Letter 28

Stop saying "the system is broken." It is not.

It is working exactly as it has been built to work.

It is built to make everyone who is not rich work as hard as possible to make the rich even richer.

It is designed to indoctrinate people, especially children to their unspoken law of "Consume, Compete, Conform."

It is designed to continually bombard you with the message that your social worth is directly correlated with what you own, and how much you buy in a market they absolutely control.

It is designed to blame all human suffering on the sufferer, never on the system that is crushing the life out of them.

It means to keep you in a continuing state of anxiety, but not so much that you can't continue being productive. You are meant to fear change, and to see your own legitimacy and place in the society as being tenuous and ephemeral.

It uses that fear to turn one group against another to conceal the fact that you, and your children, and your children's children are being exploited every day of your lives.

Above all, it is aimed at making you believe that your worth is dependent on how "efficient" you are at making a few rich ghouls rich beyond the dreams of an Ottoman despot.

They want to teach you to bless the boot on your neck, and to teach your children to praise and obey those who steal your lives and hopes.

This system is incredibly durable. It has survived wars, revolutions, epidemics and disasters. It is powerful and ruthless. It permeates education, religion, politics, entertainment, journalism and business. It tries to make you believe that it represents the only way things can be - that it is the "natural order" that you must obey.

But it isn't. It is neither eternal, nor natural, nor invulnerable.

It cannot endure one thing. The power of "No."

If enough of us refuse for long enough, if we are brave enough to lay down our tools, to refuse to enforce their self-serving laws, to refrain from patronizing their businesses, if we can do that, they will fall. One week in which a third of their victims refused to participate in any way would devastate them, panic their markets, shake their certainty without a single shot being fired.

But we're moving the opposite direction. We are becoming more compliant, more fractious, more determined to gaze at their illusions, to want what they want, and value what they value. We fight ever more fiercely over the table scraps of their constant, cannibalistic feasting.

And that is why I live so near despair.