Small Acts of Unusual Kindness Disrupts an Evil Culture

Little Free Libraries are a model for a moral and sustainable future.

People don’t want to be cruel, but kindness is ridiculed. We should overthrow the culture of greed with defiant generosity.

Little free libraries—those small wooden boxes for sharing books—are tiny hotbeds of revolution. They implicitly reject property, hoarding, selfishness. We think, perhaps, they are charming and innocuous. They are easily dismissed — as long as they remain an outlier, a tiny exception to our consumer culture.

Anything that doesn’t make money is seen as sweet, playful and reassuringly insignificant.

Fine. Let the bigger culture ignore us. We will change everything from below, from the operational level, from the position of the ordinary invisible citizen.

Taking A U-Turn From the Path to Doom

The consumer culture, the commoditization of everything, the reduction of life itself to merely a means to greater profits for an undeserving few, is the deadly path we are on. This is our civilization, its systems and leaders and its animating ideologies.

From prosperity theology, which poisons religion, to neoliberalism which empowers the favored few to brutalize and abuse the rest of us with little or no impediment, to the worldwide determination to extract toxic fossil fuels from the Earth, burn them, destabilizing the climate and dooming our children—it’s all ONE thing: bad values.

We don’t, or more accurately, our civilization doesn’t value either Life or Nature. Both of these and indeed EVERYTHING is merely a tool to use for the imagined personal benefit of accumulating more stuff. Oh, and getting praise and admiration from others for being brilliant enough to acquire and hoard more stuff.

As if this was something to be admired.

Greed Is Not Good and It Does NOT Work

Our civilization stands on the foundation of a series of deadly and fatally stupid lies.
We diagnose our situation incorrectly because we fear change. Oh, we claim to want change but what we want is merely a tweak to the horror we are living.

We want to be on “the winning side” of a silly competition. We want an empty bunch of “rewards” that we call “success.” We want to have the most toys when we die, having never bothered to live.

What we are seeking is nonsense. Why do I say this?

1. Because “success” is doom.
2. Because the seeking of success is doom.
3. Because deep down, we know better but refuse to face the truth.

Slicing A Grapefruit the Wrong Way

When you slice a grapefruit properly, you can see the segments all neatly lined up in a circle. You have two halves and they fit together perfectly. They “make sense.”

But our world seems to make no sense which exposes the fact that we are looking at it incorrectly. There’s a sharp line slashing across it that doesn’t belong and the segments are a mess.

We awkwardly pretend it’s all fine and just keep eating.

But our consumer culture, our nominally representative governments, our institutions that formalize and justify cruelty and stupidity and epic self-destruction, they are not sensible or sustainable—or good.

They must go or we must go. That’s the choice. Every day that we continue to accept and support the status quo, every day that we give up and refuse to try something different, every day we complain about the very rules and leaders and systems we actively support—that’s a day wasted, and a day closer to the end.

We are always given two choices and we pick sides. But the choices aren’t actually the only options. They are usually two bad choices.

In a war or other violent conflict, we choose one killer or the other killer and get all righteous about it. But the right choice is to end all the killing. The right choice is to end the exploitation of one group by another group. The right choice is to be friends, not opponents.

Our institutions are built on competition, on our winning and the other side losing, and that’s stupid, unnecessary and morally wrong. When both choices are cruel, then the choices—both of them—must be rejected.

We need radical fundamental change to end the horror.

We Must Do Two Things

We don’t succeed when we exploit each other, when we rapaciously take, when we rape the planet and steal from our neighbors. No wonder we have become strangers to each other, and enemies. That is the system under which we live.

We support these systems instead of caring for each other and our planet. We must do the exact opposite. We need to do two things.

1. Right now, treat ourselves and each other and the planet with love and respect.
   Whatever our differences, we are fundamentally the same. We are human beings going through similar experiences, the experience of our brief human lives. We can fully immerse ourselves in wonder and our existence, our planet, and each other. Or we can continue to be really stupid and waste this brief opportunity and hate each other, kill each other, ruin our Earth. Astoundingly, every day we continue to choose the latter.
2. We must end evil systems, and reject cruel values by refusing to support them and building alternative structures that embrace Life and Nature.
   Our economic and political systems—pretty much all of them—are bad and we should begin withdrawing our support, and openly rejecting them. We should build alternative structures—co-ops that provide for all human needs, a gift economy, genuine communities built on direct and personal human contact. Many of these systems exist, including Little Free Libraries. Let’s expand the good that’s already here, and create new life-embracing entities.

Against Defeatism

We are told, again and again, either that we have already lost or that existing systems are fixing themselves. Neither is true and both are excuses for doing nothing, for accepting the unacceptable.

Sometimes we internalize this defeatism, telling ourselves to stop, that it’s over. These are easy things to do. Many arguments exist showing how we are moving to a clean energy economy and it’ll all be okay. We also hear that we are already doomed, victims of overshoot, and too weak to challenge the wealthy and powerful.

This defeatism is a lazy approach. And yet we are not lazy. We work hard to help our abusers continue to abuse us. We get up everyday, and work hard at producing wealth for people we allow to exercise power over us. We waste our time, which is our lives, doing all this hard DESTRUCTIVE work. Because that’s the world into which we were born, or at least the dominant human-invented systems.

Our group, The Saners, believes that what we are doing and what we are allowing—no, empowering!—others to do to us and to our Earth is insane. We believe it’s essential to begin withdrawing our acceptance and active support for all this. To embody a defiant kindness. To build better alternatives. And to band together with like-minded people to make all this happen.

Doom is not inevitable. A better world is possible and even within our reach. Read about and join The Saners. We can do it. We’ve got this.