So I've done lots of psychedelics, have seen the light, and I don't mean that metaphorically.

Spent years pondering, meditating, thinking, analyzing.

Basically the solution that my mind has come to point to as the quickest route of attack to solve the most issues is simply, we need to stop funding the federal governments murder industry.

I'm sure you've all thought this, and are all familiar. If the US cut it's military budget it could clothe, feed, shelter and provide healthcare for all of it's citizens. So much resource is going to the hurting of people that it is a serious detriment to everyone's quality of life. If we could put the resources to helping people, instead of hurting them, this is really the huge flip that needs to happen.

I know the esoteric solutions to this, be the change you wish to see, focus on manifesting it, whatever and whatnot.

But for real, I think this is what it needs to come down to. Max tax protest. We simply have to stop funding the federal governments murder industry. Every year we pay to fund this, and act like we have no responsibility in it. We work all year long, to give up a chunk of our energy to harm other people. It is our energy that the federal government is transmutating into hatred and distress for the entire nation. We simply have to stop paying for that. We need to take responsibility for all of the energy we put out into the world. To give up a percentage of our energy to an entity, to then do whatever it wants with it is being irresponsible on our part.

I post this here because I figure your all on the same frequency and page as me. So I wanted to hear ideas, how could this actually come to pass? Make a website where people sign to pledge that if like half the US also pledges not to pay yearly taxes, then they won't? Clearly a huge mass of people has to do it at once.

Or do you guys see any other route to take which would allow us the opportunity to stop funding the federal governments murder industry?

Stop using petroleum products and things like plastics and anything with a lithium battery.

All our war is about resources and economics, to stop the war machine stop using the resources and participating in the economy.

Speaking as middle aged folks who find themselves working and hiding "within the system," we can only recommend the following:

1.) Get off the grid entirely. Easier said than done these days, and a bit over-rated in our opinion.

2.) Don't be greedy for money. Take a job with a service mission or at a non-profit. Early just enough to survive and minimize your tax burden.

3.) If you are relatively low income, get married - you will pay less taxes.

4.) If you make beaucoup bucks talk to a financial advisor and stiff the Feds by making yearly donations to non-profit foundations.


Peace & Love,
Pandora

Good point to bring up. The shift from political to personal solutions has been going on for half a century now with mostly deleterious effects. It's embodied in Ken Kesey's Oakland recruiting center protest speech in 1965, telling people that marching wont work and then playing "Home on the Range" with his harmonica. It's embodied in the communes of the '60s who rejected political confrontation and instead bought up tribal land, built military made geodesic domes, and preached cold-war cybernetics. It's embodied in Jerry Rubin's transformation from yippie to yuppie. It's embodied in the human potential movement at Esalen institute and est training during the "me generation" of the '70s. It's embodied in the hyper-consumerism of the new age movement, always on hand with a new technology or therapy for you.

Personal solutions have virtually no impact on the greater "system". Even if you went off the grid completely there are hundreds of thousands of people that instantly take your place on the tit of techno-industrial civilization. There needs to be an actual political revolution, if the Green party were to take over the house, senate, and presidency, initiatives would come into effect that would drastically change both our local and international relations.



I don't think clicktivism has been that effective and actually defers activism. Besides, the whole anti-tax stance is largely a conservative initiative that benefits the corporate world exclusively (e.g. the Koch funded Tea Party).

The only way something like this can change, is if everyone else does there part as well. People would need to drop out from society, and not pay their taxes so they dont support them. Essentially, the hippies knew what they were doing back in the 60's...Get enough people to turn back to that and the government has nothing to support its war funds, or other things for that matter.

I don't know how you do it. The military industrial complex has a lot of weight behind it, which has a lot of momentum. One of the big problems is the idea of the military in this country. Do we need it just because we think it's an inevitability? Do we actually need national defense? I think on some level we still do. Especially due to the fact that this country has screwed over a lot of others in the past, so there are plenty who would like to take some back.

Don't forget, the military does do a fair amount of humanitarian work. Many sites of the big disasters in the world had supplies flown in, and refugees flown out, such as the Haiti earthquake, Indonesia tsunami, Pakistan flooding, and many more. So, it's not all bad. The bad does outweigh the good, though.

The real problem is the military industrial complex, and the politicians who get their palms greased.

I'll give you an example. One of the new cargo aircraft which cost around $200 million a piece was contracted back in the 80's. the contract called for about 100 planes, based off of what the military leaders decided they needed. Congress, on the other hand, kept buying them! So the military ended up with about twice what it needed because of congress. Had the military gotten what it wanted, that would have meant less spending on the planes, less people to hire to maintain and operate them, less money needed for parts, less money for fuel, and so on. So, it meant a ton more spending, beyond just the huge multibillion dollar price tag to buy just the planes. The reason why congress bought so many was how the contracted company set up the building process. They made sure every single state had at least one factory that made a part for the plane. So, the elected representatives from the states were inclined to keep buying planes to keep jobs in their states.

Pretty cool, huh?

This is a clear example of where the problem lies.

The only problem is that it was an utter failure, and they didn't really know what they were doing on account of their congruency with Cold War culture despite being labeled counterculture. Turning away from politics was probably the biggest mistake of that era. In fact, the whole point of having Ken Kesey speak at the Oakland recruitment center rally was to merge the new communalists with the new left, and Kesey blew it by rejecting political activism furthering the rift. The new communalists were pretty naive and actually adopted a lot of Cold War (establishment they were supposedly against) cybernetic information theory and technology (see Whole Earth Catalog) for their "back to the land" movement (which was mostly stolen tribal land if they were in New Mexico). Most of y'all probably don't even realize that the phrase "expanding consciousness" originated in the military research-complex, or that the original purpose of geodesic domes was to protect missile defense systems. Finally, despite it being the largest domestic migration in the history of the United States (urban to rural), it virtually vanished in the '70s and most of those hippies became the yuppies of the '80s. In retrospect, it turned out that many of the communes devolved into authoritarian, cult, or religious groups.

If anything, their political impact was negative with the personal computer contributing to civil war in Africa...

I don't think solving this will happen by leaving society, dropping out, getting off the grid or toppling the large government.

If I could reference McKenna, as I think we all probably share similiar instincts as him.

The universe is a complexity conserving engine, where complexity is established, it uses it as a basis for further complexity.

To leave society, drop out, or dismantle the government would go against this. You would be turning your back on complexification, it is not the way forward.

The forward escape, push right through the middle. We are descending into greater novelty.

Which means, the solution will rely on existing complexity, and it would be something that gives MORE energy directly to the center of it, it will be something novel, not done before, resting on new novelty.

This is way my brain tends to point to online organized mass tax protest, it is a novel solution, and it is a solution that results in more complexity.

But is there any other solutions that can be thought up along this line of thinking?

In my opinion, civilization has always lead to homogeneity, not further complexity. So by the universe-complexity logic, that would make humanity over the last 10,000 or so years incongruent with the universe. The telescope made the moon and stars farther away, if you catch my drift...

& I'll reiterate, that online protests or clicktivism, arm chair activism, whatever you wanna call it, has done nothing, if not made the activism scene worse. I recommend, Dio, you read the book, The Net Delusion by Evgeny Morozov. Also, the whole tea party-esque conservative anti-tax stance is something you should look at from different angles. I mean, taking an anti-tax position lumps you right in with the international pin stripe mafia (bankers, lawyers, accountants) and their tax havens from the Netherlands to Cayman Islands.

At times the conclusions I come to, and the tendencies I have do align with certain parties which I in no way support or condone. But I don't think just because ones thoughts, through a completely alternate means, comes to aligns with a parties thoughts they don't like will then completely disvalidate those thoughts. It's possible that certain parties, which are out of whack on 98% of their philosophy, may have some points which are perfectly on point.

I don't see how the last 10,000 years has not been an exponential leap into complexity. We have far more 'things', and variations of 'things' all across the board. Objects, people, personalities, beliefs. The telescope may have made the moon farther away, but it also introduced awareness of the entire rest of the cosmos we have viewed through and the realization of much information about the moon. I don't think at any point in the past 10,000 years you could say there were fewer things from one point to the next.

I haven't read the whole net delusion book, but have read a couples articles describing it, and I can't see the guy as doing anything but being purposefully dissedant for attention.

If the way forward is not through greater levels of human connectivity, human communication and the bridging of cultures, then what is?

Remember though, I'm running primarily on the context that military over-spending is really a prime root of humanities distress because it absorbs resources, that if applied to helping people, would curb that distress. The problem being, people think they still need to kill each other. People still think people in other countries are some kind of 'evil'. The illusion of separation. That illusion of separation is created by institutions, and it has been held in place by the media. A hierarchical top-down media brainwashes one group of people into believing they are truly different than another group of people. The internet represents the abolishment of the hierarchical top down media, the main route by which the illusion of separation was created, and maintained, disappears with the advent of the internet becoming the most popular and followed medium. I see this as really the truly absolutely central point to many issues. The hierarchical top-down forms of media, mind control, needs to be turned into purely democrat forms of media and mind control. I don't see how anything but the internet can do that. You could potentially pick at certain aspects of the internet, and certain things it has done which could under some views be seen as undesirable, but if not the internet, then what?

And about clicktivism. I think this criticism stems from the assumption that the solution is going to come from in the streets protesting, or the attempt to radically change laws. Which potentially. But I would argue that the core of the issue is human consciousness. This is really the primary place to put one's focus, what programs humans consciousness, what is in human consciousness and how can we reprogram it or affect it? We are really at a point right now where the battlefield is really human consciousness, is the human imagination. People in mass just thinking something different is really the primary switch that needs to occur. Clicktivism can affect this, mass representation of viewpoint can impact change in thought. Now don't me wrong, I am not saying that 'clicktivism' is what we need, and the solution, I am just saying viewing it as this entirely useless phenomena that does nothing is potentially not true. If it has the chance to impact consciousness, it is doing something. I think it's potentially just one small ingredient in a much larger mixing pool of things needed to change concioussness, and is really not anything to put great relevance to. But I don't see how it is symptom of a problem.

People will do whatever they perceive to be valuable and profitable to them. Unforutnately, as it is, war is profitable, competition is profitable, beating at stuff is profitable. There is incentive to be cunning, dishonest, to take advantage of things, break the rules in order to get ahead in life. What the future needs is to find out a way to make co-operation beneficial. Otherwise, I suspect a dark future for humanity. Maybe it has always been dark. That is, so much of society is based upon lies, corruption, greed, phoniness, obligation to follow structures that are poison to the spirit. Some are oblivious to this altogther. Others are conscious of it, but afraid to do anything, or are powerless to do anything. They suffer. Others are active perpetuators of corruption.