Academy of Ideas: How to escape from a sick society

Following is sage advice for us in the US, as we are sliding into totalitarianism at an accelerating pace by the day.

Just ignoring or denying our descent doesn't work. Neither does just moving to a different location, for the problem remains for those left behind and in no way prevents that same problem from coming to your new location. We also cannot comply with it, for that only feeds its destructive agenda. We instead must resist it with non-compliance and civil disobedience. We must recognize it and act quickly and fiercely before it is too late.

Additionally and simultaneously, we must also create a parallel society. It does though not grow out of a theoretical vision of systemic change but "from the aims of life and the authentic needs of real people." Such a society is a "decentralized and voluntary alternative." Its new structures "evolve from below and are put together in a fundamentally different way." Such an orientation is conducive to flow states and peak experiences as alternative foundations for society.

The above is very much like what I described in my essay "From capitalism to the collaborative commons." To continue with a top-down vision of systemic change just continues to operate in the totalitarian frame. The collaborative commons is such a parallel society that is

"growing organically via its peer to peer principles, changing the very ethos of what it means for a system to organize. It integrates hierarchy with heterarchy in a distributed, networked format that transcends capitalism's dominant hierarchical, top-down structure. This format is where organizational levels no longer evolve in a strictly linear fashion of an ever-increasing complexity of growth but via the evolution of a folded, meshed, ecological sustainability, akin to what I've come to call hier(an)archical synplexity."