Our Quest for Freedom: Explaining and Proposing

by Paul Cudenec | Feb 15, 2024

[This is from my new book Our Quest for Freedom and other essays]

Explaining

As well as describing to other people the horrific reality in which we find ourselves today, we also need to explain to them how it was that we got here.

It is astonishing how many simply imagine it has always been like this.

The system fosters historical ignorance and even a falsified history that depicts the encroachment of criminocratic domination as a positive phenomenon.

We are told that everything that has happened to us was somehow inevitable and right. 2024 could only ever have looked the way it is today and 2050 can only be the way the criminocrats tell us it is going to be.

Over the last decade, I have tried to shed some historical light on how we came to be where we are today, particularly in The Stifled Soul of Humankind (2014) and The Withway (2022).

The key, indisputable, fact is that humans were once free, in the way that all wild living creatures are free.

The condition into which we have sunk does not really show humankind as being the cream of creation or the peak of evolution.

Animals often eat each other, of course, and can take a primal pleasure out of killing for the sake of it. Let’s not romanticise them.

But have you ever seen a fat adult crow sitting on top of a tree, having his food brought up to him by a dozen other birds who seem to feel the need to obey his commands?

Have you ever seen a young deer frolick happily through the sunlit woods but then suddenly stop short, check the time on its digital antlers, and go trotting glumly back to a dark cave to spend the rest of the day tapping figures into a computer database?

Have you ever seen a fish in the water approached by burly fish bailiffs and told that if he doesn’t cough up the river-rent he will thrown up on to the bank to die?

Layers and layers of control have been built up over the years to crush the human spirit, layers which are not just physical, but psychological.

We find it quite normal that we are slaves, cut off from our natural and communal belonging and at the complete mercy of a gang of powerful criminals.

We regard it as quite acceptable that any signs of resistance to that state of affairs are quickly hammered into invisibility by the iron fist of illegitimate “authority”.

We consider it inevitable that future generations, our offspring, will continue to be herded and prodded and abused and milked and medicated and culled and consumed by those with all the power that money can buy and all the money that power can provide.

Proposing

Once we have explained to people that our freedom has been stolen from us, it seems logical enough to propose that we take it back!

But it only works in that order. You have to dig the foundations before you build the house.

When we have realised what kind of world we are living in, and heading further into, when we have remembered that notion of a different way of being and felt our yearning for it, when that has prompted us to expose the ill-doing of power and to share the history of how it came to dominate us, then – and only then – can we suggest that we do something about it.

Otherwise, what sense does any of it make? How can you ask someone to help make a better world if they have not understood what is wrong with the world in the first place and what factors were responsible for that?

Change for the sake of change is not good change. Change for the sake of change is often the kind of change favoured by the criminocrats themselves.

The tightening of their control is always a “reform” and they know no better way to grab more power than by means of a “revolution”.

Our quest for freedom does not start in mid-air, or in the pages of some dry book of theory masquerading as radical truth.

Our quest starts from our guts, from our souls, from our memories, from our brains, from our hearts.

What we propose is a return to freedom which is not a turning-back in time but a rediscovery of the way we are meant to be, the archetypal way of being.

We propose the pursuit of our yearning, a nostalgic search for a future we had and lost, a deep desire to live once more in line with everything we know to be right and true and natural and beautiful and just.

[Audio version]