Why revolt?
Whilst everyone enjoys a little revolution once in a while, change is healthy and of course, it is all good fun until someone gets lined up against the wall and shot. If you're going to revolt, you probably want to have a good reason or at least an achievable goal, so that you know when it is over and you can go home for tea. Big and noisy revolutions, the types fuelled by angry young people who feel irrelevant and are tired of being at the bottom of societies with little hope of improving themselves and growing as beings of consciousness, tend towards the destructive, they tear down everything, the chaos they spread burns the whole house down rather than just removing the termites.
Being in the vanguard of a revolution, taking on a leadership role exposes you to the full rage of whichever establishment you are fighting against, as you are almost inevitably fighting against the powerful pendulum of an established way of thinking and the institutions that almost certainly accompanies such social forces. Even when an institution objectively makes people's lives worse, and even if subjectively the people involved in such institution were able to step back and look at themselves, they would realise they were doing bad things. That is not the nature of people, they are very bad at looking objectively at what they are doing, they can even justify the occasional bad action if it is in the interests of the society as a whole, or at least if there is a story that they can believe or is plausible. No right-wing thugs have ever had a discussion about whether they are actually the bad guys, despite wearing black uniforms, having a fetish for skulls and carrying big sticks.
Such pendulums of group thinking take on a life of their own, where single ideas or philosophies overwhelm the merits of individual cases of injustice or the curtailing of life options for others. The mission dominates all, people who are called to serve feed on the purpose, sacrificing the nuances of living in a world that is shades of grey and instead embrace a simple binary world where they are on the side of right. And any organisation will attract people who simply love power and control over others. Wherever there are groups there is the opportunity to dominate that group simply for the sake of, the thrill of it ought to compensate for the lack of power they feel in other parts of their lives.
These groups are powerful and do not want to change, once you let a pendulum form, they become alive in their own rights, they are patterns of information that will wish to continue to exist. They inspire action in those people in their group, and those actions feed the energy of the pendulum, the more action the more energy, the more energy the more action. Even negative energy can feed the pendulum, nothing justifies having a police force more than a riot, governments need enemies to increase their control.
The kind of revolution I love most, is indifference, the forthright refusal to give my energy to pendulums. Deciding exactly what to do and then finding the path of least resistance to the state I want to get to, it so much easier to sidestep lives pendulum's. Whilst always being sympathetic to the anti-capitalists and anarchists, I certainly did my part in the work avoidance movement in my twenties, the capitalist pendulum is one of the few that is pretty unavoidable in modern society, as there is not a more practical way of getting toothpaste to families. My solution to sidestepping the pendulum, was not to buy into the idea that more was better and instead asked the question what is enough? Then I gave just enough energy to the capitalist pendulum that I was able to capture some of that energy in the form of assets that produce income, and I'm certainly not a genius, I had the huge luck of being in the right place at the right time, when assets were cheap and their price had not been inflated by cheap interest rates yet.
My solution will not be your solution, every life situation is unique with your own special problems and escape routes. Your form of revolt against the pendulums will have to be tailor-made for you, however what is true, is that you cannot revolt unless you know what you are revolting against. I did not try to change the system, indeed I used the system in the way that it was supposed to be used, I exchanged labour for money and then used it to buy assets. The part of the pendulum I sidestepped was the part where you used your money to buy better and better things, to consume more and demonstrate my wealth to others. I lived like a student, I spent time with friends rather than go on holiday to spend time with people I did not know. I had a car for the purpose of getting to work, not to impress other people, I opted out worrying about my status and got on with home improvement.
If this is your kind of revolution, one which creates little independent pockets of people who enjoys the fruits of capitalism without having to be cogs in the machine. If you like quiet revolutions that do not preach or try to lead, who have people you just go about their day, trying to be kind without being self interested, who only tell you what they are doing when you ask them instead of nagging you to do the same because they don't want to feel different. People who potter in their sheds or studies, people who walk because it gives them pleasure, people who get to sit in cafes rather than having to grab a takeaway, these are the kind of rebels I would like to inspire, the kind who would be completely indifferent to me, it would give me such pleasure.
