Excerpted from an excellent editorial by Daniel Pinchbeck of Reality Sandwich / Evolver:

As I write this, the ruling regime in our rotten republic of Obama-stan is seeking to ignore the pain of the sheeple and extend lavish tax breaks for the wealthy.The financial elite engineered a massive transfer of assets over the last decades, and they are now completing the procedure of creating a two-tier society resembling a serfdom. Champagne glasses are no doubt clinking in fancy hotel rooms and private clubs to celebrate the selling out of the people, as the unemployed and dispossessed roam the streets. We witness, as spectacle,the slow-motion dismantling of the American republic — though nobody can say how the story will play out this time.

We tend to forget that Roosevelt’s New Deal was not a good-hearted gift to the working classes but a compromise to stave off mass uprising. The current oligarchy has determined that it will make no such deal this time around. I suspect they assume that the pulverizing of the populace with mind-numbing media, psychotropic drugs, police state tactics, and poison food had the desired effect. And they may be right.

From the viewpoint of those seeking a deeper level of transformation, however, the political gridlock, social polarization, and extremism of the right wing are all positive signs. The increasing rigidity of the system suggests it is soon going to crack. Perhaps the spirit of insurrection and liberty will reawaken in the people as it does so. But perhaps not.

We don’t know when or if we will reach the critical threshold where a current of rebellion becomes a wave and then a mass movement. As Albert Camus discusses in The Rebel, when a person can compromise no further, they resist, and when they resist, their rebellion brings about inner transformation, leading them beyond themselves. “When he rebels, a man identifies himself with other men and so surpasses himself, and from this point of view human solidarity is metaphysical,” Camus writes. At the unknown point where people can no longer bear to be controlled or enslaved and begin to resist, they discover something supra-personal within themselves, a source beyond the personal ego. They discover their willingness to sacrifice — even if it costs them their lives — for a principle, for justice, for freedom.

Resistance leads to rebellion — to a complete identification with values that go beyond the individual, that define human nature in its essence. “What was at first the man’s obstinate resistance now becomes the whole man, who is identified and summed up in this resistance,”Camus writes. The ruling elite employ teams of experts in social psychology and neuro-linguistic programming, trained in places like the Tavistock Institute, in order to keep the multitudes from recognizing their own interests in a movement of unified defiance. Despite these intensive efforts, it could happen anyway.

When we step back, it seems clear that the situation, as it has developed, was unavoidable. We can trace the origins of the American project, its bleak underside, back to the genocide committed against native people, considered nonhuman, and the importing of African slaves, given subhuman status, to fuel the European addictions to sugar and nicotine. Mass murder, mass theft, and mass slavery have powered the shiny engine of American progress — the projection and fulfillment of Europe’s great dreams of global Empire — from the beginning. The contradictions of a society professing the ideals of freedom and equality while dependent on slavery and domination of man and nature are now reaching a final limit, an exciting impasse.

History shows that, when reform is impossible, revolution becomes inevitable. Unfortunately, the first phase of the approaching revolution in the US is very likely to be the rise of a naked and unveiled authoritarianism, a fascist Fundamentalism, unless the alternative becomes quickly and visibly manifest. As Chris Hedges comments, “The collapse of the constitutional state, presaged by the death of the liberal class, has created a power vacuum that a new class of speculators, war profiteers, gangsters and killers, historically led by charismatic demagogues, will enthusiastically fill. It opens the door to overtly authoritarian and fascist movements.” Considering that the US is awash in guns and idiocy, the period of social convulsion we face could get ugly.

To bring about a peaceful and humane alternative would require courage, cunning, organization, and discipline. It would take more than group meditations, mass yoga exercises, or “prayers for peace,” however well intentioned. It would depend on a deeper degree of commitment than progressive movements like MoveOn, CodePink, 350.com, and so on can mobilize. The same level of analytical objectivity that the current ruling elite uses to maintain their power and privilege would have to be brought to bear on defining, developing, and mass-distributing the alternative. This requires not just good intentions, but conscious use of the techniques devised by corporations to increase market share and establish brand identification.

There is no point in putting a precise time frame on when breakdown may reach some kind of tipping point, when frustration gives way to fury. We can see many indicators sliding in this direction. As climate change intensifies while resources such as oil and fresh water become ever-more scarce, our world will continue to change with increasing rapidity over the next few years. Things are already changing incredibly quickly, and the acceleration and intensification of events — of chaos, novelty, danger, opportunity — will only speed up from here on out.

When we survey world history over the last centuries, we see that various forms of rebellion, insurrection, and revolution have been tried, sometimes with success, but usually ending with a return to domination and hierarchy. Given another opportunity to get it right, how could the architects of a near-future rebellion avoid such a trap? The short answer, according to political philosophers like Hannah Arendt and Antonio Negri, is not to impose a single-minded ideology but to create a support structure for a grassroots movement, empowering people to awaken as political agents, helping local communities become what Thomas Jefferson called “elementary republics,” within a truly planetary framework. The participatory”open source” model of social production can displace top-down or hierarchical forms of organization. An alternative orchestration of people and power that is not overtly antagonistic could be given shape and direction through the social technologies of the Internet.

In this interim or transition period, those who oppose the current system of oligarchic oppression could make skillful use of the media system and business structure of late-stage Capitalism to design and launch a transformational movement. The goal is to build a platform for radical revision, for a fundamental shift in perception and behavior, so that the alternative — what author Charles Eisenstein calls “the more beautiful world we know in our hearts is possible” — manifests in our time. Rather than a violent or polarizing revolution, this could unfold as an alchemical transmutation or gentle supersession of the present form of human society and the current stasis of consciousness. Since ideas and images, as well as social technologies for organizing people, can now flit instantly across our interlinked planet, this shift could happen quite suddenly, when the time is right.

The new system — of participatory democracy, anarchism, “angel economics” – could, potentially, unfold out of the old. Even if it doesn’t happen, it is still worth a shot. The current path leads to increasing despotism, oppression, and deployment of invasive surveillance and military technologies to control increasing civil unrest. The current path is one of ceaseless war on an increasingly ravaged planet, while people retreat ever deeper into virtual amusements, hiding behind their tiny screens. “