About the idea of liberation

It’s fully understandable that members of a formerly oppressed or deprecated or marginalized population are motivated to go through a period of uprising, pride, and visions of empowerment … but in our time liberation tends to be conceived of in highly individualistic terms.

I am woman, hear me roar
If I have to, I can do anything
I am strong, I am invincible.

There’s a lot of “I can be powerful” (and a context of us-against-them) when the truth is that the vast majority of us actually are not very powerful contending with the modern social Leviathan and we jointly need liberation from the prison of It All. Such can’t be accomplished as individuals or by a spurious “class-for-itself proletariat.” We need to effectuate our liberation as members of human-scale collectives.

David Watson (adapted from several of his essays):

By articulating a coherent refusal of capital and the new megamachine it generated, those who question the grid, the state, and the world they require may make a small opening for others to follow, encouraging practical responses as well as the communal solidarity that represents our only hope for survival.

Ivan Illich argued that the collapse of the megamachine should be “welcomed as a crisis of revolutionary liberation because our present institutions abridge basic human freedom for the sake of providing people [in fact, only some people] with more institutional outputs.” In spite of the dangers, such a devolution may be our only hope of breaking free of the Leviathan. By shrugging off the onerous burden of treadmill culture, we may consciously choose the “appropriate response” of collapse, and find ways to let it be a disaster for capital but an adventure for ourselves.

This means, without exception and without any hesitation on our part, the abolition of all empires, of a world of sacrifice zones, drudgery, penury and the toxic cornucopia of commodity society. It means the renewal of subsistence cultures, which still hang on in villages, among tribal peoples struggling to survive, and even among people finding practical responses in the fissures and cracks of civilization. It means making a life that is slower, quieter, and more contemplative. It means revivifying an aesthetic not of the assembly line but of the forest, and restoring a life that can hear what the natural world is telling us, what we once knew long ago and have forgotten as the urban labyrinth grew up around us and enclosed us.

Megatechnic capital may, of course, find a way to entirely suffocate what is humane in us before it reaches its inevitable limits and implodes under its own inertia. There are laboratories and think tanks working around the clock to do just that, even if they have called this eclipse our ultimate “liberation.” So far, though, we are still alive, and some of us still know who we are. Life’s adventure cannot be found at control panels or desks, or in digging the foundations for the work pyramid, or building higher stories in its edifice. Nor is it to be found consuming the laboratory chow of McDonaldization at the petrochemical banquet table, or running on its treadmill to nowhere. It is with the fabric of the living world, the universe itself. We are living an aberration, a nightmarish turn from our true journey.

“On the terms imposed by technocratic-capitalist society,” Lewis Mumford writes, “there is no hope … except by ‘going with’ its plans for accelerated ‘progress and development.’ But for those of us who have thrown off the myth of the machine, the next move is ours: for the gates of the prison will open, despite their rusty hinges, as soon as we choose to walk out.”

Together, community-by-community.