Radical Change Presupposes Radical Will
Discussion
Gene Youngblood:
"The ecological holocaust and the crisis of democracy are radical systemic breakdowns that demand radical response — transformation at the root. This is recognized around the world. Unless you live exclusively in the broadcast, you hear everywhere today the call for fundamental change, for transformation at the root. That’s what radical means — from the Latin radix, root. And that’s all it means. It doesn’t mean extreme. Of course it has to be equated with extremism for social control. The last thing they want is people looking at root causes.
Radical change requires radical will — the will to transform the root — and the institutions that defeated democracy and created the planetary holocaust don’t have radical will. They have only political will. Political will wants to maintain the status quo; radical will wants to transform it. Governments and corporations are incapable of radical will. They have no power to transform the root of their own existence.
Only the people can do that. Radical will belongs only to the people. And we’d better be ready to mobilize it, because fundamental change is never achieved democratically. It’s accomplished only by force — the general strike, the tax revolt — including violent force or the credible threat of it. The bloody history of organized labor is the standard example. It’s the truism that freedom isn’t free; that liberties aren’t given, they’re taken; that rights aren’t granted, they’re won.
We know it couldn’t be otherwise. The billionaire class isn’t about to give up its wealth and power to become equal to everybody else just because the Great Beast says they should. Power concedes nothing without demand, and not even then. They prefer death to compromise; they’ll darken the skies before they yield to democracy. As the economist John Kenneth Galbraith put it: “People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.”[18]
So we the people of the audience-nation face a challenge for which nothing in past experience has prepared us. We’ve known that for decades, so one might reasonably ask: are we really the ones we’ve been waiting for? Do we possess the radical will that can come only from us? There’s not much evidence of it. America is one of the most depoliticized nations in the industrial world. We live in the land of look away. T. S. Eliot said the world ends not with a bang but a whimper. If only it would be so dramatic. Given the level of distraction in America, it’s more likely the last instant of history will go by unnoticed.[19]
So it turns out that the ecosocial crisis is first and foremost a crisis of will and idea, a crisis of confidence and imagination — the expected result of our socialization in the broadcast. Which means creating on the same scale as we can destroy begins with recreating ourselves — resocializing ourselves to become the kind of people who would be capable of mobilizing radical will on the scale that’s needed. How do we do that? How do we awaken the radical will that sleeps within us? The answer to this immemorial question is found in what I call “the utopian myth of a communication revolution.” Before I explain it, we need to understand a few things about utopia." (http://www.secessionfromthebroadcast.org/blog/2013/10/29/secession-broadcast-internet-crisis-social-control/)