Revolution does not require you to live an extremist life of austerity by abandoning all brands. Consumer asceticism leads to a monoculture of deprivation, which is the opposite of diversity and openness. You are also not hypocritical if you use name brand products, while promoting brand advancements toward sustainability. Invest in ethical brands when you can, and include the local producers and services — what we could call smaller or local brands. You can best change the system by engaging the system to explore its strengths and weaknesses. This is how the power of choice works. The personal revolution is the realization that the village and nature have had the answers all along. Therefore, turn to your community and the great earth for sustenance and knowledge. Become fallible and human again by living dangerously and stepping off of the assembly lines of unnatural life before it is too late. The simple things in life are the greatest gifts. They are all there waiting for us to realize their value and partake in their blessings. We do not need to change anything, except ourselves. Nature is the supreme cradle of life, and must be protected and treated with the highest respect and care. We must have clean air and water, and beautiful natural foods for everyone, everywhere. We must cultivate beautiful spaces, where communities and families are free to come together to share and enjoy the bounty of earth. Above all you deserve real freedom, but to have real freedom, you must be wild and free yourself.
Inside each of us there is a marvelous compass which greatly favors life, freedom and vitality. Our sense for safety and betterment is also a highly refined instinct; a process running within us at all times. This complex instinct knows how to make course corrections when we are in danger. This process is in motion now, and is whispering to us the guidance we know and feel to be true. It is our voice of reason telling us to be careful. It may whisper at first, but will shout and scream if it is necessary. Our voice of reason is telling us that revolution is in the air, and that life is beautiful, precious and worth protecting.
Systems of predation are ancient, abstract, virulent, and deeply rooted in culture, they are not merely the constructs of international corporatism or imperialist capitalism. They are process organisms compelled by survival and dominance strategies, that only adhere to the unwritten and unspoken laws of primal survival. In this sense the commonly decried institutions of imperialism, capitalism, and multinational corporations become symbolic, stumbling-blocks, which effectively keep us from understanding the nature of the parasite. These familiar words and concepts are hiding places for unknown, essential entity processes, which exist behind the words. When we say "corporation" over and over, the investigations into those deeper problems stop, because we believe that we now understand the problem and its source through this identification. But these adaptable systems of predation exist in all political and monetary structures. The essential nature of this timeless predator has been with us throughout human history in nearly every civilization and cultural system. It ultimately an internal enemy. Does this phenomenon of selfishness we observe in governments and organizations exist in each of us on a smaller scale? To understand the true nature of this problem requires deep historical, cultural, and epistemological probing to peel back the layers camouflaging this system. But even before that, someone needs to care. We need to concern ourselves with understanding how and why we allow people to be harmed and used by systems we ourselves keep alive.
Being a creator puts people back in touch with their power and purpose, causing them to no longer seek their identity and purpose externally through materialism. As long as people are products, they will be obsessed with products. When people become empowered creators, or producers, they begin to think about the internal gifts they have to share with others. Creative producers understand value as something internal to give, whereas human products and consumers understand value as something external to get. Human products want products. Free human creators want sharing, people and community. Consumer life and present-day corporatism is a form of passive violence because it denatures people and turns them into disposable produce. We reclaim our power, communities and families by becoming creative producers. To end materialism, you don't merely reject materialism, you reject the contract of existing as a corporate slave and as a disposable human product. Materialism is an identity crisis. When we do not know our true identity as powerful creators, we are susceptible to being used and manipulated. We believe we are the consumers, but we are the consumed. At the highest levels is set the standard example for how we should treat our neighbors and friends. The international financial organisms treat humanity as a flock, repeatedly growing and shearing economic wealth in an age-old process of cycles of chaos and order. Through a type of social natural selection, these intelligent processes have become stronger and more evolved systems of predation.
People have a tendency to separate the concept of product from service, but in reality service is just another product. Customer service is a purposefully-cultivated cultural product of a company. It is about relationships. It is absurdly impossible to have good customer service while destroying the economy and community where that customer lives. The first rule of good customer service is there are no customers. That is a fictitious made-up word and concept, just like most of the symbols of belief to which we ascribe. In reality, there are only people; people we help or people we harm. A so-called customer is a human being. In the context of cold-blooded capitalism, a customer is a disposable commodity just like the products to be sold, which should be used-up and then replaced. A customer in the context of a community is a human being who has a share in the co-creations of the relationship between themselves and the service or goods provider. Real community is defined through sustainable and considerate creative relationships, which seek to do no harm, and to benefit all. And therefore, what we often see today is not community at all, but rather usury, exploitation and suffering. It is only community in that we are all grouped together as we are being abused and used. Generations of distilled cost-competition capitalism has produced low-quality goods for low-quality people, in such a way, where the recent generation of children can almost be said to have been born on the floors of mega-stores. We are a community of victims. We must turn our backs on these false corporate communities and reclaim our identities as co-creators in healthy, considerate relationships.
Cheap products destroy the communities where they are built from a social justice, labor, resource and environmental accounting, and then go on to destroy the communities where they are sold. Selling junk is like passing on a disease, where the seller is the original disease carrier, and every hand that touches the product is infected. This is the poison that runs through the veins of cost competition capitalism where the bottom line is the only concern, and the stakeholders have been removed from the equation. In this arrangement everyone suffers. The remote impoverished workers who make the cheap goods are inhumanly exploited, and the local employees of the corporations selling the dubious goods are perpetually hovering on the edge of destruction through economic enslavement at subsistence wages. As purveyors of junk, low-wage employees can only afford to buy junk themselves, and so the demand for cheap product is perpetuated. The environment where the cheap goods are made is poisoned, and shortly after being sold, when the goods finally arrive at their predestined landfill, that environment absorbs the last remains of a toxic chain of destruction. Irresponsible corporations who create and sell disposable goods destroy communities and people's lives. Companies who sell cheap disposable goods cannot have a relationship, which is not abusive, with their customers, employees, or a community.
The propaganda spearpoint of corporate conquest is often the promise of convenient, consistent and cheap goods and services. Corporations use brands as anchor points to sell predictability, which is psychologically favored. People like predictability and they have been conditioned and miseducated to only look at the immediate "dollar" cost of the products they buy.
Local stakeholders who care about their own community are the supreme antidote to corporate poisoning of the community by brands and franchises promising cheap, consistent and affordable goods. Cheap food and cheap goods are dangerous illusions which do not exist. In fact, once the long term environmental, energy, social and human impacts are accounted for, the so-called cheap goods are more costly than the naturally priced, higher quality goods from local sources. Cities that impose bans on franchises experience an immediate resurgence of community development, increased product diversity and overall revitalization, once the ever-grasping tentacles of the remote corporate beasts are severed.
In the franchised pseudo-communities the stakeholders of local enterprise have been replaced with centralized corporate shareholders. The difference between remote corporate shareholders and the local community stakeholders is an essential distinction to understand. Corporate shareholders seek profits for their companies without concern over the profits and losses to the communities they impact with their goods. Corporate shareholders use their consolidated financial, marketing, and political strength to disempower local small business stakeholders. This power play allows remote shareholders of infectious corporate franchises to seize control, and to influence from afar, the community's social, political, and commercial structures in ways that sicken and ultimately kill the local community. This death struggle is between centralized corporate monoculture and natural and diverse, local community culture.
When we buy junk, we become junk. A disposable society is only fit for disposable people. The loss of craftsmanship to mechanization, specialization and outsourcing, and the orchestrated suffocation of talented tradespeople has turned America into a sweeping, franchised wasteland of disposable goods. We make junk, we consume junk and we are junk. One need not look too far to see entire communities in utter shambles. Planned obsolesce has fostered cities that look like above-ground landfills. These landfill cities are full of transient quasi-gypsy renter-citizens, whose household economic lifeline is subsidized by remote mega-corporations through their international exploitation operations.
