I don't give much credit to political action. I don't believe real changes, the deepest ones, the most meaningful ones, and above all the most respectful ones of human beings and the planet (both are inseparable, the same entity) are produced by the political sphere.
I believe real salvation, real human and humanistic progress is the result of individual conscience and acts it initiates.
Of course, political action has an impact on the course of our lives, but the motivation behind political action is a combination of power and money. Such an action can only produce harmful, foul, rotten fruits that are actually exploding at us.

On the contrary, the action of conscience, of awareness of others and our surrounding world, though slow to be implemented, because it requires that each individual opens up and passes the human message to their neighbour, can crush everything on its way and then lead to major changes, not patches on a wooden leg.

Let's take an example: the French revolution. It's hard to define the political consequences and the strength of a revolution. Besides, the French revolution, if I'm not mistaken, wasn't political, but the expression of the discontent of the people regarding the established system, and its desire to be happier, and mainly to be able to eat one's fill.
A desire of revolution is often the basis for political action. It's one of the key principals of leftists, the LCR (Revolutionary Communist League, a French extreme-left party) and a fraction of anarchists. They want to create a revolution, erase capitalism and start afresh on a new path.
Unfortunately (or fortunately), no one can decide a revolution. It's the conjunction of a period of time, of events, of men finding themselves at the right place at the right time, with the charisma, the power, the conviction to enable the birth and growth of a revolution first in the conscience of each separate individual, then in the common conscience. The movement has started and can't be stopped. No politician can appear from nowhere and say: Here we go! Everyone behind me, let's overthrow all that crap!
Men need to first be consciously ready to act and determined.

A revolution is not the fruit of a political action, it's something much simpler and much stronger. A revolution is primarily an individual conscience revolting against unfair treatments. Alone, this conscience has no political future, but when it starts to be shared by most people, it becomes uncontrollable, it becomes a revolution.
Hence the importance of not enabling people to think and overwhelming them with commercials and ads to create new personal, selfish needs, having them work their arses off to buy more, promising them happiness is in proportion with owned goods. Once they're moved away from reality, it becomes almost impossible for them, once they're overwhelmed with propaganda, to raise their head above waters and see the real world and all the unfair treatments generated by the system and to force others to raise their head above waters too so they can realise and revolt against unfair treatments and, so doing, step by step, to start a revolution, very naturally, very smoothly. This individual conscience aggregation phase is the hardest, the most fragile, and the longest one.

The first need for an individual is to develop their curiosity, their open-mindedness, and ultimately their conscience in order to be able to make allowances in the dominating, conformist, insipid, dull, drab, absurd, alienating, and mind-numbing trend of thought that some men excessively aware of their own personal interest, such as politicians and commercial lobbyists, or people whose conscience of the repercussions of their actions is minimum or null keep promoting.

Regularly, politicians declare youth is the future of the nation, and therefore that their training is vital, their priority. I totally agree, developing knowledge, culture, and the ability to freely think is the most wonderful human invention. But unfortunately, in practice, public funds allocated to education keep being reduced year after year, and reforms in the sector aim at developing the ability to think the same way the rest of the mass does, in accordance with capitalist principals. Education doesn't aim at developing individual conscience but at being the warrant of the continuity of the system.
Furthermore, funds diminishing, we already witness, for instance in the USA, the sponsoring of studies from the primary school on by big companies. School stationary paid by commercial/IT companies, vending machines installed by Coca Cola in exchange for funds, and mandatory promotion of commercial values of sponsoring companies for fear of seeing the funds being taken away. Education derives from economy when it should actually be the source of it. Individuals, from their early years on, are overwhelmed with messages preventing them from developing their curiosity amongst alternative trends to make allowances and be able to choose freely and as objectively as possible whether the system they were born in is suitable to themselves, the whole community and the future development of both.

How can we change things, then?

We just need to be aware enough so this awareness creates in us a sustainable sentiment of revolt, to share this new enlightened conscience, and to never stop developing our level of conscience so this sentiment of revolt never fades away.

Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come. Victor Hugo

Fushichô

November 27, 2007