While many in the counterculture turned their anti-establishment sentiment toward Marxism and a top-down centralized new order of society, others turned their efforts toward living a life with as little interaction as possible with the established order of things and established a back-to-the-land movement that minimized participation in consumer society. While both were essentially anti-capitalist, the latter movement, while it did have its problems, advocated local decentralized communities and making creative use of local resources as much as possible in meeting the needs of society.
I submit to you that this branch of the former counterculture movement has much more in common with the Tea Party movement than with today's big government Democrats/Socialists.
It was in response to the needs of this movement that the Whole Earth Catalog came into being. Rejecting a consumer society that was controlled by large corporations, Madison Avenue ad executives, and entrenched government officials of an increasingly bureaucratized and intrusive central government, the Whole Earth Catalog helped establish a new way, an internet, if you will, for obtaining resources for living.
The political Left would have us believe that the Whole Earth Catalog was a step in their evolution, but as you will see here, the regimented indoctrination of today's leftists have little in common with the libertarian philosophy of the Whole Earth Catalog.
Stewart Brand, the founder of
The Whole Earth Catalog, described it this way in a
2010 interview:
"It was an era of big government, big business, a big formal education and court system. Whole Earth Catalog was a response to this dilemma. It was about personal power, developing the power of the individual to direct his or her own education, inspiration, and sharing the adventure with whoever was interested. We offered tools to promote this process. This was in an era when JFK was saying, 'Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.' We were saying, 'Ask not what your country can do for you; do it yourself!' "
"Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of
Wired magazine, tells me how he first came across the
Catalog when he was still in high school 'and it changed my life. But then it changed everybody's life. It inspired me not to go to college but to go and try and live out my own life. It was like being given permission to invent your own life. That was what the
Catalog did. It was called 'access to tools' and it gave you tools to create your own education, your own business, your own life.'
(
Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, the book that changed the world, by Carole Cadwalladr,
The Observer, Saturday 4 May 2013)
The requirements for being listed in the Whole Earth Catalog, described in its forward, were simple: "An item is listed in the CATALOG if it is deemed: 1) Useful as a tool, 2) Relevant to independent education, 3) High quality or low cost, 4) Not already common knowledge, 5) Easily available by mail."
Left's efforts to replace greedy capitalists, corporate empires with a centralized government that is run by self-serving politicians and control-freak bureaucrats
How complicated life has become today for the Left, with their efforts to replace the greedy capitalists and their corporate empires with a centralized government that is run by self-serving politicians and control-freak bureaucrats.
Watching the events of the Save Our Planet/Overthrow the Capitalists protest in New York last week, I postulated to a supporter that I thought the best thing to do to help our climate is to shut down large sections of our federal government in Washington, DC and return to more localized control of things. I then explained that decentralized control will do more to save energy than anything.
Finding ways to do things on our own without Big Brother telling us all what to do is a message that got lost since the Whole Earth Catalog days and has now become one of bowing down to big government because pompous liars and brainwashed followers demand it.
An out of control central government has to be reigned in, but instead people are deluded into thinking that the leaders of that same government should be given more authority over business and our personal lives in order to save us from imminent destruction that isn't happening.
And any UN program that supposedly deals with climate change is primarily designed for the purpose of diminishing US influence in the world and expropriating the wealth and resources of our nation. It's the same process as a dictator would use to retain power. Stir people up into a frenzy about fighting a false enemy that is threatening their imminent destruction all for the purpose of gaining greater control over them.
Time for those seriously concerned about saving our planet to abandon their Marxist allies. Just ask the Chinese people how centralized government helps the environment. Communist China is the worst polluter in the world.
