ReLOVEution Manifesto

Sep 16, 2015 – updated Mar 21, 2023

This is a call to action in a very different kind of revolution.

Several months ago I announced ReLOVEution. You can read the announcement at:
https://millardjmelnyk.wordpress.com/2015/03/07/reloveution/.

Several weeks ago, I presented a four-step ReLOVEution plan that you can read at:
https://millardjmelnyk.wordpress.com/2015/07/14/reloveution-this-be-the-plan/.

More recently, we launched a group on Facebook for discussion, brainstorming, and experimentation, ReLOVEution NOW!. Check it out and join in!

Here, I provide a context and break down what I mean by ReLOVEution.

——————-

Contents

——————-

I have devoted my life — and my death if need be — to radically change this world for the better. It is my full-time pursuit and I’ve been at it from various angles all my life. I understand the skeptical, cynical arguments against such so-called idealism. They’ve become repetitive, stale, and transparent — frail superstitions, void of substance or merit. We need to suck it up, stand up, and move forward. It’s long past time we did.

In time, I’ll be able to summarize in a couple pages what amounts to an attempt to turn the foundations of our corrupt societies on their ears. For now, I’ll risk the length to give you as full an initial picture as I can. It’s well worth the read and I hope you’ll take the effort, because I’m inviting you to partner with us in this work. Find out how to get involved at ReLOVEution’s Patreon page https://www.patreon.com/ReLOVEution.

(… back to TOC)

Our predicament

Our beliefs and our societies are upside-down, inside-out, and ass-backwards. They’ve long been that way, but don’t need to be. Fixing them isn’t nearly enough, because they aren’t broken. They do just what they were designed to do — privilege the few on the backs of the many — exactly the opposite of what we want them to do. We need to reverse the situation, not just changing but reinventing it. First, though, we need to reverse the basic beliefs that created the situation, sustain it, and make it chronic. Otherwise, like every revolution to date has proven, we’ll just end up back where we started, with new bosses much like the old ones, or worse.

We haven’t changed the world yet, because we keep trying to do it without changing what we think about the world. In fact, we stubbornly avoid changing our minds, preferring instead to blame others for their behavior — and just look how far that’s gotten us! What others do is only part of the problem. How we see and understand them and their actions is a more important part, one that we can fix. Until we clear our heads of the lies distorting our vision, we literally can’t see clearly enough to know what we need to do, much less do it. Ignoring our false beliefs keeps us locked into cycles of defeatist or even abusive thinking, as we recoil from lash after unjust lash in violent cycles that reinforce our impotence and impress the force of the whips and the right of whipmasters to flog us, spinning us up like generators to produce the energy that keeps the “wheels of commerce” turning.

We need to get off that not-so-merry whipping-post-go-round, but we can’t look to the whipmasters for permission, approval, or help. We keep hoping to find an escape; so we search through mountains of voluminous narratives — religious, philosophical, scientific, political, economic, psychological — all claiming to be authoritative, all imposing necessities and obligations on us that ironically keep us clinging to the whipping post. Work harder, work longer, work smarter, cheat if you have to, or even become a whipmaster yourself. We rarely step back to wonder if we’re looking at the situation correctly, and we dare not indulge in the leisure required to take a step back. Of course not: We were trained not to, our living is threatened if we try, and conditions in fact make it almost impossible to do even if we’re pig-headed enough to try anyway. This is by design. Whipmasters or their flunkies authored the narratives and orchestrated the conditions to serve their agendas. They deny our competence to judge and our right to criticize — and we keep buying it and giving in.

If you can’t find the solutions you want using the way you’re looking for them, try looking for them differently. Trying out different perspectives is simple and doable. Instead of leaping to change problems as they initially appear, first change your view of the problems. Try different angles, different lights, different lenses, different assumptions, spending time to get familiar with the problem’s many facets before jumping in to solve just one of them. If all else fails, try out opposite views: Reverse your perspective. Turn it upside-down, inside-out, and backwards. It’s fun and the reversals aren’t permanent. You can go back to your same-old view, but you won’t be the same. You’ll be smarter.

As things are now, authoritarian narratives designed to undermine us and what we want have deeply instilled warped beliefs in us. These beliefs distort our perception. So, reversing our beliefs is imperative if we’re ever going to regain our dignity and get what we want, but we can’t reverse them while embedded in the very views that they corrupted. First change your vision, and after that change the things you see afresh. Instead of vainly hoping that changing our circumstances will solve problems that originate from intimidated perception, we need to get at the roots of the intimidation. When we realize the power we have and see the empty shell of fictional power the authorities only pretend to have, our vision will clear up enough to see how to solve our problems intelligently.

Having lived in cults of authority for so long, we can hardly imagine life outside them. Peddlers pushing all kinds of freedom propaganda spout empty promises of ways that lead out of our predicament into delights in heaven or delights on Earth. Everywhere you look, they hype proprietary heavenly and earthly wares in marketplaces they themselves rigged; but despite their superficial differences, they are quite the same. All of them, regardless of their offerings, are authoritarian. All of them compete for superiority and impose their rule in order to privilege themselves and their products. As authorities, they literally do nothing productive, which is precisely the point: Authority is the power to make others produce for you so that all you need do is say it and it happens. This is as close to authoritarian godlikeness as mortals can get; and it never turns out well, because it isn’t meant to turn out well except for those on top.

Regardless their professed ideologies, both religious and secular authoritarians are true believers in authoritarianism, fully committed to faith in authoritarian principles, authoritarian means, and authoritarian ends. This credulity and their reliance on us are their weaknesses, along with the damning failure they all share: Not one of them has delivered on the promises they used to motivate their vassals to do their bidding — not because they failed to deliver, but because they never intended to deliver.

Being as yet largely untried, ReLOVEution stands a better chance of at least getting us somewhere else than the authoritarian axle we’ve been wrapped going round and round and nowhere for ages. ReLOVEution isn’t just an assault on authoritarianism, but an abandonment of the fears that plague authoritarians: fears about survival, adversariality, scarcity, terror-inspiring calamity, worthlessness, meaninglessness, etc., which have dominated the lives of us all. We’re all authoriholics, but some of us are in recovery. Away from what literally amounts to paranoia rooted in the past, ReLOVEution turns us forward toward life, relationships, and societies that we co-envision, co-create, and navigate by intelligent heart rather than by dumbly following authorities and their dictates (laws and dogmas) that demand we submit and obey, or else.

Once we’ve become as deeply brainwashed as this — as authoritized as this — living by heart can seem foolhardy except in carefully controlled situations with the relatively few trustworthy people we still know. Thanks to authoritarian conditioning imposed on us at home, school, church, and which pervades society in general, that is how skeptical we’ve become of ourselves, of our own hearts, each other, our institutions and their leaders, and the world at large.

We’ve come to believe in the power of violation far more truly and deeply than the powers of love, goodness, and truth. This is why we blindly rely on authorities as our ultimate protectors instead of our love, goodness, and truth. Violation seems far more real and formidable, and our investment of time and energy to protect and defend ourselves against it proves how convinced we are of its might. Which one do we focus on first? Which do we teach our loved ones to pay first attention to? Do we first resort to the powers of love, goodness, and truth, or only after making sure we’re safe enough from violation to indulge in them — even by violating others to secure our safety? To which do we first look for confidence: the security of protection from violation or the powerful vulnerability of loving others, sharing goodness with them, and honestly speaking the truth?

Powerful vulnerability sounds like an oxymoron to most people, which only shows how little they know about it. What we take care of first shows what we believe in most, and violation looms largest by far for practically all of us. Our demand for preemptive defense against potential violation is the primary reason we justify authority as a necessity. The other justification — efficiency of organization — is a myth. Peer collaboration is far and away more effective and efficient than competition- and conflict-laden command-and-control systems.[1]

Without credible threats of violation, authority as we know it would be useless. So, presumed threat of violation is the basis for the presumed need for authority in societies we euphemistically and ironically call “civilized”. Compounding the irony, authorities confront violation by violating the violators. This is madness and it needs to be stopped and reversed. This is how far ReLOVEution will go.

We’re not sincere if we limit our love, goodness, and honesty to small enclaves, safely cloistered with people we still dare to trust, while we dread, tolerate and condone violations and violators outside all around us, as if we were powerless to step out and stand up to them. Content with our dubious and tenuous security, we instead let them rove and rage, publicly and secretly, relying on authorities and their enforcers to deal with the most egregious ones — that is, when authorities and enforcers don’t prove to be just as bad or worse. Shame on us. We’ve lost sense of ourselves, our dignity, our interconnectedness, and our innate, inalienable power.

Manipulating circumstances so that we’re sheltered from violation is not power. Submission to authority in order to secure its ultimately violent protection against violators is not security. Instead, these are declarations of bankruptcy and capitulation to the unjust whom we trust to “protect” us by violating the unjust whom we fear. So, the unjust are the real gods of this authoritarian world, warring, conniving, thieving and destroying just like mythical gods of old. Tyrants must extract obeisance and tribute from their resistant victims; but we in farces of mock “freedom” voluntarily submit to some lords of violence in vain hopes that they will defend us from others, (which in fact rarely happens,) and that otherwise the violence and destruction perpetrated by them all will pass us over.

Except now it’s too late. No place is left to hide where their violence and destruction can pass us over. The authoritarian shadow is enveloping the globe. Until we make the crazy, radical, ill-advised move to break out of our socialized mind prisons, life will only further serve to hem and lock us in. And, yes, violators and their destruction will continue to wreak havoc until they eventually enslave and destroy even us and ours, proving our faith in their might, just as we feared: manifest calamity born of private paranoia.

Regardless of lip service in support or protest, the unjust and the power of injustice are what we truly believe in, and our religion is authoritarianism.

We can do far better than that. We can deauthoritize. And then we can start to live again.

Most of us have no clue what a credible vision of a caring, supportive, ennobling society would look like. We can barely imagine one, let alone feel what it would be like to live in one. The best we’ve managed are little pockets of safety and mutual care stuck in corners of societies reeking with toxic authoritarian carcinogens and viruses, which inevitably seep to pollute and infect our formerly safe niches, transforming them into little cancerous cults determined to grow and spread like tumors, just as eventually happened to every movement that authoritarians didn’t interdict and eradicate. ReLOVEution will show us what caring, supportive, ennobling environments look and feel like, and how to reverse the contagion-from-without process to one of health pervading and overcoming from within.

(… back to TOC)

The goal

Ultimately, I want to realize heaven on earth, nothing less. I’m serious about doing this — not in some fantastic or mysterious way, but simply by aligning our beliefs with real experience so that we achieve what we want instead of the opposite. When you don’t like the results, then try something different. If you hate the results, then try something wildly different. If you can hardly imagine worse results, then try the reverse. We don’t need the exotic or miraculous, just clear thinking based on facts instead of hand-me-down fictions and piles of bullshit, along with enough daring to try the insanely different instead of the insanely same-old, yet once more, again. Rational, reasonable, and manageable: ReLOVEution doesn’t need more than that.

ReLOVEution is the pivotal step towards experiencing the kind of life we aspire to here and now instead of hither and yon, one day over some magical or spiritual or technological rainbow. It’s about building on what we already have and already know, not pie-in-the-sky promises hanging by threads of hope for things we don’t yet have and can’t even fathom — but that supposedly magnanimous authorities or experts or gurus will offer for a price. And it’s not the Utopian dream that you might think it is. It’s not even a Utopian proposition, because Utopias are built on authoritarian principles, and authoritarianism is one of the main things that ReLOVEution reverses. Even revolutionaries and anarchists are authoritarians. The former struggle over the true or best form of authority to institute. The latter seek to sufficiently limit authority that they tolerate as a noxious inevitability or even as a marginally useful necessity. But both types remain pretty clueless about credible alternatives to authoritarianism, ones which rely on more powerful principles than authority. ReLOVEution will make those alternatives and principles clear and credible.

(… back to TOC)

ReLOVEution

Since it focuses on our basic beliefs — the ones we take for granted that lie underneath, molding the opinions, theories, ideologies, and dogmas we advocate, defend, and fight over — ReLOVEution can seem abstract and philosophical; but that’s just a disguise for its subversive nature. ReLOVEution will change our world not only by changing but by reversing basic beliefs we never wanted in the first place, precisely because they were forced on us to produce the opposite of what we want.

Although the wise have long told us that lasting change happens inwardly first, expressed outwardly afterwards, the mess we see all around shows how deeply resistant we’ve been to that priority, preoccupied instead with manipulating things — conditions, people as objects, situations, and events — while we neglect and avoid the inner transformations we sorely need. Before we can intelligently revolutionize our circumstances, we must first revolutionize our intelligence. We must first turn our minds around in order to see straight enough to turn our ship around.

Reversing beliefs isn’t new, but reversing our really basic ones is. The insistence that beliefs don’t just need to be changed but reversed is quite new. The priority of starting with inner reversals that naturally and inevitably result in rational, quantifiable, concrete change is new. The recognition that underlying violence against our dignity, worth, integrity, and beauty necessitates basic belief reversal is new. And the depths to which ReLOVEution takes the reversals are new.

I wanted a term for deep, inner reversal that communicates its radical nature without implying violence. That’s why I repurposed ReLOVEution. It’s been circulating for awhile, but it needs work. The concept itself is actually an ancient one so powerful that rulers in every age diligently worked to obscure and bastardize it. Repentance, transformation, sanctification, enlightenment, surrender, awakening, overcoming, and other terms have been used to approximate it, but were soon corrupted by authoritarian redefinitions. Many people over the last couple of decades have been touting a “consciousness shift”, but it continues to be something felt and anticipated rather than substantially described and clearly understood. ReLOVEution will rectify that.

ReLOVEution is not a matter of turning our wills around or forcing ourselves to think, believe, or behave differently. We cannot simply will ourselves to be different, nor can we will ourselves to want (desire) differently. Neither is ReLOVEution a matter of taking sides in a grand struggle between good and evil, much less switching our allegiance from evil to good — as if any of us in our heart of hearts ever wanted to side with evil and needs a change of heart to turn away from it.

Authorities ranting about all kinds of supposed evils devised systems to purportedly protect us from those evils — corrupt systems which actually inflict and reinforce the problems they are falsely advertised to solve. Being our only authorized options, we find our very survival threatened unless we participate in them, compromising our integrity and demeaning ourselves, enabling authorities to extort us while blaming the failures of their own systems on us. Supposedly, we’re too stupid, lazy, stubborn, weak, insincere, malicious, degenerate, “fallen”, corrupt, etc., to make the systems work properly. If not for us and our deficiencies, their systems would work flawlessly and everything would be peachy! Having lied and convinced us that we are the problem, they present themselves as saviors holding keys to privileged or secret knowledge, promising to rescue us from our damaged “natures” — for a price.

Yeah, right. What a noxious crock of hooey. Still, the formula has undergone countless variations and stood the test of thousands of years and billions of victims, because our forebears allowed it to stand and we perpetuate the idiocy, our basic beliefs ensuring it. I’m not going to let that rot continue. I hope you won’t either.

As opposed to forcing ourselves or forcibly reversing problematic situations and people, which again is the authoritarian method, ReLOVEution’s key step — reverse our perception of the problem — is easy, cheap, and relatively risk-free. Exploring new, reversed views and deciding how we like the results of seeing things in radically new ways, no commitment implied, are parts of a rational, self-regulating process. Regardless what we decide about its results, engaging in the process necessarily alters our desires and beliefs according to what we experience instead of what we were told to believe. That’s our way out of the bullshit and off the whipping-post-go-round.

No wonder those who live to tell us what to do didn’t teach us about this, because it involves subordinating the stories they gave us to believe to the realities we experience, enabling us to distinguish their facts from their fictions as we think for ourselves, skeptical of authority instead of credulous toward it. It’s that simple, but its power is betrayed by how thoroughly authoritarians conditioned us to scorn it, how staunchly they denounce it, and how instinctively bent we are against giving it a try — almost as if merely looking through another set of eyes and pretending they’re our own were the first step toward losing our minds, our identities, or even our souls.

ReLOVEution is not about taking on hysteria and delusion, but escaping the authoritarian brainwashing that induced them. Of course, sanity can easily look like hysteria and delusion to the brainwashed before they get their minds right, much like a straight line can look twisted to the cross-eyed.

You might think, “That’s it? Merely consider other perspectives, experiment with them, and see what we think?” It doesn’t nearly seem adequate, does it? Well, unless you’ve tried it, how could you possibly know? The internal resistance you will feel when you try it should also clue you in. Experience trumps uninformed speculation, every time — even the formalized speculation we call theory. Theory began as personal experience and is nothing without the experiential support we call evidence, all of which came from personal experiences somewhere, sometime. We need to get experienced before jumping to conclusions about ReLOVEution.

Does this seem too subjective? Sorry, but that’s an authoritarian reaction. What could possibly be more subjective than the whims and piebald schemes of authorities? And why do you think that ritual figures in so prominently in authoritarian programs? From crossing oneself and genuflecting, to kneeling and bowing head to ground, to parroting pledges of patriotic loyalty in hand-over-heart unison, to thousands of other meaningless signs of rote — authoritarians force these on us to brainwash devotion into us and exact homage out of us precisely because subjective personal experience is so powerful. Why would we deny ourselves the power of subjective experience when they make such heavy use of it? Even cognitive biases, if we’re savvy about using them, can work for us rather than against us, inspiring confidence instead of fear, intimidation, and defeatism.

We have so many safe and powerful experimental methods at our disposal, but we were trained to avoid them as being the proper province of authorities and experts, to our own detriment. We’ve let ourselves get warded off from the very means of our escape and progress.

We measure social change in terms of decades and centuries rather than in months and years, not because we’re so very avid (sic) for progressive experimentation, but because we find the prospect of rapid, profound change terrifying, which is how authoritarians react to it and conditioned us to react. It wasn’t that way, though, before they abused fear of the new and foreign into us. There was a time when we found change exhilarating and the intensely potent and exotic evoked wonder in us, not dread. Many, many of us have forgotten those days.

ReLOVEution is, among other things, a revival of serious personal and collective exploration and experimentation with the very issues we were made to believe are unalterable and unavoidable and were warned to leave alone — folly we now reject but that we once accepted, like fools stuck under authoritarian swords of retribution hanging by hairs, hating our predicament, afraid to stay put but too scared to move.

Not only is taking the risk of experimenting with radical change worth it, it’s worth it even if you fail. I am proof that there is life after shattering personal upheaval and loss so profound that it destroyed my basic beliefs; and not just once, but several times over a five-decade span, each time knocking me flat on my metaphorical ass, forcing me back to square one. I recovered just fine and came back stronger. Phoenix does rise from the ashes, because only what can be burnt gets burnt: our illusions. I realized that I hadn’t repeatedly failed, but instead I’d stumbled onto a method for rapid, revolutionary, sustainable change. Compared to that, conducting rational, controlled, bite-sized, myth-busting reversals with each other’s help and support in a manageable, collaborative process will be a cinch, and fun to boot! Anyone can do this, and I can tell you: It’s incredibly powerful stuff. Far from plumbing its depths, we’ve hardly dipped through the surface.

(… back to TOC)

Strategy, objectives and method

I have a simple strategy: Focus our efforts on fronts where we have the greatest advantage and the least risk. We’re dealing with power-crazed, inhuman psychopaths bent on the destruction or enslavement of Earth and everything on it — and if that doesn’t sound like the power elitists you know of, you don’t know them very well. We’re also dealing with their minions: the otherwise normal people who behave like psychopaths as they play their authoritarian roles. So, ReLOVEution focuses on three fronts where the inhuman are absolute idiots and minions are forced to confront their own humanity: heart, trust, and credibility — the lack of which creates psychopathy, and the power of which overcomes authoritarianism, the psychopathy behind it, and its awful results.

We’ve been so brainwashed with authoritarian nonsense that those don’t even seem like “fronts” to us; and that’s good, because this is a stealth approach. Revolutionaries who see themselves going out in idealistic blazes of glory for the sake of the cause might be a bit disappointed, but they’ll live a bit longer, too; and they’ll find that radically changing their minds and living for the cause takes far more courage and grit than the single sacrificial step of dying for it. They’ll eventually get their chance to die, too: the best of both.

I have simple objectives. I want the fighting to stop. I want the killing to stop. I want the insanity to stop. I want everyone safe so they can pursue their desires and dreams without fear. I want the stronger to help and protect the weaker instead of taking advantage of them. If you think that’s idealistic, of course it is; but if by that you mean unrealistic, then I’m sorry and your cynicism makes me sad. I and others are proving that these objectives are quite realistic. I’ve dedicated all I am and all I have toward them. We’ve already made progress and there’s much more to come. We’ll at least give pseudo-realism a serious challenge, but I’m quite sure we’ll expose it as a farce.

My method is contrarian. Some even call it contentious. Others are welcome to bring tact, diplomacy, and compromise to the table — I’d love to have them and we need them. But with life as perverse as it is now, we don’t have much time for niceties and self-absorbed caution. My interest, though, isn’t in a road less traveled but in roads we’ve spurned. We’ve rejected them for reasons, and the reasons aren’t what we think. The quickest way to uncover what’s really going on is to go there and walk them.

It doesn’t take a huge leap to imagine that the poisoned stew of beliefs we’ve so long simmered in has made even the reasonable and rational seem perversely absurd to us. It would be incredible to think we’re not seriously tainted and warped, forget about pristine! So, the supposedly perverse, absurd, or even taboo should be great places to look for solutions that, clearly, we have not found yet. When life proves chronically perverse and absurd, incorrigible despite our best correctives — as indeed it so far seems to be — then we’re no doubt avoiding viable routes to effective solutions, as ironic as that would seem. As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what I’ve found.

Whether deliberately or unawares, we keep looking for solutions where they can’t be found, avoiding where they lay waiting for discovery, and then cynically, pompously conclude that none can be found anywhere. This explains the dismal results we see. We keep that up until people come along who are brazen enough to embrace new assumptions and explore new avenues, shrug off the warnings and doomsday predictions of naysayers and alarmists, and then they find the very solutions we claimed didn’t exist. Over and over again. It’s as if we stand in a metaphorical pharmacy chock full of remedies, but someone labeled them with dunce’s caps and skulls ‘n crossbones and locked them in rooms marked, “ONLY IDIOTS, FOOLS, AND THE DEAD GO HERE.” Afraid of ridicule, doom, or punishment, we cringe and refuse to take the “risk” to break in, crack a seal, twist a lid, and find out for ourselves.

People as intimidated as I was used to think that only idiots, fools, and the dead would ignore the risks, the warning signs, and the scary labels. Rarely did we question what right the label-makers and sign-posters had to prohibit and censure or whether they did it from wisdom or to fool us. At this point, though, little question remains. Now we know that idiots and fools being slowly ground to death take the scare tactics so seriously that they suffer year after decade after century without mustering the guts to find out whether the risks are real and the warnings are true or that it’s all just a bunch of deceptive crap.

Bullheads like me ignore the risks and warnings, walk into all kinds of forbidden storerooms, crack falsely labeled lids, find out that the remedies in fact work, so they realize that we were lied to deliberately and profoundly. We already know what the remedies are. They’re already familiar. They are already ours: heart, trust, and credibility. Authorities ward us off from them and induce stress, threat, and dread to shut them down precisely because they are in fact familiar, readily available, and effective. The fact that most of us have no clue how they relate to undermining authority and undoing its abuses shows how successfully the know-how has been suppressed. We’ll start realizing its relevance once we see that the risks are negligible, the warnings are bullshit, and we start experimenting. Then nothing will be left to stop us. Following the dictates of authorities and experts got us where we are now. It’s time to find our own ways out of the mess they dragged and drove us into.

(… back to TOC)

Three Stages

ReLOVEution isn’t a short task. I’ve been working on it in various forms for nearly a decade, committing myself to full time work on it in 2009, gelling the idea over the last year or so, and appropriating ReLOVEution as its moniker last spring. I’ve done the best proofs of concept I can on my own, and the results not only pass, they’re inspiring. Now I need help to go further.

The ReLOVEution plan I mentioned at the beginning is a pivotal part of a larger organic movement to collectively, collaboratively reinvent the basis of our lives together in cooperative, supportive relationships, communities, and societies, reversing the utter nonsense that authorities or experts will figure it out and set it up for us so that all we need to do is find our places and comply. ReLOVEution is profound DIY on both expansive and intimate scales, and we’d better tackle it if we don’t want thousands more years of authoritarian injustice as both its victims and accessories.

Reversing beliefs means to show how inane and absurd they are, creating a vacuum that makes their opposites credible enough to consider no matter how unlikely they might have seemed, and then to experiment intelligently with those opposites, assess results, and adopt what works. For many people, reversing beliefs turns out to be an intimidating prospect, an equal opportunity threatener for conservatives, liberals, progressives, and even self-styled radicals. So, I think we need to take it in stages.

First stage

Collectively do initial theoretical and experimental work to explain deauthoritized thinking and living, disseminating the work through grassroots communication. Being just talk about ideas and small-scale projects, this won’t be scary for those clinging to their preferred status quos, and it will avoid threatening authorities who, if they notice it at all, will see it as various shades of the frivolous and ridiculous. An open core of thinkers with a community of frontrunners doing lots of individual and small group R&D and experimentation, inviting everyone to get involved — thinking integrated with leading-edge practice in what Paulo Freire called praxis[2] — will develop and flesh the theory out. This will build a solid foundation for a defensible case with which to meet questions and objections even from experts, cutting the basis for authoritarianism right out from under its feet before authoritarians will realize what happened.

Work on this is already being done by a number of people and organizations independently. We need to coordinate with each other and integrate it — not to consolidate control, but to make it intelligible, cohesive, and then expand it. ReLOVEution is collaborative, inclusive, distributed, not centralized or hierarchical — a network of peers working together on a continually developing body of peer contributions. Think of Open Source and Open Science as analogs. This is where ReLOVEution starts: with the “Visualize” and “Expose” steps of the ReLOVEution plan.

We need to disseminate this work in clear, easily understood ways, synergistically building a popular understanding in tandem with a robust theoretical description, bringing together experts and laypeople who have for centuries been kept far separate. Traditional theoretical work, like academic and scientific research, has long been conducted by elite groups claiming proprietary rights over their results, leaving popularized information trailing far behind, often by decades. There are reasons for that, all of which have to do with creating a rift that fosters superiority, enabling centralized control of R&D processes and their results. ReLOVEution will obliterate that control, greatly to the eventual angst of authoritarians and the empowerment of the rest of us. Much work remains to be done in this stage.

Second stage

Judiciously and openly demonstrate that the theory works in real life practice: experiments, case studies, trials, creative exhibitions and demonstrations, with lots of conversations and what-iffing and personal experiences informing it all. Again, this is already happening independently on different fronts in many places in the common spirit of redignifying and empowering persons, reaffirming life and love for it, and counteracting authoritarian atrocities — but lacking the cohesion of a shared narrative. ReLOVEution provides that narrative. In this stage, the “Expose” step of the ReLOVEution plan will go viral and the “Subvert” step will kick in.

(Note: At this point we’re still talking subversion of credibility, not physical subversion of systems or control structures or the authorities running them. Subverting those will naturally result from mounting discreditation of the authoritarian basis they rest on and the authoritarian principles they operate under.)

Most people I talk with have grave reservations about taking serious action against authoritarianism, let alone anything as audacious as ReLOVEution. Even though they admit that they wish something could be done, it’s too daunting; and they worry about fallout and retaliation. Intelligently done proofs of concept will dispel most of those fears and inspire others to get involved and share their findings, beefing up the theory and practical results, making them more credible and less vulnerable to criticism, while amping the exposés and subversion until we hit a tipping point: the “Conversion” step of the ReLOVEution plan. This is when personal sovereignty — each one’s inalienable right to determine and affirm their own dignity, worth, integrity, and beauty — will reemerge conspicuously, correctly understood as the basis for all that we could call genuine authority, in stark dismissal of the inept farce of authority that has to preempt personal sovereignty just to be taken seriously.

This will reverse the situation we’re in now, where self-entitled pseudo-sovereigns (“pseudo-” since their false sovereignty is nothing without our compliance and support of it) dispense authority to elite groups and individuals, usually along familial or old boys’ club lines, but otherwise deny the sovereignty of the remaining vast majority of people. ReLOVEution doesn’t deny anyone sovereignty, but dissolves the bogus basis by which authorities deny sovereignty to all but a few.

Third stage

Having gathered critical mass, with the tipping point behind us and conversion going viral, openly challenge the credibility — the true basis of power — of our systems and institutions and the idiots who created and control them. This will be the first time we directly confront the unjust about the injustice they’ve inflicted on us, the Earth, and everything living on it; but it won’t be a physical attack on their persons, property, or the systems and institutions they control — it will be an open attack on their right to wield authority after having shown that authority itself is a fraud and their claim on it is a lie. This will be a battle we’ve already rigged to win.

We will have done our homework. We will have prepared the field. We will have cemented our commitment to each other through communication, a common vision created together, collaborative planning, and collective work. We will have demystified and rationalized the problem space, quantifying it and eliminating hysteria. We will have reframed the problems constructively in non-authoritarian terms. We will have discredited the authorities, their rationales, their agendas, their enterprises, and the false concept of authority they rest on. Through all this, we will no doubt develop with each other a solidarity more formidable than even we expected. We will have rigged the game against no one, but instead rigged it for everyone — even for authoritarians as people and peers, only not for their authoritarianism and their authoritarian roles.

The outcome

In spirit, mind, heart, in truth, and in demonstrated fact — in all ways except brute force and violence — we will have undermined every reasonable means of authoritarian navigation, support, and influence. At that juncture, force and violence on the part of authorities would only further expose the incompetence and bankruptcy of their inhumanity by proving that they have no humane resort, which will have been precisely our point all along. Then they, not we, will be damned if they do and damned if they don’t — a gratifying reversal, don’t you think?

From our perspective, though, it will be a win-win, because the double-bind we put authoritarians into will bring them squarely to face themselves: their first step toward freedom from the slavery they created, whose machinations turned on them enslaved them. As Freire also explained, the oppressed will become the means of liberating the oppressors from their own oppression, another remarkable reversal.[3] As soon as they get their heads screwed on straight, they’ll see it as a win-win, too.

At this point, we will have avoided physical conflict because we focused on the source of physical power instead of its methods and objects. Loss of credibility dematerializes power and control over people, resources, and systems. Discreditation doesn’t target authorities for a fight — it disintegrates the authority they need to mount a fight. Authorities will lose authority in the shambles of its transparent, debunked hoax.

No fight is needed when one side has lost the ability to put up a fight, having been made an ironically pathetic laughingstock. ReLOVEution secures psychological victory before a physical one. This is the key to lasting revolution. Few revolutionaries understood this — in fact most had the sequence backwards — and none of them fully tapped its potential; but ReLOVEutionaries will.

We can’t overcome authority by taking it seriously, because taking a patently incoherent and irrational notion seriously is a ludicrous response that only confirms and endorses it, obscuring its absurdity. Authority is a mockery of humanity and human dignity, an affront, not a position or privilege. We won’t need to resist it once we expose the bullshit and stupidity at its core. Then all the money and property and legalities and weapons and armed forces in the world won’t be enough to put the Lords Humpty back together again because, with their titles, rights, and claims disgraced as lunatic ravings, their commands will get denied and rejected.

Profound loss of credibility invokes the kind of abject humiliation that drives some types to commit suicide — especially those who live or die by reputations they built on admiration, celebrity, allegiance, and support from people they convinced to believe lies about them. In ReLOVEution’s most ironic reversal, authoritarianism exposed will overcome itself. That is how powerful ReLOVEution is. It’s why we, the formerly oppressed, will become our oppressors’ saviors; because we will invite them back into the human family as peers, not rulers — at least, those who can find their ways clear to accept our invitation. We won’t need to do much about the rest.

Finally, in an overarching reversal, the call to change our systems and institutions and our ways of managing them — bones of contention over which revolutionaries typically start their struggles — will arise as ReLOVEution’s inevitable results. We will have created irresistible demand for change, with idiots and idiocy giving way to life-affirming, life-supportive people and practices that reject theft-for-profit models and embrace share-for-benefit models.

So, reversing our circumstances will result from having thoroughly reversed our minds to rejoin our hearts. At that point we’ll have much better ideas about how to make optimal concrete changes, availing ourselves of an abundance of options rather than a crying lack, because ReLOVEution will greet innovations with eager reception and supportive trial instead of authoritarian gauntlets through which only a selected few supposedly profitable ideas survive. Instead of wondering, “What is the best we can hope for?” we’ll wonder, “How good is this going get, and how will we keep up with it?” A few years ago, anticipating just such an accelerating rate of change in my personal development, the thought occurred to me that it would resemble Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride and I’d better learn how to hang on. 😀

(… back to TOC)

Targeted Basic Beliefs

The basic beliefs we need to reverse include authoritarianism, skepticism/cynicism, survivalism/adversariality, and materialism/physicalism. That’s to start, in order of importance. I’ve focused on authoritarianism in this manifesto. I’ve done a fair amount of work on the others, too, with plenty more coming.

Underlying all of these beliefs is an assumption that our personal dignity and human worth are not real or genuine until we have demonstrated them. That’s a profoundly debasing and disempowering assumption — and it has no basis in fact, but rather is rooted in brainwashing. We were not taught to believe it as much as we were abusively conditioned into false certainty that nothing else is believable.

ReLOVEution reinstates personal dignity, worth, integrity, and beauty as incontrovertible givens — presumptions that need no demonstration or proof — just like our dignity and worth are presumed as given and defended by those who love us. Founding our understanding and our beliefs on that basis has profound, far-reaching, and amazing consequences. Convincing us of our fundamental indignity, worthlessness, rottenness, and ugliness is the key intention behind every aspect of authoritarianism and the other targeted basic beliefs, because authoritarians are thoroughly convinced of these things about themselves. Reversing their worthless-and-powerless-until-proven-otherwise premises back to presumptive affirmation of personal sovereignty is an example of what ReLOVEution counts as radical.

We have much wisdom available to us from old traditions, but there is no going back. We need to integrate old wisdom with new wisdom in new approaches that capitalize on our rapidly expanding knowledge and address the issues we face now. This requires both deconstructing unworkable beliefs and formulating not just new beliefs, but new ways of believing. Routinely improvising and changing beliefs must become a welcome norm, a means of discovery and play that keeps our thinking current and fresh in ongoing development, much like we do in the best of our sciences. Deliberate, intelligent, creative, collaborative co-authorship and co-management must replace old habits of procrastination that defer serious change as long as we can bear it, until we’re forced by threats, necessity, or preservation of sanity to choose off and fight the status quo, because some of us just can’t stand living with the results of entrenched, centuries-old dogmas anymore, and the rest can’t bear to part with them. Even the history of our academic disciplines reads like a long string of ideological conflict and conquest by revolutionaries who vanquished respective, then-current “old schools”. We need to halt chronic cycles of violence and domination, not only in society and geopolitics, but in our academics, our minds, and our personal and communal lives as well. We need reversal and reinvention — not revolution but ReLOVEution!

Merely destroying unworkable, corrosive beliefs would leave us without recourse. Reversing them — discarding the backward and inventing the new forward — gives us places to stand, things to work with, and work to do. R. Buckminster Fuller had it half right: We need new models that make the existing models obsolete. But that alone won’t stop promoters and defenders of existing models from destroying new ones, leaving the obsolete and dysfunctional as the last ones standing. That is the authoritarian way, and it has long been their history in fact. We need to tackle both sides of the problem of progress, not only reinventing thinking and living, but also eliminating unreasonable attack against new models by subverting the false foundations of attackers who would destroy the new and untried before anyone can give it a go.

(… back to TOC)

Initial Questions

In keeping with the oblique approach of ReLOVEution’s First Stage, I’ve been undermining basic beliefs by exploring some very old questions. Here’s an initial list with the basic beliefs they target. The philosophical abstractness of the questions keeps the subversion opaque and the perception reversal process covert. Even more than the answers we’ll find, the value of the exercise lies in the process of developing answers — a stealthy form of Socratic method that alters minds while they’re focused on problems. No one will get up in arms about something like this.

  1. Are there such things as absolutes, objective truth, or a universal morality? (challenges authoritarianism)
  2. Is the universe a friendly place, an indifferent place, or a hostile place? (challenges skepticism/cynicism, survivalism/adversariality)
  3. Why do bad things happen to innocent people, especially children and the defenseless? (challenges skepticism/cynicism, survivalism/adversariality)
  4. Is there any merit to spirituality, and if there is, what is real spirituality? (challenges authoritarianism, skepticism/cynicism, materialism/physicalism)

I’ve already answered the first two questions and dented the other two. I need to clarify and articulate the answers to the first two and finish work on the others. There might be additional questions we should tackle or better ones — I’m open to suggestions. And I need collaborators! I believe that we will answer all of them or, at the very least, move our understanding of them forward significantly — not because we’re more ingenious or erudite than others who have already tried, but instead because of the mundane fact that we’re exploring angles that others have neglected or deliberately avoided. What’s more, we’ll do it collaboratively, outside the strictures of authoritarian blinders, agenda-driven control, elitist protocols, and without the distortions of authoritarian bias that have characterized virtually all serious work to date. And we’ll do it with even greater rigor, the rigor that nature herself uses: overwhelming, large-scale participation.

The answers we’ll develop will be remarkable but, more importantly, working on the questions will reestablish a sense of our own credibility and resuscitate confidence in our own competence — two key trusts that authoritarians have virtually demolished. We’re not trying to claim bragging rights as riddle solvers, (another typically authoritarian gem,) but we will reestablish the nobility of our minds, hearts, and intentions; the validity of our voices; the integrity of our agendas; and the merit of our contributions which dwarf those of rulers and owners and bosses who take credit for ours and profit by them. In addition, our discussions will serve to build a platform from which targeted basic beliefs can be challenged. As things stand now, those beliefs seem so peerlessly self-evident to so many people that just raising questions about them can seem preposterous, and suggesting that better alternatives are credible can seem tantamount to madness.

No one person can do all that on his own, of course, nor do I presume to try — but I plan on doing everything I can. Together, we can get this really moving. Some of you are already helping. Our wisdom together will eventually unravel the knots, and sooner than we think, I suspect. I, like you, can only contribute what I have to give — but we must contribute what we’ve got. We need everything that develops from everyone’s thinking, explorations, experimentation, and experience as we grow back into our native connectedness and collaborate. My unique offerings are my facileness with belief reversals; new angles from which to approach these old questions; the surprising results I’m getting as I explore and discuss them; a quickly developing cogent narrative that describes personal-sovereignty-based, deauthoritized life and society; and a vision for heaven on Earth and how to realize it without resorting to authoritarian means. What’s more, I’ve found some shortcuts, so to speak. Not only do I explore divergent possibilities, I make use of divergent exploration methods, ones I rarely see used.

As a teaser, here’s an example. We’re quite familiar with skepticism as an approach to ascertaining truth. Have you ever heard of credulism? Probably not, unless you’ve already read my material on it. Pretty much, we were given to believe that skepticism is savvy and solid, and that credulity is just another way to be gullible and get taken for a fool; but in fact, that’s not so. Credulity used stupidly makes people gullible. So we need to ask what the real problem with gullibility is: credulity or stupidity? No one told us (except me as far as I’ve found) that credulity used intelligently often works far better than skepticism, let alone showed us how to use it; but of course, there are ways. I wonder if credulity and other non-traditional methods were deliberately maligned in order to deprive us of their help? Part of my work is to explain new and forgotten methods like this.

(… back to TOC)

What do we do about bastards?

Invariably at some point, conversations about escape from abuse and oppression break down over the presumed invincibility of oppressors — as if we can’t do anything at all until we’ve found ultimate solutions for dealing with them. Rubbish. An important part of ReLOVEution addresses this misperception. I can’t cover it sufficiently here, but I want to assure you that there are very real, effective, and sane ways of dealing with bastards. I’ll take some time with it, though, since it’s often a concern over which people check out of the discussion.

Oddly enough, although socially sanctioned authorities have wreaked more havoc on more people in more places throughout our history than all remaining immoral and criminal elements combined could ever hope to remotely approach, many people think that our most serious social problems involve street variety crooks, gangsters, rapists, domestic abusers, mass murders, or even Ponzi scheme architects — the kinds that law enforcement pretends to protect us from. But what about the architects of the societies and systems and living conditions that fostered those smaller-scale culprits? Which law enforcement agencies protect us from the theft and murder that lawmakers legalize? For example, how is taxation not a nation-wide, multilevel Ponzi scheme, but with a simple motivational difference: instead of paying in order to gain a return, you pay taxes in order to avoid being penalized and losing even more, up to and including loss of physical freedom? Ponzi didn’t fine or incarcerate anybody, his unwitting investors actually wanted to give him their money, and compared to the State, at least he seemed like a nice guy offering hope, even if it was false. In other contexts and apart from our authoritarian brainwashing, we would call taxation an extortion racket.

Taken as a whole, the programs of recognized authorities don’t essentially differ from those of criminalized authorities, better known as mobsters engaged in racketeering, cartels engaged in drug and human trafficking, or gangsters protecting their turf in street wars financed by local drug dealing and prostitution — except that the State’s rackets and wars and trafficking of drugs and humans occur on massive scales, often in cooperation with mobsters and cartels or even as allies. The difference is that criminals are more straightforward than the State: They don’t bother creating legal systems giving them official cover for their obscene violations of persons, personal sovereignty, and human rights. At least criminals don’t usually add to their crimes the hypocrisy of claiming that they’re violating you for the “greater good”.

We’ve tried authoritarian ways to rid society of its so-called criminal elements, and surprise! They, like the poor, are always with us. Of course they are. Their activities and the problems they create validate the the existence of authorities and the need for their “solutions”. Instead, we need to try a reversal and see what happens to criminals and the poor if we get rid of lawmakers and the injustices their laws promote and perpetuate.

Recognizing that bastards in office are not essentially different than bastards elsewhere is an important first step. Although not everyone will openly admit it, we all know that bastards rule and have long ruled our lands, our economies, our jobs, our property (through debt, taxation, and flat-out confiscation or “eminent domain”), even our families, our homes, our minds, and our bodies. I barely avoided the legalized confiscation of my body that was known as “the draft” when they halted it just after I registered in 1972. Bastards have bought us, herded us, entrapped us, and bastardly intentions and behavior were how they attained their power. Even they admit it when we get them to stop lying.

Official, outlawed, informal, organized, or otherwise — the major features of bastard psychology are quite similar regardless of the ilk of its host or the context in which it operates. That means what we learn from dealing with the bastards we can handle will apply to the ones that seem untouchable. We just need to get experienced — wherever we are, practice possibilities abound — and then work our ways up.

We also need to recognize that we are largely responsible for letting bastards get where they’ve gotten and do what they do. Regardless of legitimacy or lack of it, whether they win or lose the dreadful games they play, they in fact are truly losers and truly lost. The only recourse for dyed-in-the-wool losers is to make others into worse losers than they are, because losing is all they genuinely, experientially understand. They can’t understand winning except as greater loss elsewhere, especially if it offsets the losing streak their lives would otherwise be. They are psychologically deficient people, strongly averse to human inclinations that serve to dignify others and foster communality and general welfare. And they are identifiable. This is the kind of person we let dominate us. Our abdication of rights and our failure to make serious attempt to stop them are big reasons for the success of their bids for power and perennial reigns.

So, what do we do about morons who are willing to hurt their fellow players in order to “win”, who would destroy the game rather than fail to gain control over it and bear the shame of losing? How do you stop brutes and snakes without becoming one yourself? Plenty of people are working on answers; but frankly, it’s premature. We still labor under twisted beliefs we were brainwashed with by authoritarian parenting, education, and endless inundation of government and corporate propaganda through news, entertainment and other media. We haven’t gotten our minds free enough yet to know how to stop them. That’s not to say we should stop trying, but that we should first get our minds right.

We’re only capable of minimal creative thought while inwardly cowering before bastards that brandish weapons of physical, psychological, financial, or social deprivation, enslavement, and destruction. Clearly, our thinking hasn’t progressed far under duress like that, because here we still are, treating them like unstoppable beasts or virtual gods, just like humankind has done for thousands of years. Even though we know that humans have no right to behave like beasts, nor mortals like gods, we remain largely at a loss about how to turn the tables.

We need to disambiguate the incompetent fools that authoritarians are from the daunting displays of might they project and hide behind. And then we need to realize who we are. That’s when we’ll start finding effective answers. As an example of the mind-reversing needed for this, consider the well-kept secret of one of the most famous underdog stories in Western literature: the story of David and Goliath.

The secret of the story is: David was not an underdog. He didn’t see himself that way, and he didn’t see Goliath as a giant, but as just another “uncircumcised Philistine”. Read the story and pay attention to David’s attitude. To him, confronting Goliath was not remarkable. It was rational, predictable, what any self-respecting man of his time would do. He wasn’t dismayed at a lack of unusual courage and faith in his countrymen, because nothing unusual was required. He was appalled at their cowardice due to intimidation resulting from the delusionary way they looked at the situation.

Facing Goliath was not a feat. Nor was David delusional, as the outcome showed. When we likewise finally reverse our own perspectives, realizing the truly minimal nature and extent of the threat that intimidating assholes truly pose in contrast to the hype and spectacle that they have saturated our minds with, we’ll find that we already have the means to fell them, regardless of size — means both familiar and available, no more exotic than a few stones and a sling. Giants loom large in our imaginations. This is key, because most of that looming is bullshit. What actually stands against us and what we actually need to do about it are well within our capabilities.

We need practical, experiential knowledge of this, not just theory, so we need to get experienced with personal perspective reversals involving small “giants” to begin with. Experiment with minor bastards, just like David did until he could take on bear, lion, and finally an oversize but pea-brained thug. Fear of monsters seems to dissuade us even from confronting manageable pests, preventing us from eventually learning that the monsters aren’t nearly as formidable as we made them out to be. ReLOVEution will make this clear.

Everything I’ve outlined above involves low risk or manageable risk, requiring little to no change in circumstance, but just some self-paced experimentation — first personally, then in small groups, and then collectively. Even in a swamp while fighting alligators, you can find a tree or a hole that affords you space and time to get together with others and figure out how to drain the swamp, eliminating the alligators’ environment, sapping their strength and confidence and your fears along with them. Rationality born in safety is where ReLOVEution starts; and then we experiment with it, talk about it, develop it, help each other, and spread it. Even while fighting against tooth and scale the best we know how, we can plan our moves toward far more effective methods. It sounds like a fairy tale until you try it on a personal level and see what the power differential feels like. You’ll never go back.

We have only just begun to reinvent the fight.

(… back to TOC)

The truth about bastards

By the time we need to face off with major bastards, we’ll know how they work and have effective stratagems to deal with them. But, so you know I’m not blowing fairy dust and smoke, here’s another teaser: rarely recognized facts about bastards. More accurately, rarely recognized facts about how we think about bastards. ReLOVEution reverses this thinking and leverages the result. This is how we see through the appearance of a formidable giant and catch glimpse of the pea-brained thug hiding behind the intimidating false front.

Take any example you like of real or imaginary evil personified (and don’t get hung up if I mention someone you like in this list of examples — the point here is to choose someone that you consider as evil, whatever “evil” might mean to you): Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Satan and his demonic hordes, marauding hooligan bands in dystopian futures, zombies, vampires, reptilian alien infiltrators like David Icke’s Archons, or whatever else you prefer. Now notice a peculiar feature of all evil beings, factual or fictional: We imagine them as if they didn’t possess vulnerable, manipulable psychologies. Instead, it’s as if their elaborate machinations of domination and destruction sprang full-grown from impervious heads housing inscrutable, impregnable minds that can’t be diverted from nefarious objectives, (or lack of minds in the case of zombies which sport a kind of vacuous impregnability.) In other words: We act as if they were inexplicable and untouchable, much the same way that people of old regarded both gods and devils to be. All that repugnant, occult invincibility actually abides in our imaginations. Their deeds are real enough, but their evil doesn’t reside in their deeds — it resides in the impenetrability of intentions so alien that we can only guess at them.

So what does that say more about: evildoers and their evil or our imaginations of them? Obviously, unless you know evildoers directly and fairly well, your information about them must be largely imaginary, or second-hand at best if it’s factual at all. Your grasp of their inner worlds is not only feeble, you probably haven’t tried to dig into them much deeper than the clichéd, “I can’t understand how they could possibly…” nor do you want to dig in. And that’s actually the rub. If we understood evil, we’d have information that might help us counteract it without getting infected, but we prefer to avoid contagion and get as far away as possible, despite that it means keeping ourselves the dark, which in many circles passes for innocence. We nip the question of understanding evil in the bud, ironically using the virtues of ignorance as our excuse. Thought terminations like that — especially those that preclude unpredictable pursuits like questioning, exploration, investigation, and discovery — mark boundaries set by authoritarian brainwashing, beyond which evidence of brainwashing might get uncovered. ReLOVEution obliterates those boundaries.

Despite our deification of them, bastards are the most ego-sensitive and vulnerable people on the planet, especially when it comes to fragile identities, gravely wounded self-esteems, and resulting violently allergic reactions to perceived disrespect. Their feeble grasp on personal issues and pathetic internal incompetence force them to focus outwardly, driving them to achieve and flaunt atrocious, intimidating competence over others that serves as preemptive defense and cover to prevent disclosure of the blind, incompetent dimwits that they secretly and deeply feel horrified to be. They cannot meet others as peers on level fields, but must first secure advantage and control enabling them to dominate the scene. Otherwise, they proceed to obliterate resistance, resisters, and if necessary the scene itself. That signifies profound intimidation, not courage, and decrepitude, not strength. Being absolute idiots about navigating life from and by the heart, they focus on navigating and subjugating it and others by manipulating externalities: appearances, narratives, situations, information, behaviors, and persons like objects, as if they were moving game pieces around on a board — anything to keep the light shining elsewhere, preventing it from exposing what they secretly, truly are.

Nothing forces us to meet them on that battlefield. What’s more, the battle isn’t against them — it’s against the very lies of ineptitude that terrorize them. When we stand for what’s ennobling and beneficial and against what’s degrading and harmful, they can’t resist us without aligning themselves with the shame and threat they secretly feel and fear. We stand for the very things that could save them from humiliation, so in opposing us they oppose themselves. That’s just one of the Catch-22s we ReLOVEutionaries will put them into.

(… back to TOC)

The way out

The idea that we can’t exploit the colossal weaknesses of deeply debilitated human psyches, the kind of people that ancient wisdom calls fools, is laughable. We’d have to be fools ourselves, cynics who fell for fools’ tales of our helplessness in the face of sky-is-falling doom. Bastards are people, not gods, so don’t accept myths to the contrary. They aren’t capable of denying Newton’s Third Law. For every action we make, they must make equal and opposite reactions, like it or not. We just need to figure out which actions produce the reactions we want instead of the ones we don’t want.

Undoing authoritarian cycles of domination and abuse is as simple and subtle as choosing to be initiators instead of responders — another too-easy-to-be-true point that ReLOVEution will demonstrate is all too true. This is literally a choice to be creators instead of slaves, and it occurs as a reversal in our minds and hearts before it reverses our circumstances. Frederick Douglass’ crucial step of self-emancipation, mentioned in the ReLOVEution announcement (click to read it), is a great example of the decisive power of this choice. The immense ongoing investment that authoritarians make to maintain their images of superiority with us as their subordinates proves that we are formidable, because it takes formidable work to keep us subjugated. We are in the driver’s seat of our own contributions to the cycles, and they are irrepressible unless we fail to make them. Freedom is not an allowance but an assertion that can’t fail to have effect. We determine our positions as creative, initiating agents as a choice we make about ourselves, or else we accept our positions as enslaved, responsive victims as a choice others made about us. Our sovereignty consists of our unfettered freedom to choose between those very different orientations.

We’ve let bastards define the battle and choose the battlefields and dictate the rules of engagement long enough. We’ve been dealing with them according to their playbooks of force, intimidation, harm, and bullshit power. We need to write our own playbook, choose our own places, times, and modes of confrontation, operate under our own logic and rules, and abandon the crap they brainwashed us with. We can do this work quite freely and openly. We won’t need much secrecy or encryption, because not only are our concepts and language foreign to them, to their ears we literally sound like fools babbling about nonsense. We won’t pose threat to anything they understand, and what they manage to decipher will seem ridiculous, incredible — no cause for alarm, just noise. We can say pretty much whatever we want in the presence of those who, for truly human intents and purposes, are imbeciles.

(… back to TOC)

My invitation and challenge to you

This work has not been attempted before. That might sound arrogant, and I’ll gladly retract as soon as I find others or someone shows me others who advocate personal sovereignty and are working on radical reversal of basic authoritarian beliefs. So far, my claim stands unrefuted.

Whatever your opinion of ReLOVEution is, you must ask why we haven’t already investigated it, but instead have intently avoided and dismissed its possibilities. We cannot very well intelligently say what will happen if we explore it, given our ignorance. Where and when exactly did we seriously, competently experiment with deauthoritized life? I can answer that question, because I’ve actually looked (have you?) and found that very few have experimented with it — and those who did were swiftly exterminated by nearby authoritarians who wiped out almost all trace of information about their ways of life. Every genocide, ethnic cleansing, purge, and pogrom in history was an authoritarian enterprise or a result of one. We have no choice but to start basically from scratch.

So, for lack of available information about precedents, I’m experimenting with deauthoritized life myself and encouraging others to do the same. We certainly won’t get much help from the institutions of our authoritarian societies. I invite you to get involved, explore these possibilities with us, promote the work, support it, and help further it. If you know others who are doing related work, help and support them — and please let me know who they are.

Given our glaring lack of attention to ReLOVEution’s propositions and their game-changing potential, everyone should support this work, if only to see what happens! 🙂

Exploring these angles isn’t just wise and honest, it’s now imperative. Hoping for different results while doggedly trudging the routes we’ve already worn out, blaming our recurring, dismal failures on “them” — the other guys who refuse to comply and adequately perform and the bastards who keep this clown circus hopping in circles — is literally insane at this point. There no longer are good reasons to decline radical options, but there’s still a serious shortage of huevos to try them out.

Paths we haven’t yet tried might fail or lead us nowhere, it’s true; but when we’ve trodden all the old ones to muck and they keep leading us right back to the same few-extorts-many, denigrating, survival-threatening, violent bullshit we’ve lived under for thousands of years, we are fools not to pursue the options we’ve till now suspiciously, conspicuously, consistently avoided.

I’m already all in. I’ve devoted my life and my future to this. Let’s dig in together and find out what happens. I’m telling you: you will be surprised.

What You Can Do

Spread the word that ReLOVEution is happening!

Share this essay with as many as possible — both sympathetic and otherwise!

Give me feedback! Get involved! You have plenty to offer. Join us in ReLOVEolting! (see contact info below)

This work will benefit many, many people. I simply cannot see how it could fail in the long run. I invite you to invest in it. Go to ReLOVEution’s Patreon page https://www.patreon.com/ReLOVEution to get started!

(… back to TOC)

How to Reach Me

Please contact me with questions, suggestions, feedback, complaints, rants, whatever! I personally respond to every message and email I get.

Messaging

Email: millardjmelnyk@gmail.com

Google Plus: https://www.google.com/+MillardJMelnyk

Twitter: @MillardJMelnyk

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pub/millard-j-melnyk/31/150/536

Invest in the work

ReLOVEution’s Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/ReLOVEution

Our Web site ReLOVEution.org: http://reloveution.org

Our blog ReLOVEution NOW! https://reloveutionnow.wordpress.com/

On Facebook

My page: Millard J Melnyk at https://www.facebook.com/millard.j.melnyk

Our group ReLOVEution NOW! https://www.facebook.com/groups/ReLOVEutionNOW

… and its sister group …

Awakening Together: https://www.facebook.com/groups/awake.all.together/

… and check out my other blogs …

Millard’s Blog — Madness behind the method: http://millardjmelnyk.wordpress.com/

To Christians — Spirituality with a bite: http://tochristians.wordpress.com/

… and my favorite, although quite long neglected (but ReLOVEution will change that) …

Crushing Shit and Shitty People — Experiment in disruptive goodness:
http://crushingshittypeople.wordpress.com

Thanks for reading and for your support! Let’s make …

————

[1] Just one example: In a 2011 TED Talk on Open Science, referring to Tim Gowers’ massively collaborative Polymath project, Michael Nielsen said, “Gowers described the process as being to ordinary research as driving is to pushing a car.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnWocYKqvhw&t=145 (back to reading…)

[2] “Lenin’s famous statement: ‘Without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement’ means that a revolution is achieved with neither verbalism nor activism, but rather with praxis, that is, with reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed. The revolutionary effort to transform these structures radically cannot designate its leaders as its thinkers and the oppressed as mere doers.”
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy. New York: Continuum Publishing, 1982. Print. p. 120.
(back to reading…)

[3] “This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors who oppress, exploit and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both. Any attempt to “soften” the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity; indeed, the attempt never goes beyond this. In order to have the continued opportunity to express their “generosity,” the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this “generosity,” which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty. That is why the dispensers of false generosity become desperate at the slightest threat to its source.”
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy. New York: Continuum Publishing, 1982. Print. pp. 28-29, or see http://www2.webster.edu/~corbetre/philosophy/education/freire/freire-1.html
(back to reading…)