Over

[matrixmann]

One thing everyone needs to be ready for: If you tear down the current system, it means your current state of wealth is going to vanish too. The gadgets, the electronic devices, the oversupply that you use - is tied to the current economic and political system. If you make it go away, these things only keep existing as a remembrance of different times. There are no more of these things getting produced, the food chain needs to be rebuild from the basic local infrastructure.
There are going to be times of shortages and deprivation again over a certain amount of time.

Comments

[gansje.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. Yet this presents a huge problem; one of the things that helps keep a political structure in place and get its citizens' support is to improve and maintain the citizens' perceived sense of well-being (not their actual well-being, just their sense of well-being). Consumerism's current hold means perceived sense of well-being is measured with consumption-centered metrics. Thus any revolutionary measures to change systems produce dissatisfaction and may, without totalitarianism, collapse. Evolutionary change works more effectively in terms of civil acceptance, but obviously is too slow and unpredictable a process.

[matrixmann]

Precisely what I'm thinking about for the current system.
This is consumerism and consumerism lives of buying and having means to buy. So - taking that away or telling people to lower it means you're going to harvest their rage towards you. Rather they try to fulfill the requirements of the hamster wheel to go on with that than they think for a minute and feel their dignity as a human being and what says everything should serve to not touch this human dignity.
Actually one could dig his head in resignation according to that because the system is going to make sure to keep these circumstances up and only bring sacrifice in when it serves its purposes.
But on the other hand I don't like that idea - and on another hand I see no matter what the system itself says, it has no guarantee to offer that everything keeps going on as it currently is now.
Words mean nothing, deeds are what matter - and the deeds point at "we try to pull everything out of this machine, even life's necessities", which in the end means, in a world with a limit, someone stealing your carrot, your carrot is gone.

[red-child.livejournal.com]

Destroy the system, but only after you've designed, then formed, a replacement one that fulfills all of your intentions. Once the current system is down put yours in place as deeply and strongly as possible; you'll probably need some powerful military techniques and some good, honest propaganda that ensures people good is at hand in a way that's comforting to their inadequate manners of interpreting things. Wherever your system doesn't provide, pick up the destroyed system's available tactics. Use them, but tactically apply change, keeping your resource expenditures measured and cleverly employed, but keep changing the tactics until they match your intentions, just like the system you built as a replacement for once the destroyed one was down, and eventually end up with a system you want.
People will be far less exposed to suffering, and therein dissatisfaction and a likelihood to fight back, essentially resulting in a superior method for pacifying the population. It might be a favored method for keeping people 'safe and happy', it might be a favored method for depressing the number of violent dissenters you have to kill... but it's an idea that could work out if you know how to go about it.
I think the hardest parts are in destroying the system and in making sure your replacement system doesn't turn corrupt during the phase of trying to transform the old system's tactics that you adopted. They're corrupt, and people being exposed to how much power that gives them might, in turn, become tempted to be corrupt. So, I guess, choose the members of your replacement system wisely.

It sounds like a solution to me. Am I falling short somewhere?

[matrixmann]

I sort of regard it the same way.

The corruption point is a very hard one - and it's also very tied to if you have somebody from the outside working against you.
Like in Cold War times, as the capitalistic West tried to take every possibility to get a thorn into the side of the communistic countries. And this included hard power methods (like getting a turmoil going and killing people) as well as soft power methods (like cutting them off from world markets of anything while their population can watch Western TV and Western advertising and think in the West it's like the land of milk and honey).
First thing you can do something against if you have an army and a secret service that has a good moral to serve the state and not their own pocket and if both are well equipped and supplied.
Second thing is a much harder issue - and that because people are pretty greedy, especially if they don't get told from the start how the world works, where the stuff they desire comes from and how the West gets a hold of it.
In that case I even say the communists and the Soviets made a mistake. Instead of trampling on the other system, they should have entered the arena from the start and told people where does the shit come from that they have and which they don't have. How it comes that they don't have some certain wares in their shops or why they were so hard to get a hold of.
Today, with a little proper thinking, you know some things - and it's not because of the war between both systems and some things were prohibited.
Licenses for manufacturing things you didn't invent yourself are pretty expensive, and if you don't have of the desired currencies they are even more expensive.
Some with music, books, movies - cultural stuff.
Those enterprises are really greedy if it comes down to handing out licenses or selling their products.
If it comes down to food - the West only has exotic food because people in Africa and Southern America only work for a Dollar a day, so that's why they can sell them for a price less than 10 Euros a kilogramm. At all, they have trading partners all over the world delivering them wares - it's much different if half of the world has sanctions in force against you.

These are political things which I'd say they're not totally difficult to understand and if you say it that clearly, it's much better an advertisement for understanding for your actions and why your system lacks all kinds of things instead of preaching to them how wonderful the achievements are that they reached for your and in the end the shops are empty, nothing to buy and nothing to eat there.
That way you don't need to wait for long why people can be influenced and corrupted by your system enemy.