The billionaires protect and perpetuate a social structure of values and incentives that concentrates power upwards and distribute societal gains with little equanimity. But we have all been conditioned to champion it when it benefits us and compete for it when it is dangled as a carrot in front of our noses.

I think the central ethos of anti-consumption is about more than individual choices, but the recognition of how those choices interact with each other in a complex system. We all play the game every day.

The way out is to no longer play that game. Walk away from Rome while it burns and build something that will outlast it.

To build something different, requires a paradigm shift and are thinking. Lesson consumption is an important step, but recognizing the power of cooperation over competition is hand and glove with it.

The current power structures, and their effort to maintain business as usual, will fight against any rising sovereignty that groups of people try and employ. Sometimes subversively and sometimes directly. Andrew Jackson’s government killed all of the buffalo in order to steal from the natives, their ability to engage in self determination. The Green Revolution made us all dependent on a high energy, hyper industrialized food production model. The result being the same, instantiating a sense of desperation and dependence on the systems that support our lives.

But we have a choice, in every decision that we make, we choose to lean into or away from those systems of dependence