The writers’ room for Togetherland is all of us, learning to be authors of our own reality by realizing that the governing authorities of corporations and nations have no legitimate authority over us. In a world of consensus reality, we make our own reality.
This week, I listened to an episode of On Being with Ruth Wilson Gilmore, which gave me new language for this experience of growing up in CANADA, the Corporation for Apartheid Nationalism and Aboriginal Dispossession and Assimilation: organized abandonment.
CANADA is not a nation but a corporation that rebranded itself as a nation and ran a PR, marketing, and advertising campaign to sell the idea to the settlers who bought land from the Crown when the Crown did not own the land nor have the right to sell it. CANADA is a scam. We have been duped. What can we do but acknowledge the truth and give the land back?
It appears we have a problem of collective ignorance and organized abandonment. This state of affairs has created a technological society built upon propaganda for the purpose of maintaining the rule of the many by the few.
Learned helplessness (social)
Trained incapacities (economic)
Bureaucratic intransigence (political)
We do not need to wait for a revolution. Change is available to us right now. We can choose to assert our own authority by engaging in collective intelligence and communities of care. We can be the authors of our own stories and weave our world together by telling the truth and nothing but the truth about the past. Fiction is the way we can use our imaginations to tell stories of what could be, to explore how we imagine, design, and build the future together.
Law as Justification for Criminality at Scale
With the first criminal indictment of a former president of the United States, there have been cries from the members of his party that the law was “weaponized for political purposes.”
Let us get to the root of the problems posed by law and politics and consider where those laws originated.
This morning, I was listening to a podcast episode from Don’t Call Me Resilient about the Doctrine of Discovery. On Thursday, March 30, 2023, the Vatican released a Joint Statement of the Dicasteries for Culture and Education and for Promoting Integral Human Development on the “Doctrine of Discovery”.
In no uncertain terms, the Church’s magisterium upholds the respect due to every human being. The Catholic Church therefore repudiates those concepts that fail to recognize the inherent human rights of indigenous peoples, including what has become known as the legal and political “doctrine of discovery”.
According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC),
The statement was a response to decades of demands from Indigenous people for the Vatican to formally rescind the papal bulls that provided the Portuguese and Spanish kingdoms the religious backing to expand their territories in Africa and the Americas for the sake of spreading Christianity.
Those decrees underpin the Doctrine of Discovery, a legal concept coined in an 1823 U.S. Supreme Court decision that has come to be understood as meaning that ownership and sovereignty over land passed to Europeans because they "discovered" it.
It was cited as recently as a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court decision involving the Oneida Indian Nation written by the late justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Since the 1493 papal bull inter caetera, European nations have used the doctrine of discovery as justification for ownership and sovereignty over land and to render laws on these lands as under the authority of the Crown. In so-called Canada, legal authority is based on title granted by the Crown, or the land is assumed to be Crown land.
As of March 30, 2023, such claims are illegitimate, according to the Pope. In fact, any such claims were illegitimate from 1537.
Numerous and repeated statements by the Church and the Popes uphold the rights of indigenous peoples. For example, in the 1537 Bull Sublimis Deus, Pope Paul III wrote, “We define and declare [ ... ] that [, .. ] the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the Christian faith; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect”.
According to my reading of the statement from the Vatican, the so-called nations of the United States of America and the Dominion of Canada have been formed by laws that were “weaponized for political purposes.” These laws are henceforth null and have no effect.
In political philosophy, the phrase consent of the governed refers to the idea that a government's legitimacy and moral right to use state power is justified and lawful only when consented to by the people or society over which that political power is exercised. This theory of consent is historically contrasted to the divine right of kings and had often been invoked against the legitimacy of colonialism. Article 21 of the United Nations' 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that "The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government".
It is only because the settlers of Canada believe that the Dominion of Canada wields authority over this land that the government of Canada has any authority. If the fact of the matter is that the so-called Government of Canada and the British Crown have no authority and jurisdiction over this land, what do we do?
If the people could agree that the Crown has no authority over this land, we would have full authority to reimagine our relationships with the Indigenous, First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples.
Full Faith & Credit
Similarly, money has no real value. Rather, humans have a shared belief that money has value, therefore, we treat money as valuable.
Propaganda
Jacques Ellul wrote The Technological Society and Propaganda after he was a leader of the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation of France.
Jacques Ellul (January 6, 1912 – May 19, 1994) was a French philosopher, sociologist, lay theologian, and professor who was a noted Christian anarchist. Ellul was a longtime Professor of History and the Sociology of Institutions on the Faculty of Law and Economic Sciences at the University of Bordeaux. A prolific writer, he authored more than 60 books and more than 600 articles over his lifetime, many of which discussed propaganda, the impact of technology on society, and the interaction between religion and politics.
The Technological Society
Ellul argues that modern society is being dominated by technique, which he defines as a series of means that are established to achieve an end. Technique is ultimately focused on the concept of efficiency. The term “technique” is to be comprehended in its broadest possible meaning as it touches upon virtually all areas of life, including science, automation, but also politics and human relations.
Propaganda
He argued that propaganda had to become as natural as breathing air in a technological society, because it was essential that people adapt to the disruptions of a technological society.
“The passions it provokes — which exist in everybody — are amplified. The suppression of the critical faculty — man’s growing incapacity to distinguish truth from falsehood, the individual from the collectivity, action from talk, reality from statistics, and so on — is one of the most evident results of the technical power of propaganda.”
Apartheid and Genocide
This essay investigates a twofold theory that Canada’s Indian Reserve System served, officially, as a strategy of Indigenous apartheid (preceding South African apartheid) and unofficially, as a policy of Indigenous genocide (preceding the Nazi concentration camps of World War II).
The Government of Canada was formed as a system of apartheid to enact a genocide and engage in ecocide for the profit of the British Crown and its corporations. The Nazis, learning from Canada the model of concentration camps from reserves and residential schools, were defeated in World War II. The Canadian system of apartheid has been an ongoing institution of genocide, extraction, and exploitation since 1867.
Beating Swords into Plowshares, Turning Weaponry into Livingry
This design science revolution would use the highest aeronautical and engineering facilities of the world and redirect them from weaponry to livingry production; all humanity would thereby have the option of becoming enduringly successful.
The weapons being waged against people by corporations and nations are collective ignorance and organized abandonment.
However, people made these systems and we can remake them. We need not regard the authorities as legitimate. We can be authors of our own stories, as we already are, at each moment of our lives.
We have proven to ourselves that the technological society and propaganda will not save us. They are the weapons being used by the corporations and the nations to divide and conquer, to turn powerful collectives of people into helpless individuals.
However, we need to deal with our own internalized sense of learned helplessness. It takes time to regain a sense of agency, ability, and authority. We have forgotten how to do this collectively, because we have been desensitized by outsourcing these qualities to the corporation and the nation. By disconnecting from the abstracted “body” of the corporation and reconnecting to ourselves, to each other, and to the tangible, physical, and nurturing body of the earth, we can resensitize and regenerate ourselves and the earth.
Change happens from the inside out.
That is why I am prototyping my own way of resensitizing myself: growing senses of co-creation.
How would you imagine being the author of our collective story of becoming?
How would you write the story of how we transcend collective ignorance and organized abandonment?
Togetherland
Togetherland is audacious, a planetary scale context that can represent anyone and everyone, simultaneously and harmoniously.
Within Togetherland, there is a central “plot” that revolves around a pioneering number of people who catalyze an evolutionary leap of worldview from competition to co-creation, from destruction and war to regeneration and peace, from scarcity and fear to prosperity and love.
A multitude of diverse and interconnected plots, themes, and narratives branch out of inspiration from this central plot. Fractal Impact Entertainment allows us to play with apparent diversity and multiplicity whilst all ways revealing an undivided whole.
Builders Collective
My own language for Togetherland is the builders collective.
We are the medium. We are the message. We are the interface. We are a creative, collaborative, self-organizing learning community. We are exploring how we imagine, design, and build the future together. We are the builders collective.