People are collaborating to create a citizen's democracy, a global grassroots marketplace, and a truly open society.

At our OpenSources home page we explain how successfully using free technology is one of the most important strategic decisions any organization can make right now. Why? Because knowledge is our most precious resource. And efficiently working with information to create knowledge is crucial to maintaining a competitive business and an effective organization. It is also the essential ingredient found in any informed, articulate and active citizenry. And an informed citizenry is the foundation of a truly successful democracy. Such a democracy maintains a natural system of checks and balances to keep its citizens, elected leaders, private and public institutions as honest and free from corruption as is humanly possible.

A healthy democracy depends on essentials like honest dialog, respectful compromise, rational debate, commitment to accuracy and a willingness to believe in concrete reality rather than delusional fantasy. An open and tolerant society is the primary product of a successful democracy. Sadly, this is not where the globe's most culturally and militarily dominant society finds itself. At the beginning of the 21st Century, Americans no longer live in a genuine democracy. We live in a sham democracy driven by a culture of rampant consumerism, corporate hucksterism, celebrity worship, myopic self-interest and wishful thinking.

Skeptical? No need to sell you on this notion; you can observe it for yourself. Examine, for instance, the unwanted email shoving its way daily into your inbox. With pitches for male-enhancement pills, pornography, get rich quick schemes and other scams, spam can tell you a great deal about our social psychographics. And the "legitimate" advertising infesting our televisions, radios, billboards, newspapers, magazines and web browsers is hardly better. This is the inevitable product of a society made up of consumers, not citizens. Where greed is "good," wealth is worshiped, and a capitalist casino is considered the "free market."

In recent years, however, many of us have noticed a particularly disturbing cloud bank forming over America's political and social landscape. Perhaps you raised an eyebrow when the US Supreme Court installed its first president back in 2000, despite having no rational justification for doing so. Maybe you even grew alarmed at the spectacle of US politicians tripping all over themselves to shamelessly exploit a horrifying terrorist act for their own malign political purposes. Perhaps you got even a little angry watching them thoughtlessly push through legislation that degraded the civil liberties of all Americans, but did virtually nothing to combat genuine terrorism.

Thank goodness, then, that here in the States, we Americans can comfort ourselves with our "American Exceptionalism." But when we stop to actually think about this exceptionalism, serious questions emerge. How, exactly, are we exceptional? Are Americans a different species than other Homo sapiens living elsewhere across the globe? If not, then what makes us more "exceptional" than other people living in other societies? Our liberty? Those incarcerated in our prisons, the highest in the world in both per-capita and absolute numbers, may beg to differ. And the unfortunate wretches the Pentagon has holed up in Abu Gharib, Guantánamo Bay and other military dungeons across the globe may just be begging at this point. America's increasingly troubled social and political climate makes doubts about our "American Exceptionalism" more than just academic.

We humans have consistently proved ourselves capable of justifying just about any deed, thought, belief, or action. Hitler imposed his vile "final solution" on those he supposed, in his lunacy, were part of a "Jewish Problem." Stalin and Mao brutally inflicted their insanely grand schemes on their own countryfolk. Even fellow Americans of generations past enslaved African captives while relentlessly slaughtering this continent's pre-European inhabitants who got in the way of their rapacious land-grab. Did current-day Americans somehow become more "exceptional" than our ancestors of a few generations back?

The answer, clearly, is no. Worse yet, now our government appears hell-bent on spreading the gospel of American Exceptionalism across the globe under the guise of making the world safe for democracy. But when armed with a clear head, credible information and cold logic, the motives for belligerent actions like the US invasion of Iraq quickly become obvious. That's because modern industrial economies have at least one thing in common: all absolutely must maintain reliable access to cheap energy resources for their very survival. The energy resource most usable to modern industrial economies is oil, the availability of which has either peaked, or will shortly. The fact that demand certainly has not peaked means oil is poised to become prohibitively expensive and scarce.

Political, social and military upheavals will likely result as cheap energy goes away. These are the kinds of societal disruptions that historically cause empires to rapidly decay or totally collapse. And collapsing empires are never pleasant to anyone caught up in them. The degradation of civil liberties in the United States over the past several years is significant, but it's likely to get substantially worse as the American Empire heaves its final gasps.

What can we do? First each of us can take our individual sovereignty back. This is our basic human right. Collectively we can demand the separation of citizen and state. Stop equating multinational corporate capitalism with democracy. Refuse to exchange our genuine liberties for a false sense of security. Let our ideals, not mindless ideology, guide us. And never sacrifice truth for dogma.

The good news is that now, more than ever before, we have resources available to create and interact with other communities across the globe. These treasures give real citizens scattered around the world the resources to connect with each other to create immense power and genuinely free markets. We can create power big enough to wrest control from the tiny clique of corpo-state power brokers currently running the world for their own self-interests; everyone else be damned. But we must take this initiative ourselves. The folks currently in charge aren't just going to hand us our power on a platinum platter. And lest we forget that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, we must ensure that our new-found power is distributed equitably, fairly and democratically. The revolution has begun! Won't you join?

May the Source be with you.

Dave Myers
Publisher
Spring, 2005