ReLOVEution — This Be the Plan

It’s preliminary, but it’s real. All suggestions and criticisms are heartily welcome.

We’re on our way to a tipping point that has nothing to do with who is in control, but rather who is credible. When those in control lose credibility, they lose any right to control, so their only resort is to force. When their ability to force and impose control loses credibility, they lose actual control; because if no one believes they can, no one believes they will, and no one will cooperate.

So let’s go for the jugular: the credibility of the controlling elite. No laughingstock can wield power long. They’re totally dependent on us taking them seriously. Let’s not.

Four steps to ReLOVEution

1. Visualize
   Create a vision of the world that we want to live in instead of one we think we’re forced to live in by necessity and the crimes of our exploiters. Asking what’s possible or feasible is the wrong first question. Expecting others to provide us with a vision while we armchair critics vet it is the wrong first move — or should I say second move? Taking a place in the critics’ chair follows a prior move to abdicate authorship to others! Why do we behave like people stripped of rights, shackled in solitary silos of the mind, whose only resort is to choose a lesser evil from a bunch of bad options? We need to stop acting like victims, prisoners, and slaves incapable of dreaming and communicating, and start behaving like sovereigns with minds, hearts, and voices, because that is what we are.
    
   Visualizing is both imaginative and demonstrative. We need to describe and portray what we see. Together, we’ll create a solid picture and feasible ways toward it will start rising into view.
    
   The fact that we want something better is the only reason we need for getting it or, if need be, taking it. Our question will be “How good can we make things?” not “What’s the best we can hope for?” Cynicism is capitulation disguised as realism and will get us nowhere, because the cynical mind swears we’ve already gotten as good as we’re likely to get. Scientific and technical progress? The cynic says, “No problem!” But serious social, interpersonal, and individual progress for all? The cynic says, “What dope you been smokin’?” To hell with that hypocrisy and the myth of human nature it rode in on.

   With sovereign, confident, dignified, and dignifying attitudes, our shared vision will emerge organically (not centrally manipulated/organized) and energetically (not driven by propaganda). The vibrant upgrowth of determined hearts, our vision will be impossible to resist, like life itself. We won’t need saviors, representatives, or talking heads; and we won’t need permission. We will share what’s ours, representing ourselves and each other, luxuriating like our vision, impossible to resist.

   I realize what that sounds like, but I’m not kidding.

2. Expose
   Create a rationally compelling, strongly empirical case that clearly shows the stupidity of our basic assumptions — such as that we have no choice but to work for survival in an adversarial world; that without authority punitively imposed on us, many of us would degenerate into bestial, dystopian insanity; that doing hard, honest work has anything at all to do with obtaining unconscionably obscene material wealth; or, one of the dumbest, that property and material wealth have anything at all to do with true wealth and prosperity — a case showing not only that ideas like these are wrong, they are incoherent bullshit foisted to deceive us about the way things really work. Upside-down, inside-out and ass-backwards — the assumptions couldn’t be more wrong. In fact, “wrong” takes them too seriously and gives too much credit — they’re ridiculous and laughable. No joke. This will eliminate cogent dissent from the intelligentsia and along with it any defensible basis for the bombastry of the elite.
3. Subvert
   Ridicule the bullshit: the bogus assumptions, the beliefs founded on them, the systems built on them, everyone who promotes them, and the idiocy of staying stuck when we have far better places to go. This is already going on piecemeal in limited ways, but it needs to go viral. It’s been hamstrung because steps #1 and #2 haven’t happened yet, so we’re still nagged by doubts. We feel threatened under Damoclean swords of privileged, inscrutable, secret competence that will drop from hair-hung hazards and skewer us should we make too bold a move. Inscrutable because it’s not at all clear what constituted the sword lords’ supposed authority over our resources, competence and persons, other than that they yarned a whopper of a tale to justify taking charge both by conniving and force, and having fragmented us, hold us one against the other like fools who can’t tell friends from foes.
    
   In the light of a vision of a much better world instead of just a little less awful one, seeing the authoritarian sword for the pot metal prop it really is will charge our discourse, amping it and emboldening us who before were intimidated into silence. No longer tentative or defensive, no longer afraid of getting threatened or blasted by idiots gorged with elitist nonsense, we’ll each start contributing potent, actionable ideas that pompous blowhards waived off in contempt as unfeasible, naive, dangerous (haha — bullshit!) and unprofitable — fuck that! We need each other and every single one of those contributions. When the ideas start pouring out and we see what we’re each really made of, they will blow us away. Much of it will come from our children, the very persons who feel most stifled and voiceless — and it’s already started happening.
4. Convert
   We’ll hit credibility tipping points that gel our vision and the ridiculousness of opposition to it — personal ones, at first, then collective ones as our confidence solidifies, culminating in the “shift in consciousness” that so many anticipate. Shifts in consciousness precede shifts in the societies which are expressions of their participants’ individual and collective consciousnesses — that is, when the expressions are genuine and society and its participants aren’t being manipulated. Shifts in our minds and hearts cause shifts in action and circumstance, individually and collectively. So what will shift? Personal sovereignty abdicated will revert to personal sovereignty reclaimed and reinstated.
    
   Our growing confidence will make new possibilities worth proving, and our experience with them will inform and encourage us and others, snowballing from proof possible to proofs accomplished. Massive latent power and wisdom resident in every person quashed under abuse and oppression will begin erupting. We’ll start describing and developing and testing solutions that no one yet dares to take seriously, along with more that no one has yet conceived. No crackdown will happen, because we’ll have done nothing to crack down on. Long before elitists realize it, we’ll have opened Pandora’s box of plagues to privileged status quo, and nothing will be able to close it or force us back under heel to the traitors of humanity again.

Elitists not included

This will be the first true people’s revolt, because it won’t be about a new elite leveraging us in order to install itself and replace the old one — this will be each one of us making our unique, valuable contributions, working with each other to realize them together, proving that no elite is necessary. This will be a revolution of love overcoming force and violence, good overcoming evil, and life overcoming death — not ushered in some day over a magical rainbow by superheroes from some kind of Great Beyond, but here and now by us.

Beyond that, we have no real clue what the ReLOVEution will or won’t entail, because we’ve never seen one before. For now, anyone who claims what it must be or can’t be is patently full of shit. It’s hiding in the hearts and minds of every one of us who wants a better world. It needs to be released, expressed, recognized, shared, tried, and celebrated. Only then will we know enough to say much about it.

We do know one thing, though. In precisely the same way and for exactly the same reasons that life broke out on this planet — whether you think it was by inexorable eventuality of random occurrence or by the irresistible hand of intentional design and creation — ReLOVEution is absolutely inevitable, as certain as anything ever was or can be. And now, for the first time since prehistoric eras, we have solid reasons to think that the time is ripe. We’ve never before been so in touch and connected at decentralized, grassroots levels. The resulting solidarity is a global tsunami already forming with no appreciable resistance — other than the bullshit that we’ll expose in step #2 and ridicule into incoherence in step #3. Long before the movement becomes generally apparent, just like a tsunami at open sea, it will already have become unstoppable.

We know not what we’re made of… yet

A little analogy might help. Most people think that to create change you need fireworks — captivating displays that do something — which you then use to gather others and convince them to put their pyrotechnic arsenals together with yours, creating stockpiles big enough to gather yet more who rally around them, taunting, “Join us or get burnt!” In all this hubbub, everyone seems oblivious to the freaking volcano they’re gyrating on the lip of!

This plan taps into the well-capped, volcano-rivaling power of our aspirations for love, goodness, connection and community, fairness, compassion, creativity, prosperity and trust; fueled by our care for our families, friends, and fellows; driven by our amazing capacity to work patiently and, if need be, suffer long to realize our ideals — the groaning at the core of each of us who grope and strain for something much, much better than this shit we’ve got. Compared to that repressed, collective inferno roiling with superheated hope and indignation that we feel every single day, all the come-look-see-shock-and-awe displays of boom and inflammatory “power” taken together — no matter how dire or disturbing or damaging — amount to little more than smoldering fits and sputters, vain attempts to manipulate spectacle by incompetents who can’t manage their own souls but need props and recognition to assure them that they matter, or even that they exist.

If elitist power were so genuinely formidable, why would its deliberate, incessant exhibitions be necessary? Those who get us to pull the levers of ornate contraptions that they profit from and claim to own but haven’t the slightest clue how to operate — what would they do without their ceremonies and pageants and monuments and grand edifices of awe-inspiring architecture and engineering prowess and strange costumes and bizarre accouterments and ostentatious opulence and charismatic masks — every one an eye-catching marvel that might connote power and greatness to juvenile minds, but should not signify it to us who can pull back the curtains and expose the little psychopathic dweebs hiding behind it all? Stripped naked but for their Emperor’s new clothes and exposed to everyone as the humanity-challenged, inept, twisted bastards they truly are, what would they do without their imposing, intimidating facades that convey illusions of superiority precisely because there is no substance to it? And what will we do about it? When we have our answers to those questions, we’ll have our solution to the problems we face, which really are a single problem: our faith in and commitment to the inevitability of our exploitation — a foul, false faith and a cruel, castrating commitment.

You know how deeply important your hopes and yearning for a better life in a better world are to you. Don’t presume that you’re so different. They’re that important, maybe more so, for many, many others. We don’t lack depths or heights of aspiration. We don’t lack numbers. We lack vision, and we lack credibility in our own eyes. But it really doesn’t take much to fix that.

Coming out

When people truly realize that they can, they start behaving like they will and, if faced with resistance, they figure out reasons why they should regardless. Without opposition, though, we don’t look for reasons beforehand — they come afterwards, just like they do in science, as results of experience rather than presupposition ahead of time. Instead, our desires are reason enough. Only challengers demand proof; but before we give proof, we should ask whether their challenges are valid.

What kind of person challenges our making the world a better place and what motivates them? Invariably, they are naysayers and skeptics protecting their stakes in the unjust status quo, which might otherwise make sense if the status quo were remotely what we wanted. In challenging us, they might pretend that they don’t want this shit, that it’s unavoidable, but their inexperienced, ignorant resistance betrays them. By precluding discovery of ways to change things, they prove that this shit is exactly what they want.

Before proving anything, we need to believe that trying to prove it is worth the risk and cost. That only takes a bit of faith — just a mustard seed’s worth along with a pair of huevos. And when it comes to something as profound as freedom from tyranny, let alone the potential survival of the planet and everything on it, what options do we think we have, and which ones would be safer and cheaper? How much more of the same old insane exploitation and oppression will we bear, hoping for different results to wondrously occur?

All you skeptics and cynics out there: what are your alternatives? Can you tell us even one? Of course you can’t. You can’t so much as imagine one. Your acumen amounts to: keep heads low; exploit the system; maximize your gains; and die as painlessly as possible. Prove me wrong. And if you do have better options, then tell us why you haven’t been proclaiming them from the housetops already.

Maybe you fear the loss of your property or status or safety. Are you really so blind? You lost them long ago, but apparently you remain clueless. Time won’t heal these wounds, because in no time we get wounded again, then again. When is enough enough and more intolerable — unless there is no such point for you and you can’t tell living apart from living dead? Denial is a terrible ally that abandons you the instant you see the fool it made of you; and procrastinating in hope that things will fix themselves won’t spare you from a single lash of the consequential whip. Almost everyone in Nazi concentration camps hoped that complying and persevering offered them a chance of surviving; but such hopes were futile for all but a few. Surviving isn’t living, and then you die anyway. Compliance is not the way to freedom, but the habit of slaves.

To release the immense, explosive power which we’ve already got in us, all we need is a little confidence in it, in ourselves, and in each other. Just a spark of trust. A match has no power to burn down the house, but it can start a blaze that will. Step into it if you can’t manage a leap. You’ll be surprised. It won’t take long until you can’t keep yourself from running. It’s addictive. Then the work we need to do will basically do itself, much like anything else we love doing does. Our problem won’t be, “How can we possibly…” do this or manage that — it will be, “OH SHIT! How do I hang on and ride this sucker?!!”

Come and get it

You want power? You want freedom? Seriously? It’s there for the taking — but not a taking from others, because they did not take it from you. Your faith in their stories and their bullshit power robbed you. You didn’t create the circumstances in which you now suffer — others did — but you believed them! That’s the problem. You take authoritarian power and actions and the circumstances they created, along with the stories they tell about your powerlessness and indignity and worthlessness, as if they were definitive. They are not. You accept them as authoritative, spurning your own power and right to narrate yourself and your own life. Changing your story does not require changing its circumstances, but rather a change of faith to start believing in yourself, your own actions, your own power, and your own story. You are their author and final editor. Not a single person can prevent you. You can think of scores of things you’re sure that you can’t do and can’t change and can’t reclaim — of course you can — but why are you stuck on them? You don’t need imagination or guts to acknowledge impotence and helplessness, sadly — especially not if they serve as cover for timidity or cowardice. The obviously impossible in no way erases the obviously possible. Get your eye on the ball and start doing you can.

And in fact there are tangible things you can reclaim right now — no authoritarian permission necessary. You’re not reclaiming what belongs to others or conning them into giving it to you. Reclaim what’s yours from whichever altar you laid it on. Pick your dignity, your integrity, your resolve, your self-esteem, and your beauty back up. Pick your identity back up, and your right to decide who you are and what you will be. Stop looking for someone to grant them or return them to you, duly blessed and sanctified by whichever sacrificial nonsense they used to convince you to give up your soul. No one else can work your hands for you. Your mind, heart, and body are yours, your person is yours — you are yours and always have been. You merely believed lies to the contrary. You don’t belong to anyone except the Earth or the Universe itself, or if it’s your bent, its Creator. It’s the same either way: Stop bowing to usurpers, eradicate every middleman, get your mind right, and start.

Reclaim what you can, as paltry or pitiful as it might seem, and go on from there; because then the view will look differently — more possible, not less, with yet more that you then can reclaim from the vantage where you then stand. If you don’t take a step and move, doing what you can instead of cowering, incapacitated under the weight of the many, many things you can’t, you’re as good as stuck and, eventually, as good as dead. If you can’t pick back up the little bit of your integrity lying in front of you, in whatever small, fragile form that takes, then you’re fucked. But it’s not true — it’s a lie. You’re not fucked and you can pick it back up. Stop waffling and do it. You won’t die, not at this point. And by the time you actually might face real danger, loss, or death, you’ll be ready. You’ll sneer at them.

We lost what we had because we let others steal what wasn’t theirs. For whatever reasons — and they were probably formidable — we laid it down and let them do what they wanted with us. But we don’t need to become like them in order to take back what already is and always was ours. All we need to do is stop pretending, stop denying, no permission necessary, no apology remotely relevant. Nothing has a real hope of stopping us unless we give in again to posturing and bluster and maybe even, yes, some blows. We’re worth more than that, and in fact we’re stronger than that. Besides, we have help. We have each other, the whole Earth, and the truth itself in solidarity with us, offering us avenues and watching our backs. You’ll see once you get going, but the first step is yours to take.

Just one problem

The only remaining problem we need to solve (besides regaining confidence in ourselves and each other) is a minuscule gaggle of nitwits who freaked themselves into lashing out like asshole hoarders under attack, as if they were something special and coveted, and as if everyone wants what they have and wants to be like them: pretended winners against self-stacked odds; overcoming calamities born of their own folly and demons of their own sorcery and enemies who would have been their friends but for their abuses; offending and defending in a sick game invented by and for their own fear-enfevered, demented, hysterical minds.

What a fucking riot.

They fervently wish and hope for star-class adulation, alright, enough to violate and extract it out of us — but no. It’s a farce. They aren’t under attack, except from each other. They’re really not special at all, not nearly. We don’t want what’s theirs, which actually amounts to relatively little, even considering their clownish, embarrassing exhibitionism of so-called wealth. Desperate to awe us with prowess and achievements enabled by fabled caches, they are no more than accolade junkies, every one. And their elitist entitlement is revolting. Who wants to be like that or like them? I’d ask if they were kidding, but I know their delusions are real enough. They take their paranoid outlooks quite seriously; but we don’t need to.

Without us to reinforce it, their own worth isn’t credible to them. We give dignity and credibility to those who have none without us. They utterly depend on us. The power in this arrangement is ours. We’re better and smarter than their abject narcissism. We’re better than they are, so why do we let them call the shots?

We don’t need to overrule them to free ourselves, because our freedom and identity don’t depend on them, their recognition, or their approval. We want everyone to share and have a share and for no one to go without, not even the morons who fucked it all up. We only want what every five-year-old already understands (unless their parents are elitist assholes). And five-year-olds know one thing better than the lot of us, because they still believe that a caring, fair world is possible — at least until brutes beat that knowledge out of them. That’s got to stop, and we need to stop it.

It’s time to reclaim the wisdom and faith we once had in life, in ourselves, and in each other. Stop swallowing and wallowing in survivalist, everyone-is-out-to-take-and-get-us bullshit, and let’s start writing the story of us together. I have no doubt that we’ll come up with a far better tale… and a far better world. Why? Because it’s what we want. That’s all the reason we need.

Read the ReLOVEution Manifesto at:
https://reloveutionnow.wordpress.com/reloveution-manifesto/

Support the movement at ReLOVEution’s Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/ReLOVEution

If you missed the ReLOVEution announcement please check it out at:
https://millardjmelnyk.wordpress.com/2015/03/07/reloveution/

Check out our blog, ReLOVEution NOW!, at:
https://reloveutionnow.wordpress.com/revloveution-now-blog/

And check out our web site ReLOVEution.org: http://reloveution.org.

We’re on Facebook, too, for discussion, brainstorming, and experimentation, ReLOVEution NOW!. Check it out and join in!

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