Keith's post addresses the global situation perfectly and he brings it to the real point:
"Time for a movement that addresses the problem we face now: where will we find the popular political forces to stop all this? Probably not short of another world war." Popular political forces are currently gathering in more serious and organized form than I have seen in the past; but it's highly likely that only war or major supply-chain breakdowns (due to drought, hurricanes or other extreme weather phenomena) will force structural change. To me, the conclusion that emerges from that is not how do you escape, or what will "uncivilization" look like - those are fantasies, you won't escape and civilization will continue. The question is what do you do today and through the rest of your life to help prepare society for such a dangerous and bloody transition? Because obviously, without people to move into the breach there will only be a thousand varieties of armed violence. I'm just about sixty, and it seems likely that this transition will begin in my own lifetime. We need something on the order of a new civil religion - a socialist version of free masonary, whose internal codes and group relations are able to give members the intelligence, the discipline, the foresight and the cosmology that will allow them to contribute decisively when the corporate music stops and life must once again be organized for survival at the scale of the nation-state or smaller. These kinds of groupings need not be secret (beyond an initiatory core) nor do they need to disengage from political and cultural life, on the contrary. But they do need the collective construction of an inner compass that points beyond mass idiocy organized by cunning and greed, which is what is now called "global society."
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