taken from Victoria street news, September ,08.
King Solomon or Qoheleth (your choice) was right; nothing is new under the sun. Nothing will ever change. The oligarchs are always going to find favour in a crowd that just wants to be inclusive with the term "society." On average those citizens that want to see change, are really only trying to change the direction of the status quo. In reality we need a new status quo. We use society as a means of fighting for equality yet we never take the time to define the term society. Has it ever really changed?
I realize that the astute ones out there are aghast at the moment, thinking about such things as Hammurabi's Monolith, or the Bible, the Magna Carta, The Doomsday Book, The Anglo Saxon Chronicles, and how many Constitutions or Acts of Royalty? Although they all seem to be freeing our species from the bonds of slavery and non-civilization they are actually indoctrinating us to accept the hierarchal power structure. None of the aforementioned decrees even forecasts a time when leaders will not be required and classes will no longer have to exist, they just promote hierarchy. This leads directly to the controlling of societal evolution by the oligarchs of a society. Be they evil or indifferent is irrelevant, they are unnecessary. Just as poverty, or struggling to keep a middle class family housed and fed are not necessary.
Each segment of the population has had to fight for their right to vote for example. Let us look at just the one segment called "women and their fight for the right to vote" and then apply this same observation to all segments of the population. As with any segment we cannot fault the women of the time because they had a different perspective of the world than we do now. Hindsight is 20, 20. The women believed that they were fighting for equality with men when they were fighting for the vote. Yet, in fact, they were not fighting to be equal with First Nations men, they were fighting to be equal with rich white men, which are considered to be 'society.' So in order to have a vote they were tacitly agreeing to a hierarchy.
In each of the documents mentioned above the same rule applied for all the different fights that any of the segments of a population had to go through during their eras. In order to get what was considered a 'right' for that era that segment had to accept the rule of the oligarchs. This is not participatory democracy it is imposed ideology. It is accepting an unjust system because we are taught to call it just, not because it is just.
So we are not governing ourselves, we are actually ruled over. Each oligarch is standing on the shoulders of his or her predecessor following the path as they were informed or indoctrinated to understand. Now the probability is that for the oligarchs, just as for the majority of citizenry, we have forgotten that this isn't the way it is, rather, it is the way we have allowed society to develop. For the majority they have been caught up in the struggle to make life better for the next generation without defining what their personal struggle is about or why it is necessary. It is called assimilation or the inability to think freely because even thinking freely is defined for us.
For example Liberal or Conservatives or the N.D.P. are not choices, they represent the same thing - hierarchies. Or maybe the path is deliberately designed to remain with the oligarchs as rulers as we pretend it's the way things are supposed to be. The status quo must change. Either we admit it and stop calling this freedom and democracy, or change the way we govern ourselves.
Anarchism or direct democracy as a word has its roots in ancient Greek. "Anarkhos" means "without ruler" and was originally used because it appears that the people of the time, some as early as the 9th century B.C., thought that a direct democracy was better than having rulers. The oligarchs considered this would result in lawlessness and chaos. Or possibly they saw it as not having things their way, so they created the term to represent lawlessness and disorder from their perspective. Regardless of the oligarch's intentions the words anarchism and direct democracy are synonymous. What the people called direct democracy the oligarchs called anarchism.
Each segment of our population surrendered to the goals of the oligarchs, a hierarchy, in order to get the vote. Another option is horizontal power structures, which places decision making in the hands of the people and the representatives become, well, just people. No more competition to be a citizen but rather voluntary cooperation to create many communities that respect each other and demonstrate this by learning from each other. Start giving each other a hand up. No more imposing one set of ideals on a population that is made of many sets of ideals.
Anarchism is an ideology that is being defined for you as it was for the citizens of ancient Greece. A fantastic documentary by Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein is called 'The Take.' You can find out what a direct democracy is for yourself.
Become informed...Society needs you.