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Title: Escaping the Matrix: How We the People can change the world
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Manufacturer: The Cyberjournal Project
List Price: $15.95
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| Escaping the Matrix: How We the People can change the world by The Cyberjournal Project Perhaps the Most Revolutionary and Liberating Book Going Into 2008 | This book has jumped to the top of the transpartisan list. Together with All Rise and several of the other books on that list, it is an actionable practical formula for restoring the Republic and then spreading participatory democracy and moral capitalism--communal localized capitalism--to the rest of the world in a non-violent information-driven manner.
The "matrix" is the virtual unreality that governments and their corporately-owned media have manufactured to distract, imprison, enslave, and manipulate the majority of the public into dropping out of politics and failing to exercise their right to think, debate, vote, and oversee their representatives. I completely agree with Ron Paul when he says we need to dismantle this insolvent corrupt mess of a government, and reconfigure ourselves back to a Republic of, by, and for We the People.
Key themes in this world interconnectedness instead of separation; community sovereignty instead of federal sovereignty, distributed economics (no absentee landlords) instead of concentrated wealth, transformation and harmonization instead of adversarial, common sense judgments instead of special interest judgments, and finally, the reconstruction of social will to completely overpower, in a non-violent manner, the class war and globalized predatory looting of the commons that the central bankers have wrought on the planet.
This non-violent social transformation, according to the author, includes local empowerment, human liberation, participatory democracy, sensible economics, and cooperation on a global scale for mutual benefit of all.
The elite is fighting back, repressing dissent, even fully-funded logical dissent. ABC is deleting Ron Paul, who is winning his debates, and this is all I need to believe that we are winning. The revolution will not be televised, as Joe Trippi's book explains to well.
This is a transpartisan author who is quite correct when he says that history shows that we have a false manufactured reality being screened everyday, which is completely different from the real world. He also understands (see my list on Natural Capitalism) that predatory imperialism has deliberately kept the Third World poor and genocidal, with the explicit intent of looting their natural resources and getting as many of them as possible to die off--eugenics.
This author provides one of the finest summaries of how predatory capitalism has disenfranchised population, suborned governments, and "exploded the client" as Michael Lewis tells us in more detail in "Liar's Poker" and more recently, John Perkins' "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man."
He reviews the transition for competitive imperialism to collective imperialism, and has some very elegant detail on how the central banks have managed a succession of global "bait and switch," successively destroying, at great profit, the gold standard, the petrodollar standard, and now the United States of America. The banks, he tells us, are "the house" and profit regardless of the misfortunes of others, indeed, because of the manufactured misfortunes, wars, stolen aid, botched humanitarian assistance, and so on.
He has two revelations in this book that for me, at least, are explosive. First, that FDR approved eight covert actions against the Japanese with the intent of forcing them to commit the first overt act of war against the US. Second, that Viet-Nam was a known "no-win" war with a known ten-year trajectory and a known 50,000 projected dead. It was used to militarize the US on a grander scale, while enriching a handful of banks and corporations, all as the expense of the individual tax-payer.
He offers fascinating perspectives of how WWI and WWII were deliberately started (I have read other books in this vein, I believe the author's analysis to be on target), and he accuses Henry Kissinger, a known war criminal, of being the cause of the Middle East problems in his constant mis-representation and manipulation of the views of different parties for whom he was supposed to be an honest broker.
Banking, Oil, Covert Action, and Overt Intervention are the four pillars of what Derek Leebaert called "The Fifty Year Wound" and Chalmers Johnson, "Sorrows of Empire."
He tells us that in the 1970's the US elites concluded that managing consensus democracy was annoyingly complex, so they began moving toward police state capabilities with the use of big lies, among which I include 9-11, never investigated honorably. I believe that Dick Cheney, Rudy Giuliani and Larry Silverstein should be indicted, arrested, investigated, and interrogated with the same techniques they approved for use on others. Drugs and especially marijuana have been used to create a prison complex while the US Government has deliberately, as a covert action, imported drugs into the US for profit, using the drug czar to control the criminal competition. I am told that Ollie North personally supervised the loading of cocaine on to U.S. Navy vessels in Colombia, and this one of many leads I would like to see brought before a Grand Jury.
He tells us that the core elements of the elite plan are five: US-UK control of oil; neoliberal economics; WTO/IMF as economic assassins; police state powers; and the Pentagon as a big stick; on which see General Smedley Butler, "War is a Racket."
Key point by the author: culture (and social will) are the missing ingredient for activating the bottom-up Epoch B collective leadership and will of We the People.
He says that reform must be all or nothing. I agree. He says that representative democracy is an adversarial system that must be replaced by a fully participatory bottom-up collaborative system. Adversaries take their differences as a given, collaborators take them as a starting point for dialog.
He is at one with the author of "All Rise" and with Reuniting America's transpartisanship vision of dignity for all, and inclusion of all. An opinion can be debated but a person is always valid and not to be denied or excluded.
We can do this. He concludes with the best annotated bibliography I have seen, as relevant to our challenge in 2008.
All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (Bk Currents)
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street
Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything
War Is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America's Most Decorated General, Two Other Anti=Interventionist Tracts, and Photographs from the Horror of It | | Escaping the Matrix: How We the People can change the world by The Cyberjournal Project Solutions | Everywhere we hear the gripes of society and the human condition. Many can outline the ill's of today - that's easy. It takes much more fore thought and shear bravery to actually explore and propose solutions.
| | Escaping the Matrix: How We the People can change the world by The Cyberjournal Project Great Vision/Great Solutions | Richard Moore's succinct analysis of history lifts the veil from our eyes to clear a path for social change. Similar to David Korten's perspective expressed in "The Great Turning", but spiced up with droll, pointed humorous remarks, he challenges the reader to "escape" from a worldview designed to enslave the average person into compliance with a facade of freedom and democracy that ultimately serves only a tiny, elite "ruling class".
He then walks the reader through his solution, empowered self-goverance beginning with direct relationships, with good descriptions of proven and effective dialogue and decison processes that build social capacity at the local grassroots level, which he refers to as "harmonization".
Excellent resource information is provided for those interested in assuming personal responsibilty for creating community that truly is of the people, for the people, and by the people. | | Escaping the Matrix: How We the People can change the world by The Cyberjournal Project Sweet dreams... | | A nice light review of human history followed by the cure for modernity: love-ins followed by dispossesion of the rich and landed- which they will not mind because they will finally see the countless sufferers as "people" thanks to said love-ins... this is all nice for a society in collapse...like the workers actions in bankrupt argentina to keep business running... but here(US) we have affluence, and peoples common worry is, can I get a bigger TV, house, or [...]... so yes, when the anihilation of our way of life comes maybe there will be room for some change (;-)) But I bet on science to change our context at this point- it seems the one force that has no trouble flipping our cultures on end. I found this book really depressing in its glossing over of inevitable violence and flakiness... you think people will respond later who don't now? why? -addendum- i note people do not find these comments "useful"- i like rkm- but this book only has one great line- so sorry if you think it is the answer, but i think "Our word is our weapon" or some of m. bookshin's books like "remaking society" are more clear and well reasoned. I welcome and forment revolution daily but this book is just limp hippified red fascism that would lead to a class war to finnish us all. The truth is, as obvious as class is, it is an illusion. There is no class, just people, no people, just life. This book comes from a hopeful heart, and i agree with sixty percent of it, but it is a road to deathcamps for one side or the "other". Sorry if y'all still resent my comments, I read this book with great eagerness, but I will not deny my dissapointment just for "solidarity"....i mean, if you tried to take my land or assets i would kill... the change is not to make everyone commie poor, the goal is to make everyone rich gods with no environmental impact. like it or not you can not stop this train, you must lay new track ahead and guide the train onto it. For me this involves meditation, philosophy, and (Lord save us) nanotechnology. I hope we can all move to a higher level together, as collaborators. rkm-really work on the rewrite for the next edittion. | | Escaping the Matrix: How We the People can change the world by The Cyberjournal Project Finding how the pieces fit | I have a small basket of the most valuable tools and books that I refer back to and share with others who are looking to fit the pieces of the puzzle together. Escaping The Matrix is my newest addition, for which I am most grateful to the author Richard Moore.
Once I read the first page and sensed the pace wasn't slowing, I drank it down in big gulps. I was delighted by the clarity and rapid fire presentation of information, and his linking of the pieces to make the point - that we live in a world quite different from the one suggested to us by the corporate dominated media machine.
I can't praise highly enough, the synthesis of knowledge about the development of our human history and what we can now reasonably assume (based on present wisdom, research, and widely accepted facts) is the real world. That our society is being manipulated and managed by a few elite rulers is a hard pill to swallow when we are deeply embedded in the Matrix view, but we are stepped through the facts until it's obviousness is undeniable. The bibliography and list of resources at the back of the book, offers a plethora of excellent material to help you if you doubt this proposition. And understanding it is a helpful pre-requisite to the second half of the book which deals with some possible responses and discusses how we might become part of the solution - now that the problem is overwhelmingly clear.
If not as thrilling and liberating as peeling away the layers of illusion about the situation we are presently in, the second part has prompted me to go and search out more information, and some of what I have found excites me. In these latter chapters, Richard describes processes and tools, and proceeds to offer ideas about how these might be engaged to transform our society, from the grass roots on up. He paints a picture of a time when large numbers of people might come to that most valued, harmonious and hopeful disposition of "we the people."
While offering a few examples to whet our appetite, perhaps the examples we so desperately need are the ones that will be demonstrated by us. | | Escaping the Matrix: How We the People can change the world by The Cyberjournal Project Product Description | | Richard Moore has distilled decades of participatory thought and dialog into a delightfully readable volume by exploring a compelling metaphor: The Matrix is our present manufactured reality, carefully managed for the benefit of elite interests and rarely questioned by those who live within its structures. Escaping the Matrix catalogs the persistent historical patterns of 'civilized' hierarchy that keep wealthy elites in control of governments and economies. But Moore does not simply tally historical injustices or enumerate the many discrepancies between Matrix and real-world realities. Instead, he challenges us all to action by courageously linking the apparently bleak situation of a dominated world directly to a hopeful vision for achieving new sustainable societies. He urges us to bridge artificially divisive ideological boundaries through a process of community-centered dialog known as harmonization. Escaping the Matrix contains worldview-altering insights and profoundly optimistic conclusions that will leave readers of every political persuasion with real hope that there are practical ways for ordinary individuals to escape The Matrix by taking personal responsibility for changing the world through local action. |
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