Certainly!

Here’s a summary of nuggets from the extracts you provided, organized with a focus on themes or key points:

---

**Vaccine Hesitancy & Social Pressure**
- Some people refused rapidly developed COVID vaccines, viewing them as unsafe for low-risk groups.

- Governments framed such defiance as selfish, prompting social pressure for compliance.

**Pluralism and Filipino Identity ("TAYO is We")**
- The notion of a pluralized society in the Philippines has gained acceptance since WWII.

- The idea of "TAYO" emphasizes collectivism and shared national identity, building a positive, inclusive future.

**Gen Z and Climate Activism**
- Gen Z youth face climate anxiety and feelings of helplessness regarding environmental crises.

- Community, friendship, and collective activism are seen as essential supports for coping and creating change.

- Voting and engagement in grassroots movements are promoted as avenues for action.

**The Value of Grassroots Movements**
- Grassroots activism is vital for societal change and addressing critical global issues (e.g., Black Lives Matter).

- Collective action and shared goals drive such movements, which are historically important.

**Humans’ Place in the Universe**
- The rarity of intelligent life suggests humanity's unique role and responsibility.

- Urgency is expressed regarding the need for a new, respectful relationship with nature and our planet.

**Art and Activism (Olafur Eliasson, Alan Moore)**
- Some artists and writers see activism (climate/environmental or "magic") as core to their work, using their platforms to inspire change rather than expecting “magical” solutions.

**Pandemic-era Social Change**
- The COVID pandemic triggered real lifestyle shifts and exposed both interconnection and growing geopolitical divisions that may hamper collective action moving forward.

**Self-Sufficiency in History**
- Historical references (e.g., monks as farmers) underscore self-reliance and local cooperation as survival strategies.

Certainly!

Title:

Content: Posted in: Comics, Current News | Tagged: ,

Alan Moore (Saviour of Brazil) On Magic, Fascism & What We Can All Do

Recently, Alan Moore held an audience with the Scottish Book Trust, hosted by Heather Parry. And talked about magic, fascism and Brazil.

Article Summary

  • Alan Moore discusses magic as a sophisticated worldview that shapes his creative process.
  • Magic, Moore asserts, can empower individuals to effect real-world change and combat fascism.
  • Moore, tongue in cheek, claims a personal victory in influencing Brazil's election, humorously dubbing himself "Saviour of Brazil".
  • His poignant letter to Brazil is shared, detailing his stance against Bolsonaro and support for Lula.

Recently, Alan Moore held an audience with the Scottish Book Trust, hosted by fellow author Heather Parry. They talked about everything from cabbages to kings, from Star Trek to satire, but also that this was the occasion of his seventieth birthday. Which meant it was thirty years since he declared that he was a magician. And Heather wondered how his attitude to magic and creation had changed in those three decades.

Alan Moore, thirty years a magician

Now, before I get into the transcript, and there is a lot of it that's relevant, I do ask you to take things in context. Alan Moore is a fine practitioner of spoken irony, on a number of levels, and one of those is to say something outrageously conceited, but in a self-derogatory way, he is mocking that anyone, especially him, could ever say such a thing. It's obvious when you see him in person, it's less obvious when transcribed, but it's clear if you bear this in mind. Onwards. Alan Moore told her that;

"it's become more sophisticated, I don't really do much of the ceremonial bit these days. That was probably when I started out as a magician and needed to convince myself that this wasn't all delusional, that it did have a kind of practical application in the real world and I needed things to convince me. These days I am convinced of magic and it's a world view that I have internalized and which affects pretty much everything that I do. It's got more acute but I still hold with almost everything that I said back in my frankly delusional first couple of years of magic, especially the thing about the equivalence between magic and art. These days I'd say that representation or art, and consciousness, and writing, and magic probably are all part of the same thing and all arose at the same time. So I believe that any artistic expression potentially is an act of magic. You're using your consciousness in a purposeful way to have an effect that is beyond the frontiers of science. To explain you're trying to affect other people's mind and their reality in the way that they see the world, is a big thing. You're trying to conjure things into being into tangible and visible being for your readership."

"I remember always that back in the tradition of magic, if you offended a magician they might put a curse on you and your hands might be funny for six months. If you offended a bard they might put a satire on you which would make you ridiculous in the eyes of your contemporaries in the eyes probably of your family, of yourself and that would probably endure if it was a good satire. People after you were dead would still be laughing at you. This is why people were terrified of bards much more than they were terrified of warlocks or witches. And this is what I would like to see. I would like to see people terrified of writers… well not terrified but actually thinking of themselves as something more than entertainers. I would like to see writers and artists and musicians and everybody thinking of what they actually are, not what they've been corralled into being part of an entertainment system.  I think that people probably put limits on themselves. One of the things that becoming a magician did for me was to remove those limits. So if you're going to declare yourself uh as a magician when you're really, really drunk and celebrating your birthday in a biker's pub then you can really pretty much write your own rule book after that. Because the power of declaring something and sticking to it is also large and we end up being what we pretend to be."

"I think that's probably true of most of us. We invent a personality for ourselves when we were about 12 or 13, when we realized that the personality that got us through our first 12 or 13 years of life isn't going to work when it comes to our puberty and adolescence so we start to borrow bits from fictional characters from friends that we admire, and we put together this Frankenstein personality which, after a few years, we forget that we put it together and we assume that it's us. We probably stay with that for our entire lives."

"I think that the whole point of magic is not to acquire physical results or everybody would be doing sigils to end fascism forever. You change your consciousness, that's all that you have power over. That's all you can do and if you can do that   then you make yourself into the kind of person that could end fascism forever."

How Alan Moore saved Brazil from fascism

We needed an example of course and Alan Moore was happy to give us one.

"Can I brag here a little bit please? Exactly a year ago. my daughter sent me a letter that she'd had from a Brazilian journalist um saying that the elections were just coming up and it was Bolsonaro against Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Bolsonaro was a complete fascist, he was on his way to completely destroying the Amazon and displacing all these indigenous people and everything like that and this journalist was saying that I do have apparently quite a big following in Brazil. And would I write a letter explaining why everybody should vote for Lula rather than Bolsonaro to end fascism in Brazil forever? Uh.. you've got five days. I stayed up really really late one night and I wrote this letter that started dearest Brazil and I really wrote my heart out. I was a bit tired by the time I'd finished but it was some good writing and apparently he sent it to da Silva and da Silva posted it to the electorate of Brazil and got in by a very very narrow margin. So now I know that that wasn't necessarily because of the letter that I wrote but I'm definitely going to claim it and if people would in the future… I never had any academic letters after my name but if they want put "Saviour of Brazil" in brackets then that that would suit me very well you know. So yes you can actually have an effect just because you've altered your own consciousness and that's the way to do it and that is the way that magic could still affect huge changes in the culture that we've been saddled with and you to could end up saving Brazil as well. Although I have pretty much got that covered."

"I was talking with some friends the other day  we were talking about ways that capitalism could be dismantled and things like that and then one of them there's still the problem of all this popular fascism and I said I think you can leave that to me, everybody don't worry about it, I've got it."

Remember what I said about layered irony? Well here, reproduced in full, is that letter, written by Alan Moore.

Dearest Brazil,

We are fast running out of last chances to save the planet and its peoples. Our world is changing, faster than it's ever changed before, and forcing us to adapt more quickly if we are to survive. From hunter-gatherer society to agriculture, from agriculture to industry, from industry to whatever is taking shape now — this new condition that we do not as yet have a name for — humanity has seen these kinds of monumental shift before, although not often. These transitions are not caused by political forces but by the unstoppable tidal movements of history and technology, which is a tide that we can either steer our vessels to take advantage of, or we can be washed away by. The Earth is turning, turning of necessity into a new place, and we can only turn with it or else lose the biosphere that sustains us forever. Most people, I believe, know this in their hearts and feel it in their stomachs.

And yet, over this past five or so years, we have seen across the globe a ferocious resurgence of exactly the political and economic ideas that led us into this clearly disastrous situation in the first place. The unconcealed aggression of this extreme right advance seems to me so forceful, and yet so disconnected from any reality, that it can only be born of desperation; the hysterical fear felt by those most invested in the power structures of the old world, who know the new world can, ultimately, have no place for them. Afraid for their very existence, for the existence of the worldview from which they benefit, they have crowded the world stage over this last half -decade with increasingly loud, overblown and blustering pantomime characters, for whom no course of action is too corrupt or inhuman, and no line of reasoning too blatantly absurd.

Unashamedly monstrous, these have persecuted racial and religious minorities, or their native peoples, or the poor, or women, or people of different sexualities, or all of the above. During the still-evolving pandemic they put their political posturing and their financial doctrines before the safety of their populations, presiding over hundreds of thousands of potentially unnecessary deaths; hundreds of thousands of devastated families, devastated communities. With their nations on fire, or flooded, or parched by drought, they insisted that climate change was a leftist hoax to inconvenience industry, and branded environmental or social protestors as terrorists. Adopting the fascist circus-act style of Italy's Silvio Berlusconi, we have had the dangerous insurrectionary theatrics of Donald Trump in North America, and the ruinous indignities of Boris Johnson and his understudies in the (at present) United Kingdom. And, of course, Brazil has had Jair Bolsonaro.

Although we in the Global North obviously contribute much more than our fair share of horrifying political figures to the world's situation, I don't know anybody with an ounce of conscience and compassion who isn't appalled by what Bolsonaro, riding into office on Trump's bow-wave, has done to your huge and beautiful country, along with what he continues to do to our relatively small and somehow-still-beautiful planet. We've watched despairingly while, singing from the same hymn -book as his North American inspiration, Bolsonaro has railed against Brazil's indigenous people, its homosexuals and the rights of its women to safe abortions, fuelling an uncontrolled bonfire of hatred as a distraction from his social and economic agendas, while simultaneously flooding your culture with guns. We've seen him attempt to swagger his way through the pandemic by spouting his anti-vaccination idiocy, and we've seen Brazil's increasing acreage of hastily-prepared graveyards; those pigeonhole grids in grey soil with here and there dead flowers or painted markers as a drip of colour.

We've also looked on while he responded to the prospect of new international environmental laws by simply speeding up his suicidal destruction of the rainforest, choking our communal atmosphere with burning jungle, displacing or dispatching people who had lived in these regions for generations, and seemingly colluding with or turning a blind eye to the murder of journalists investigating this brutal ethnic cleansing. A respected British science magazine that I subscribe to, New Scientist, has recently described Brazil's imminent elections as a potentially crucial point of no return in our
species' life-or-death battle with the climate catastrophe we ourselves have engineered.

Simply put, Jair Bolsonaro can continue, profitably, to please the corporate interests that support him, or our grandchildren can eat and breathe. It's one or the other.

As an anarchist, there are very few political leaders that | could completely tolerate, much less endorse, but from all that | have heard or read about him, Luiz da Silva, Lula, seems to be one such rare individual. His policies appear to be fair, humane and practical, and, as I understand it, he has promised to reverse many of Bolsonaro's most disastrous decisions.

Repairing the damage of these last five years would surely not be easy or without cost, and da Silva would be inheriting a badly disfigured political landscape. At the very least, however, from this distance, he at least has the look of a candidate who acknowledges that mankind is going through one of its infrequent seismic transformations, and realises that we must change how we live, if we are to live at all. He seems a politician committed to the future, with its hard work and its just and wonderful possibilities, rather than the flailing and destructive death-throes of an unsustainable past.

Brazil's forthcoming election is, I'm told, balanced on something of a knife edge and, as discussed above, the whole world is riding on it. lf you have ever enjoyed any of my work, or have felt any sympathy with its humanitarian leanings, then please go out and vote for a future that is fit for human beings, for a world that is more than the golden latrine of its corporations and their puppets.

Let's put the iniquities of the last five, or perhaps the last five hundred years, behind us. With love, and trust,

Your friend, Alan Moore x

General elections were held in Brazil in October 2022. As no candidate for president received more than half of the valid votes, a runoff election was held four weeks later. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva received the majority of the votes in the second round and became president-elect of Brazil. Bolsonaro requested the courts invalidate electronic votes. The court rejected the request and fined the party $4.3 million for bad faith litigation. During the inauguration, pro-Bolsonaro protestors stormed the government and court offices, and the Presidential resident, though unsuccessfully. Maybe Glycon was watching.

Since 1998, Scottish Book Trust has been delivering world-class programmes across Scotland and working with partners from small community groups to the Scottish Government. As a national charity, they believe that reading and writing for pleasure have the power to transform lives and everyone should have access to their benefits. You'll find the Scottish Book Trust in schools and libraries, at community events, in towns, cities, and isolated rural communities, bringing books to life for children in care, families living in challenging circumstances, people living with dementia and people in prison.

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About Rich Johnston

Founder of Bleeding Cool. The longest-serving digital news reporter in the world, since 1992. Author of The Flying Friar, Holed Up, The Avengefuls, Doctor Who: Room With A Deja Vu, The Many Murders Of Miss Cranbourne, Chase Variant. Lives in South-West London, works from Blacks on Dean Street, shops at Piranha Comics. Father of two. Political cartoonist.

Here’s a summary of nuggets from the extracts you provided, organized with a focus on themes or key points:

---

**Vaccine Hesitancy & Social Pressure**
- Some people refused rapidly developed COVID vaccines, viewing them as unsafe for low-risk groups.

Title:

Content: Health News & Commentary

They Spent Years Telling Us Peer Pressure Is Wrong, Now It’s Their Weapon of Choice

"Instead of accepting that there is a perfectly rational explanation for refusing a rushed vaccine with the worst safety record in modern history for a virus that presents next-to-no risk for most people – prime ministers, presidents and premiers have insisted that defiance is a selfish act that demands constant social pressure."
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Shops in various European countries have erected physical wire fences to separate vaccinated and unvaccinated customers.

Footage from a Kaufland supermarket in Romania has surfaced depicting a sign at the entrance dividing customers into aisles separated by two-metre high wire barricades, draped with plastic, open at the top and the bottom.

Despite these literal walls placed between people, many continue to deny that segregation is taking place.

After months of independent reports contradicting the global narrative, the World Health Authority has admitted that both vaccinated and unvaccinated people spread Covid at roughly the same rate, and that being vaccinated (in this particular case) does not stop transmission.

If governments remained true to their word about ‘following the science’, this revelation should have signalled the end for vaccine passports.

Instead, nearly every government has come out in recent days to double-down on their booster-shot programs to combat a new Covid variant. Omicron is noted for being vaccine-resistant and mild, mimicking a weak flu and yet politicians have successfully used its existence to guarantee the continuation of authoritarian health orders.

Our governments have forgotten that ‘unvaccinated’ does not mean infected. For the first time in history, completely healthy people have found themselves permanently restricted by biosecurity regulations designed to temporarily isolate infected patients until their recovery.

Romania’s shopping centre fences provide a visual representation of what Western nations have done by stealth. Australia has built its fences out of fear, segregating people via a noxious combination of threats, fines, and social pressure.

By far the most damaging aspect of Covid propaganda has been the psychological war waged on the population.

Humans are social creatures. Our behaviour is mostly shaped by the social norms we observe around us. The localised imitation of each other provides the foundation of ‘culture’ and has created an incalculable tapestry of variations across the world. We are so malleable to suggestion that we form behavioural bonds at a family, peer, work, sport, community, city, state, and national level. These expected social norms exist in constant competition with each other and the wider world.

The addition of homogeneous Covid propaganda to this system has attempted to create a single pattern of behaviour – a blueprint if you will – for humanity. It is an exercise in social engineering instead of a natural progression of advantageous behaviour discovered through trial and error. This kind of mono-thought is particularly dangerous because it is inflicted upon society regardless of merit. All socialist societies suffer from this structural error and in short order, it leads to the collapse of nations and the decimation of their civil unity.

Click here to support Alexandra Marshall’s work.

Covid mania has evolved into a new type of socialism that blends total state control with woke-political theory and the ambition of global corporate entities. Like all authoritarian regimes, it propagates itself via the control of information (in partnership with Silicon Valley) reinforced through the bombardment of fear (courtesy of weak politicians).

Considering how much time our current generation has spent congratulating itself for being morally superior by ‘erasing the past in revenge for historical harms’ – it is interesting to note how frequently the majority have fallen for textbook propaganda.

Over the last decade, several dangerous ideological movements have managed to motivate significant sections of society into acts of self-harm.

The Climate Change eco-fascist cult has convinced everyone from children to CEOs to punish society for being successful. It has imposed a parallel currency of Carbon Credits to micromanage citizens while pouring profit into the pockets of Green companies trading on the promise of a fictional apocalypse. Meanwhile, Black Lives Matter – the Marxist race-baiting organisation encouraging teenagers to destroy private property and assault strangers – has turned harmonious societies across the world into racist crucibles.

These two political movements utilised social media to create an intense environment of peer pressure that stalked impressionable minds. It is easy to understand how young people found themselves lured into a virtue-signalling hierarchy where reblogging propaganda invigorated their online popularity. Soon after, the corporate world went from a predatory marketing campaign designed to soak up these brainwashed customers, into a cannibalistic cycle of shame where CEOs bullied each other into compliance and those who refused found themselves viciously attacked.

The market of ideas is often coercive – frequently ruthless – and sometimes profitable. ‘Crazes’ come and go inside society as humans develop an intense interest for one activity or ideological movement before growing bored and moving on. However, when the government passes policy to institutionalise the behaviour, mandate it, or generously reward it (which has happened with both Net Zero policy and demands for office quotas) these transient fixations become artificially extended.

Unlike a harmless obsession for Furbies or Zumba, all three of the current ideological movements (Climate Change, Black Lives Matter, and Covid) include extremely harmful and abusive social qualities which are rewarded by authoritative bodies.

Covid is easily the most destructive of the three.

The message coming out of the world’s governments is that people who refuse to get vaccinated are dangerous. These dissidents pose an immediate and serious threat to the personal safety of others through a deliberate and malicious action, which in turn justifies ordinarily illegal civil retribution.

Instead of accepting that there is a perfectly rational explanation for refusing a rushed vaccine with the worst safety record in modern history for a virus that presents next-to-no risk for most people – prime ministers, presidents and premiers have insisted that defiance is a selfish act that demands constant social pressure.

This does not come solely in the form of online bullying. Governments have inflicted laws which lock citizens out of the economy and actively mark them as a segregated sub-class who are easily identified by the peer group.

It is called ‘painting a target’.

Politicians have done this for many reasons, the most obvious being that the constant abuse and victimisation levelled at the unvaccinated by their family, friends, and strangers creates a mental hell that breaks most people. In general, humans want to be an accepted member of the group and inciting constant torment means that politicians can conscript the public to do what they cannot legally get away with – harassment.

Segregating part of the community for vilification also scares people into compliance. Those who withstand this assault serve a purpose too. It is helpful to have a small group of people who resist because they provide the perfect ‘stick’ with which to threaten everyone else. ‘If you don’t do what we say, you’ll end up like these people…’

The last reason is to create a scapegoat for both government failure, and for the whole of society to shift their frustration, anger, hatred, and blame onto.

We have seen this numerous times throughout the pandemic, where politicians like Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews has described Covid as a ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’ – a statement left uncorrected. Even New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet punished the unvaccinated by moving the ‘freedom’ date from December 1 to December 15 due to several Covid outbreaks in fully vaccinated gyms controlled by a vaccine passport system. Logic would suggest that restrictions should have been placed on the vaccinated, but instead it was the unvaccinated who, already essentially locked in their homes, were issued with an extension to their arbitrary detention.

Health professionals – who represent authority figures garnishing these sinister overtures with credibility – have done everything from trying to raise healthcare taxes on the unvaccinated, to locking them out of essential healthcare and suggesting they be left to die as punishment.

2GB radio host Ray Hadley said on November 30 that ‘anti-vaxxers’ were like Hitler or paedophiles – two of the most reviled groups in human history. He did not offer to justify that nonsense comparison, nor could he, as Hadley was describing law-abiding citizens who simply wished to opt-out of a dangerous drug trial and be left alone to get on with their lives.

If he had vilified any other group of people – such as a religion or race – Hadley not only would have found himself sacked, but there would likely be legal proceedings taken against him.

The Hitler comparison is ironic, in that there are plenty of parallels between the behaviour of Covid’s propaganda to the early stages of the Nazi regime. Australia’s system of medical tyranny is used to justify segregation, discrimination, dehumanization, and exclusion from society to the point where premiers are gleeful at the prospect of the unvaccinated starving on the street. All of the worst regimes in history believed they were ‘saving people’, and this one is no different.

It is a very strange place for Australia to find itself in after the decades successive governments spent a fortune educating children on the dangers of bullying and peer pressure.

Public money was invested (and clearly wasted) in educating children and parents about peer pressure in order to stop people from being bullied into dangerous activities for the sake of social status.

The government and its teams of experts know exactly how this psychology works. We have a morally lacklustre generation of politicians prepared to exploit the social dependency of humanity to expand their power, protect their investments, and hide their failures.

This ends when people stop policing each other, and shift their attention to the depravity of those in charge.

Click here to support Alexandra Marshall’s work.

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- Governments framed such defiance as selfish, prompting social pressure for compliance.

**Pluralism and Filipino Identity ("TAYO is We")**
- The notion of a pluralized society in the Philippines has gained acceptance since WWII.

Title:

Content: A SOJOURNER’S VIEW: How Filipino youth could be the hope of the fatherland in this computer age

Share this story

CEBU CITY (MindaNews / 21 June)—In my last column published in MindaNews last June 11, I entitled the piece, “Quo Vadis the Filipino youth today on 125th anniversary of our Independence?” In this essay, I asked the question: “So how are the Filipino youth today able to maneuver through this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) society? Faced with this rather bleak reality, how can the Filipino youth of today (those of the Millennial and Gen-X generations) be expected to even consider the question: how can we be patriots?”

I ended that column by introducing the reader to Mr. Camilo Osias—first Filipino Superintendent of Schools (1915 to 1916), Assistant Director of Education (1917 to 1921), later Secretary of Education (1940s), a lecturer at the University of the Philippines (1919 to 1921), 1934 member of Constitutional Convention in 1934, National Assembly member in 1935, Senate President (1952-53). I wouldn’t be surprised if the Filipino youth of today hardly know this very distinguished Filipino scholar and statesman.

In 1940, he wrote a book entitled “The Filipino Way of Life: The Pluralized Philosophy” published in New York. Written almost 80 years ago, long before the current popular philosophical theories are taught in our universities (decolonial, post-colonial, post-structural and post-modern theories) as well as the advancement of computer technology with the dawn of the Information Age, Osias’ philosophical framework finds resonance in contemporary Philippine society.

The idea of being a pluralized society has become far more acceptable now than just before and after the Second World War. Today we Filipinos—especially among the youth—there is greater consciousness that we live in a Republic characterized by different classes, ethnicities, religious and cultural traditions, genders, sexual orientations, age differences, level of physical and mental capacities and other categories of identities. And yet we are called to be united if our Republic is to advance in her vision to be a truly free, just and sovereign nation-state! And we her citizens are all called to be patriots!

Osias’ vision of how a pluralized society is encapsulated in his appropriation of a Tagalog word—TAYO (an inclusive word to mean we or us, i.e., including people speaking and including people spoken to). But when pronounced tayô: it means condition, social position or stance. Thus, tumayô means to take a stand, to stand up, to rise, to position oneself; and magtayô means to set up, to build, to erect, to put up and to construct. TAYO is thus the perfect Pilipino word to capture the essence of Osias’ pluralized philosophy.

Here’s a quote from his book indicating what is the vision of his TAYO philosophy:
“Under the… Tayo, or pluralized concept, there is no room for the practice of ‘Let (Juan) do it.’ Everybody must do his duty and bear his share of the burden and responsibility. Participating, thinking, and doing are prominent features of the pluralized philosophy. The people must be… schooled in the lessons of justice, liberty, and democracy… They must value peace and order, personal freedom and political liberty. Young and adults alike must learn to conceive and develop democracy by experiencing and living democracy.

“The pluralized philosophy presents efficiency, freedom, and happiness as the trinity of objectives most worthwhile in life. It is wedded to democracy and seeks to deepen faith in, and increase devotion to, democracy. There must be a continual striving for democratic objectives following democratic processes. The Filipino way of life—yes, the human way of life —recognizes the value and sanctity of human personality and seeks co-operation and solidarity among individuals within the nation and among nations.”

But an important question—which naturally did not arise in Osias’ era—but which confronts us today in this post-modern world is this: Is this pluralized philosophy relevant to the lives of today’s Filipino youth considering how different their lives are to those of Osias’ generation? Compared to the post-war reality, the VUCA landscape has turned far more complex with major shifts in geopolitics the US/EU/Japan clique no longer holds dominion as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa; but recently Iran and Saudi Arabia want to join) alliance is getting stronger as well as in terms of the urgent issues demanding global responses (e.g., the impact of climate change, the rise of pandemics and the contentious migration waves, fundamentalist resurgence, the popularity of populism and so many others).

And the youth of today has little convergence with those of the 1960s-1980s by way of their socio-political engagements. They are ensconced in their own world and it is not fair for those of the baby boomers and Gen-X generations to expect them to be copycats. After all, they live in a very different context their parents and grandparents would not have imagined might arise in just a few decades since their youth. This especially because of how the computer and other technological gadgets have become integral in the everyday lives of our youth today.

The high-tech revolution is unstoppable and is fast progressing into new apps, algorithms, social platforms and all that that jazz. Unlike their elders, they maneuver through these labyrinthian corridors with ease often leaving their elders perplexed! It seems they are now slowly starting to lose interest in email, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter with the fast entrance of artificial intelligence beginning with ChatGPT, the sibling model to InstructGPT trained to follow an instruction in a prompt and provide a detailed response. Despite the fears expressed by the moguls of the internet world, including Elon Musk, AI technology is bound to grow by leaps and bounds. And now we are hearing this thing called Singularity which would produce the mythical bionic man!

So is it possible to bridge youth activism (among millennials, Gen-Z and the next generation) and the computer technology? Jon Traya—a Davao-based millennial philosopher-architect-artist-businessman—is offering a possible model. An Osias disciple, as he appropriated the TAYO philosophy, he has crafted an app that the Filipino youth of today might want to consider. That is, if they do want to have some kind of engagement in responding to the country’s socio-political ills. Which can be done online, without having to go out and march in the streets! Here is Traya’s Manifesto for TAYO (which was publicly released last June 12, Independence Day):

We believe it is time for a new economic and social organization model.
We believe in the power of community to create a more inclusive, egalitarian, and sustainable system. We cast aside the traditional models of capitalism and communism, which prioritize profits and political ideologies over the needs of people and the planet.
We forward the concept of the third space in this digital world, where people from diverse backgrounds and experiences may come together to collaborate and co-create a better future; A space unbounded by the constraints of the past and creatively open to new and innovative ideas that challenge the status quo.
We are committed to building social networks in an atmosphere of trust and cooperation; to leveraging the unique strengths and resources of our community members.
We believe in the power of the collective and the importance of equal access and opportunity within our community.
We surmise that the traditional models of capitalism and communism/socialism have failed to deliver on their promises of prosperity and fairness for all—it is now time for a new approach that recognizes the interdependence and interconnectedness of all individuals and communities to emerge.
We propose an alternative model in the context also observed by Camilo Osias—the pluralized idea.
We propose TAYO.
TAYO has been unconsciously guiding us in our worldview (“kalibutan,” “palibot,” “libot” or around us). It is rooted in our being, in our language, embracing us, and somehow escapes our consciousness. Now is the time to be cognizant of TAYO.
TAYO emphasizes the power of networks and social connections in shaping ideas and economic outcomes.
TAYO recognizes the importance of building social capital, leveraging indigenous knowledge and cultural traditions, and equalizing access within the network.
TAYO seeks to build communities rooted in the ideals of inclusivity, equity, and sustainability.
We invite all those who share these values to join us and be guided by the spirit of TAYO in building a better future for all. Together, we create a kalibutan that is all-inclusive, a we-all-world not limited to species, color, race, ethnicity, ideology, territory, or religion as its basis for unity but recognizes plurality and interdependence of all.

TAYO is We. We Stand, We Build, Us Together. The Collective We.

Only time will tell if this TAYO agenda will take off and resonate with a mass of our Filipino youth. But there is already an available app, that in your computer appears in the company of the other apps. In a sense this is a genuinely Filipino app taking advantage of a foreign technology.

If you are interested, check out https://tayoapp.com, available for both Apple and Android.

A few days ago we celebrated the 162nd birthday of Dr. Jose Rizal who was born in 1861. Rizal is known to have written: “The youth is the hope of the Fatherland!” If he were born today, what would be his suggestion as to how the Filipino youth could truly be the hope of the Fatherland?”

(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Redemptorist Brother Karl Gaspar is Mindanao’s most prolific book author. Gaspar is also a Datu Bago 2018 awardee, the highest honor the Davao City government bestows on its constituents. He recently moved to his new assignment in Cebu City.)

Your perspective matters! Leave a comment below and let us know what you think. We welcome diverse viewpoints and encourage respectful discussions. Don't hesitate to share your ideas or engage with others.
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TOP STORIES

- The idea of "TAYO" emphasizes collectivism and shared national identity, building a positive, inclusive future.

**Gen Z and Climate Activism**
- Gen Z youth face climate anxiety and feelings of helplessness regarding environmental crises.

Title:

Content: Our Burning Planet

YOUTH RISING 2023

Meet the bold Gen Z learner who uses his break time at school for his climate activism

Otsile Nkadimeng speaking at the Daily Maverick The Gathering 2023 Earth Edition in Cape Town, South Africa. (Photo: Felix Dlangamandla)

To be a teenager at this moment is, to put it as a Gen Z would say, ‘not it’. But young climate activists like Otsile Nkadimeng are fighting for change while also juggling school and planning a future.

“Gen Z just happens to be the generation that appears when that countdown clock is no longer in hours or minutes, but it’s down to seconds… We don’t have time to say climate change will be someone else’s issue. We cannot shrug off the responsibility.”

These were the words of Otsile Nkadimeng, an 18-year-old climate activist and lead organiser of Fridays for Future South Africa and co-founder of the Sundial Movement, from Edenvale, Johannesburg.

Nkadimeng is in matric at Jeppe High School for Boys, in Kensington. When Daily Maverick spoke to him on Zoom on a Monday afternoon, he was wearing his school uniform. He was in the midst of mid-year exams; having written one that day, he was preparing for another on Thursday. He uses his “break” time for activism work.

Read in Daily Maverick: Change will come not from power but youth, so step aside, say climate activists

The young activist appears eager, expressive and confident. He speaks genuinely about his passions and finding his way in the SA climate activism space.

Speaking about his activism, he says: “When I first started learning about the climate crisis, it seemed to me, if there’s a problem, it can be solved. But the fact that no one seemed to be doing anything is sort of what activated me. I had to do something… It’s sort of like that John Lewis quote: ‘If not us, then who? If not now, then when?’”

‘Climate shock’

He started in climate activism in late 2019, after hearing Greta Thunberg’s “How Dare You” speech at the 2019 UN Climate action summit in New York. Googling her, he found out about Fridays for Future, the youth-led movement that Thunberg started to pressure policymakers to act on climate change. Fridays for Future South Africa didn’t have open applications at the time, so he signed up with Extinction Rebellion and became an activist.

“I had joined to learn, but that’s where my activism really got started,” he told Daily Maverick.

But Nkadimeng described soon feeling completely overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude and scale of the climate crisis. It would hit him in the early-morning hours — what he calls “climate shock”.

“The process of me learning about the magnitude and scale of the climate crisis, led me to completely fall apart in the climate space for what was pretty much a year. I shut down… I was just captured by this crisis and not knowing what to do about it,” he says.

There are different terms for what Nkadimeng experienced, of course. It’s also not unusual. Often termed climate anxiety or eco-anxiety, this feeling can manifest as what the American Psychological Association describes as “a chronic fear of environmental doom.”

Otsile Nkadimeng at the June 16 Youth Parade for Justice and Peace to the Union Buildings in 2022. This was his first protest with the Fridays For Future group. (Photo: Supplied)

Read in Daily Maverick: Climate anxiety is real. Why talking about it matters

When asked how he learned to cope with climate anxiety, Nkadimeng responded: “The honest answer is I don’t think I do.”

But he gets by with a little help from his friends.

Comfort in community

In August 2022, Nkadimeng co-founded the Sundial Movement, which acts as a network for high schools, allowing students to communicate on the climate crisis and take collective action on key issues. Just months after starting Sundial, the organisation boasts a network of about 31 schools — with 17 located in Gauteng, and 14 in the Western Cape.

An avid debater, Nkadimeng describes how he would network with students from other schools at debating tournaments, and encourage them to join the Movement.

Schools participate by holding school-sanctioned sit-ins, walkouts or informative assemblies about climate change, says Nkadimeng. Parktown High School for Girls, in Johannesburg, and Springfield Convent, in Cape Town, both held walkouts in collaboration with Sundial, late last year.

Nkadimeng said it took creating the Sundial Movement to realise that he wasn’t alone in feeling the way he does about what’s happening to the planet.

“There’s not really a lot of other people my age that operate in this space – at least in the way I do – that I can talk to about how I feel as a teenager,” he said.

“Being in this space and doing what we’re doing, literally is on-the-job training. There is no amount of preparation as a young person you can get for the type of fight we’re up against.”

As he met more young people through the Movement, he began to see that many in his generation shared the will to act, but were battling with the thought that it couldn’t be done in the window we have. The importance of community cannot be overstated; we all felt the effects of isolation during the pandemic. He sees the Sundial community as a space to talk honestly, take collective action and to learn from each other.

Read in Daily Maverick: Eco-anxiety: The mental health effects associated with the climate crisis

“The biggest challenge is battling climate anxiety; battling the notion that we can’t do it… With Sundial, it’s all about how do we [respond to climate change] in the very short time that we have to do so, with as many people as we need to do it, without driving people into the ground.”

After matriculating, Nkadimeng envisions playing more of an advisory role in Sundial, and intends to turn his attention to Fridays for Future and the youth advocacy group, So We Vote, of which he is the executive director. He also plans to study locally (but not something climate-related — he doesn’t want it to take over his life).

Otsile Nkadimeng pictured at his first protest as a Climate Activist outside Standard Bank on 12 March 2021 against Standard Bank’s financing of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline. (Photo: Supplied)

Similar to the organisations, 18by Vote and Gen Z for Change in the US, Nkadimeng says So We Vote is trying to use social media and Gen Z networks to register young South Africans to vote ahead of the 2024 general election.

“The name is in response to everything that’s happening in the country,” Nkadimeng says, describing South Africa’s many crises including climate change, gender-based violence, energy and education.

“What can young people do? The crises are getting worse. What do we do? What we can do is vote. So we vote.”

The Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) reported that, of a total eligible voting population of just over 40 million, only 26.2 million South Africans registered to vote in the 2021 municipal elections.

The mid-year population estimate by Statistics South Africa, published in July 2022, shows South Africa has a population of 60.6 million, with 20.6 million people aged between 15 and 34 years.

“[So We Vote] is informed by the idea that once a generation becomes a significant voting demographic — registered and with the potential to vote — it scares the hell out of politicians.

“If the majority of young people registered to vote and actually voted, and [politicians] saw that young people were making up the majority of the voting demographic in the country, there is so much that can change. It would mean politicians would need to hear us, and actually answer us,” he continued.

Nkadimeng has solidified his place as a leading voice among young South Africans who are bravely calling for action against climate change, and systematic and institutional changes. He hopes that So We Vote, coupled with the work Sundial is doing at a ground level, will help to galvanise young people around climate change and “spark them to be more politically active.”

“We need to make climate change a massive political issue,” he said.

“We haven’t not dealt with climate change because there are no solutions. The solutions exist, the people who can implement them exist, it’s just that there are some people who don’t want the solutions to be implemented. And those are the people who are in power, and that’s what we’re fighting.”

But first, he says, he “needs to fight his exam on Thursday.” That’s just the youth-activism life. DM

To read all about Daily Maverick’s recent The Gathering: Earth Edition, click here.

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- Community, friendship, and collective activism are seen as essential supports for coping and creating change.

Title:

Content: What is a Grassroots Movement?

Grassroots movements have played a pivotal role in shaping societies and driving change throughout history. They are often associated with passionate individuals coming together to advocate for social, political, or environmental transformation. In this article, we’ll delve into the concept of grassroots movements, exploring what they are, their characteristics, and their impact on society.

Understanding Grassroots Movements

grassroots movement is a type of social or political movement that originates from the ground level of society, driven by ordinary citizens rather than established institutions or organizations. These movements are decentralized and often lack hierarchical leadership structures. Instead, they are characterized by the collective action and shared goals of individuals who are deeply committed to a cause. Here are key aspects of grassroots movements:

1. Bottom-Up Approach

At the heart of a grassroots movement is its bottom-up approach. Unlike top-down initiatives that are often led by governments, corporations, or established organizations, grassroots movements are driven by the people themselves. They emerge organically from the concerns and aspirations of individuals within a community.

2. Inclusivity and Diversity

Grassroots movements are inherently inclusive and diverse. They bring together people from various backgrounds, including different ages, races, genders, socioeconomic statuses, and political affiliations. This diversity enhances the movement’s strength and credibility, as it reflects a broad cross-section of society.

3. Lack of Formal Hierarchy

Grassroots movements typically lack formal leadership hierarchies. Instead, decision-making is often achieved through consensus or democratic processes. Leaders may emerge based on their dedication, experience, and ability to inspire others, but they do not hold the same centralized power as leaders in traditional organizations.

4. Passion-Driven Activism

Grassroots activists are motivated by a deep passion for their cause. They are willing to invest their time, energy, and resources because they believe in the urgency and importance of the issue they are addressing. This passion is a driving force behind the movement’s momentum and resilience.

Characteristics of Grassroots Movements

1. Grassroots Mobilization

Grassroots movements are known for their ability to mobilize people on a local and sometimes national or even international scale. They use a variety of strategies, such as community organizing, social media, and grassroots marketing, to reach and engage supporters.

2. Grassroots Funding

Funding for grassroots movements often comes from small, individual donations and volunteers rather than large financial institutions or corporations. Crowdfunding platforms and direct appeals to supporters play a significant role in financing these movements.

3. Grassroots Campaigning

Grassroots campaigns focus on public awareness and advocacy. They use strategies like community meetings, protests, letter-writing campaigns, and social media activism to influence public opinion and pressure decision-makers.

4. Grassroots Impact

Despite their decentralized nature, grassroots movements can have a substantial impact on policy and public discourse. They bring critical issues to the forefront, hold institutions accountable, and often drive tangible change through their persistence and determination.

The Historical Significance of Grassroots Movements

Throughout history, grassroots movements have played a pivotal role in promoting positive social and political change. Here are a few notable examples:

1. Civil Rights Movement

The Civil Rights Movement in the United States is one of the most iconic grassroots movements. It aimed to end racial segregation and discrimination. Led by figures like Martin Luther King Jr., it utilized nonviolent protests, boycotts, and grassroots organizing to challenge systemic racism.

2. Women’s Suffrage Movement

The fight for women’s suffrage, which granted women the right to vote, was another grassroots effort. Women’s suffrage activists organized rallies, marches, and letter-writing campaigns to advocate for their rights.

3. Environmental Movements

Grassroots environmental movements have had a global impact. Examples include Greenpeace’s efforts to protect the environment, the anti-nuclear movement, and more recently, climate change activism led by figures like Greta Thunberg.

4. LGBTQ+ Rights Movement

The LGBTQ+ rights movement has made significant progress through grassroots activism. It has focused on raising awareness, advocating for legal rights, and changing societal attitudes towards LGBTQ+ individuals.

The Modern Role of Grassroots Movements

In the modern era, grassroots movements continue to be powerful forces for change. They have adapted to new technologies and communication tools, allowing them to reach a wider audience and mobilize support more effectively. Here are a few contemporary examples:

1. Black Lives Matter

The Black Lives Matter movement, which emerged in the 21st century, is a powerful example of grassroots activism. It advocates for the rights and equity of Black individuals, challenging systemic racism and police violence.

2. #MeToo Movement

The #MeToo movement, driven by social media, has empowered survivors of sexual harassment and assault to share their stories and demand change. It has led to important discussions about consent, gender equality, and accountability.

3. Youth-Led Movements

Youth-led grassroots movements, such as the March for Our Lives, have brought attention to issues like gun control. They demonstrate that young people can be powerful advocates for change.

4. Environmental Activism

Environmental grassroots movements continue to be crucial in addressing climate change and environmental issues. Movements like Extinction Rebellion and Sunrise Movement advocate for urgent action on climate-related challenges.

The Impact and Future of Grassroots Movements

Grassroots movements continue to shape society, and their impact is undeniable. They serve as a counterbalance to entrenched power structures and provide a voice for marginalized or underrepresented groups. The future of grassroots movements will likely see continued adaptation to new technologies, as well as an ongoing commitment to social, political, and environmental justice.

In conclusion, a grassroots movement is a powerful force for social and political change, driven by individuals who are passionate about their cause. These movements are marked by inclusivity, decentralized structures, and a bottom-up approach. Throughout history and into the modern era, they have played a crucial role in addressing critical issues and shaping societies around the world. The future of grassroots movements promises to be just as impactful, driven by the dedication and determination of individuals who seek to make a difference.

Clare Louise

- Voting and engagement in grassroots movements are promoted as avenues for action.

**The Value of Grassroots Movements**
- Grassroots activism is vital for societal change and addressing critical global issues (e.g., Black Lives Matter).

- Collective action and shared goals drive such movements, which are historically important.

**Humans’ Place in the Universe**
- The rarity of intelligent life suggests humanity's unique role and responsibility.

Title:

Content: Skip to content
The Well

Why we are the only humans in the Universe and why it matters for our collective future

The acceptance of our cosmic loneliness and the rarity of our planet is a wakeup call.
Key Takeaways
  • For millennia, tribal divisions governed humanity. But what was good for our ancestors and their survival now seeds deeply destructive and predatory behavior. Humanity needs to unite.
  • One way for humanity to unite is to realize that we are the only humans in the cosmos. Even if life exists elsewhere, it won't be like us.
  • Therefore, the human voice is unique in the cosmos. If we ruin our project of civilization, the Universe will once again become silent.

We need to change the way we see each other and our relation to our home planet. For thousands of years, tribal divisions have ruled the way we humans have organized ourselves in groups. Unfortunately, what was good for our ancestors and their survival now seeds deeply destructive and predatory behavior.

We don’t care about the other living creatures with whom we share this planet. We don’t care about the planet. We don’t understand what is needed for our survival as a species. As the news tells us daily, we remain profoundly divided, prone to isolate ourselves in groups that define the way we think and behave. Widespread political strife, cultural intolerance, and tribal entrenchment are symptoms of a deeper problem: Our focus on material greed and unstoppable growth is choking civilization and the planet along with it. Civilization is at a crossroads. To move beyond, we need to reframe our connection to other living creatures and to the planet we all share.

A new unifying narrative

We need a new unifying narrative that has the power to awaken humankind to a very urgent truth: that despite our political and religious differences, we are a single species living on a fragile and rare planet. This narrative must break down the tribal walls that separate us; it must make a convincing case that we need to work together if we are to protect our way of life and the planet that harbors it. Scaring people about the dangers of global warming, social unrest, and mass extinctions is not working. We need something new, something that we can all share, that we can all relate to, that can awe and inspire us into action — a positive, constructive, inclusive message that resonates with young and old alike, from Baby Boomers to Generation Z. We need a new narrative of mythic proportions that unites us as a species and brings our planetary fragility to the forefront. We need to restructure our project of civilization.

The essence of this new narrative, which I present in a forthcoming book, is that the Universe has a history only because we are here to tell it. But this story is not just about the Big Bang and the expanding Universe, of myriad galaxies and stars, of electrons and quarks, of planets and moons. It is a story of the interconnectedness of the nonliving with the living, of the uniqueness of our planet and its biosphere, of our cosmic loneliness and its deep moral implications. The way we tell a story makes a difference. And the story of who we are and of our planetary role needs to be retold.

Consider the nascent Earth 4.5 billion years ago, a hot ball of molten matter, bubbling and boiling as it slowly took shape. Debris from leftover protoplanetary matter in the form of comets and meteors collided mercilessly with young Earth, causing major havoc but also delivering life’s essential building blocks: water and a variety of chemicals, including some simple organics (that is, chemical compounds with carbon). We could call this the cosmic angry-gifting era. The onslaught would only quiet down some 600 million years after Earth’s origin, around 3.9 billion years ago. If elements had gathered to make some kind of living creature before then, the poor thing was probably destroyed without a trace. Life may have had many false starts, lost in the dust of time.

We are the only humans in the Universe

To understand the history of life on Earth, we must understand Earth’s life history. This is true for any planet that may harbor life, whether in the past, the present, or the future: The history of life on a planet is contingent on the planet’s life history. And here is the amazing consequence of this fact: given that no two planets have the same history, life is not a repeatable experiment. Even if different life forms share the same biochemical principles across the Universe, being carbon-based and gene-driven by Darwinian natural selection, each world will harbor its own kind of living entities, which will mutate and evolve according to chance and the world’s unique changing environment. The living creatures on a world carry the indelible imprint of the world’s properties and history.

The preceding argument speaks to us directly. Life on Earth is unique: If there is life elsewhere, it will be different. We can state with confidence that we are the only humans in the cosmos. And given that we are, for better and for worse, the dominant intelligent life form on this planet — I do love and respect whales, dolphins, monkeys, dogs, cats, etc., but they don’t write poetry and build radio-telescopes or nuclear bombs — we are unique in our kind of intelligence. If there are intelligent life forms in other stellar systems, “they” will not be like us, even if they may share some of our traits, such as an approximate left-right symmetry. Furthermore, any existing alien life form is so far away that, for all practical purposes, we are alone. This means that the spectacular transformation that has unfolded on our planet from a barren ball of molten rock to a thriving abode for life matters in a very central way, what I like to call biocentrism.

The next time someone repeats the tenets of Copernicanism, that we are nothing in the vastness of the cosmos, that science teaches us how worthless we are, please beg to differ. We matter. We matter for our uniqueness as thinking molecular machines capable of transforming raw materials into revolutionary technologies, products of four billion years of evolution on a planet that matters for its uniqueness as a stable abode for the prolonged existence of life. These two inter-related conditions — the existence of intelligent life and a planet that offers long-lasting shelter for its creatures — are not likely to be encountered with high probability in the cosmos. If there is intelligent life elsewhere, it will be rare.

Biocentrism

We have learned much about where we are and what we are made of. Our amazing tools have greatly extended our vision of the world and of the Universe beyond. We also have learned that there is much that we don’t know, and much that we will never know. Our reach is wide but limited. Nature need not comply with our flights of fancy. Science tells us how nature works and not how it should work. As we began to send probes across the Solar System, we were struck by how different these other worlds were, how magnificent and barren — and how indifferent to life.

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We have longed for the harmonies for too long; we have longed for cosmic companionship — divine or alien — for too long. We must accept that we are alone in the cosmos, if not in absolute terms — as we can never be certain of what lies beyond the reach of our instruments — at least in practice. This makes us very special indeed. And it creates a new purpose for humankind.

Note that this is very far away from a return to an anthropocentric worldview, to pre-Copernican times when the Earth was the center of Creation. (I call it biocentric to make the distinction clear.) Biocentrism is necessarily post-Copernican. I am saying that we are unique and important — but not for having been created by a god, or for being the result of a purposeful cosmic directive.

We are unique and important for being self-aware living entities capable of asking questions about their origin and future. We may not be the measure of all things as Protagoras of Abdera proclaimed long ago, but we are the things that can measure. We experience the world, we measure it, and we tell stories about what we see and what we feel. And what we are finding out is that we may very well be the only ones asking such questions — or, at the very least, the only ones we know of, which effectively amounts to the same thing. Even if “they” exist and tell stories, their stories will not be ours. There is only one human voice in the cosmos. And if we ruin our project of civilization, the Universe will once again become silent.

A planetary wakeup call

The acceptance of our cosmic loneliness and the rarity of our planet is a wakeup call, ringing to awaken a new collective consciousness. I believe it to be the new unifying myth of our generation, with the power to go beyond tribal divides and bigotry, to lead us into a new era of human flourishing. But for this to happen, we need to change how we relate to life and to the planet that allows us to exist. We are not above nature, and we don’t own it. We are a part of it and depend on it for our existence.

Life is rare. We are rare. This planet is rare. Treasure life and planet, worship it, learn from Indigenous cultures and their sacred connection to the land. This is the moral imperative of our time, what we owe future generations and the life we share this planet with.

Related

Up Next

- Urgency is expressed regarding the need for a new, respectful relationship with nature and our planet.

**Art and Activism (Olafur Eliasson, Alan Moore)**
- Some artists and writers see activism (climate/environmental or "magic") as core to their work, using their platforms to inspire change rather than expecting “magical” solutions.

**Pandemic-era Social Change**
- The COVID pandemic triggered real lifestyle shifts and exposed both interconnection and growing geopolitical divisions that may hamper collective action moving forward.

**Self-Sufficiency in History**
- Historical references (e.g., monks as farmers) underscore self-reliance and local cooperation as survival strategies.

Title:

Content: Asking for a Friend

In “The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation,” the former Catholic, now Orthodox, writer and columnist Rod Dreher calls for a unifying retreat from the vicissitudes of the modern age. Christians today need to rally, he claims, via “strategic withdrawal” from the opulence and corruption of secular culture. While not entirely novel, the idea has its merits and, as a political movement, has found some success in recent years.

The “Benedict Option,” as a movement, is significantly inspired by the conclusions drawn in “After Virtue,” written by Alasdair MacIntyre, the acclaimed Scottish American philosopher. In a keynote on the common good, MacIntyre, responding to this movement as a political reality, qualifies that his goal was not to inspire a mass exodus from social order, but was instead to “suggest that we have been waiting for a new St. Benedict.” In other words, “I was suggesting we need a new kind of engagement with the social order, not any kind of withdrawal from it.”

These two authors exemplify the tension we experience today, I believe. On the one hand, the technological age has ushered in a new era of incredible innovation and advancement in healthcare, education, transportation, etc. On the other hand, the technological age has been grounded in a particularly strong reaction against traditional religious practice, the stability of the family and a creeping secularism in various avenues of our life. Feeling this tension, each individual is tasked with making a discernment of engagement or withdrawal; more often than not, we think ourselves capable of a selective existence, engaging with what has merit and withdrawing from what we consider vicious. But life is not so simple, and we can easily find ourselves too invested in what the world offers — to our detriment — and believing that we can maintain the proper balance. Fearing this imbalance, we can instead choose the charged response of total withdrawal and abandon the Lord’s command to make disciples of all nations.

At the end of “After Virtue,” MacIntyre reminds us, “This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.” Tempted by withdrawal and fearing engagement with a culture that has become so obviously absent of God, what is one to do? It seems we are all finding ourselves waiting for a new St. Benedict.

MacIntyre notes that St. Benedict’s engagement with the social order was brilliantly simple. In founding a monastic community beyond the confines of the wall, the public square began to naturally surround the enclosure. The monks had to grow their own food — they were all farmers — but they could trade with nearby villagers, and so they did. And because they were in such proximity to these villages and exchanged goods, they also began to educate the children of the village. This symbiotic relationship between the monastic community and the local community provides a blueprint for the Christian seeking to virtuously engage with the world.

The keystone required to address the fading reality of the local community is engagement. But such engagement seems entirely foreign to our modern experience. There is no longer a “public square,” which for ages has functioned as the focal point for commerce, culture and community. Moreover, our lives are no longer so clearly defined by opportunities for local engagement, like bowling leagues and knitting circles. Even sports, which used to exclusively serve a local community, have given way to “travel teams” and “select” rosters.

In dismantling our sense of local community, one of the greatest culprits has been ecommerce, specifically shopping on Amazon. In the past, Saturday morning errands might have taken one to their local hardware store, farmers market and department store. Today, with the ease of online shopping, by just a few clicks of a computer mouse, these items can arrive at our door within days. It’s easy, it’s simple. Why wouldn’t we take advantage of that?

Precisely because such behavior from the consumer — of which I am guilty, dear reader — completely separates the villager from the village. We are no longer members of a local community; instead, we become cutoff from and altogether absent from an experience of local engagement. If we want to respond to the challenge from MacIntyre, to become the “new St. Benedict” — one capable of easing that tension of being in the world, but not of the world — there must be some sacrifice. Yes, it is easier to order hardware parts from Amazon, but the extra effort it takes to frequent our local shops and stores means participating in that same symbiotic relationship illustrated so beautifully by monastic communities centuries ago.

We are not going to resolve this tension overnight. But engaging in our local community, even in the smallest measure, goes a long way in building up a culture of real, inspired encounter that can serve as a foundation for the seeds of the Gospel to take root in the lives of those we meet. So, ask yourself: Should we shop on Amazon?