Getting over the Addiction to Corrupt Power Systems
These are the 12 steps in getting over our collective addiction to corrupt corporations, governments and bureacracies.
The first step was borrowed from Jose Arguelles‘ book Surfers of the Zuvuya; I kind of ran with it from there. I actually have had some experience recently with a 12-Step program and it has changed my life in many ways. The key to it all is surrender to a will greater than your own. I call that God in the steps below, but Higher Power, or Great Spirit work just as well. In the end, all terms are pretty lame and limiting, for the Creator of such an amazing universe.
When I read the concept of Earthlings Anonymous in Joe’s book, it totally clicked that the problem of addiction is universal and that it exists on a massive political and social level in how we arrange our societies to ultimately abuse us and our environment.
The common factor running through history, up to the present, is that the majority gives its power away to the minority. Not minority in the traditional sense of racial minorities but as in statistical minorities.
Usually this plays itself out as the lower class giving power away to the rich, but it is just as real in communist countries where the focus in not on material wealth. It’s as if common people everywhere have surrendered their power to a small portion of their society, refusing to believe in the unlimited spiritual and creative wealth that each human being possesses.
This denial of True Individual Power has gotten us in a heck of a mess. In no greater place than America, where we now have an administration running roughshod over foreign countries, while destroying our constitution at home in some farcical attempt to “preserve” freedom.
The results: the worst environmental record in modern history, a growing fear, distrust and hatred of us spreading like wildfire abroad, a frightening acceleration of money moving upwards from the poor to the rich, the wholesale destruction of economies through insane financial institutions, the dismantling of human rights and justice, the expanding exploitation of work forces who have no other choices… I could go on and on, but those are the big ones.
So what do we do about?
Like any addiction, we must first admit we are addicts.
- We must admit that we are addicted to buying products that exploit workers in other countries, all for our own personal ease, style and satisfaction.
- We must admit that we are addicted to lazy entertainment instead of vigorously exploring history and its connection to current events.
- We must fess up to passing the responsibility to someone else, thinking there is some magical “them” that will save the earth and its people. (As the Hopi Elders recently said, we must stop looking outside ourselves for the leader.)
- And we must get over the weak-minded idea that we aren’t responsible for getting the disenfranchised around us up off of their ass and involved in the political process.
Beyond all of that, I think we need to also seek a spiritual solution.
The fact is, it’s pretty desperate out there and I think we need to put some major attention in to connecting with our Higher Power in order to help us get out of this mess. In doing that we can find great hope to carry out the changes in our behaviors necessary to turn us back from the brink. And we’re really headed there folks… even if we’re lucky and shrub gang actually stops raging random war we must admit that…
70% of the world’s population lives on the coast lines… the icebergs are melting, the oceans are rising and the world’s biggest polluter isn’t doing JACK SHIT to stop it. Guess that’s what happens when a bunch of oil men stage a bloodless coup, refuse to increase vehicle efficiency standards and wage wars for petroleum resource control.
So here we go; here are the 12 steps to gettting over our addictions to corrupt power systems.
- We admitted we were powerless over our human habits and the disempowering institutions we created to support them.
- Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
- Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.
- Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves and examined all the ways in which we surrender our power to corrupt institutions.
- Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
- Were entirely ready to have God remove all of these defects of character.
- Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.
- Made a list of all persons (in our country and those abroad) who were harmed by our support of our corrupt institutions and became willing to make amends to them all.
- Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them, others or ourselves (from backlash by our corrupt institutions).
- Continued to take personal inventory to discover additional ways in which all of our actions (companies we support, products we buy, parties we vote for) harm others and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it and sought to change our habits and behaviors.
- Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out.
- Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other people addicted to giving their power away, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.