The praxis of deep and interconnected human liberal values, as opposed to (abused and abusive) “market liberal” values.

Large coercive political and economic institutions are anathema and must be held directly accountable for their irresponsibility, intentional obscurity and dishonesty. These decision makers have squandered much of their moral authority leaving us, the commons, with little hope that they will change egocentric trends; seriously address the issues of global warming and implementation of renewable energy sources without the distinctive dithering. They continue to betray the publics trust. Their deplorable actions implant the entropy that accelerates the deterioration of our societies and hinders every effort in preparation for a sustainable future. Incompetent leadership disrupts the process to achieve sustainability and self-sufficiency: the people in charge don’t take the appropriate action, because this would require a dramatic change of policies; instead, they intensify existing efforts, which usually only makes matters worse. Investments in the status quo on the part of corporations and governmental bureaucracies are preventing efforts that are advocated by everyone who is familiar with the facts of global warming and fossil fuel depletion. Meanwhile those with the will even to begin to change the system are excluded from the decision-making positions.

As we devolve into a set of autonomous regions, we can expect a chasm of economic and political order on a scale that will leave the unprepared in various modes of desperation for the basic elements necessary for the sustenance of healthful life. Government policies that are not owned by the people will not sustain themselves. We must make sure that we utilize our democratic rights of free vote to ensure that politicians adopt, and adhere to, a system of governance that has citizen primacy as its basic tenet and a political system that has checks and balances that give people the means to hold their politicians constantly accountable. Central governments, unwilling to relinquish their potency to control and manage, could resort to authoritarian rule servicing legalized thugs, police and military to indiscriminately incriminate, confiscate, expropriate, and incarcerate any person or groups who present challenge or opposition. Fear will become the principle instrument of domination.

This is why it is imperative that we, the commons, develop faculties of discernment for what is true, right and lasting; be on the alert, closely observant and sagaciously evaluate current trends and conditions; pay rapt attention to the deepening poverty and environmental ruin around us; commiserate for the victims of capitalism, industrialism and for those who feel a strong sense of loyalty to malevolent, morally reprehensible political and corporate elite; wake out of dangerous complacency and rise above the level of thinking and doing business as usual that has brought us to today’s state of the world. People everywhere must be vigilant and stand on guard against unconstitutional laws backed by the will of an entrenched government that has decided on a course of action and has at its disposal the significant resources of unwitting taxpayers. We need to muster the courageous to fight oppression, empathetically compel governments to adhere to the tenet that all humans are created equal and have natural and unalienable rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, security of the person and his private property, together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can.

We tend to forget how each and every one of us has a birthright of conscious awareness and freewill. Sustainability and self-sufficiency cannot be achieved until the modern individual musters courage to reconcile his cognitive dissonances, reclaim his birthright of conscious awareness, assert his free will and assume responsibility to question the assumptions of the operant societal worldview rather than just blindly living life in submissive accordance with dominant, out-dated norms and geriatric assumptions. Only then will the individual overcome his state of despondence, break out of societal paradigm paralysis and confront the current state of the real world and take control of the tyranny, fanaticism and ignorance that takes true knowledge away from people to keep them in darkness and subdued.

However the history of liberty is the history of resistance and limitation of governmental power. We must now choose to use our collective powers of free will to change the trends and course of history or suffer the results of disturbing tyranny, environmental and energy crises that could be in apocalyptic proportions. A resort to political atheism and acceptance of libertarian ideals may help to strengthen immunity to political bribery, propaganda and the methods employed by governments to shape thought. Truculence is particularly strong among the movements who urge the dispersing of political power and wealth, rather than further concentrating them; human rights organizations, who counter political repression, confront entrenched patterns of social inequity and injustice; environmentalists who understand the ecological impacts of global warming and fossil fuel resource depletion and are opposed to the increased rates of resource extraction and destruction of the Earth’s fragile ecosystems; preservationists of abstract knowledge and important skills who persist in acts of service that make them indispensable to the regional population and who seek peace, cooperation, equity, freedom and justice. These, and many others, are the advocacies whose views are radically different from that of the ruling elite; though prevail by their perseverance, moral example and persuasion. In their perseverance for democratic and economic freedom, rights and civil liberties in pursuit of self-sufficiency, they hold the moral high ground and may be marginalized and demonized by the ruling elite.

Divided, they are like so many gnats pestering the elite leviathan. To reduce vulnerability to political incentives and constraints, these movements will need to work together and present a united front. The interest and loyalty of multitudes will be their incentive and will increase their potency. But whether this mass dissatisfaction can be channeled into a dynamic movement depends on the underlying cause of it – global warming and dwindling oil supplies can be that cause!

They are “all calling for a fair, ambitious and binding climate change agreement in December 2009 in Copenhagen”

using the “open campaign” model:
http://tcktcktck.org/partners/why-tck/an-open-campaign

There should be multiplicity of methods because no single method is sure to work. The Transition approach is just one — good because it has viralized, but results are so very much not in yet; we all must act as we see fit.

There will be no paradigm shift. There will be no new society. There is no-one to blame.

Bradk: Other means have been used, in the past, to remove officials and leaders that were misguided.

True; the historical record doesn’t look great for that kind of action though.

(Read the BNP website — they are just itching for people to start thinking that way. It is their plan to wait until all the politicians look like self-serving idiots who have completely failed, then point out that they have had plans for dealing with peak oil all along. No more greedy bankers and no more separate class of politicos — let’s get back to traditional values, make do with less, be British again, and herd up everyone called ‘Naresh’ into convenient camps.)

It is entirely predictable, historically, that at such a moment as this vested interest will not allow direction change in the culture as a whole. Doesn’t matter how angry one gets. Read Joseph Tainter — or do what John Michael Greer, who looks wiser every day, always urges: read Oswald Spengler.

Hope doesn’t spring from this moment. What replaces this culture will be disorder and great difficulty. Not that local gains can’t be made! But international ones will not be; handwringing won’t help either.

I suspect that the Transition Town approach is the most likely to succeed. Until a “critical mass” of a majority of the population of a state is already involved in transition – political leaders are going to be on the side of bullies, thugs, gangs, organized labor unions, and organized crime. That is, they built their power base on the status quo. Radical change will redefine the “status quo” to something different. All organizations are designed to perpetuate themselves: Businesses; Governments; Criminal operations and organizations; and Grass roots movements.

Regardless of whether an organization or individual wants the best for themselves or for others, if they formed before today, their power base and their future will be threatened by transition.

The Transition Town concept isolates people with a common objective, even if not all have the same understanding what the means or how to achieve it. By excluding, as much as possible, those invested in resisting change, they reduce the chances that outside forces will interfere – catastrophically.

The meltdown at Copenhagen was foreordained. You cannot gather the heads of today’s states and not expect “business as usual” – petty politics, money laundering, putting image of their state and position ahead of substance. And that besides those few intent on ruling the world, because that was on the table, too.

My own feeling is mostly relief, about the lack of political success of COP15. The science presented was tainted – there were too many instances of claimed solidarity of findings, in the face of believable claims that noses were counted that faced pressure of loss of job, funding, or publication if they disagreed. This does *not* mean the science is invalid. But the rush to finger CO2 and methane as the only metrics that need corrected, and the political graft-magnet of “climate debt” were politically expedient, not necessarily rational engineering.

And I think we need some engineering answers, not just scientists and politicians. We need nothing less than to enable our world to avert economic and ecologic collapse. We don’t usually skip the engineering step between lab results and implementation. I think Transition Towns count as one form of social engineering experiment; as the results are compiled, refined, and the process “debugged”, I expect the hope to grow and resistance to diminish. It is the engineer that realizes, “Gads, we need to get a user manual together!” We shouldn’t be trying to skip that step.

We need the same old universal values, but turned upside down. True brotherhood will lead to justice by com-passion (understood as mutual passion), wich will inevitably lead to true freedom by love and respect.
I know I am not saying anything new, because it seems tho me from afar that the transition movement incarnates those inverted values that can eventually topple power from the bottom-up without a traditional revolution, but through a process of deep transformation: towards a post-capitalist society and the beginning of the new era of consciousness.

Please, let us expand somehow this transition to the rest of the world. Let´s generate the explosion (or the implosion?) Let us bring down the other cold war wall, the one that remains still standing and that is preventing us to move a bit backward in order to actually be able move forward.

What I am saying may sound like a dream, but we only have two options:

a) Wait for traditional politics to solve it (utopian and unlikely)

b) Let the transition towards deep transformation expand like a virus and eventually take hold of (ethical) power (eu-topian and probable).

I have been thinking about these issues for more than 3 years now and when I learned about transition two weeks ago, I sarted having hopes…

I think you missed the point, about “we must bear a collective responsibility for the collective failure to achieve what is necessary”.

I think the point was not to be proactive, to have not contributed to the ecological problems.

The point was to allowing the politicians failing to address the problems to remain in office. To not have removed those that “don’t get it”. In so-called democracies, with enough organization, money, determination, and coordination, supposedly any “bad” official can be removed. Other means have been used, in the past, to remove officials and leaders that were misguided.

At least, I read that part as meaning taking responsibility for the political climate and it’s agenda, and only indirectly about the climate issues.

(Typing this from a 54 degree room as it snows outside, because my furnace went out, similar to John above. Easier to get through than I would have thought.)

Along that line, ran out of bottled cooking-gas yesterday and decided to perfect the art of cooking over my log fire without the stew spilling over and putting it out! It was delicious. Just another little rehearsal for the future!

Cheers – John

What’s so wrong with it? Take this idea: “we must bear a collective responsibility for the collective failure to achieve what is necessary” Who is this WE? One half of the world population is not in this WE, the poor people of the world (in all countries) who earn virtually nothing, or really don’t consume anything. We are not all equally responsible for this mess we find ourselves in. Let’s state a basic fact: The rich and powerful are largely responsible for the mess we are in. The system was never designed by the people – it has been designed by the powerful to serve their interests. This is not a socialist thought, but basic to capitalist enterprise.

To blame consumers as being responsible, or as not exercising their power to change things, is a bit like blaming the victim. They maniupuate conditions favourable to their existence. Corporatations are not benign things, they exist to sell us stuff, to make us unhappy, to exploit others (places, species and people).

To think that the transition will be peaceful and can occur within the current system seems problematic. When the concerned protest, or present alternatives, the powerful, via their agents (eg the police in the article), ensure that the protest is not heard, or reported correctly, and is trampled on. This is the basic contradiction in the article: when the people do protest and make their voices hears, they get crushed – it happens all the time – remember Seattle (10 yrs ago).

When the transition upsets the status quo, will transition be tolerated by vested interests? Doubtful.

Copenhagen was never going to work. The system is full of vested interests, concentrated power and is fundamentally flawed and corrupted. Transition to a low energy society (transition) may be the only alternative. But we can’t ignore questions of power.