CAPITALIST SICKNESS

JONATHAN COOK—In the new environment of social media, that began to change. Not only have some journalists become more influential than the papers they write for, but others have abandoned the employee-servant model completely. They have reached the conclusion that they no longer need a corporate outlet to secure an audience. They can publish themselves, build their own readership, and generate their own income – freeing themselves from corporate servitude.

In the last few years, this is a path I have pursued myself – becoming mostly reader-financed. For most of us, it is a precarious option. But it is liberating too – in a way that no previous generation of journalists could ever have imagined possible.

Since the overpaid corporate media whores will never risk their careers to report the truth as they are supposed to do—the world must rely on spontaneous journalism provided by anyone conversant with the facts and brave enough to disseminate them. This is not hyperbole. After systematically corrupting the media entirely, thereby hijacking the mainstream narrative informing most people’s minds about world realities, corporate power, led by the US, has practically killed democracy wherever it managed to survive, including in the US itself, easily one of the most heavily propagandised nations in history. The consequences of this disgraceful situation can be seen everywhere, and that’s why the fight for the truth has never been so vital.

JACQUES R. PAUWELS—On the ruins of the Ancien Régime, which had served the interests of the nobility and the Church, [the moderate revolutionaries] erected a state that was supposed to be in the service of the well-to-do burghers. Politically, these solid gentlemen initially found a home in the “club” or embryonic political party of the Feuillants, subsequently in that of the Girondins. The latter name reflected the place of origin of its leading element, a contingent of members of the bourgeoisie of Bordeaux, the great harbour on the banks of the Gironde estuary, whose wealth was based not only on trade in wine but also, and primarily, in slaves.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Capitalism is a misanthropic, dystopian religion. By “capitalism” I mean this or any other possible system wherein mass-scale human behavior is driven by the pursuit of capital. By “religion” I mean organized collective faith-based belief system.

In times past the dominant religions had names like “Christianity” or “Islam”, which were used to promote doctrines that shaped societies, dominated civilizations, and built entire empires. Theocratic institutions labored on behalf of the powerful to bend entire continents to their will, using narratives about beneficent invisible deities as cover. Nowadays the dominant religion is called capitalism, and the theocratic institutions are called governments, and the beneficent deity is called the invisible hand of the market.

In the old religions, people would gather once a week in a building to be indoctrinated by clergymen. In the new religion the clergymen come to indoctrinate you right in the comfort of your own home on screens showing news, TV shows, and Hollywood movies.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—We’re not going to rocket ship our way out of this mess. We’re not going to be able to keep doing things the way we are doing them. The “growth for its own sake” ideology that Musk and Bezos have dedicated their lives to embodying is, as Edward Abbey put it, the ideology of a cancer cell. Such an ideology is unsustainable. We’re going to have to change.

“I must change” is always the first possibility that an ego rules out when evaluating a dilemma, and it’s the same ego which says we are separate individuals, and it’s the same ego which created our dilemma in the first place. But we must change. We must transcend the ego.

That’s always the last thing anyone wants to hear, that we need to change, but it’s true. We’ll either collectively change our minds in a way that enables us to drastically shift the way we operate on this planet, or we’ll go extinct. It is evolve or die time. We’ll either make it or we won’t.

Space will not save us, and we will never colonize it. We can explore space, but it will be done via satellites and other tech, not by living organisms. Our astronauts have up until this point been nothing more than glorified scuba divers, entirely dependent on boxes of Earth’s ecosystem, no more independent from that ecosystem than someone holding their breath. This will remain the case.