Chapter 13b
The Dream


In the section of Chapter 8 entitled ‘A Vision of Building Effective Communications’, we tried to get across, in a few brief words, the kinds of things that we can accomplish if we will use this technology to harness the full power of True Democracy, to unite our resources to apply to a keenly targeted common purpose.

We have to realize the enormity of the task before us, however, and we must be aware of the amount of time, and the degree of sustained effort, it will likely take to accomplish our purpose. If we can find the means to join together to start this task, to get this great wheel moving, we will provide our children with the opportunity to complete it, and our grandchildren with the full benefits of its effects.

Many are confused in their belief that in order to change the status quo, and change our lives for the better, our task is simply to somehow capture the seat of political power. What many of us do not adequately recognize, (or else often forget), is that our only legitimate and effective power must be firmly and deeply rooted in the opinions and beliefs that prevail in the public consciousness.

As President Obama’s short ‘honeymoon’ has now ended, [these words are written in late March of ‘09], and as he begins, (somewhat reluctantly, it seems), to face-off against the real powers in our socio-political system, (the immense power of the forces of the corporate/military/industrial status quo), many of us who had great hopes for what an eloquent and passionate ‘hero’ in the White House could accomplish for us are starting to realize that capturing the seat of power does not necessarily provide power itself.

As the forces of ‘conservatism’ begin to re-organize their efforts, we are beginning to see that they still enjoy widespread support among the intricately misinformed and constantly confused masses. We must not fail to recognize the depths of confusion into which the public consciousness has fallen. Using their control of, and effortless access to, the media of mass communications, we all can see that the immensely powerful forces opposing us are applying their highly organized and opulently well-funded efforts to constantly confuse, misinform, and generally bamboozle as many people as they can.

Surely we all can see that affecting people’s belief systems to our advantage will not be a quick or easy task. But however difficult or daunting this task may be, it will never be accomplished if it is not started.

We must have faith in the one huge advantage that we have over our adversaries. We serve the truth. We serve the most basic moral tenet that the human species has recognized throughout the history of our long and tragic struggle to become civilized. We serve the same moral tenet upon which all the world’s major religions are founded. We serve concepts, True Democracy, and the Common Good, that are firmly and deeply rooted in our obligation to consider the interests of others, as we would have them consider ours in return.

All around us, every day, we see the depths of selfish depravity to which the powers-that-be have driven us, in order to serve their ends. They have taught us that “greed is good”, and that our greatest human happiness is to be found in giving free rein to our every selfish desire. We have been taught to ignore the better inclinations of our human spirit, our instinct to care about others, our ability to imagine how others are affected by our actions, our ability to feel the suffering of others, and our desire and willingness to make personal sacrifices to ameliorate that suffering.

We have been taught to suppress the social instincts that are the better part of our human nature, and to amplify the instincts that express the worst in us. We are taught not merely to be selfish and greedy, we are taught to give free rein to envy, to gloating, to gluttony, and to overbearing pride.

This deliberate depravity of the human spirit has been so deeply imbued in us that it will not be easy to dislodge. We must challenge this depravity by undermining its foundations of greed and selfishness, and by calling people to heed the better inclinations and instincts to which the better part of human nature compels us.

The powers arrayed against us, the powers that have come to be generally known as ‘Conservatism’, have, over the past generation, successfully inculcated their own basic message deep into the mass consciousness. They have defined ‘freedom’ as the uninhibited ability of some to attain such a degree of wealth that others are deprived of basic dignity in their lives. They have attacked the very idea of ‘government’ as an evil that must be weakened, because they know that government is the only social agency that has the power to restrain their selfishness and unbridled greed.

We must realize that in the early stages of our efforts to reclaim our legacy of Democracy in this nation, our task must be to begin to beat the drum of a powerful Basic Message that can counter, and will ultimately defeat, theirs. We must begin to proclaim the message of the Common Good, as loudly and as widely as we can. We must begin to define ‘freedom’ in terms of enlightened self-interest, not unrestrained greed and selfish desire. And we must champion the ability of a government “of The People, by The People, and FOR The People”, a TRULY democratic government, to guard us from the ravages that the powers of Corporate Capital, in their incessant and bottomless greed, will always wreak upon our lives.

We must have confidence that our Basic Message is inherently much more powerful than theirs. That is certainly not to say that theirs is not powerful. We need only look around us to see the power they have derived from appealing to the baser instincts in human nature. But if we have any hope for our species to survive on this planet, our hope must surely be grounded in our faith that the goodness in our basic human character, if nurtured and allowed to flourish, will prove to be more powerful than the baser instincts calling us to selfishness and greed.

When food is put on the family table, no worthy parent teaches their children that they are ‘free’ to take such a large portion for themselves that their sisters and brothers are deprived of their fair share. Yet that is EXACTLY what these forces that have seized our society in their clutches teach us all. “Feel free to take as much as you can”, they tell us, “and never mind if those at the end of the line get little or none”.

THAT is their definition of ‘freedom’. ‘Freedom’, to them, means that a few are ‘free’ to seize such a large share of the wealth that the society produces in common that others are deprived of basic human dignity in their lives. We are now learning the painful lessons of what happens when this bizarre brand of ‘freedom’ has its way with us. Not only are tens of millions of us suffering in conditions of poverty that strip our lives of human dignity, but now that this philosophy of unrestrained greed has played out fully, almost all of us are living in some considerable degree of anxiety, and often stark fear.

The powers arrayed against us define government as ‘the great evil’ because government is the only social agency that can possibly have any power to restrain their unbridled greed. They deliberately engineer the failures of government, through the levers of power they control; they line their gilded coffers by corrupting government to channel our tax dollars to them, and to their self-serving purposes around the world, and then they point to those very failures that they have created, to those very corruptions that they have deliberately engineered, to ‘prove’ to us that government is bad.

Large numbers of people, gnawing helplessly on our angers and frustrations, are entirely vulnerable to this argument. Many good-hearted people have been bamboozled into proclaiming that we must ‘get government off our backs’. Nothing serves the nefarious designs of the powers opposing us than this misguided and self-defeating idea that ‘government’ is the problem.

We must find the means to communicate with these people to get them to ‘see’ that it is bad government, (not government itself), it is government that has been completely corrupted by corporate power, that we must indeed get off our backs. We must replace this corrupted government we now have with a truly democratic government that will guard the Common Good, that will protect the best interests of the nation’s citizens from the ravages of corporate ‘freedom’.

The basic message of conservatism is that “freedom is just another word for no restraints on greed, and government must be weakened so we can be free to be as selfish and greedy as we desire”.

We must counter this with our own much more powerful Basic Message that proclaims that freedom means that every citizen will be free to have the opportunity to develop her or his greatest potential to contribute to society, and to earn the greatest degree of prosperity that the value of her or his contributions will allow. We must proclaim that no citizen’s freedom can be allowed to impinge on the freedom of other citizen’s to attain the same opportunities for prosperity.

And our Basic Message must proclaim that a truly democratic government, under the control of The People, not ‘special interests’, is the ONLY agency available to us that has the power to protect us from the ravaging greed of corporate power. Only a truly democratic government, which by its intrinsic democratic nature will protect and preserve the Common Good, the collective well-being of ALL the society’s citizens, can protect us from the ravages of the abject moral depravity of unbridled greed that ‘conservatism’ has wrought all around us.

No one is yet effectively promoting this ONE basic message that can save us. No one is promoting the idea that Democracy must inherently serve the Common Good. Anyone who stands up to even begin to promote this idea of the Common Good is quickly cut down with hysterical accusations of ‘socialist’. But we are not socialists. Neither are we capitalists. We are citizen’s who believe in True Democracy. We are citizen’s who believe that our government must be under our collective control, and therefore must guard our collective Common Good. We are citizen’s who see that our government is currently under the control of ‘special interests’, and that it therefore serves those interests, not the interests of the nation’s citizens.

We are citizens who believe that using the power of True Democracy to unite our energies and resources will be the key to proclaiming the message of Democracy and the Common Good so powerfully that the confusions in the mass consciousness of the nation will fall away. The nation’s citizen’s will no longer be fooled into believing the lies and misinformation that serve the cause of those who would rule over us, to enrich themselves at the expense of our families, and our children’s hopes and dreams.

That is The Dream. We will take up the power of digital communications that is lying at our fingertips. We will use this power to form ourselves into a True Democracy of our OWN. This ‘people’s democracy’ will give us the means to unite our resources, and to democratically administer our united resources to develop channels of mass communications through which we can impart our Basic Message to the nation’s citizens.

Those of us who are ‘awake’ to what is happening around us will unite ourselves through the power of True Democracy, and we will use our united power to awaken our fellow citizens to both the moral and economic tyranny under which we live, and to the awareness that a solution to our predicament is readily available. We must realize that though we may be a relatively small percentage of the population, we are millions upon millions strong. If we can unite our strength through True Democracy, no force will withstand our united power.



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