Don't Be a Dickhead - Love Thy Neighbor

Here are ten ways to fight fascism that are personally empowering:


Ten Ways YOU Can Fight Fascist America!

Submitted by Chad ONeill on October 1, 2007 - 2:00pm. London Commons

posted by Thirty Seven in counterculture on Sat Sep 22 17:36:35 -0400 2007

This is the best guide I can offer for proactive, prolonged, independent and effective resistance against the overwhelming direction towards greater warfare, poverty, and fascist control we see around the world in 2007.

We find ourselves up against an entrenched power structure composed of a relatively very small group of wealthy elites. They seldom rule directly or even visibly, and maintain their power through building huge armed bureaucracies who enforce power for them. The global power structure is a decentralized, constantly shifting network of organized crime and national control systems, representing many different races, nationalities, religious dogmas and cultures.
However, there are common threads in all systems of social control:
They do not have a sense of humor, they are bitterly opposed to Art, and they are unable to handle bizarre and confusing situations. These systems are built upon enforcing conformity, turning nature into consumer goods, and controlling information. These systems require enemies and they create criminals.
Because of these common threads, these systems all have common weakness that we have the power to exploit to incredible effect. If you take nothing else away from this, please remember: you are exponentially more powerful than you think you are.
The simplest summation of the overall strategy I propose is this:

1. Destabilize Existing Structure
2. Minimize Destructive Backlash
3. Establish Robust Communication
To this end, I propose 10 steps which form a conceptual toolkit. Perhaps that's a euphemism for "disorganized pile of shit," but I feel strongly that these are all relevant and useful:


1. Practice is repetition is preparation is power. i.e..
...Can you control a situation enough to escape?... self-defense is a core life skill.. Without it, you're not effective. I recommend Aikido and Tai Chi to all living humans, unconditionally.
Establish meaningful and beneficial routines. Our culture is a constant pulse of imposed rhythms and rituals that we need to actively fight against to maintain clarity and effectiveness.

2. Create situations that cannot be controlled


Ideally, in any confrontation, you want control of the situation. However, we're talking about us, you and me as individuals, taking on the global power structure of Earth in 2007 for control of our planet. We are not in control of the situation, it is dumb to assume we could be. So go for the next best thing—be totally unpredictable, escalate chaos and noise, and create a situation that nobody could possibly control.
Embrace chaos and leverage chaos, because what cannot be predicted cannot be controlled. Only a lawyer would pretend otherwise.

3. Do not allow yourself to be controlled by situations.

What do you do if someone puts a loaded gun in your face? Sure, that's a heavy situation, but do you panic? I propose you remain calm and ask the human with the gun what they want. There is never any reason to panic. Self-assembling nanotech hunter-destroyer clusters swarming thousands of feet high, raining down human blood and internal organs, is still not a valid reason to panic. Panic is helpless idiot fear. In high stakes situations, you need to be calm and focused.

4. Seek information, avoid arguments

The only person responsible for getting you trustworthy information is you. This involves a great deal of work. Am I seriously advocating that you spend hours a day just sitting around learning stuff? Absolutely yes, I am. The wonderful Jennifer Bowen introduced me to the phrase "good company is kept discussing good ideas—not people."

5. Seek predictive models, avoid explanatory models.
I propose that it’s more important to have a general sense of what’s coming up next, than to have a precise picture of what’s going on now. The global power structure is not a monolithic, static object: it is constantly shifting, and while we focus on one tentacle, seven more will be taking advantage of our ignorance. An accurate history of this power structure is far less valuable than knowing how they operate, and what their assumptions are.
...
This is a massive source of power that few activists seem to be aware of: for the past three centuries, governments, militaries and corporations have been waging a very literal War Against Nature, attempting to control what they cannot understand. Recent documents like the UK Ministry of Defense report “Global Trends 2007-2036” make it clear that those in power cannot predict the short-term consequences of worldwide toxic pollution. They are scrambling to prepare for a future crisis they cannot plan for. You can, though.

6. Become an autonomous cell.

Do you realize that most of what “intelligence analysts” do is just read through publicly available media and look for patterns? Are you familiar with the concept, technique and theory behind “asymmetric warfare”? What do you think military analysts mean when they predict a future of “constant low-intensity urban conflict?” Is it signifigant that the US government has a long track record of inflitrating, subverting and murdering counter-culture icons and revolutionary leaders?...
Take advantage of your opponents paranoia, use their need for control against them.
Autonomy also implies economic freedom, good health, and secure access to food. Shelter can of course be communal and improvised—in many climates, shelter is barely nescessary most of the year. Although I’m essentially advocating that we take the Army recruiting slogan, “an army of one,” further than they themselves ever will, I’m not avocating turning your back on anyone. I’m advocating that you work for your community, independently and perhaps invisibly.


7. Don’t be a dickhead, and love thy neighbor.

It’s the only rational approach to life: do your best to be nice. By doing so, you make life easier for those around you, you reduce physical stress that wears on your own body, and you will often find yourself reaping rewards at random. Some people call this “karma,” other folks call this “emergent properties of complex networks.”
Be nice to your neighbors. Help them out for no reason, refuse to accept money for doing so. Partly because real charity is subversive these days. Also, in 2007, you do not want the cops called on you, period. You truly do the world a favor when you purge yourself of terms like “sheeple” and “the herd”—I’ve also learned, through hilarious personal experience, that referring to taxpaying citizens as “slaves” will never work out for you.
There is nothing wrong with being selfish, only being dumb. Dumb selfish people look for simple self-benefit, smart selfish people look for open-ended, mutually beneficial situations. My personal rule of thumb is avoiding theory as much as I can and focusing on That Which Is Useful, but perhaps that’s not useful for you. If you can improve your community, you have also improved your personal power base and your chances for long-term success. That’s not “public service,” just science, math and common sense.

8. Invest in tools and share them subversively

The old Industrial Revolution plan for social control was simple. Wealthy families owned all the “capitol goods”—the machines and factories that make consumer goods. So they used that power to hire poor people to work for them, in exchange for being able to purchase some of the “consumer goods” they themselves made. Things have changed a lot in 2007, because the line between captiol and consumer goods has blurred almost completely. You can launch a record label with about $5000 and be pressing your own CDs, for instance.

Technology is magick. I think that’s become clear enough to just leave that as a statement. We now have the tools for invisibility, weather control, human cloning and burning entire cities to the ground with a single missile. We will soon have the tools for universal translation, undoing one of Jehovah’s major curses as chronicled in Genesis 11. It’s vitally important that us fringe weirdos get ahold of all these amazing future toys before they get turned into future weapons against us.
Sharing (in this culture) is subversive. Communal access to important tools is subversive. ...Nobody will go pay for a service or tool when they can use an equally good one locally, for free. You would be amazed how low overhead can be when maintenance is your only expense. You would be amazed how well you can maintain tools and facilities if you’re willing to put in work.

9. Become a Beacon of Insane Hope

There’s strong evidence that fear and anger are actively used as tools of manipulation and social control: the White House spent $1.6 billion dollars in 2006 on “public relations.” This is a signal that needs to be counteracted, because based on psychology experiments, evoking the concept of death alters human perception. People become more dogmatic, nationalist and likely to support violence. This is based on the research of Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski, and you can find more information searching for the phrase “Terror Management Theory.”

...I am not advocating violence to any extent. Perhaps this is the strangest concept in my toolbag, but for what it’s worth: violence is actually not your weapon. Sure, you can throw rocks at cops, shoot cops, and blow up police stations, but you’re actually not accomplishing anything. In fact, you’re doing Their job for them, which is why undercover police officers around the world try to start riots at peaceful protests. Violence is not a weapon we can control, so it’s not a weapon we should use, either.


10. Please, be fearless

The stakes are beautifully high, the enemy is unbelievably strong, the fight looks completely hopeless. It’s too perfect, it’s ridiculous. How can we be bored on a planet as deliciously dangerous and insane as Earth? I can only conclude that my entire generation is living inside an open-ended video game that we’ve been training for since birth without even realizing it.

So keep pushing, stay calm, eat healthy, seek novelty, breathe deeply, take risks, think slowly, move quickly, speak clearly, fight dirty, dream crazy and please, be fearless.

Thirty Seven is a rapper and professional weirdo from the backwoods of Vermont. He spends a truly unhealthy amount of time online and reading books, in a potentially futile effort to understand the Universe he was born into. He can be reached at humpasaurjones@gmail.com.

Thanks Thirty Seven. I am visualizing a burst of pure light energy from me to you ...like a kiss of light, from one soul to another in free form once again.