Guiding Lights In A Collapsing World
Who are some of the guiding lights in terms of what must be done? I would suggest Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Emerson, Thoreau, Bookchin, Kropotkin, Chomsky, Rudolph Rocker, Vandana Shiva, EF Schumacher, Elinor Ostrom, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Max Weber, Erich Fromm, Alan Watts, Allan Wallace, Joseph Campbell, Einstein, Bohm, Socrates, Spinoza, Dickens, Blake, Anthony J. Hall, John McMurtry, David Suzuki, Maude Barlow, Joel Bakan, John Pilger, John Perkins, Michel Chossudovsky, Ronald Wright, Winona LaDuke, Vine Deloria Jr., Richard Heinberg, Michael Hudson, Ellen Brown, David C. Korten, Joanna Macy, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Daly and Cobb, Montaigne, Etienne de La Boite, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, (in no particular order) are among them. And I would also humbly offer my own essays and books, as a summary and a synthesis of the best.
Remember, no one person has all the answers. Even the most brilliant thinkers are not omniscient, and are not infallible. Above all, think for yourself! Question everything. And try not to be too dogmatic. We either unite the people now, or we die slowly.
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What is needed now, is the building of alliances, based in shared power, rather than command and control, top-down, pyramidal, centralized and hierarchical power structures. That means federations must be chosen over our present norm of hyper-concentration of power, and decentralization over excessive centralization. This must apply to politics, and more importantly, also to economics.
If the people of Texas want conservative libertarianism, the people of Vermont want democratic socialism, Massachusetts wants liberal democracy, FDR-style (hopefully with some sensible anti-trust legislation, and serious checks and balances, and limits, not only on concentrations of political power, but equally critically, on great concentrations of wealth and economic power), Washington state and Wisconsin want libertarian socialism; and other states, provinces, nations, or blocks of nations, want one of these four alternatives, or something different altogether, why should that frighten us? The more diverse and more numerous our experiments in living, and in organizing human society, the better chances we have of the survival of our species. Moreover, with many different modes and models for organizing society, we can more quickly learn from each other, and adopt the elements that work, and jettison those that do not.
It is unity in diversity which will give us the best chances of a better world, and a viable future; not uniformity and a monocrop of the mind. Gathering all power in Davos and Beijing, which is the current trend, and current agenda, will only result in tyranny, dystopia, and inevitable collapse.
Unite the people now. But do not fear diversity. It is, along with a unity of common cause, our greatest strength.
Our common cause is simple and direct: we must dethrone the oligarchs, both East and West. From there, once we have accomplished that most urgent and critical task, we can debate and discuss all other issues, ’till our hearts are content.
Unite the people now. Reclaim your power. It is not too late; but the hour is at hand, and is here. We either stand now, together, or die slowly, in a dystopia of our worst imaginings.
J. Todd Ring,
March 30, 2021
Writings of J. Todd Ring 
April 2, 2021 at 1:05 am
There are also many other excellent sources out there. I mentioned only a few above.
One of the best summary analyses yet of the major patterns unfolding now, along with the speeches and interviews by Rocco Galati, and the articles and videos by the American Herald Tribune, Global Research, Whitney Webb, James Corbett, GreenMedInfo and Sayer Ji, is this short, and very witty video, below.
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April 2, 2021 at 3:01 am
You do not have to search far away in space or time to find good, sensible advice, and depth. Sometimes, it is very close at hand. The best is to look within. That is as close as it can get. But there are other voices of good sense, also close at hand, though our current “culture”, with its obsession with only the very latest of “news” (and new gadgets, more importantly), which thinks that anything more than two weeks old is ancient and irrelevant, and its equally great obsession with the merely superficial, cannot typically see them; but for that matter, it can’t see the nose on its face, or the ground beneath its feet, either. It is a blind man stumbling in the dark, being led into a slaughter house, and believing it to be an amusement park – a delusion which his handlers are careful not disoblige him of.
We could take good counsel from Jefferson, Paine, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, TS Eliot, Einstein, Chomsky, or Martin Luther King Jr., to name just a few recent American figures, and from Shakespeare, Blake, Dickens, Wordsworth and Coleridge, to name just a few who are British, and Louis Joseph Papineau, my fifth great uncle on my paternal grandmother’s side, and Tommy Douglas, Margaret Atwood, Farley Mowat, Wade Davis, Ronald Wright and David Suzuki, to name only a few great Canadians. And the list goes on. We have only touched on three countries, and not remotely exhausted even them. There is a whole world out there, as well, with many fine and strong, lucid and sometimes wise voices, both from the present and the past. There are many voices of sanity near at hand, ultimately, and always. The question is, as always, do any have ears to hear? Some do. Do you?
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April 4, 2021 at 3:11 pm
“With regard to freedom of speech there are basically two positions: you defend it vigorously for views you hate, or you reject it and prefer Stalinist/fascist standards. It is unfortunate that it remains necessary to stress these simple truths.” – Noam Chomsky
“It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.” – Noam Chomsky
I think Chomsky is using the term intellectual in the broad sense: that is, people who choose to have a life of the mind, have a responsibility to seek the truth and to speak the truth. Ideally, that means all of us. But if someone is being paid to do intellectual work, or their vocation or life path is academic, scholarly or intellectual, or they are lawyers, doctors, journalists, writers or film-makers, priests or ministers, artists, actors, producers or directors, or are attending or teaching school, college or university, then I think it is true that they, public intellectuals in the broad sense, have an added responsibility to seek the truth and to speak the truth. I think of Oliver Stone, Joel Bakan, Michael Moore, Rocco Galati, Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn here, and people like Gerald Celente, James Corbett, Michel Chossudovsky, Anthony J. Hall, Paul Craig Roberts, Maude Barlow, David Suzuki, Vandana Shiva, Arundhati Roy, Jeremy Corbyn, Yanis Varoufakis, Russell Brand, Abbey Martin, Aaron Mate, Jimmy Dore and Matt Taibbi, and brave whistle-blowers and publishers like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, as prime examples of honourable, virtuous, truly noble integrity with intelligence and courage, and I tip my hat to them, and to others like them. But I think the important part to realize is that it is a responsibility of everyone in society, and especially in a democratic society, or a society that wants to be free or democratic, for all of the people, or as many of the people as possible, to actively seek the truth, and to speak the truth, to the best of our ability and understanding.
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