Everything has become a fight.
We need to "fight" to keep our democracy - such as it is.
We need to "fight" for more money as the cost of everything unrelentingly rises at an increasing pace - remember: inflation is the rate at which things get more expensive, and it's almost always a positive number.
We need to "fight" for basic human rights as rulers, elected and otherwise, constantly threaten them as a means of getting more attention and, therefore, more donations, votes, and support from otherist cowards.
We need to "fight" just to maintain our standard of living, which for too many of us never rose to the levels we were promised.
For as long as we keep fighting, the people who manipulate us through fear continue to gain more power over us.
We need to stop fighting and start building - building community, localized support infrastructure, and alternatives to the corruption that props up "society".
Order Always Requires Violence
"Fighting" too often translates into violence. Indeed, the image most of us conjure when we hear the word is not of peaceful coalition building, but raucous energy and likely actual physical violence - like a boxing match or a riot.
Let me be clear about what I mean by "violence", as it's a word most don't seem to understand that well. Violence is not just physical - violence can be committed emotionally, financially, socially, intellectually...
Violence is any act committed upon a person without their fully informed, active, and affirmative consent.
An MMA fight may be brutal - some have died in the Octagon - but every individual who steps onto the mat knows the risks. They have trained to be there. They have sparred and practiced and dedicated themselves to the competition. They may act brutally in the ring, but I would not argue they are acting violently.
Alternately, a surprise party planned completely without the knowledge - or consideration - for the person being surprised may be considered a violent act. That the target may afterward forgive everyone involved for the surprise doesn't necessarily excuse the planners for not taking their potential reactions into consideration.
Of course, if the target had in the past said to the organizers something like "Oh, I love surprises!", then one can assume a standard surprise party may actually be something they would consent to. I'm someone who does not like such surprises, though, so it's best to coordinate with me before planning such a thing on my behalf.
The reason we must keep fighting is because people in positions of power must maintain their power through violence.
They call this "order". Order always requires violence to maintain.
We too often confuse "order" with "peace" because those in positions of power want us to.
If we want to maintain "peace", they tell us, we must do as we're told, follow the rules they created for us, and not make a fuss when we disagree.
But that's not peace - that's extortion.
Peace is the Absence of Violence
I don't think people really understand what "peace" is because so few of us have ever actually experienced it.
Peace is the absence of unnecessary violence. Peace exists when the individual is in total control of themselves and not under threat from anyone else. The conditions for peace exist only when everyone within one's reach (i.e. "sphere of influence") is well fed, well loved, and well rested according to their personal and cultural needs.
Peace is not the absence of conflict - note the "unnecessary" qualifier in front of the word "violence". Some acts of violence simply can not be avoided - hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding rains, earthquakes, etc. remain beyond our control - but they can be mitigated. The communities that rebuild the fastest after a natural disaster tend to be those that have best learned to work together.
Violent Histories are Intentionally Biased
The violence committed between people is neither natural nor necessary. Stories of war and violence echo through the histories passed down to us from prior civilizations, leading many to believe that violence was crucial to the survival of those civilizations, even as they have collapsed and been built over time and again. We have far fewer stories of the people and communities who actually built those civilizations - the designers and builders who created works that still stand thousands of years later; the farmers, harvesters, bakers, butchers, and brewers who kept their communities fed and healthy; the scribes and community leaders who advised the rulers in their decisions.
History is not merely written by the victor - its purpose is to glorify rulers, validate their actions and ideologies, and to create shared stories that everyone under their influence is expected to adopt and believe, whether it's true or not, whether it applies to them or not. As an American growing up in California, for example, it was frustrating to learn so much about the history of the east coast - where the country was started - while learning almost nothing about the area in which I lived and grew up, as if our history didn't matter.
We are drawn to conflict because of our fear. We are told when faced with conflict that we need to fight. When we finish one fight, we all too often find another one waiting for us. The fighting is endless.
But, without the constant fighting, we would stop feeling fear. And, if we stop feeling fear, we may realize we no longer need the power seekers.
Power and Money Perverts Control Us Through Fear
That represents an existential threat to them. Power seekers are, above all other things, cowards - they fear everything, they trust nothing. They seek power because they seek control over their fears, and trust there is no other way for them to succeed. The more unwilling they are to bend, the more violence they are willing to commit, the higher they rise. Decent people who do not seek power over others drop out of this race early, seeking instead to spend more time with their family or otherwise participate in normal human endeavors.
Power seekers focus exclusively on attaining more power at any cost.
They lead with fear and threats. Don't like your job? Fine: go find another one - but don't expect them to vouch for you, or help you, or contribute to an environment where you can easily find another position that will actually treat you better.
In their pursuit of power, they pervert basic human needs - love, compassion, rest, health, comfort - and expect others to do the same.
This is why I refer to them as "power perverts" and "money perverts" - since capital / money has become the primary tool they use as a cudgel against us, through they still rely on religion and threats of physical violence as well.
From the president of the United States to the president of the company you work for to the president of your local HOA, power perverts do everything they can to rise through hierarchies seeking as much control as possible for themselves while lying about their motivations and actions to maintain as much support as possible.
Why Do We Settle For Their World?
The thing is... you already know all this.
So much of our media references this. We tend to accept as fact, for example, that all politicians lie.
Yet, we continue to vote for them. We continue to support the corrupt system they represent. We know they control us through our fear, but we're afraid of what happens if we ignore them.
Because they make constant threats to our safety and stability when we try. Even though they can't carry out those threats without our help.
So why do we allow it to happen? Why do we continue to support them? Why do we continue to believe them?
I think it's because we've become so conditioned by their messaging we struggle to see any other way out.
Between media centralized through a handful of newspapers, radio stations, and television channels, national educational standards for learning history and literature, and a federal government whose control has only grown since the civil war - influencing all other government structures both beneath and around it - we have been cowed into accepting the current state of things as "natural", "normal", and even desirable, despite the massive amounts of human misery required to operate it all.
The Internet represented a threat to this by allowing anyone to publish information in a variety of forms and reach global audiences. The last decade of the tech industry has been a desperate march to wrestle this control back, poisoning online relationships with "engagement through enragement" content, creating algorithms that promote their ideals over everything else, and replacing the connections we've made with "sock puppets", bots, and generative AI.
Everything we consume is designed to align us with their interests, sacrificing our own if necessary.
We're expected to sell a minimum of 40 hours a week of our lives to them in order to "earn a living". They call this "contributing to society", but so much of that employed work results in useless bullshit that produces nothing and, quite often, does more harm than good. Our global supply chain is a chain of human misery and exploitation - the computer I am typing this out on was built by underpaid, exploited workers who can't even afford the thing they're building, using materials mined from countries with even poorer human rights records by people existing in conditions so close to slavery it's offensive to quibble over the semantics.
When we look around the communities in which we live, we see so much work undone. The number of unhoused people keeps going up. The recent federal shutdown demonstrated how many vulnerable people in our cities are completely dependent on a government that would gladly see them starve if it means winning political points with their supporters.
The work we need to do to help our communities stabilize, grow, and thrive does not profit the power perverts - it distracts us from whatever they want us to focus on for their benefit. They offer weak solutions in the form of private charities, government welfare, and police action. Every problem is recast as a financial challenge - money is the means by which they control us, so it becomes the gate to everything, including basic human rights like housing, food, clean air and water, safety, and companionship.
They want us to fight them for the right to make our communities better. They want us to recast every problem as a financial challenge so they can sell to us and control the solution. They want to own and control everything; indeed, they already do - access to housing is controlled through landlords and lenders; access to food is controlled by agricultural conglomerates; access to healthcare is controlled by insurers who ultimately get to decide who lives and dies based on what they approve
But WE are the ones who build the houses. WE are the ones who grow, harvest, cook, and serve the food. WE are the ones who actually provide care for one another. WE design and build and market and sell every thing that enters our economy while they collect the majority of the proceeds and pretend their manipulation, exploitation, and money counting is actual "work".
What, exactly, are we working for if it isn't to build stability for ourselves and the people who directly matter to us? Why do we allow their fear to permeate everything we do?
If we're not working for peace - the absence of violence, the absence of their control over us - what are we working for?
Peace is Not the Destination - It's the Road That We Walk
Peace means having control over our lives. It means stability for ourselves, our family, our neighbors, and everyone within our reach and influence. It means working for ourselves and our own happiness rather than "earning a living" for perverts whose desire for control is in direct opposition to our personal needs.
The conditions for peace are fairly simple. Peace requires stability. Stability is attained when you and everyone within your reach is well fed, well loved, and well rested according to their personal needs and cultural tastes.
It really is that simple.
You can start working for peace when you stop working for them and start putting your energy and priorities toward the communities and people who actually matter to you.
Stop using money as a standard of value. Inflation means money is constantly losing value. Money loses value because it's not pinned to anything that has value - most money is currently "fiat" money, relying on complex equations to determine the money supply and its relative value; the "Gold Standard" is also an inadequate representation, as it relies on the supply of gold and our belief in it as a token of value.
The only thing in the human world that has ANY value is human life. Nothing of value exists without a human assigning value to it. For money to be fair, it must be pinned to human life - something like one monetary unit (dollar, cent, whatever) for every minute lived - otherwise it's just a fiction that can be easily perverted by those who attain the most money through any means necessary, including those deemed "inhumane", "illegal", or "immoral".
Over the next few days / weeks, I intend on expanding on this and sharing the details of what I believe we need to create a more peaceful world. We don't need to get everyone on board - just the people within your reach.
We don't need rulers, we need leaders and guides - those who can organize and coordinate members of their communities to work toward a more peaceful and just way of living for each other.
We need to leave the perverts behind. Let's build a truly peaceful future together.
Stop fighting.
Start building.