When you’ve already squandered your wealth and future on war and financial fraud, a situation arises which is comparable to the final stages of gambling addiction. In case you’re not familiar with it, it’s the phase where anything accessible gets committed to the till for a sort of ‘graduation ceremony’ which often ends in the absolute destruction of the addict’s life (and/or worse).

This represents a last bid to ‘prove’ to (themselves and) the world that the whole gambling thing was somehow actually justified from the beginning. One ‘real win’ will (in minds thus compromised) erase a history of catastrophic losses.

So a nation that bet its future on war, prisons, and delusional systems of commerce, is going to sell the schools, the hospitals, the labs… every aspect of social infrastructure… into slavery… for war, delusional systems of commerce, and prisons.

And this is where the people of the nation, and the corporations and organs of government come directly into conflict; for it becomes obvious to everyone involved that the intelligence and trust embodied in those collectives has been misplaced. For a time, confusion may reign, and during this time, the gambler will take advantage of the confusion to liquidate every accessible asset as quickly and covertly as possible…

Sound familiar?

Now that it is obvious that the intelligence and power invested in corporations and the organs of our government is directed specifically against the planet, our own people, and any reasonably habitable future for ourselves and our children, it is surely incumbent upon us to spare no effort in causing the most rapid and radical transformation of these circumstances.

What this means is not yet entirely clear, for a simple reason: we have never had to take on the responsibilities attended by these collectives, and are not implicitly equipped to direct the forces involved intelligently. In fact, we may not even be equipped to direct our own activity intelligently, since, let’s face it, our social infrastructure isn’t exactly the icon of contemplative and efficacious intellect.

So we may have to establish new forms of (active) collective intelligence amongst ourselves before we would even have the capacity to project such intelligence ‘upscale’ as it were, into new forms of collectives.

Yes, revolution is a crucial pivot of our time. But it is not enough to upend the casket of the already-dead empire. We must have something beautiful and humane to surpass it with. And we should have that in any case, revolution or not. So, it seems, we must first have each other… and ways of learning insightfully and working effectively as collectives, if we are to have a nation at all. And this, most conservatively, means new forms of agreements about who, and why we are … and where we hope to go together.