The Bene Gesserit Littainy against Fear.

I must not fear.

Fear is the mind-killer.

Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

I will face my fear.

I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.

Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.

Only I will remain.

“Compassion is not weakness, and concern for the unfortunate is not socialism.” Hubert Humphrey

“In nature’s economy the currency is not money, it is life.”  

“You are not Atlas carrying the world on your shoulder. It is good to remember that the planet is carrying you”  

– Vandana Shiva

“There stands, my friend, in yonder pool

An engine called the ducking-stool;

By legal power commanded down

The joy and terror of the town.

If jarring females kindle strife,

Give language foul, or lug the coif,

If noisy dames should once begin

To drive the house with horrid din,

Away, you cry, you’ll grace the stool;

We’ll teach you how your tongue to rule.

The fair offender fills the seat

In sullen pomp, profoundly great;

Down in the deep the stool descends,

But here, at first, we miss our ends;

She mounts again and rages more

Than ever vixen did before.

So, throwing water on the fire

Will make it but burn up the higher.

If so, my friend, pray let her take

A second turn into the lake,

And, rather than your patience lose,

Thrice and again repeat the dose.

No brawling wives, no furious wenches,

No fire so hot but water quenches.”

—Benjamin  West  1780

[Note from the author:  Okay…I know this is out of order.  Sorry about breaking tradition, but I just couldn’t get what I wanted out of the next Utopia chapter so I am still working to make it better.

In the mean time I had this pretty well cooked.  So here is the 15th chapter of the Utopia/Dystopia series.]

“Yes: death–or renewal! Either the state forever, crushing individual and local life, taking over in all fields of human activity, bringing with it its wars and its domestic struggles for power, its palace revolutions which only replace one tyrant by another, and inevitably at the end of this development there is…death! Or the destruction of the state, and new life starting again in thousands of centers on the principle of the lively initiative of the individual and groups and that of the free agreement. The choice lies with you!”

—Peter Kropotkin  

Power has to be insecure to be responsive.

There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.

Ralph Nader

There will be scarcities of corn and squash during this katun and this will lead to great mortality. This was the katun during which the settlement of Chichen Itza occurred, when the man-god Kukulcan (Quetzalcoatl) arrived. It is the katun of remembering and recording knowledge.

Katun 4 (1993-2012) of the Mayan Calendar as prophesied by Chilam Balam

For half there will be food, for others misfortunes.  A time of the end of the word of God.  A time for uniting for a cause.

Katun 2 (2012-2032) of the Mayan Calendar as prophesied by Chilam Balam

“TV is sometimes accused of encouraging fantasies. Its real problem, though, is that it encourages-enforces, almost-a brute realism. It is anti-Utopian in the extreme. We’re discouraged from thinking that, except for a few new products, there might be a better way of doing things.”

— Bill McKibben

“And hundreds of thousands of simple, kindly folk torn from their wives, mothers, and children, and with murderous weapons in their hands will trudge where ever they may be driven, stifling the despair in their soles by songs, debauchery, and vodka.  They will march, freeze, suffer from hunger and fall ill.  Some will die of disease, and some will at last come to the place where men will kill them by the thousands. And they too, without themselves knowing why, will murder thousands of others, whom they have never yet before seen and whom have neither done nor could do them any wrong.”  From Christianity and Patriotism By Leo Tolstoy Author of War and Peace

Other problems include the fact that this system rewards the least scrupulous behavior and penalizes community oriented behavior. It concentrates wealth in the hands of the wealthy and in so doing also concentrates the power at the top, creating a plutocracy in the least case and economic feudalism in the worst case.
The problem in the United States is a kind of willed ignorance. A decision that people make not to know things. I think that is the primary problem in the United States;that people with education and access to information make a choice not to know things. Because to know things if one retains any sort of moral sensibility, if you know about something that's going on that is inconsistent with your own principles, once you know about it there is the moral question about why have you not acted.

 

In the United States part of this mass mediated, mass marketed mass medicated world is about allowing people to remain willfully ignorant. That is another level that we have to combat. This is where I often find myself again in tension because if you look at things like the movie industry and television and spectacle sports, all of this industry that is designed to keep people out of touch, that has to be resisted and when you resist that, then you are told that you are being elitist and ya know you got to understand that it is good to go to the Cubs game now and then. And I think, “No!” I actually think that's part of the problem. So these tensions work out too, in organizing. How do you reject that part of the society without doing it in a way that seems to be talking down to ordinary people? How do you make that analysis part of a bigger politics that tries to offer an alternative to the mass mediated, mass marketed, mass medicated world? So its both about critique and construction of alternatives.
Robert Jensen – “The Old Future's Gone – Progressive Strategy Amid Cascading Crises” which can be heard in its entirety at Unwelcome Guests #428 and #429.