How To Save Your Dying Country
An Essay-Poetry Hybrid
Do you ever fantasise about being dictator for a day?
I sure do. I imagine it being a lot of fun tearing through the bloated, corrupt offices, stopping our meddling in other country’s affairs, ending the monetary, cultural, psychological and every other means of public manipulation to leave us with what I would consider a pretty good society. For a society with as many nuanced and complicated problems that the UK has, I enjoy considering how much better everything could be, from using fisheries to alleviate our need for food imports to cutting taxes in ways that boost everyone’s (and, by extension, the country’) wealth.
That said, I would never run for office. With a system as compromised by global technocratic elitists as our own, I genuinely believe that nobody who isn’t willing to “tow the line” in some regards will never even make it to those positions.
Plus, I don’t want to be your leader. I want you to be your own leader.
I was well convinced by Hans Herman Hoppe’s works that a democratic system where the entire nation contributes is a bad idea. Democracy, as most nations follow, creates a deliberate incentive for the most psychopathic and power-hungry types to take control of and manipulate the country’s assets for their own interests, as they are simply “caretakers” for the 5-year term that they sit. I’d argue this is exactly what we’ve seen from every nation that prides itself on its democratic values. Majority rule does not work when the majority has deceptively been fed false information and beliefs.
Something I really like about Over To The Youth is that, first and foremost, the organisation serves the youth and mentors being providing for. Creating a culture and focus where confluences of individuals only happens because there’s a specific challenge to address that’s greater than any one individual is key.
We are still individuals within that with agency. If someone tries to bring in something that will fundamentally destabilise the soul-healing properties of what we’re able to provide (even when those people mean well!) we get to say “this is not going to work here”. Then we get the pleasure of exploring what does work, and how it may work even better. And if it truly won’t work for an individual, there’s nothing stopping them from going elsewhere or starting up their own initiative.
That is decentralisation at its finest. I’m keen on means of decentralising power away from institutions in many aspects, whether financially, technologically and so forth. This can absolutely be the case in general governance too. I envision a cascading system where the wisest members of a local community hold space to resolve disagreements between the individuals within them. These “councils” alone select one representative to go up to the next level of governance, and so forth. To me, this encourages meritocracy while maintaining an accountability, with the needs of individuals trickling up to the highest levels.
This system will not save your dying country. At least, not by itself. The system we find ourselves in exists because of a culture of outsourcing all our critical thinking abilities to “higher authorities”. We can implement a new system that might survive a generation, maybe two, but without changing the paradigm in which we operate, we will ultimately revert to the same situation we currently find ourselves in.
That is where the poet comes in.
The Dissidents Rhyme
In the land of robeless tyrants and surveillance blanketing all, as the watchful clocks strike thirteen I hear the whispers in the wall. When I heard, I listened in hard, but to begin it made no sense. I caught only the fraying ends of rhymes that made me feel so tense. Then one night, with my thoughts in knots, I left the comfort of my sheets. I needed out of the echoes and dragged my feet along the streets. Fighting blinding lights of adverts and propaganda messaging, I caught a glimpse down an alley of a person rhyming something. Then—like that—he had disappeared before the blue lights realised. But I could now put to those words a face I'd only theorised. With wrinkled eyes but youthful lips and speaking only in taboos over and over, all the while rhyming and then rhyming anew. Day and night his musings rung out, reverberating in my mind. How could he have spoken so sweet, in the face of all that’s unkind?! Then one evening, as I waded battling hordes of uniforms, I caught the warm trill of his song just beyond all the rhymeless swarms. And how my feet could not keep with the racing pace my heart drummed up! Darting left and right and onwards, as he grew close my pace picked up. Then as I broke off from the crowds, I heard the counterpoint at play, more than one, for there were others rhyming with the end of this day! Now I crept, as not to rupture the harmony that bubbled near. They were there, around a corner: an orchestra, lush to my ear. Pausing there, I listened in close to each syllable short and long, to both the words and their rhythm. Thus, I learnt the dissidents’ song: "Just as busy bees build their hives, poetry is simply our lives. A state of being, not a skill, let us pick up our ink and quill. Poetry is the why and how, and it is what is needed now. Poetry is simply our lives; poetry is what will survive." But as those final words were said, a cold and heartless blue did shriek and scream in agony and fright that someone dare reject the bleak destined for the weak populous. Phantom-like husks geared up like drones unleashed on men who sang that prose and leaving no unbroken bone— I scurried, I hurried, I hid within the still and lifeless sea. Even in that low vibration a remnant of its energy remained echoing endlessly; Soothing, self-perpetuating, a symphony played on repeat, deeper, still deeper penetrating. "Just as busy bees build their hives, poetry is simply our lives. A state of being, not a skill, let us pick up our ink and quill. Poetry is the why and how, and it is what is needed now. Poetry is simply our lives; poetry is what will survive." And ever since that fateful day, the world’s been a cacophony, with each revolution bringing a broken memory back up. But now I have a means to bring peace right to my innermost realm. And should I meet a forlorn soul, this song can guide them at the helm: "Just as busy bees build their hives, poetry is simply our lives. A state of being, not a skill, let us pick up our ink and quill. Poetry is the why and how, and it is what is needed now. Poetry is simply our lives; poetry is what will survive."
The Dissidents Rhyme ~ as featured in “From A Dying Empire Near You”
The Creator Within
Communing and co-creating only works when we as individuals are our most honest, most integral and most heart-centred selves. Thus, doing the “inner work” on ourselves to ensure we can bring this out as effectively as possible is crucial. The traumas and challenges of our past that create narratives which inform how we move through the world can also hold us back from being as creative as we are able to. Moreover, I believe it is a duty to create, with that ability to do so coming from each and every one of us being a piece of God (or whatever you call the ultimate creative force in the universe).
This is why I am a poet, first and foremost.
Poetry is the most potent vehicle at taking our soul urges and transmuting them into a communicable idea. It speaks to things beyond our senses and our rational understandings of the world. It allows us to transform the initial perspectives that we see into something wholly new, forging a path through the senseless into the sense-full. We save the essence of the ideas that matter, and create a new frame in which to channel them.
With this in mind, maybe the question we should be asking is: what is it we actually want to save? An abstracted system, or ourselves?
Here’s how I think we save ourselves: Be the change you wish to see in the world. Do the work that allows for that state of being. Don’t wait for someone else on a ballot paper to say that they are the change.
That’s how to save a dying country.
If this is your first time here, make sure to subscribe so you can see exactly how my poetic efforts are doing just this.
Thank you for taking the time to read this piece, I look forward to sharing more with you soon.
With gratitude,
Tom
Come Join Me At Liberpulco!
I’m happy to announce that I’ll be doing a talk for Liberpulco all around poetry and language as a tool for rewriting personal and societal languages, and why having sovereignty over the words we use is so important. There’s still time to grab tickets, virtual or in-person, by clicking the button below:
Brilliant Dissidents Rhyme
And why poetry is so important, thanks Tom 🙏