First, a timely offer from author David Cundiff, MD, that goes toward sustaining our work:
Unless collapse comes immediately, the U.S. has a small chance to quickly re-utilize its resources and community power: the Health Economy. As you might have understood from our article on David's new book The Health Economy, his approach could be the most tangible and progressive culture change opportunity in a generation or since the Great Depression. Buy the book now for $10 on our donation page, and all the proceeds go to Culture Change.
The Health Economy is available now in e-book format, and will shortly be available through print-on-demand and Amazon.com. Please let us know what format you need. Give us an alternative address if the one associated with your PayPal or credit card is not where we should send the hard copy of The Health Economy.
Here's another easy way to help bring about culture change by supporting Culture Change, but at a higher level:
If you cannot make a donation to Culture Change now, enlist a family member, friend or acquaintance in supporting our work. Keeping our show on the road must be done through meeting our $1,500 goal for February 1st, and we are $1,125 short! Tax-deductibility is through making checks payable to "Culture Change/GVI." Our secure online donating webpage is at culturechange.org/donate.html
Grassroots activists are likely to be among those slipping through society's partial safety-net. To help manage one's needs, fasting and other natural living/organic food habits mostly save us from the common plight of costly and dangerous medication dependency. The petrochemical pharmaceutical corporations aren't a sector of the economy we want to see growing. It's not sustainable. One can save money by being healthy and not needing hospitals, for example, but dental work shouldn't be put off long.
The tiny staff of Culture Change (three of us at most in recent years) hopes to achieve better health care through greater public exposure for Culture Change and my autobiography Songs of Petroleum.
We hope that by offering the world something of value, such as David Cundiff's The Health Economy and our ongoing journalism and projects such as Sail Transport Network, we help you too.
Culture Change must transition to the next level in its 22-year odyssey. We were founded in 1988 after I ended my oil industry analysis career. The adventure and good people one meets in post-corporatocracy life are worth the much lower pay.
Our existing support base is painfully too limited for optimum functioning in early 2011. To pay for the basics such as internet, transportation, rent, etc., and be available to keep up the good fight on the morrow, we need your help today. Thanks for considering. And now:
Culture Change concept for the day
The "Maximum Control Culture" is my new name for the way people are forced to relate to each other in this modern world. The control urge by rulers is just an inherited tradition, but it is quite tied up with other related traditions (e.g., private property) that constrain us too. I will not now count the ways of how the dominant culture is centered around that aggravated evolutionary phenomenon I can dub "control freakism."
The above is rather simplifying but I think it's on the money (so to speak), as a concise mini-analysis.
An example of maximum control culture at work is the sweep against homeless people. It is not super high-intensity, as some tent areas and shelters are tolerated and even supported. But the war on the poor (as "noted" by Leonard Cohen) -- or on the many -- is not ending, and is perhaps a basic feature in the entire conflict of Western Civilization. One simple-sounding means of control of the majority is through a "reasonable sounding law" against public urination, which humbly serves to help round up an uncontrolled part of the social stratum of "undesirables" who don't own property such as houses and cars.
Here in Santa Barbara, the city is spending $50,000 to remove the benches on popular State Street, and re-install them perpendicular, rather than parallel (at present). The idea is that homeless people and beggars will not want to hold signs for help, if they cannot face the sidewalk and storefronts. Subtle control of poor people through "the bench twist" might succeed, but the money could instead go to actually help get people off the street. After all, getting out of the global-warming afternoon heat this January in Santa Barbara is important for all of us here.
In writing this brief idea on the maximum control culture it feels like I'm continuing logically upon Adam Sacks' new essay on Culture Change, The Natural Laws of Collapse. Praise has been high for this original article. Please share it.
- Jan Lundberg,
independent oil industry analyst
Culture Change founder and Editor
Culture Change
P.O. Box 4347, Arcata, CA 95518 USA
Culture Change mailing address: P.O. Box 3387, Santa Cruz, California, 95063, USA, Telephone 1-215-243-3144 (and fax). Culture Change was founded by Sustainable Energy Institute (formerly Fossil Fuels Policy Action), a nonprofit organization.
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