vibrant black business district one day, he came to an important realization:

We had grabbed off everything, I thought, we owned it all - money, land, factories, shiny cars, nice houses - yet these people, confined to their shacks and their slums, really possessed America; they alone, of the pioneers who cleared the land, had learned how to enjoy themselves in this big, lonesome continent - they were the only full-blown Americans.

Blues music was born among the people, simple folks that dug the earth and worked under the sun. People that often lived with less than enough under difficult conditions. But what beauty came from the Delta experience. An enduring beauty that caught on and was widely imitated by white performers.

But they only imitated the music, and not so much the lifestyle. But it was the lifestyle, the simple, basic things like community and being grateful for what you've got that inspired a totally unique way of dealing with the constant difficulties of oppression. The people played and sang and tranced out on porches up and down the dusty roads of cotton country. This music could never have been born in the suburbs of mainstream America.

Alan Lomax was right, it is the simple folks that can truly learn what the unencumbered life is all about. More and more of us are beginning to understand this, some by choice. The blues moans and wails and sweats and shakes, but it is also an antidote to our ills.

We will learn the benefits of our new reality while changing things in the process, and who knows what will come of it. Rest assured that Son House, Robert Johnson, Willy Dixon, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters and others will be there to help console and inspire us along the way.

Are We Still Going Up If We Are Going Down?

"The environmental disruptions, the ever-increasing list of species extinctions - all are evidence to those who are willing to see that this past 10,000-year phase of development does not mark great evolutionary progress but a terminal crisis in the life cycle of the planet.

It is time to imagine beyond endings."

From: Voices of the First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime by Robert Lawlor, 1991

I have often wondered why the concept of evolution, a supposedly scientific theory (culturally-generated story), has white males at the top of the ladder with everything and everyone else taking up the rungs below.

We need a new story. Let's knock down the ladder and make it into a bridge.

Private Sector Doesn't Do Affordable, Sustainable Housing

What does a guy have to do to get an affordable, efficient, tiny house around here? Something about the size of the average two car garage, say, 400 to 500 sq. ft. It would be nice to have some space outside for a large garden, a few solar panels, a compost pile, and a bit of nature. Somewhere to escape the crushing burden of rent or mortgage payments and live a simple low-impact life.

I dream of a home that is different from the ubiquitous boxes that cloak our landscape as monuments to the dinosaur of for-profit housing. These McHomes may not be energy efficient, or have room for a garden, or encourage community, but they sure do maximize profits for developers, builders and realtors.

Why is a gargantuan mortgage the only option for securing shelter? Shackling yourself to the Big Banks for 35 to 40 years is not my idea of freedom. What if you don't want a 3000 sq.ft. cookie-cutter house in a prestigious neighbourhood with a front double garage and postage stamp yard? What happened to reasonable sized houses? What is wrong with tiny homes?

Across the land where the average size of new homes is growing (currently about 2500 sq. ft.), you will find it is illegal to build a house smaller than about 15oo sq. ft. Architectural restrictions in your enclave ensure any individuality is banned along with outdoor laundry lines.

We know that monocultures are very susceptible to disruption. Diversity is the key to survival. But you will not find that in your regular development.

No orientation for maximum solar gain, no solar water heaters, no straw bale, no grey water systems, no wind turbines, no tiny homes. No, you are not going to see any alternative, forward-thinking innovations here, because these homes and developments are about one thing, and one thing only - maximum profit.

Don't look for answers from the private sector. They are unwilling to provide affordable housing, and are not concerned with providing solutions to our environmental challenges.

A local developer recently quoted in the Sooke News Mirror said, "the imposition of affordable housing makes our business unsuccessful."

It is time to set aside self-interest and think instead about our survival. Securing shelter, a basic human need, should not make one a slave to the bank for half a lifetime. And those with cash on hand should have more of a choice than the unimaginative, expensive, inefficient wastes of space currently offered.

If the private sector can't, or won't, provide affordable housing, then the government should. If they refuse, then they should let the people organize and support their efforts, because the people CAN provide affordable, sustainable housing when profit is not the number one motivating factor.

All I want is my little hobbit house, in a cooperative community of forward thinking individuals willing to show that housing for all is not just a dream. It is attainable if we stand together and work toward that goal without greed in our hearts.

The imposition of unaffordable, inefficient housing makes us, and our planet, unsuccessful.

The Mean And The Greedy

Meet Michael Martin, former speaker of the British House of Commons, and current poster child for avarice while sucking from the public teat. He has been ousted now, the first speaker to be kicked out since it last happened in 1695. At that time Sir John Trevor was sacked for taking bribes.

Rodney Barker, a professor of government at the London School of Economics, said Mr. Martin's departure shows Parliament is taking reform seriously.

“It won't solve anything at all, but if his successor could appear to be taking charge of things in a way that implements proper procedures, probity, and decent use of public money, that would be the very opposite of Michael Martin's position,” Mr. Barker said. “He has been seen as a supporter of the most greedy and the most mean.”

Is it not time we quit supporting the most greedy and mean among us? Speaking of which, the politicians here in British Columbia are busily following the same agenda. The minimum wage in this province has not increased in a decade, and welfare rolls are up almost 50% over last year. It is in this climate that the BC Liberals voted themselves generous wage and pension increases. The leader of the party, Gordon Campbell, gave himself a whopping 54 per cent wage hike -- a $89,000 raise.

Now the NDP in the BC legislature have decided, after initial opposition, to also take the wage and pension package. If the Green Party had a few seats in the legislature (and they would if we had opted for the Single Transferable Vote system in the referendum), I wonder if they would have taken the increase?

Our current system was made by humans, therefore humans can change it for a model more in line with our times and our current level of evolution. If we were starting out now, can you seriously say that the current system is the one we would choose to build for ourselves? A system in which the richest 2% in the world possess over half of all household wealth? Is this what we would vote for?

Or do the richest 2% somehow "deserve" such wealth? Don't they earn it, fair and square?

"Earned does not mean deserved. Due to the law of conservation of energy, one cannot gain wealth without taking it from somewhere. Due to the misfortune that nothing of value exists on this planet without some form of human claimant, all wealth must come about through exploitation of one human by another. So try to imagine how 2% of the world have come to acquire half of the world’s household wealth…or how they ‘earned’ it. Then try to understand the incredible violence that a word like ‘earned’ suggests." - Devin


Show me a great concentration of wealth and I will show you crime and corruption. That is the nature of our current system. What can you do? Be a rebel. Right now one of the most subversive things a citizen can do is stop buying stuff. Keep your money in a jar in the back yard. Do not support the mean and the greedy. Stop buying their stuff.