i give you a caitlin essay and begin with her title:

We’re in a burning house, and the people inside don’t believe it’s on fire and think you’re a crazy crackpot for saying it is;

I write a lot more about the problems our society faces than I do about solutions. I do this because we are so far from being able to implement real solutions that most people don’t even really know the problems exist yet.

I could spend my time talking about the need for a giant people’s revolution to dismantle the US-centralized empire, end capitalism and replace the competition-based systems which are driving us to our doom with collaboration-based systems where all of humanity cooperates with each other and with our ecosystem, but those solutions aren’t going to emerge anytime soon because public consent for the status quo order is still being manufactured with a very high degree of success. At this point in history’s unfolding I may as well say we should solve all our problems by inventing free energy and living in the sky like the Jetsons.

Right now our society is like a sick man who (A) doesn’t know he’s sick, (B) refuses to believe he is sick, (C) believes the medicine is poison, (D) has no health insurance and can’t afford the medicine anyway, and (E) also has no means of transportation to get to the doctor. The very first step in that long list of obstacles to his health is to get him to understand that he is sick. That’s why I spend so much energy showing evidence that the media are lying to us, that we are ruled by psychopaths, and that our status quo systems are driving us toward annihilation. 

Westerners who spend their time posturing as brave revolutionaries online and talking about how ready they are to set up the guillotines and take up arms against the ruling class always remind me of LARPers, because they’re talking about something that has exactly zero chance of becoming a reality as things stand right now. They’re role playing as revolutionary militants like other people role play as warriors and wizards in an imaginary fantasy realm. They’ve got no skin in the game; their play-acting has no weight and carries with it no real material risk. Many who talk tough in their fantasy land would run like rabbits the instant things got real...........more........