Intro: Diminishing Entitlement at the End of Empire

Diminishing Entitlement at the End of Empire:
Why We Need Real Limits If We Are Going To Make The Necessary Transitions

“America... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.”
-Hunter S. Thompson

“Crises are caused by people who don’t want to do anything for themselves.”
-Bill Mollison

Introduction:
It is obvious by this late in the game that our society is addicted to this all-consuming, growth-driven, extraction machine called industrial civilization. This monstrosity grants us a sense of entitlement that surpasses that of the divine monarchs of antiquity, allowing us to consume far beyond our fair share of the planet’s resources, and without giving anything back to the land. Our over-population and bloated consumption capacity both continue to grow, and with the slightest sign of economic slowdown this culture’s mantra becomes: by any means necessary, keep this thing going. After all, our “quality of life” and “livelihood” depend on it.
The truth is our ancestors sold off (or were robbed of) any healthy land-based living ethics they had long ago, and, although a fringe minority are conserving and/or creating dynamic low-input life support systems, we currently lack an adequate rehabilitation program for this destructive way of life. Our lead foot remains on the accelerator, and as distant as breakdown and collapse may seem after we’ve been so comfortable for so long, the prospect of making a meaningful and necessary transition is even more distant and unrealistic. The amount of change we need is not going to come from liberal/progressive politics, financial reforms and legal regulations, a retrofitted “green” industrial economy, or any institution that remotely resembles modern, western governance—that much is clear.
What we need is a truly grassroots revolution; not the type where the privileged buy a little token change, corporations greenwash new spectacles, and the non-profit industrial complex organizes people to pressure the Big Government to put a little restraint on it’s friends who run the Even Bigger Corporate Apparatus. The time has come for a grassroots effort where local communities are transformed to actually live like local communities, shaking off the chains of servitude and reliance in order to establish real autonomy and independence from this global exploitation racket. If these changes don’t happen voluntarily, climate change, peak oil, mass extinction, resource scarcity, global war, and other severe consequences will cause us to scale back population and consumption anyways, with greater human suffering and ecological catastrophe along the way.
It’s to ask ourselves: What would it mean to create a local community that is not dependent upon the inevitably unaccountable higher-ups and the greed-heads who are only too happy to sell off the future for a quick buck? How much do we need to transform our day-to-day living practices and the entitlement that anxiously rests at the heart of modern identity? In essence, what would our liberation look like? What would it take to create a healthy post-industrial culture?